The Russian's Ultimatum (12 page)

Skin on skin.

There were no words.

Nothing could ever describe the total bliss filling her.

With Pascha’s hand steadying her, she started to move. Gripping the sides of his head, her sensitised breasts brushing against his chest, she ground against him, a steady, almost lazy tempo, the pulsations within her deepening.

A glazed look came into his eyes but the total connection between them remained, fusing them so deeply that she lost any sense of where he began and she ended.

Pure, pure pleasure.

Her orgasm started out as a low surge rippling through her, setting alight every atom of her being. Higher and higher it climbed until it peaked in an explosion of colour.

A strangled groan escaped his lips and he bucked into her, holding her tight against him, prolonging the moment for them both.

She rode the crest for as long as she could before floating back to earth, the softest landing.

Emily expelled a contented sigh.

Her face was buried in his neck, his strong hands stroking her back, holding her tight to him,

Pascha twisted onto his side so he could look down at her.

A lock of ebony hair lay damp across her forehead. He smoothed it away, pressing a kiss to the newly exposed skin.

‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ she asked, tracing a lazy finger up and down his forearm.

‘Because I like staring at you. You’re beautiful.’

‘I think
you’re
beautiful.’

‘A very macho description,’ he said with a laugh, and rolled onto his back, pulling her with him

The sun’s rays were increasing, bathing them in a warm pool of light. Pascha could almost imagine it was just the two of them on the planet. If it
were
just the two of them left on Earth, Pascha reflected, he doubted he would ever be bored. Emily kept him on his toes.

‘What possessed you to make the jump?’ he asked after long, serene minutes had passed. ‘Anything could have happened to you.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘But it could have.’

She raised her head and smiled. ‘Pascha, this waterfall has clearly been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years, and the pool with it. I knew it would be deep.’

‘But you couldn’t have known what was beneath the waterline. There could have been rocks or anything. You could have killed yourself.’ A coldness crept into his bones at the thought.

‘But I didn’t.’

‘But what if you had? Where would that leave your father? Your brother?’
Me
, he almost added, the thought coming from nowhere.

‘I don’t know.’ She bit into her lip and stared at him. ‘They have each other. It was on James’s watch that my dad got out of bed.’

‘You’ve been there the rest of the time.’ From what Pascha understood, Emily had been there the
whole
time. She’d given up the independence of her home and put her job in jeopardy for her father.

‘From what’s happened since I left, it’s obvious that the only person my dad needed was James. Not me.’ She broke the stare and tugged herself out of his arms, sitting up. ‘I’ve tried so hard. All my life I’ve tried.’

‘Tried for what?’

She turned her face back to him and raised her shoulders. ‘To be enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘For him to hold on to.’ She shook her head. ‘In all honesty, Mum was the only one he really responded to when he was ill, but James would tell him a joke and sometimes Dad would smile. I’d tell him a joke—normally the same one as James—and he never responded. Never. When he was well, he was wonderful with me, but when he was ill it was as if I didn’t exist. I was never enough. I guess I’m still not.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ he said carefully, rubbing a hand over her naked back. She had the softest skin. ‘Your father loves you.’

‘I know he loves me.’ Her voice was sad. ‘It’s just not enough, is it? Not if I can’t help him.’

He placed a kiss to the small of her back. ‘You’ve done more for your father than anyone could have wished. It is time for you to forget about your relationship with him as a child. Focus on the future.’ He kissed her again, a little higher. ‘I would sell my soul if I could have a future with my father.’

‘I know. You’re right.’

‘Of course I’m right.’

‘Your arrogance never gets old.’

He swiped at her nose before wrapping his legs around her and pulling her so she leant back against him.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘You’re asking my permission?’ He was certain she was going to ask about his sterility. As if there was anything to be discussed. It was a fact of life—a fact of
his
life—something he’d long ago accepted. Just as he’d accepted it prevented him from having the future he’d always craved.

‘It was something you said before about you and your father building Plushenko’s between you. I always thought it was a really old firm, like Fabergé.’

