by Olivia Gates
So he said nothing, just took her hand and leaned back in his seat, pretending to watch the magical manifestation across the sky. Soon she followed suit, and they spent another hour watching in silence until she asked him to take her home.
* * *
Maksim stood beneath the stinging, scalding jet of water, willing his senses to subside, his arousal to lessen enough so he wouldn’t burst something vital. Like his aneurysm.
Not funny, Volkov. He knew physical stress had nothing to do with the possibility of that ticking bomb in his head going off. If it ever decided to go, it would, just like that. Now it was his heart that might race itself to a standstill.
Caliope had wanted him tonight. He could tell with every fiber of his being that she’d been craving him from that first night. But tonight, being alone and free from distractions, her hunger had almost killed him. Up till the moment they’d parted ways in the hallway.
If he pushed, if he went to her now, snatched her up into his arms and marched back to his suite, he knew she’d go up in flames in his arms. She’d beg him to take her, plunder her to sobbing, nerveless satiation.
But he couldn’t. It wouldn’t mean anything if she didn’t seek him as she once had, out of her own free will and full choice. So though he craved her desperately, would do just about anything to have her, he couldn’t take her power away like that.
Which meant he’d live in hell for the rest of his miserable life—one that he could only pray would be long, for Leonid’s sake—and try to find a way to withstand the torture of her nearness.
It was no use now. His body remained clenched under the unremitting barrage of yearning that neither punishingly hot nor cold water had ameliorated. He rinsed the hair she’d told him she loved long, combed it back out of his eyes with his fingers, reliving the times she’d done that, until he couldn’t bear the phantom sensations of her hands running through...
“Maksim.”
He squeezed his eyes tighter. He kept hearing her voice calling him. As she used to—intimate, hot, hungry.
“Maksim.”
There he went again. But this time, it sounded so...real.
Knowing he’d kick himself for being a wishful fool, his eyes snapped open to make certain. And through the heavy spray and the misted glass of the cubicle...there she was. Caliope.
As if from the depth of a dream, he pushed the door open.
And she was really there. Standing framed against the closed, ivory-painted door in a satin-and-lace nightgown and robe a darker shade of her eyes, just like he’d imagined in his fantasies.
His senses rioted so violently, he almost charged her. But he had to wait for her to tell him what she wanted.
For soul-searing moments she stared at him, her eyes briefly leaving his to skim over his body, wincing as she saw the evidence of his accident in his fading scars, then gasping at the sight of his arousal, before returning to his face.
He could barely hear her whisper over the still-pounding shower. “I couldn’t wait any longer.”
Then she moved, strode toward him, picking up speed with every urgent step. With the last one she threw herself against him under the gushing spray of water.
He almost lost his balance with her hurtling momentum and barely steadied them, looked down at her in pure astonishment. Was this really happening?
In answer to his silent disbelief, she climbed him, winding herself around him, twisting in his arms, forcing him to press her against the marble wall.
His hand behind her head and his arm at her back took the impact at the last second. They remained like this for endless moments, panting, their bodies and gazes fused. And he saw it all written all over her face, in the depths of her eyes: memories, longing, hunger...everything.
Then her hands were stabbing into his hair as he’d been yearning for them to minutes ago, grabbing his head by its tether and dragging his lips down to hers. She wrenched at them, and when he only surrendered to her fervor, paralyzed under the onslaught of her feel, the disbelief at her actions, she whimpered in frustration, bit his lower lip, hard.
A guttural growl rumbled from his gut as he dropped her to her feet and tore the clinging wet ensemble off her body. Then she was naked against him. She crushed her swollen, hard-tipped breasts against his chest, rubbed her firm belly feverishly against his steel erection.
Before his mind overloaded, he dropped to his knee to rid her of her last barrier, that wisp of turquoise lace. But as he started worshipping the feast of her long-craved flesh, her hands were again gripping his hair, pulling him back up to his feet. Straining against him, climbing him again, trembling all over now, she clamped her legs around his buttocks and sobbed, streams of tears flowing with the water sluicing over her face.
“I need you inside me...now, Maksim, now.”
“Caliope, moya serdtse...”
He didn’t recognize the voice of the beast who’d growled this to her, proclaiming her his heart. He was abruptly at the end of his tether, no more finesse, no more restraint. She’d demolished his control with her distressed demand.
Fusing their mouths together, he flexed his hips, his manhood nudging her entrance, and went blind with the sledgehammer of pleasure as her hot and molten core opened for him. Passion roared as she surrendered fully, all of her shuddering apart for his invasion, his completion.
But as he began to ease himself inside her, she bit down hard on his lip again. “I can’t bear slow or gentle. Give me all you have, all your strength and greed. Devastate me, finish me.”
He would have withheld his next heartbeats than deny her what she needed. Holding her gaze that shimmered with tears, he stabbed his girth inside her, hard and fierce. Her hot, honeyed flesh yielded to his invasion as he watched greedily the shocked wonder and pained pleasure slashing across her magnificent face, squeezing out of her in splintering, ravenous cries.
