by Lucy Ellis
Somewhere in there was a compliment, she thought uneasily, but it got lost in the concept of fifteen wives and the way he was looking at her. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be on the bed. She felt entirely too vulnerable to him.
She knew he could overwhelm her in moments—not with his expertise, although that was considerable, but with his sheer maleness, and feeling as vulnerable as she was she didn’t know how she was going to cope.
She knew she could say no and Serge would stop. But no wasn’t coming, and all of a sudden the only thing that was going to work was skin on skin.
All Serge knew as he came over her on the bed was that desire crashed through him, stronger than he had ever felt it. He was driven to possess her and he would.
His father had been this way with his mother. Scenes on scenes. Crashing doors, shouting, dramatic gestures. As a child it had been terrifying. As an adult man he had been fleeing his father’s legacy—a great passion destroyed in the blink of an eye.
And right now he just didn’t know what it all meant any more.
He needed the sweet hot centre of her body, how it felt driving inside her, the oblivion of reaching release, of knowing nothing but pleasure with this woman who was driving him to such extremes.
Yet as he settled on top of her and began to kiss her the kissing grew slower, deeper, prolonging this time they had together. It wasn’t out of control, it wasn’t frenzied, and he knew then what he had been fighting.
Not Clementine. Not his past.
Himself.
What he was capable of and the fear he wouldn’t be capable of it at all.
True love—deep and abiding. As if a grand passion in all its wrenching glory was all he could have and he might mistake that for the other kind. The real stuff. But the other side of that coin held by a fearful boy was a yearning for both—to love exaltedly and to love simply and truly.
Clementine’s lashes fluttered down, all the resistance going out of her. The pink colour spread across her chest, up into her face, mounting her cheeks. He tugged her hair gently free of its tie and then he had his fingers spread in the silky weight, and her hands were softly caressing his neck, down over his shoulders, his back, as tantalising as a feather. She kissed him as if it nourished her. She clung and she said his name.
He slid down her body and pleasured her with his mouth until she was trembling, and he kept going until she peaked. Then he positioned himself and stretched her, filled her, rocking into her with gentle, slow strokes until she was murmuring incoherently and locking her thighs around him. The feel of her breasts rising and falling between them, the sweet tickle of her breath on his neck, was almost too good.
‘So beautiful, Clementine,’ he whispered, unable not to gaze his fill of her. ‘The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.’
Her eyes spilled over with tears. He gently pressed his mouth to each eyelid, catching them with his tongue.
‘Sweet Clementine,’ his mouth murmured against her skin, his movements increasing in tempo.
She lifted her hips, took him deeply into her, threw her head back and made a sobbing sound as her internal muscles tightened around him. He gave way with a deeply satisfied groan, the pleasure hurtling through his body at force. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more from her. Twice more he took her as the evening wore on, absorbing the heat of her body, the scent of her skin, the clash of his body giving way to the sweet clutch of hers. Until he had her limp and quiet, breathing softly beside him.
Clementine released a ragged breath and wondered why, after the most intense sexual experience of her life, she couldn’t get enough breath in her lungs. She sucked in as much air as she could and turned her head, ate up the sight of him, eyes shut, chest labouring as he caught his breath, the sheen of sweat lightly glossing his skin. He had been so generous, so passionate, so much everything she wanted. Except he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to love her.
She had been wrong all along. He had never seen her as anything different from the women who had preceded her and would probably come after her. She wasn’t going to mistake his tenderness, his gentleness in the act of sex, for feelings he didn’t have for her.
He rolled over, and suddenly those dragon-green eyes were enmeshed with hers. Despair gripped her. In a moment she would lose herself again in wanting this to be real. But it wasn’t. Tears she couldn’t repress filled her eyes, spilled over, made a mess of her face.
Serge cursed and drew her in against him. His arms were tight around her, but instead of comfort it only reminded her of what she had lost.
‘Don’t cry, sweet Clementine, don’t cry,’ he murmured.
Except those words didn’t mean anything, did they? Nothing was going to change, and one day—sooner rather than later—it would all be over and her heart would be smashed to smithereens.
‘Tell me what’s wrong?’
‘I don’t want it to end,’ she wept, unable to hide her true feelings any more.
His Tartar blood turned his expression wild and fierce as he caught her face between his hands. ‘It’s not ending. Listen to me, Clementine, nothing is over.’
For an endless moment Clementine held herself in the bright circle of his assurance, the words But you don’t love me dying on her lips, because her next words, And I love you—so very much, would tear this moment apart.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell him how much she felt when there was nothing in him to answer it. Instead she let him draw her close into his arms and listened as he began to croon to her in Russian, his hand moving in circles on her bare back. Gradually her crying fit subsided and she lay still and broken.
She lay there for a long time, until by his deep even breathing she was sure he was asleep. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, but it felt much later to Clementine. It felt like an endless day that was never going to be over.
She had faced up to this when she was a seventeen-year-old girl, knowing the only way free of the emotions tearing her apart was to go out into the world on her own and make a new life.