‘That was clever marketing—we wanted people to believe that.’ He breathed in a sigh of relief as he realised it wasn’t the subject he’d thought she was going to broach. At that moment, wrapped around Emily, he was as close to peace as he’d ever been.

He couldn’t regret making love to her again. He would never regret it. For now, all he wanted was to hold onto it for a little longer.

As he inhaled, he captured the scent of her hair. Even with her swim in the pool and the spray of the waterfall he could still catch the faint scent of the light, fruity shampoo she favoured.

‘In a way, you can thank my leukaemia for the founding of Plushenko’s,’ he said. ‘I had to undergo five years of chemotherapy and steroids and a host of other medicines. To keep me alive cost money. The only way to afford it was for Andrei—the man I called Papa—to work all the hours he could. At the time he was earning minimal wages as a jewellery maker for a middle-of-the-road Russian jeweller. He started to produce his own bespoke pieces, working every spare hour in the workshop he built at the back of our house. Those pieces paid for my medications and, unwittingly, formed the basis of the company known today as Plushenko’s.’

‘He sounds like an amazing man.’

‘He was,’ Pascha agreed.

‘Do you think all the attention Andrei paid you, and all the hours he spent working to earn money for your treatment, made Marat jealous?’ she asked.

He breathed her in deeply. ‘I don’t remember Marat ever liking me.’ Knowing how much Marat loathed his very existence had done nothing to stop Pascha’s idolisation of him. For years he’d wanted nothing more than Marat’s acceptance. A part of him still longed for it.

‘Have you thought of trying again with him?’ she said. ‘I know you said you offered to buy Plushenko’s a number of years ago, but you were probably both feeling raw; it was so soon after your father had died. Maybe time has mellowed him.’

‘I can’t take the risk.’

‘Why not?’

Because if it blows up in my face I will lose the chance to save Andrei’s legacy. And if I lose that I will never be able to convince my mother how sorry I am.’

‘Are you still estranged from her too?’

He nodded. ‘I sought her out after Andrei’s funeral. I apologised for our estrangement. I told her about the island I’d bought in her name but she didn’t want to know.’ She’d rejected him, just like Pascha had rejected
her.

‘Words aren’t always enough,’ she said softly. ‘It’s our actions that prove our love.’

‘Is that why you went out of your way, at your own risk and with a real possibility of arrest, to help your father?’ he said with more acid than he would have liked. ‘Is that why you’ve given up your home and sacrificed your job, so he has living proof of how much you love him?’

She froze in his arms. When she next spoke, her words were measured but had a definite catch to them. ‘The one thing I know with any certainty is that our time on this earth is limited. And you know it too.’

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to.

They’d both lost people who’d meant the world to them.

But Emily’s situation was different and not just because she’d been secure in her mother’s love. Emily had never wounded someone she loved so badly that forgiveness was only an elusive dream. And, if she ever did wound someone she loved to that extent, she would be forgiven without having to prove her worth. Whatever darkness resided in her father’s head, he did love her. She wasn’t inherently unlovable. She didn’t have something missing like he did. The blood that ran through the Richardson clan’s veins tied them together, made them a part of each other.

He shared his mother’s blood but still she couldn’t forgive him.

With a start he realised it had been almost three years since he’d asked her forgiveness at Andrei’s funeral.

Emily had lost her mother three months ago and the pain was still very much there on the surface.

He’d lived through a dark fog for at least a year after Andrei had died.

His mother and Andrei had been soul mates. Was it any wonder she’d lashed out at him when he’d said, five years too late, that he was sorry?

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, brushing her hair with the flat of his hand. ‘I know your need to help your father comes from the love you have for him.’ She had more love in her heart than anyone he’d ever met before.

Emily rubbed his arm in silent understanding then leaned forward slightly to swipe a small bug off her thigh. As she did so, his attention was captured by a tiny blue blur on the base of her spine. ‘Sit forward.’

She shifted a little and he was able to see it clearly: another butterfly tattoo, smaller yet more intricate than the one on her ankle.

‘I got it done just after my mum died,’ she explained, craning her neck to look at him. ‘We had our ankle ones done together.’

