The Russian's Ultimatum

by Michelle Smart

  ‘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.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have adopted?’

  ‘That’s what Yana suggested, but I’m afraid adoption is not a route I will go down.’

  ‘Your father adopted you,’ she pointed out softly.

  ‘And wasn’t I made to know it? Hardly a day went by when Marat didn’t rub my nose in the fact that he shared Andrei’s blood and I didn’t, that I was the cuckoo in the Plushenko nest. Andrei himself used the fact of Marat being his blood to undermine my point of view about bringing him onto the board at Plushenko’s.’ He raised his shoulders. ‘I can’t do that to a child. I won’t see another person suffer for their blood not being the same as the family they live with.’

  ‘How ridiculous.’

  Whatever reaction he’d expected from Emily, scorn most definitely was not it.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he refuted tightly.

  ‘Rubbish. You have your mother’s blood for a start—’

  ‘Which meant nothing to her when she took Andrei and Marat’s side.’

  ‘You put her in an impossible situation. What was she supposed to do? Tell you that your irrationality was justified? I don’t care what your father said, I’m certain he never meant it in the way you took it. He worked his fingers to the bone to keep you alive. If that isn’t love then I don’t know what is. For goodness’ sake, he even got his hands on black market copies of Top Cat for you to watch when you were too weak to do anything else. Blood doesn’t come into it.’

  Her words were like tiny barbs being thrown at his skin, all landing straight in his chest. It took all his control to stop his hands from shaking.

  He’d always been able to temper his anger but now...now he could feel it slipping.

  She’d done this to him. He didn’t know how or why but Emily pushed buttons in him that no one else could even find.

  ‘You think because we’ve made love that you have a right to tell me how I should feel, is that it?’

  ‘I never said that. There are thousands—millions, for all I know—of orphaned children in this world begging for a family to love them, and you won’t consider taking one of them in and building a family of your own because of Marat’s jealous attitude towards you.’

  ‘You do not know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Then explain it to me.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain anything to you.’ He stared down at her. She gazed right back, her eyes full of hurt, but also full of a powerful anger. ‘I’ve explained this much because after everything we’ve been through over these past few days I thought I owed you an explanation. I can’t give a woman a baby and I will not be party to an adoption. Eventually, resentment rears its head and snap—’ he snapped his fingers for emphasis ‘—the end of the relationship follows along with the mourning for wasted years. I couldn’t give Yana the baby she wanted but in my arrogance I thought my love would be enough for her. It wasn’t. She turned into a shell of herself and I won’t—I can’t—do that to you too. I won’t watch the light in your eyes die.’

  All the anger emanating from Emily’s pores dissipated. She tilted her head, shaking it slowly. ‘If Yana had loved you enough then you really would have been enough. Yes, I want children, but if I fell head over heels in love with someone who couldn’t have them I would cherish the relationship for what it could give me and not what it couldn’t.’

  ‘You mean you would do what you have always done and stifle your desires for someone else’s sake,’ he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

  ‘I feel sorry for you,’ she surprised him by saying. ‘Love isn’t a tick-box or a competition. I know I need to reclaim my life fo
r myself but I will always be there for the people I love. I’ve let my father’s depression and the way it affects me take over my life, always feeling I wasn’t enough. I need to stop thinking like that and remember the good times with him, because when he’s well our relationship is great.

  ‘That’s what I meant about cherishing a relationship for what it could give me rather than what it could not. And if I loved you, Pascha Virshilas, I wouldn’t care about your sterility so long as you loved me back, and so long as I knew you would always be there for me.’

  ‘But that’s you all over, isn’t it, milaya moya? And it’s that life and passion you contain within yourself that lets me know I am right about this. I would not wish for all that life to die out. You deserve to have it all.’

  ‘But not with you,’ she finished for him softly.

  ‘No. Not with me. I can’t give you it all. All I can give you is unfulfilled dreams that will eventually eat into your soul and destroy you.’

  ‘Then I guess there’s nothing else for us to say,’ she said quietly. Reaching up, she pressed a chaste kiss to his cheek. ‘I hope one day you can look in the mirror and see a man who deserves to have it all too.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EMILY HEARD THE front door open.

  She took a sip of her lukewarm coffee and pushed her plate of half-eaten chicken pie to one side. She wasn’t hungry.

  She’d hoped with all her heart that her father getting out of bed was the first step towards recovery. But her return had set him back.

  She’d returned to the house late last night, so had waited until the morning to give him the good news about the money and relay everything else Pascha had said. There had been no reaction, not even when she’d told him his job was there for him to go back to if he wanted.

  He’d spent the day in bed.

  She’d spent the day making phone calls and waiting for James to get back from work. It wasn’t as if she had a job to go to. As she’d suspected, Hugo had fired her. The letter had sat on the sideboard waiting for her return. No severance pay. Nothing. She kept waiting for the devastation to hit her but, to her surprise, all she felt was relief.