She was a twenty-six-year-old woman now, and it should be easier. Except it wasn’t. The pain was tearing her up like the claws of a wild animal and she couldn’t stop it. And the longer she lay here in this bed the harder it was going to be to get up and force herself to go.
Extricating herself as carefully as possible, she silently dressed, packed her suitcase with her old clothes, and sat down to write Serge a note on hotel stationery.
She didn’t know what to say and in the end she simply wrote her name—Clementine. One name to add to his many. She put the note on the bedside table, pinned it down with the red jewellery case, and took a last look at his sleeping form. His beautiful male face looked so peaceful—as if he’d let go of something that had been hurting him and now all she saw was a kind of relief.
One day I will feel that way too, she told herself.
‘I will get over you Serge Marinov,’ she whispered.
But the force of her emotions threatened to overwhelm her again, because something told her she never would. Not completely.
She had to protect herself. It was time to go.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE bright lights in the main terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport seared Clementine’s sensitive vision, and she made a stop at a chemist and bought a pair of cheap sunglasses, an eye-pack for the flight and some aspirin.
As she crossed the concourse she found herself looking around for him. As she queued, as she waited, even as she went through Security she kept half expecting to hear that dark Russian voice, to turn around and tangle in his eyes again. But what good would it do anyway? He didn’t love her. He wasn’t going to love her. The past weeks had been a fantasy. She had been right in that little shop when she had first seen him—a Cossack out of a historical epic. Ridiculous, hopelessly romantic, it didn’t stand up to the light of day. He wasn’t going to chase her. Not any more.
It was truly over. It was time to get on with her l
ife.
As she bumped along the aisle to her seat in cattle class her thoughts flashed back to the private jet, and it brought home to her just how unreal her time with Serge had been.
In less than two hours she would be on her adopted home soil and life would begin again—more or less as it had been when she’d left months before. She remembered how she had felt back in St Petersburg when she’d thought she had lost him, the little lecture she had given herself about putting her experience with Joe Carnegie behind her once and for all, getting on with her life in a proactive fashion.
But now she was finding it hard to picture her flat, had forgotten Joe Carnegie, and couldn’t fathom how she was going to drag herself through the next few days, let alone get a grasp on her dreams and ambitions once more. Because she had allowed herself to dream with Serge and those plans now lay in ruins.
One step at a time, her weary mind acknowledged.
As her head touched the back of her seat she closed her eyes. The noise in the plane ceased to touch her as the emotional strain took its toll and she slept.
It was five o’clock in the morning when Clementine emerged from the airport with her luggage. She wondered how she was going to get a taxi—briefly considered phoning Luke until she realised the hour. People jostled her as she ground to a halt on the concourse, but she had a suitcase, a piece of hand luggage and a shoulder bag to deal with and only two arms. She fumbled in her handbag for her purse and the money for a coffee. She needed to take a breath before she gathered herself together and thought about getting home.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw her suitcase lifted and swung out of her line of vision. She gave a cry of, ‘Hey!’ before her gaze ran up six and a half feet of muscle-honed male in jeans and a jacket and a blue T-shirt she remembered that brought out the intense green of his eyes. Her shock turned to heart-stuttering confusion. Then he hauled her hand luggage under his arm and took off.
‘Serge!’
For a moment shock held her immobile as he strode off. With her belongings.
‘Serge!’ She took off after him. ‘Wait! What are you doing?’
She dodged and weaved through the wave of people coming in the other direction, but she was hardly going to lose him. He stood head and shoulders above the crowd, and he wasn’t in a hurry. It was just the length of those long, purposeful strides.
‘Stop! Stop!’ she shrieked, no longer caring what anybody thought of her. He’d come for her. She threw herself at his back the precise moment he ground to a halt and landed smack against those big shoulders, her hands going up to steady herself.
He dumped all her luggage and turned around, his expression so fierce she took a backward step.
‘Da,’ he said fiercely. ‘It’s good you have to chase me for a bit. How does it feel, Clementine, being the one on the hop? Isn’t that one of your Australian expressions?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said unthinkingly, still coming to terms with his presence. ‘How did you get here?’ It was the least important question that came to mind, but her brain seemed to have short-circuited.
He made a ‘no importance’ gesture—so like the Serge she loved, king of his own fiefdom. As if the practical considerations of life that so bedevilled the general population had nothing to do with him.
‘You like to run, don’t you, kisa? Ever since I first laid eyes on you I have been chasing you. Why would it be any different now?’ His tone was almost meditative, but his eyes were charged and as wild as she had ever seen them.
‘I’m not running. I’ve come home. The holiday is over, Serge. You made that clear. You took me to Paris to break up with me.’ Her voice shattered over those words. ‘The most romantic time in my life and you took it and you smashed it.’
The colour left his face as her words sank in, and for a moment she experienced a modicum of satisfaction that he understood how truly awful that experience had been for her. Then a deep sadness began to invade her, its tendrils reaching into every corner of her body.
‘That wasn’t my intention,’ he said, in a deep, fractured voice. ‘Clementine, please believe me—it was never my intention to hurt you.’