He bottomed out in her depths with that first ferocious plunge, dropped his forehead to hers, groaned deep and long at the severity of sensations. “Caliope, at last, moya dusha, at last...”
“Yes...Maksim, do it, take everything, do it all to me. I missed you so much, I’ve gone insane missing you....”
Unable to hold back anymore, he rammed into her, that unbearable tightness still the same sheath of madness he remembered, even after she’d given him Leonid. The impossible fit, the end of his exile, coming home inside her, sent him out of his mind. He withdrew and rammed back again and again, turning her cries to squeals, then shrieks. She thrashed against him as her slick flesh clamped around his length with a force he was only too familiar with, had craved to insanity. The herald of her orgasm. He knew what it would take now to give her an explosive release, wring her voluptuous body of every last spark of sensation and satisfaction.
He built the momentum of his thrusts until he was jackhammering inside her in frantic, forceful jabs. Her convulsions started from the farthest point he plunged, constricting her whole body around him, inside and out. Her shrieks became one continuous scream, stifling as bursts of completion raged through her.
He withstood her storm until she’d expended every shudder and tear, then he finished her as she’d always craved him to, impaling her beyond her limits, nudging the very core of her femininity, releasing his agonized ecstasy there, in one burst after another of scorching pleasure.
She sagged in his arms, nerveless, replete. He, too, could barely stand, so sank down, containing her. It felt as if she had been made to fit within him, as if he had been made to wrap around her.
His mind was a total blank as his tongue mated with hers in a languid, healing duel. He’d thought he’d starved for her taste. He’d been wrong. He’d shriveled up and expired. Drinking from its very fount was a resurrection.
A long, long time later, he relinquished her lips to gaze down at her. Her head fell bac
k against his shoulder, her eyes drugged with satisfaction.
Then those lips he’d kissed swollen moved, and that beloved voice poured out in a heartbreakingly tender melody.
Then he realized what she’d said.
“Will you marry me, Maksim?”
Eight
Maksim stared at Caliope’s flushed face and intoxicated eyes and wondered if his mind had finally snapped.
If he’d been able to think at all about what her coming to him meant, he wouldn’t have dared to hope for more than her finally accepting him as a lover again. So he couldn’t be hearing what he wanted to hear. Since he hadn’t wanted to hear that.
This meant...this was real. She meant it.
One question expanded to fill the world. But he couldn’t ask it just yet. He had to take her out of here.
Coordination shot from the one-two combo of satiation and shock, he turned the water off, then scooped her up. He stepped with his armful of replete woman outside the shower, dried her then carried her to bed. She surrendered to his ministrations like a feline delighting in her owner’s cosseting.
Coming down beside her on the bed, entwining their nakedness, sweeping her beloved flesh in caresses and her face in kisses, he asked the one thing left in his mind.
“Why? What changed?”
She pulled back to stare into his eyes. And the change in hers startled him. They looked somber, sorrowful.
“Don’t...bozhe moy, please don’t. I can’t bear you to feel a moment’s distress. I don’t need explanations. I don’t need to know anything more than that you’re here in my arms.”
She cupped his face in her hands, her eyes beseeching. “But I need you to understand why I said no, why I held you at arm’s length the past three months.” She paused, inhaled a shuddering breath. “It was because of Leonidas.”
Her dead brother, the one she’d named Leonid after.
Feeling her revelations would hurt her, he didn’t want her to go on. But he also sensed that she needed to unburden herself. He turned his lips into the palm caressing his face and nodded, encouraging her to continue.
She did, sharing with him the intensely personal loss for the first time. “I never told you much about what happened, because we didn’t delve into each other’s private lives before, then because it remained too painful even when we did. Leonidas was...was the closest to me in age, and in everything. My only friend. My Mikhail.” He ran soothing hands down her back, fortifying her when she faltered. She went on, her voice subdued. “He, too, was into extreme sports, though the extreme exertion variety. He was competing in a decathlon when he suffered a severe fracture in his left knee. During treatment, it was discovered the fracture had tumors behind them, in his tibia and femur around the joint—what he’d long thought was overtraining pain. After investigation, it was found to be an extremely malignant form of osteosarcoma.”
His heart convulsed. He now knew where this was probably going. He hugged her closer, as if to ward off the desperation she’d felt for the sibling she’d loved most in the world.
“We told everyone his surgery was to fix his fracture. Only I knew it was a tumor-resection, limb-salvage surgery. But he was already in an advanced stage with metastasis to the lungs. We were told with aggressive treatments he had about fifty percent chance of survival. I talked him into going for it, since he was otherwise healthy and could withstand treatment, and I’d be there with him every step of the way. He agreed and I moved in with him, and we went through the cycles of treatment, which he weathered as best as could be expected.”
Her eyes started to overflow with remembered despair, her whole body buzzing with the desolation of reliving the ordeal. “But a year later, another tumor was found, and this time there would have been no way to salvage his leg. And his survival rates had also plummeted. As we left the hospital, he told me he wanted to be on his own for a while, would come home later. But in two hours, I was contacted by the police. He’d just had a fatal car crash.”
