‘What did he say?’ Roman asked.
‘I don’t want to tell you.’
‘Come home,’ he offered.
‘No, I’m going to go to the dance studio and go through it alone.’
‘How many times have you done that?’
So many times, Anya thought.
‘Whatever you’re doing isn’t working,’ Roman pointed out.
‘No.’
‘So why not try something different?’
They walked and they could go the long way and avoid the square where she had seen them kiss, but she had avoided so much and it was getting them nowhere so they walked through it.
And his arm was around hers and it hurt less and less.
‘I’ve made you a light supper—’ he started, and Anya turned in surprise.
‘You cook?’
‘Yes,’ Roman said. ‘Josie and her husband are coming back tonight. I’ve sent my driver to pick them up this time. You can have a nice bath and then something to eat, then sleep.’
He calmed her—he always had.
Oh, he enthralled her and made her burn but he was so strong and so measured that with him she felt safe with her wild emotions.
They arrived back at the apartment and again Anya felt soothed as she stood in the entrance hall.
It felt good to be home.
‘Why don’t you go and have a bath?’ Roman suggested.
‘Do I smell?’ Anya asked.
‘Just a bit.’ He smiled and he made her smile.
She ran the deepest bath and peeled off her clothes and the scented, oily water was relaxing to her aching limbs so she lay there for a generous while.
And then she felt the pull of her body to be with him. She put on her robe and walked through to the kitchen.
His back was to her and he was wearing black jeans and no top and his scars were becoming familiar to her now.
She went up behind him and kissed his shoulder and then looked at what he was making.
He was turning out a crab tartare, one of several, and she dipped her finger in a dish filled with red and tasted that it was hren, a horseradish relish, and one of her favourite foods from home.
It was what she had ordered at the restaurant that terrible time.
Yet now he had made it.
‘I love hren,’ she said.
‘I remember.’
She watched as he sautéed wild chanterelles, and the scent of the mushrooms made her stomach growl.
It really was the perfect supper for the night before such a performance and, had she eaten out tonight, this was what she might well have chosen.
And it was also the perfect company to be in when your nerves were in shreds.
Some considered Roman to be lacking in emotion.
Anya had always known different.
The emotions were there, and she felt them. His calm presence tonight was for her.
‘Did you learn to cook in the legion?’ she asked him.
‘The only thing I learnt about cooking there was to open cans.’
‘Was the food awful?’
‘It did its job.’
‘So, when did you learn to cook like this?’
‘Anya,’ Roman said ‘let’s not do this tonight.’
‘Celeste?’ Anya asked, and said her name without venom.
Roman nodded. ‘Let’s go through.’
There were so many parts of his life still missing. Her dancing had suffered since his return, not because of Roman, she was starting to realise, but because of her own dark thoughts and fears.
They ate at the table, and it had been beautifully laid, with silver and candles, which Roman lit.
And Celeste must have taught him this also, Anya thought, for there was no silver service at the orphanage, she knew for sure, and she guessed it was the same at the foreign legion.
There was a burn of jealousy, but she breathed through it.
Roman drank wine, Anya water, and she looked over as he loaded his plate.
And she tasted the crab, so fresh that she knew it must have been prepared from scratch after she had called him.
And all this would not be possible without Celeste, Anya knew.
They would not be sitting having such a romantic meal, Roman, his top half naked, she in a robe, and eating this sumptuous dinner that he had prepared for her, without the years they could not speak of.
Celeste was a part of his complex journey and not knowing a part of his life felt worse than the jealousy that choked her.
‘Tell me about her,’ Anya said.
‘No,’ Roman said. ‘Tonight you need calm.’
‘I’m ready to hear. I need to know, Roman, I know I get jealous...’
‘I don’t want to hurt you Anya,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want you speaking badly of her.’
‘I will try not to.’
Roman nodded. He did not want to upset her further tonight, but maybe the decks needed to be cleared.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘All of it,’ she said. ‘I want to know why you were looking for a wife.’
‘Just as I was about to leave, some friends showed me an advert. It was a joke at first...’
‘What did the advert say?’
‘Just that she wanted company—someone to go to the theatre with and things like that.’
‘And to share her bed?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to know what the advert said.’
‘She said that her father was dying and he had wanted to see her married. Celeste had given up on love but she wanted to make her father happy. She hoped the marriage would last for two years. She spoke of the ballet and theatre, and that she liked to cook but preferred to eat out.’
‘Roman?’ Anya pushed.
‘She wanted someone good looking, preferably younger than her...’
‘Roman?’ Anya pushed again. ‘Did the advert imply sex?’
He told her but he was not cruel.