‘Your mum had a tattoo?’

She nodded with a whimsical smile. ‘She’d always wanted one. When we got the diagnosis that her illness was terminal, we went to a tattoo parlour and had identical ones done. I wanted this one as my own private memory of her.’

Pascha stared at the private memorial a beat longer, feeling like he had just had his own butterfly let loose in his chest.

He gently pushed her forward some more so he could kiss the butterfly. She truly tasted like the honey scent she carried.

A gasp escaped her throat as he trailed his tongue up her spine, all the way to the base of her neck.

‘Enough talk.’ He knelt behind her and cupped a breast, savouring its creamy weight. He felt as if he could savour it—savour her—for ever.

CHAPTER TWELVE

H
E
MUST
HAVE
dozed off. Totally spent, Pascha had gathered Emily into his arms and lain back down on the grass with a heart hammering loudly enough to frighten any wildlife.

He’d held her close, inhaling the musty scent of their sex, and a solid form of contentment had stolen over him.

For the first time in his life, he’d truly let go of himself. Emily did that to him. Somehow she was able to tap into parts of him he’d hidden for so long he’d forgotten they’d ever been there.

As a child he’d dreamt of driving fast cars. Now, as an adult, he owned more fast cars than his childhood self had known existed—but he drove them cautiously, all too aware of what other drivers on the road could do.

His childhood self would have been disgusted that he’d never taken one of his fast cars onto a track and put his foot down just for the sheer hell of the ride.

He had no way of knowing the time but, judging by the position of the sun almost directly over them, it must have been getting on for midday.

Emily looked so sweet curled on him with her hair spread across his chest that he felt cruel waking her. But he had no choice. He should have headed back to the lodge hours ago. Before he’d made love to her. Before he’d been foolish enough to go against everything he believed in and jumped off the ledge.

Both were equally dangerous in their own way.

He had a sudden image of his small childhood self, fist-pumping at seeing him fly off the ledge and into the pool. Yes, younger, childhood Pascha would have approved of
that
. But that was before he had learned how precarious life could be.

‘We need to go back,’ he said, kissing her shoulder before giving it a gentle shake.

She opened her eyes and smothered a yawn. ‘Already?’

‘I should have word if someone is available to get me to the mainland.’ For all he knew, someone knowledgeable about the coral reef might have already made the trip to Aliana Island and, unable to locate him, returned to their own island. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to care. He wanted to hold onto this moment while he was living it. Before he had to say goodbye to her.

Emily got to her feet and tied her bikini bottoms back together.

‘Where’s my top?’ He didn’t have a chance to look for it before she spotted it and walked a couple of feet to retrieve it. Keeping her back to him, she put it on, tying it together at the back in a bow. Done, she turned back to him. ‘So, Sherlock, how do we get out of here?’

‘You mean to say you jumped into the pool without an escape route planned?’ He didn’t know whether to laugh or shout.

‘You jumped too,’ she pointed out with a grin.

‘I assumed you’d already thought of a way out before
you
jumped.’ He’d thought no such thing. At the time he hadn’t been thinking of anything but her. If he’d been thinking a fraction more coherently, he would never have made the jump.

As they scanned their surroundings, he caught sight of his shorts floating at the edge of the pool. He fished them out and wrung as much water as he could out of them. He was stepping into them when Emily pointed to the right of the waterfall.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘that incline there seems to have some natural gradients—we should be able to climb up it.’

‘It’s the most plausible way out,’ he agreed, not seeing any other way.

He’d barely finished speaking before Emily darted over to it. She didn’t even pause when she reached it.

Open-mouthed, his heart seeming to stop, he watched with a combination of horror and admiration as she began to scale the incline, her bare feet white against the rock.

Where did she get this fearlessness from?

And did he follow in her wake or wait at the base to catch her if she should fall...? Not that she showed any sign of falling; her movements were focused and assured.

From his vantage point he had an excellent view of her bottom and couldn’t help the half-smile that twitched on his lips.

