She was an athlete, a dancer, and knew all about nutrition as well as starving and muscle definition.
‘Sergio is out of touch—’ she continued but Roman broke in.
‘I don’t need dieting advice from you, Anya.’
He didn’t. She was tiny and far thinner than he remembered her to be, and that concerned him.
Yet she was even more beautiful.
‘Anyway...’ Roman shrugged ‘...I’m sick of boxing. I’ve applied for a passport.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there is nothing for me here.’
‘Are you going to look for Daniil?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not turning up on his doorstep...’
‘He might want you to.’
‘No.’ Roman was adamant. He would not be a burden on his brother.
‘So where will you go?’
Wherever it was, Anya didn’t want him to leave. Even though she hadn’t seen him in two years, she liked knowing that he was around and hearing about him sometimes. She had dreamed of a moment like this, meeting him on the street, and now it had transpired.
‘What have you been up to?’ he asked.
‘Just my dance,’ Anya said. ‘I just found out that I have an audition in two weeks’ time for a place in the corps de ballet.’
He just stared.
‘A part in their next performance,’ she explained. ‘Just a small part but I would be on the stage.’
‘You’ll get it,’ Roman said. He had always known that she would go far.
‘Would you come and see me perform if I did?’
Roman looked up at the theatre she had just come out of and could not imagine himself inside there, and yet he wanted to see her perform.
‘Yes.’
He didn’t know how, just that one day he would.
His answer meant everything to Anya and she reached out to touch the bruise over his eye but he moved his head back in reflex.
The only touches he knew were punches, jabs...
There had been zero affection in his life.
None.
Ever.
The girls who hung around the boxing gym adored Roman and did not care if he was not affectionate with them or that he didn’t want affection back.
But then her fingers met his skin and she lightly stroked the swollen flesh and she watched his eyes close.
Anya had always had a thing for him.
‘No boys,’ her mother said. ‘To dance, there must be sacrifice.’
There had been so many sacrifices, but Roman was her guilty pleasure and she had touched herself many times while thinking of him.
After the fight with his brother, Roman’s file had been marked Unsuitable for Adoption and he had been sent to the secure wing, though Anya knew he had not needed to be held there.
At sixteen he had left the orphanage and for two years she had missed him very much.
Now she could see his lips and that bruised, swollen mouth she wanted to taste. Her breathing was coming in a strange rhythm, as if she had just completed floor exercise, and yet she was standing still.
His breathing was slower and deeper, though, almost as it was before a fight, pulling oxygen into every cell, in preparation, anticipation.
Who kissed who?
Neither knew.
Their mouths simply met.
And it was soft for a second, but he could take pain so he pressed her into deeper contact and his tongue slipped into her mouth.
With one taste she was his. Both had waited for this moment for so long. Her arms went up and her hand met the back of his head, and then her shoulders met the wall.
He kissed her harder and she felt him unbuttoning her jacket and then the warmth of his hands as he touched her breast through her jumper as he had wanted to for so long.
Anya loved the intimate contact. The mingling of tongues continued and now her hand was busy. She reached down just so she could feel what had been pressing into her, and it was thick and hard.
They were dirty deep kissing down an alley and all thought of telling her mother about her audition was gone but then his hand caught her wrist and pulled it away from where she wanted to linger.
‘Anya...’
‘I want you, Roman, I always have. Take me back to yours,’ she said. ‘Take me.’
‘You need to go home,’ he said, breathing more rapidly now. He was ashamed of where he lived. ‘Go back to your mother...’ He walked off and she watched him go, yet despite the cold snow her mouth and body were on fire from her first kiss and she would not leave things there.
She ran.
Down the alleyway she ran and leapt onto his back and clung to him like a monkey, and though Roman carried on walking he laughed.
He laughed.
But then he swung her around so her legs wrapped around his waist and they faced the other, and as he walked on she asked him a question that she had asked a couple of years ago on that night when she had taken his supper to him.
‘How did you get the chocolate?’
He hadn’t answered then, they had just stared at each other and turned each other on in their first moment alone.
Now he told her.
‘Sev. He won a medal and they gave it to him. He saved it for me.’
‘You should have had it.’
‘I always wanted to have something I could give you,’ Roman said, and now he had a question for her.
‘What did your mother say when she caught you? We had to go back to our rooms and I just saw her going to the cupboard and then the shouts.’
‘She said you were trouble.’ Anya smiled. ‘That you were a saboteur.’
Roman stopped walking and he tried to peel her from him but she refused to be put down.
‘Anya...’ He did not know how best to voice it but that word had stung for it was his fear that he might sabotage not just Anya but his brother, were he to go looking for him. For years he had been told he was bad news, trouble, and that no family would ever want him to be a part of theirs.