She had a performance tomorrow and to mention adventurous would provoke the screams of Firebird being plucked alive.
‘She said that as well as all that, she wanted a sexual partner.’
‘So you were just a sex toy.’
‘Yes,’ Roman said, and he could leave it there but it would be a lie and a cop-out and Celeste deserved better than that. So too did Anya. They needed the truth if they were to survive so he amended, ‘At first.’
His words cut like a knife, because him as a sex toy she could almost, almost, deal with, but never his affection for another woman, never that it might have turned to love.
‘Do you want to hear this?’ he checked. ‘Are you sure you need to hear this tonight?’
Anya nodded and then shook her head. ‘You could have come to Saint Petersburg and been with me,’ she said. ‘You say you were rich by then, whereas I was barely making ends meet...’
‘Anya, if you want to hear this then you need to listen properly. I never intended to come and find you.’
‘But why not?’
‘Pride,’ he said.
‘Foolish pride.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I would do it all again because the man I was would not have sat back and let you do what you had to to get by in the dance world. Celeste taught me patience.’
‘No, that was me,’ Anya said, and she remembered the burn of their first time, how he would have had her in a moment and that she had slowed him down.
‘She taught me manners,’ Roman said.
‘No,’ Anya refuted. ‘That was also me.’
‘I’m not talking about please and thank you in the bedroom...’ Roman countered.
Anya was.
‘And what else did Saint Celeste teach you?’ she asked with a sneer, but her face soon crumpled and she knew he would terminate the conversation. ‘I am trying...’ she pleaded.
‘I know,’ he said, and instead of telling her off he took her hand.
Roman had known this would be a difficult conversation, which was why he hadn’t wanted to go there tonight. His reaction would be just the same if Anya spoke of Mika or another lover she’d had.
Soon it would be his turn, to sit lacerated as she told him about Mika, and so for now he kept it at Celeste.
‘She taught me how to hold a fine china cup and how to sit in a restaurant...’
And she winced because their last night had been spent in a restaurant.
‘Remember how I embarrassed you.’
‘You did not.’
‘But I did,’ Roman said. ‘Decorum was part of your curriculum...’
‘I could have shown you,’ she pleaded.
‘But I didn’t want you teaching me.’
‘You let her, though!’
‘Because I did not care for her then. Celeste and I had a deal, two years together, and I intended to use them wisely.’
‘So you answered the ad...’
‘Yes.’
‘And you made love to her.’
‘Sex,’ Roman said.
‘With affection?’ she asked, and then changed her mind. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘You do need to hear this, Anya,’
Roman had decided.
It was time.
‘I was locked in the secure unit for four years. I had no social skills, it is not a part of the orphanage’s curriculum.’
His words were cutting and she nodded her understanding that it still hurt him to recall those times and Roman continued.
‘I remember when I went first to her home. I had never been inside one, not a proper home.’
And she thought how bleak his life had been at the bedsit that he had tried to make presentable for her.
‘Was that the first time you saw her?’
‘Yes, we had exchanged photos and spoken on the phone, but that was our first meeting. Celeste too was shocked,’ Roman recalled. ‘She said, “You look like your picture...”’
And Anya smiled for the first time about the subject.
‘Did you sleep with her that day?’
‘No,’ Roman said, and he held her angry glare. ‘That night.’
‘And?’
‘I would never discuss what went on in the bedroom with you and I shall extend the same courtesy to Celeste. All I shall say is that affection grew. Anya, when I turned up at Daniil’s Libby embraced me. When I turned up at Celeste’s door and she did the same I recoiled.’
Anya could not speak.
‘I wanted to improve myself. Which I did. If you don’t approve of my methods, that is up to you.’
‘I don’t approve...’ she said, and then she closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked at him. ‘It was supposed to last only two years, yet it went on for longer?’
‘Celeste found out that she was dying. I chose to be with her till the end.’
And how could she hate him for that?
‘What is your new name?’ she asked.
It was the only question he wasn’t prepared for.
‘Roman?’ Anya begged. ‘Surely you can tell me that.’
It was so hard to, though. ‘I wanted to give my brother a chance of a life without his poor relation on his back. I wanted you to have the life you deserved. I couldn’t turn my back on it all, though.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I was given a new identity—we all are for that first year. Then you get a choice, retain the new one or go back to the old. If I kept my new one, I could never look you up, I could never see my brother again. And I couldn’t do it. I am still Roman Zverev.’
‘So why have you stayed away all these years?’ she asked.
‘Because I never felt ready, because I still thought I would be a strain...’
‘So, what, you had to change before you could find me?’
‘I didn’t do for you, Anya, I did it for me.’