‘Come on, slow-coach,’ she called down to him, pausing for a moment. ‘After a couple of feet it’s more scrambling than climbing. Honestly, it’s fine.’

She’d said similar words right before he’d jumped. Despite himself, and all the protection he placed around himself, he’d believed her. He’d trusted her. He still did.

He trusted her completely.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, he placed a hand on a ridge and carefully began to climb.

He refused to look down until he made it to the top, which came a lot more quickly than he’d expected.

‘Do you have no fear?’ he asked, catching his breath. Who needed to work out in a gym? A morning with Emily Richardson provided enough exercise and adrenaline to last a month.

‘Of course I do. I just don’t feel the need to do a full risk assessment first.’ Emily flashed him a half-grin. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a die-hard thrill-seeker or anything, but when the opportunity comes to experience something new or different I want to take it.’

It was just another part of herself that she’d suppressed in recent times. Well, no more.

She wrapped her sarong around her waist and slipped her feet into her flip-flops, all the while wishing they didn’t have to leave this spot. Not yet.

But the time was inching closer.

In a few short hours Pascha would be leaving the island. Leaving her.

The thought made her throat close and her heart constrict.

She didn’t want him to go. Not without her.

His pace was slower than the long strides he usually took. With his hand clasping hers firmly, hope began to stir.

She hadn’t been with a man for more years than she could count. It was for a whole host of reasons that she’d avoided relationships and one of them—probably the most minor reason of the lot—was because she’d been waiting to find a man who made her heart beat faster just to think of him; a man who made her go figuratively weak at the knees.

Pascha did all that. He made her feel more than she’d ever felt in her life.

He wasn’t the monster she’d thought him at the beginning. He was just a man, a mortal with his own demons to conquer, trying hard to make amends for a past it hurt her heart to think about.

In his office, she’d imagined sex with him would be perfunctory and proper. How she wished she’d been right. Maybe then the need within her would have been extinguished with disappointment, not quadrupled and morphed into something so huge her brain struggled to comprehend it.

But, what her brain struggled to recognise, her heart knew.

Her heart knew she was falling in love with him...

‘When we get back to the lodge we’ll learn if there’s a boat available to take us back to Puerto Rico,’ Pascha said, breaking through her dumbfounded thoughts. ‘If there is, you will need to pack.’

‘I’m coming with you?’ That little bit of hope stirred a little stronger.

He gave a rueful smile. ‘I have no good reason to keep you here, not any more. I know you won’t say anything about the Plushenko deal.’

Stunned at this unexpected development, Emily stopped walking. ‘Thank you.’

‘I will speak to Zlatan, my lawyer, as soon as we return to the lodge and get the money transferred into your father’s bank account. I will also have an official letter drawn up exonerating him of any wrong-doing and leaving the door open for him to return to his job if and when he feels able to.’

‘Have you had the case investigated?’ she asked hopefully.

‘I do not believe your father took that money deliberately. We still need to trace exactly where it went and make moves to retrieve it but that’s nothing for you to worry about.’

‘That’s—’

She tried to speak but he cut her off by cupping her cheeks with his strong hands. ‘I want you to know how sorry I am that I didn’t get this situation resolved when it first occurred. I like matters of theft, which is what I believed it to be, to be investigated by my personal legal team. Because I had them working flat-out on the Plushenko buyout, your father’s case was put to one side. I can’t express how deep my regret is for what your father’s been through. I am very much aware that I have contributed to his mental decline. Please let him know that if he chooses not to return as my employee I will give him an excellent reference.’

Emily was at a loss for what to say. Pascha’s words were like music to her ears. In the end, all she could do was rise onto her toes and place a gentle kiss on his lips. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me. It should never have come to this in the first place.’

‘You’ve had a lot on your plate.’

‘And don’t make excuses for me.’ She caught the fleeting ghost of a smile on his handsome features before he released his hold on her and stepped back, running a hand through his hair. ‘Come; let’s get you back to the lodge and see if we can get you home. I know how badly you want to return to your family.’

Did she? Did she really? She was certainly anxious to see for herself that her father had made an improvement, but did she really want to go back to that same life, a life where she lived for everyone else rather than herself?