It was agonizing to see the shock in her eyes as if it was fresh, as if she relived the loss all over again.
“I...I thought I had more time with him. But he was suddenly gone, and everything I’d been bottling up since the discovery of his cancer and during his agonizing treatments—the pain, the fear, the constant anxiety—came crashing down on me. It was such a devastating blow, knowing it had all been for nothing. For months I didn’t know that I’d ever rise from beneath the rubble. Then I met you.”
When she’d detailed the emotional abuse her mother had gone though at the hands of the father she’d never seen, he’d thought this explained her no-strings-attached position on intimacy when they’d met. But this revelation gave a far deeper dimension to her mindset at the time. She’d met him in the aftermath of this life-changing loss, must have been reeling, needing closeness yet dreading it.
Remorse tore into him again, fiercer than ever before. “And I exposed you to more distress, especially when I deserted you, and then came back offering you more angst and uncertainty.”
Her tears abruptly stopping, a look of urgency and conviction replaced the despondency on her beloved face. “No, Maksim. I see now that your problems did seem insurmountable to you back then, and I no longer think telling me about your past at the time would have led to us working things out. We both had to go through all this to know ourselves better, and to find out what we mean to each other, for better or for worse.”
Still feeling unworthy of her love and forgiveness, after all that he’d put her through, he pulled away and sat up. “I understood why you said no to my proposal. I was too much of a risk, on every front, and you had your priorities right. But I didn’t imagine you had such personal injury and dread to fortify your rejection. Now that I know, I can’t understand why you’ve suddenly changed your mind about us.”
She sat up, too, a goddess of voluptuousness, her breasts full and lush, her waist nipped, her thighs long and sleek, her hair gleaming silk around her polished shoulders. His body roared, forcing him to snatch the covers to hide his engorged erection, angry at his reaction when he should be tending to her emotional needs.
But she pressed her softness into his hardness, palm spreading over his heart, turning arousal to distress.
“There’s nothing sudden about it,” she murmured against his chest. “I refused you that first night because I thought I could go back to my old life, raising Leo alone without you. But I couldn’t act on my conviction and I let you in, and there’s no changing that you are part of our family, part of us, now. Ya lyublyu tebya...nye magoo zheet byes tebya.... I love you and I can’t live without you, Maksim. So will you marry me, moy lyubov? You’ve already claimed me as yours.”
Hearing her calling him her love, admitting his claim to her heart, her life, was beyond endurance.
What had he done?
He had craved her nearness and passion, but he hadn’t thought she’d open herself so completely to him like this. He’d only ever wanted the best for her, and Leo.
“What if you were right to refuse me? What if the worst thing that ever happened to you is when I insinuated myself into your lives? What if something happens to me...?”
She stemmed the flow of his doubts and trepidations in a desperate kiss. “I already loved you with everything in me before you left. It was why your departure devastated me. And I’ve loved you more with each moment since your return. If anything happens to you now, whether we’re married or not, it would shatter me just the same. So really, all I’ve been achieving by keeping you away is depriving us of all the intimacy only we can give each other, and having the pain without the pleasure.”
His whole body stiffened as if under a barrage of blows. To imagine her in pain was unendurable. He’d wanted to love her, but he hadn’t wanted her to suffer the agony of loving him to the same degree, to live in fear
for him.
As if realizing the trajectory of his thoughts, she tugged on his hair to bring him out of his surrender to recriminations. “As you said that first night—nobody knows how long they’ll live, or how long they’ll have with someone. All we can do as finite humans is take whatever we can whenever we can and make the best of it. And you are the best possible everything that has ever happened to me. You’re also the best father I’ve seen or imagined, surpassing even Aristedes.”
The delight of her adulation, the dread of her dependence, sank into his heart with joy and terror.
But he’d created this impossible dilemma. She already loved him as much as he loved her, and he would hurt her whether he gave her the closeness and commitment she now craved or if he maintained their status quo. He’d been a fool not to realize how risky this all was, to think they could share so much without dragging her down into the well of addiction with him. He’d done this to her, and could only now give her whatever she wanted. Every single second of his life, every spark of his being.
What she already had total claim to.
Now she needed his corroboration. And for him to provide a distraction from all this overwrought emotion.
He forced a grin to his lips. “Better than the legendary Aristedes, huh? And you’re not biased at all, of course.”
An impish grin overlapped her urgency, transforming her face. “Not one tiny bit. He’s a close second, granted, but you’re the unapproachable number one.” She pushed him on his back, coming to lie on top of him, pressing her hot length to his every inch. “So since it would be for better or for worse between us from now on, whether I marry you or not, ‘not’ is only pointless denial. So I again ask you, moy serdtse. Marry me.”
He gazed up at her adoringly, unable to do anything anymore but risk living with constant worry and dread for the pleasure and privilege of any time they could have together.