But you did.
Her whole body was howling and he was just standing there, looking fierce and troubled and desperate.
‘Go and find yourself another girl, Serge,’ she said heavily. ‘I’m sure there are thousands of women in New York City alone who would be happy to take my place.’
He reached for her, leaning in, and suddenly all she could see was the turbulence inside of him and something else. Something tender—something awakened by her words.
‘Where do you get this from? When have I looked at another woman since I met you?’
For a long moment her heart felt too big for her chest. If only he meant a word of that. But she knew it couldn’t be true. She shook his hand from her arm. ‘You have a history, Serge. Do you think I was living in a bubble back in New York? Everywhere I went I heard about your airhead bimbos. This is what you’re like with women.’
‘Not with you, Clementine.’
‘We were having sex, Serge,’ she hissed. ‘Sex—that’s all it was. You told me that’s all it was. You spelt it out. How am I supposed to feel? How am I supposed to deal with that? I don’t have casual flings. I’m not built that way.’
‘I know you’re not.’
She shook her head, shaking out the soft, persuasive sound of his words. Meaningless, empty words.
‘I’m not coming back with you, Serge. It’s over.’
He caught her hand. ‘No.’ It wasn’t a plea. It wasn’t a request. It was a statement of fact. No.
It gave her the much needed anger to power herself up.
‘Get over yourself, rich boy.’ She shook his hand off. ‘You’re not that irresistible.’
He didn’t shift and suddenly she wanted him to know how badly he’d hurt her. But she also wanted him to know he was nothing special.
‘I met another guy like you, Serge, a year ago. A rich guy who thought he just had to throw his money around and everything would belong to him. He dated me for six weeks. He dressed me, he asked me to wear jewellery he’d loaned me, and then he offered me an apartment because he didn’t want to slum it in my flat. The problem was he was engaged the whole time and had no intention of me being anything other than his mistress. Just another guy looking for no-strings sex with an easy girl.’
Serge was looking at her as if she’d punched him.
She took a deep breath, lowering her voice. ‘Except I didn’t sleep with him. Because it means something to me, Serge, when I share my body. And the only reason I’m telling you any of this is so you understand what I risked when I came with you to New York City.’
‘Clementine—’
She heard him say her name but she barrelled on, full of emotion, hardly knowing what she was saying or revealing any more, and not caring.
‘I didn’t date for a year afterwards—until I met you and took a chance. You fit the profile, Serge. Money, charisma, the sort of guy who owns the world.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘But I thought, He’s a good guy. I should look beyond the outer trappings to the man underneath. But in the end, Serge, you’re worse than he is because you made me believe you cared about me. All that other guy did was make a fool of me.’
Serge was silent, then he said roughly, ‘You should have told me.’
‘I’m telling you now. I just wanted to go on a date,’ she said stonily. ‘I wanted to be a normal girl for a change, who gets dated instead of propositioned.’
‘I never propositioned you.’
‘Sure you did. You asked me to come with you to New York and my first thought was, Great, another jerk. And guess what? I was right.’
‘We ran out of time,’ he said softly.
‘I know. That’s why I said yes. Because I thought just maybe I’d give you the benefit of the doubt. I thought you saw me, Serge, the real me. More fool me.’
‘I do
see you.’ Serge touched her cheek, and when she flinched turned her face to make her look at him. ‘I do see you,’ he repeated, his finger curling possessively under her chin.
‘No, you don’t see me at all. All you see is what everyone else sees—sexy Clementine working her stuff,’ she said bitterly. ‘You made that very clear yesterday. It’s about sex, you said. Just sex.’
‘That is not true, Clementine. I lied to you.’
She went very still.
Serge’s whole body had drawn taut. ‘I didn’t want to feel this way about you. My parents had passion in their marriage, Clementine, and it wiped out everything else. My father thought loving meant annihilating the other person. I vowed I would never do that, and whenever I found myself getting close to a woman I would pull back. Until you.’
His eyes softened on her. ‘Everything about you has been different. From the moment I saw you in that little shop, saw that smile of yours, you invited me in. It was like being a kid again, following you down that road, and when you wouldn’t let me look after you I was stumped. I couldn’t leave you there.’
His green eyes, so fierce as she’d flung her accusations at him, grew tender and their gazes locked.
‘I’ve been chasing you ever since.’
She blinked.
‘I’m in love with you, Clementine.’
She felt her legs give. She sat down heavily on her suitcase and Serge dropped to his knees beside her. In the middle of an airport terminal, under harsh, unforgiving lights. But all Clementine saw was the man she loved in front of her, on his knees, declaring himself.
‘Then why did you push me away?’ she whispered hoarsely, not really believing what he was saying.
‘Fear.’
Her chin came up. It was a huge admission for a man like Serge to make, and she met the sincerity in his eyes and believed him.
‘I didn’t want to be like my father,’ he admitted tautly. ‘I didn’t want to destroy the woman I loved. But, God help me, Clementine, when I woke up and found you gone I knew I’d destroyed what we had anyway. I was exactly like my father.’