And when he could not properly explain, they kissed again, her sex against his flat stomach and his erection stretching to reach it, and they both knew where this would lead. It was February tomorrow, and that meant that, although it was only four o’clock, soon it would be starting to get dark. ‘You should go home.’
‘I want to be with you, though,’ she said. ‘I want you to be my first. It has to be you.’
And Roman could not stand the thought of it being anyone other than him.
‘Take me to your home,’ Anya said.
‘It’s not a home.’
It was a bedsit in a building that the government provided for troubled young men like him.
‘We make it a home,’ Anya said, and they kissed in the cold, yet she felt warm for her feet were not on the ground, her legs were wrapped around him and her body pressed to his as their mouths generated heat.
He lowered her to the ground and they walked out onto the street. The snow was cold but she didn’t notice it with his arm around her, but outside a pharmacy he told her to wait outside.
They walked again, yet he stopped at another store.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just wait here,’ he said, and she wrapped her arms around herself in an attempt to stay warm. Finally he came out, carrying a bag, and she asked what was in it.
‘Never mind.’
They walked further until they came to the large grey house where Roman had a bedsit.
They dropped contact. He walked ahead of her and she followed him up a set of stairs. He took out a key and opened a door but again she was told to wait outside.
‘Roman?’
An
ya did not like this house and knew there could be trouble but she waited nervously, wondering what the hell he was up to.
The door opened a moment later and she stepped in and though she did not acknowledge to Roman that she knew, she saw that on the mattress on the floor were new sheets and a fresh pillowcase.
It had taken just a moment for him to make up the mattress. After all, he had spent his life rising early and making his bed, but that he had done what he could to make this room as pleasing as possible for her meant everything to Anya.
Alone in his room they weren’t shy, perhaps just a little awkward at first.
It was almost as cold in the room as it was outside and Roman fed coins into a meter and a small heater came on, but it would take ages to heat the room.
‘Get undressed,’ he said.
Perhaps not romantic but as Anya took off her clothes he put them on a chair by the heater so they would be warm when she dressed.
From her time in changing rooms Anya was very comfortable dressing and undressing in front of others but now she could feel his eyes on her body and it made her blush, though not in embarrassment.
Shivering, she got onto the mattress and slipped under the starchy sheet and watched as he now undressed. She was glad there was no curtain on the small window. A dusky grey wintery sky above allowed her to see his body as he peeled off his jumper.
He was magnificent. Broad and muscular and, though she was used to toned bodies, his was absolute bliss. There were black and purple bruises on his chest from his fight yesterday, and the paleness of his skin made her hand want to reach out.
He retrieved the condoms he had bought and tossed them down to the floor by the mattress then pulled down black jeans and his underwear. Anya felt her breath burn in her lungs at the sight of him. The thought of that inside her made her feel nervous and excited. As he came over and got onto the low mattress it was only the cold that kept her under the sheet, but he peeled it off and would keep her warm with his skin.
She felt his arms and wanted them to be wrapped around her and she ran her hand over his thigh, just enjoying the strength of him and that finally they could touch and hold each other.
He reached over for the condoms.
‘Roman...’ Anya said. ‘Kiss me first.’
He kissed her again, and it was deeper than last time, rougher than in the alley, and she tried to slow him down with her tongue. His hands played with her small breasts and he moaned into her mouth.
‘Taste them,’ Anya begged.
He did and he licked and sucked so hard that it caused the most delicious of hurts. She could feel him hard against her thigh and then again his hands patted outside the mattress for the condoms.
‘Wait,’ Anya said, because she wanted more of his mouth.
‘I don’t want to wait,’ he said, and he rolled onto his back, annoyed at the tease as Anya climbed on and sat on his stomach,
He did not like the kisses that trailed over his chest, and the nip of her teeth on his nipples, or rather he did but he did not want to feel her wet sex on his stomach when he wanted to be inside.
‘I want to come,’ he said, and she lifted and knelt, but instead of lowering herself onto his hard length she sat on his thighs and took his erection in her hand and started to stroke him.
‘I can do that myself.’
She was too slow, too tender and she watched his sulky face as she stroked him.
‘We’d be finished by now if I’d left it to you,’ she said.
‘I want to be finished.’ Roman had grown up used to a very quick come in the shower, and even now that was his preferred place.
Sex he liked hard and fast. Where was the pleasure in lying back, watching someone stroke him?
‘You’re too slow.’
‘Do it yourself then,’ she said, and got off. Then she decided to do something that he could not do for himself and knelt aside him. She heard his raw moan as she tasted him, as she licked his head and then slid her mouth down and sucked him.
‘More...’ he moaned.