Anya sat there as he stood.
‘I am not going to apologise for Celeste. Get used to that,’ he said. ‘Anya, had we stayed together we would have been as poor as church mice and I tell you now...’ he made a gesture with two fingers to the back of his throat, and her own throat closed as he touched on a painful subject ‘...I could not have put up with that. I would have held you back.’
He was done explaining, and left the table and went through to the bedroom.
He lay on his back with his hands behind his head. He loathed sharing his feelings, he loathed to admit that need for Anya that had clawed at his heart.
And Anya came to the door and she remembered a time many, many years ago.
Flu had swept through the orphanage. In an effort to contain it, all the orphans had been confined to their dormitories and rooms.
Katya too had been ill and Anya had been asked to work in the kitchen. She had taken suppers around on a trolley without the perpetual guard of her mother.
As she’d looked in she had seen Roman, lying on his bed, his hands behind his head.
He hadn’t been sick but had been confined.
The guard had opened the door and she had gone in.
Roman had stared up at the ceiling and had not turned to look, for he’d expected it to be Katya bringing him his meal.
‘One day you will get out of here and do great things,’ Anya had said, and his face had turned towards her.
Anya smiled at the recollection.
He was out of there and had done great things.
He’d done them in his own unique way, and she was proud that he had.
‘How did you get the chocolate?’ she had asked as she had walked towards him, carrying his tray.
He hadn’t answered.
Instead he had smiled.
She had walked into his room utterly innocent, but he had stripped her bare with his eyes. She had walked over, her eyes on his crotch, watching him harden.
His eyes had been on her breasts, which had ached.
‘What time are lights out?’ she had asked.
‘Ten.’
‘Anya.’ A worker had called for her to hurry, but their love had been born by then.
And at ten that night she had lain in her own bed and thought of him, and Roman had done the same as her.
‘You did get out of there, Roman,’ Anya said, and he turned and looked. ‘And you have done great things.’
‘I had to do it by myself, for myself.’
Anya nodded, even if she did not quite understand.
Now, though, she could do as she had wanted to back then. She walked towards him, and he smiled as she stripped herself of her robe.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED to be here,’ Roman warned as she walked towards him. ‘No sex before a match...’
‘Sergio had no idea,’ Anya said. ‘Anyway, I’m not a boxer.’
She bent her head and kissed his sulky mouth as she had wanted to back then.
And he stroked her breasts.
His kiss felt like a delicious reward, and all the promise of his mouth and the skill of his tongue and cares and worries faded.
She stroked him, unzipped him and he kicked his jeans off. Their mouths barely parted.
As she knelt over him his mouth took her breast and sent little volts of pleasure through her body. Her breast felt hot, tender, and he roused in her an endless ache.
‘No bruises,’ she warned.
He knew now.
‘Turn over,’ she said, and though her voice was husky with lust there was something she had to do.
And she did.
She looked at his back and now he liked the soft kisses she rained there. He thought of that time and the sand, like salt in wounds, and now they were bathed by the salt of her tears. He thought of that long, lonely night she had been by his side, even if not physically.
He liked too the heat of her sex in the small of his back yet he rolled them over because he wanted more.
There was no better feeling than being taken by Roman and she could feel the warmth spread through her, a deep, enduring warmth that was always waiting for him.
She looked at him and the surroundings did not matter when she was with him.
They could have been anywhere—teenagers in a shabby room with a silver-grey sky streaming through a small window, or in this luxurious apartment—but the feelings were, and had always been, the same.
She centred on him, and when he moved it was slowly and with a precision only Roman could achieve.
He knew her needs, and her need was him.
She moved her hands over his back to feel the skin and the muscles that were taut beneath her fingers.
When her head arched he kissed her neck and found a spot so tender that her hips rose.
And he simply knew.
There was the sound of them and the feeling of him and it was a place where Anya could voice doubt.
‘If you leave me again, never come back.’
‘I’m never leaving you.’
And then his pace quickened, and that powerful body at full thrust was dizzying.
His buttocks were firm and she dug her fingers in and held on, not to him but to herself because her thighs were shaking and there was a rush of heat.
Every part of her was taut and on the edge and then he stilled, and she watched his jaw grit and then as he came she toppled beneath him. An orgasm so intense that there was no breath in her body. The power that shot into her seemed to stun her and then the weight of him for a moment, as their bodies pulsed as one.
‘Why do you say I’ll leave you?’
‘Because you did.’
Because you still might.
Still he had not told her he loved her.
The jigsaw of them was complete, the jigsaw of Roman was she thought, too.
Return of the Untamed Billionaire Page 12