She’d been like that in all her relationships.

With a jolt she realised that Pascha was the first person ever to have really known her, stripped back. When they’d first met she’d been too anxious and angry to put on any kind of face for him.

He’d seen
her
, the rawness, all the components that made her Emily, and he hadn’t rejected her.

No wonder her few relationships had failed. She’d moulded herself into what she’d thought her boyfriends wanted her to be. And they’d seen through it, become bored with a woman who agreed with everything they said and was always obliging, doing what they wanted.

She’d been right: she hadn’t been enough for any of them. How could she have been when she’d never been enough for herself?

Pascha had only ever seen her as herself and still he’d wanted her.

The question now was whether he would still want her when they were away from this spot of paradise.

* * *

Emily stood at the back of the yacht watching Aliana Island shrink away, blinking back hot tears. This could be the last time she saw it.

In less than a week her world had changed irrevocably.

The island had become little more than a speck on the horizon when Pascha joined her on the deck.

When they’d got back to the lodge, his hair had been mussed, his jaw covered with dark stubble. He’d looked wild and devilishly sexy.

Since their return he’d showered and shaved, styled his hair and dressed into a beautifully ironed open-necked white shirt and dark-grey trousers. Even his black belt looked as if it had been pressed. Add a tie and blazer, and he could step into any boardroom.

His wildness had gone but he still looked devilishly sexy.

‘Am I going to see you again?’ she asked, staring up at him and taking the bull by the horns. One thing she had learned during the past few days was that she needed to control her own destiny. If there were changes to be made then she had to be the one to make them.

She saw rather than heard him draw in a breath, his mouth compressing, his features contorting into something that looked like pain. That same pain shot straight into her heart.

‘Do I take that as a no?’

Pascha watched as a whole swathe of emotions flittered over Emily’s face. The one that struck the strongest chord with him was the fleeting anguish she hadn’t been quick enough to conceal. It hurt
him
to see it.

He should never have given in to his desire, should have fought it harder. And now he had to hurt a woman who had already been through too much pain. But the alternative would only cause her far more.

‘Emily, I’m sorry; you and I can never be together.’ He needed to spell it out to her. He didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings. She deserved the truth.

That familiar groove appeared.

‘I need you to understand. It isn’t you. It’s me.’

Now her features darkened, her lips thinning, her shoulders hunching together.

‘I know that’s a line a lot of men use, but in this case it’s the truth.’ He reached out to capture a lock of ebony hair. She flinched away from him, stepping back. ‘Emily, we can return to Europe and pick up where we leave off here—enjoy each other’s company and have fantastic sex—but nothing can ever come of it. We have no future.
I
can’t give you a future.’

‘How do you know that?’ she whispered.

‘Because I can’t give you the babies you want.’

She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I don’t recall us ever discussing children.’

‘We didn’t need to. I
know
you and I know family is everything to you.’ He remembered the light in her face when she’d been swinging little Ava in the air. If there was a woman made to be a mother, this woman was it. ‘I know you want children, and one day you will have them, but I can’t be the man to give them to you. I almost destroyed my ex-fiancée over it and I won’t destroy you too.’

Emily loosened her arms, a questioning frown appearing.

‘Yana and I were together for years,’ he said, needing to help her understand. ‘She’d always wanted children—we both did—so when we became engaged we thought it be best I get tested. I’d always known I could be sterile but I needed to be sure before we made that final commitment.’ He shook his head, remembering how the results had knocked him sideways.

While he had always known he
could
be sterile, he’d never truly believed that he was. He’d come out the other end of treatment physically unscathed, so how could life throw him this at so late a turn?

It was as if fate had turned around and stuck a fork in him for daring to hope he could have a future with a family of his own.

‘For two years I watched her suffer and turn into a shell of herself.’ His voice had become hoarse. ‘I would cringe to hear about any of her friends and family becoming pregnant, knowing it was another knife in her heart. But I thought I should be enough for her, that her yearning for a baby was something she should just forget about for my sake.’