And more Anya gave. She licked and sucked and loved the pressure he exerted with his hand to her head and the way his voice told her to go harder, take him deeper.
He held her hair and thrust into her and Anya wanted to touch herself because she was so close to coming.
Then she felt him swell and a powerful rush into her mouth and she tasted his salt and heard his ragged breathing as he lay there with his eyes closed.
And when he opened them Roman could not see her at first, for she was lying down, her head by his feet.
‘My turn now.’
He knelt up and hauled her over, parted her legs and looked down at her.
‘You’re beautiful, Anya,’ he said, and his fingers explored her intimate lips.
She propped herself up on her elbows and looked down. ‘When I touch myself to you...’ she pointed ‘...I touch there.’
He was hardening again, from looking at her and thinking of Anya touching herself to him.
And her finger showed him the little bud and then his hand swept her finger away and he lowered his head.
Her sob told him he hit exactly the right location, so he sucked her there and then blew and sucked and licked till it was Anya who swore, and who pleaded for more.
He parted her thighs further and he was still rough but now expert. His unshaven jaw felt delicious, the probe of his tongue so sublime that not even her elbows could hold her and she went onto her back and arched up.
She started to moan, he told her to hush, but he said it into her sex. Anya gritted her teeth and tried to hold onto the scream and as she did, the tension released to his mouth, his lips thrummed to the pulse of her and then Roman lowered her hips.
Anya felt spent. Her thighs were together and her hand covered her sex as it ached yet she was high on arousal and he moved so that he was over her body and on his elbows, looking down.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said.
‘I want you to,’ she said, and she peeled her hand away and his muscled thigh parted her legs.
He held onto himself as if holding himself back and then he entered a little. His face was beside hers and he heard her sob and he pulled back.
He tried again and it hurt so much she let out a cry of pain. ‘Just do it,’ she said.
‘Anya?’
‘Please.’
He did so and it killed her. The tear and stretch as he filled her was a heated agony and the feel as he hit her cervix was so bruising that she felt sick, and then she opened her eyes and he was deep inside her.
He kissed her in a way that he had not before. It started as an apology, then a kiss to chase away the pain. This was a kiss she wanted, tender, breathless, and as he started to move inside her the pain was replaced by warmth and she soon found she was moving with him.
For Roman the feel of their aroused skin sliding together felt sublime. It was like first contact, real contact with another soul. The touch of her hands on his shoulders he welcomed and then the roaming of them over his buttocks drew him further in.
They rolled to their sides to face each other and kiss deeply and then watch for a moment.
He thrust harder and watched as he did so. Her blood was on him and he would never hurt her again.
‘Roman...’ There was an urgent plea in her husky voice.
Anya had come to the thought of him many times, but never like this, for it was moving through her slowly. She felt as if she were dying a delicious death as she lost contact with all her senses, apart from the one that was him.
He turned her again, she was on her back again and he was heavy on top of her and it felt sublime.
Then she came hard; sweet and hot, it just flooded her body and gathered at her centre. And it beckoned
him to fill her. Which he did. His rapid thrusts were deliciously jarring, and then the rush of him inside her was heaven. Anya’s orgasm dragged back and then in like the ocean and swept them together to a place neither had ever been.
They lay still.
It was dark yet their bodies felt light and the heater had now warmed the room.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said as she lay in bliss.
‘You have to.’
‘I want to be with you,’ she said, and she turned to him. ‘I love you.’
He stared back at her and then rose from the mattress. ‘Come on, you need to get home.’
He dressed her in warm clothes and then walked her through the snow back to her world.
A world she didn’t want to be in without him.
* * *
Even the memory of them made Anya hungry.
She sat in a restaurant in Paris and usually she would toy with a quail-egg salad and pick out the croutons.
Tonight she ate quail.
But not even a generous supper could dim the hunger, for it was Roman she craved.
She turned on her phone at the end of the meal.
He had not called her again and that made her frown for she had expected more persistence.
More thrill from his chase.
The troupe wandered back towards the hotel. There were posters up, advertising the ballet, and there was a buzz that the famed dance company had now arrived in Paris. There were a couple of media journalists outside so Mika slipped an arm around her.
‘Can you do me a favour?’ Anya asked him.
‘I can.’ Mika frowned in surprise. It was most unlike Anya to ask for anything.
‘Would you look after my phone tonight and not give it back to me, even if I beg you to?’
‘Can I ask why?’
She never told anyone what was going on in her life but Anya could not stand to be alone in her head any more with this.
She needed friends.
‘Because the love of my life now has my number, and I have his and I am scared that I shall be too weak not to use it when I need him tonight.’
And Mika, who had a formidable reputation with woman but had secretly loved Anya for years, had his heart broken right there and then.
Return of the Untamed Billionaire Page 8
