Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Dani Collins

  The Truth About Little Red Riding Hood

  —Roz Fayrer

  MARRIED. SHE WAS MARRIED. Ella pressed her fingers to her lips, still thrumming from the kiss that had sealed her fate. There had been kisses between them before—of course there had—but nothing compared to the searing passion she’d felt almost consuming her the moment he’d claimed her before the priest and God. Ever since, her body had been in a constant state of awareness, soaring between hot and cold, both of which produced goose bumps across her skin, prickles of need and want. Heat coiled low within her and nothing would satiate it. Certainly not the hooded glances she felt from Roman when he thought she was not looking.

  Barely two hours ago, she had bid her grandmother adieu and been whisked away in Roman’s private jet and now they were en route to Belarus. It seemed impossible to her that she had taken the reverse of this same journey only five weeks ago. Then she had been filled with fear for her grandmother, feeling impossibly lonely and helpless. Yet now her grandmother was safe and happy, and she was about to embark on a new life with a man who filled her days with joy and made her feel…strong? Capable? Even as she thought it, she shushed a very Célia-sounding voice chiding that she shouldn’t need a man to make her feel those things.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ asked the perfectly presented male attendant.

  She smiled and shook her head, half fearful that she would blurt out that she needed no more than what she now had in her life. All that was left to do before she could truly begin was for Roman to meet Vladimir, and then… She frowned. They hadn’t actually discussed where they would go after that meeting. She’d been so focused on actually getting to the wedding, thoughts and discussions of what would happen next had seemed almost impossible.

  Now, sitting on the plane, she realised it was almost silly not to know where she was going. And it both excited her and made her a little uncomfortable. She had placed all of her trust in Roman. He would look after her, she knew it. But as she cast a glance at her husband, who had spent a large portion of the flight so far consumed by whatever he was reading on his tablet, that unease began to grow.

  He was unusually quiet, and Dorcas seemed to pick up on this too as she padded between them, back and forth across the aisle of the small cabin. Dorcas hmphed down into a shape the size of a giant boulder at her feet and Ella didn’t have the heart to be worried about her dress. The warmth and physical contact was a balm to her heightened senses.

  She caressed the wiry tendrils beneath Dorcas’s jaw and large yellow eyes stared up at her as if in concern. Strangely, she found herself reassuring the animal as much as herself with gently whispered words so as not to disturb Roman’s concentration.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ she finally ventured after another half an hour of silence.

  ‘Da.’

  It was strange hearing Roman speak Russian. Even though Ella was fluent, they had always reverted to English. But from the moment they’d stepped onto the plane, all of Roman’s directions to the pilot and the staff had been in Russian, even the few sentences he had shared with her. As if he had forgotten the way things had been between them for the last month.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ she asked, hoping that might be the reason for the strange mood that had descended over her husband.

  At this, he finally put aside his phone and looked at her with some confusion. ‘Why would I be nervous?’

  ‘About meeting my guardian. I know your businesses are in a different area, but Kolikov is a fairly well-known name and I’m aware that he has…a reputation.’

  Roman smiled—a smile that Ella had not seen from him before. Predatory. The word ran through her mind before she could stop it.

  ‘No. In fact, I am relishing it.’

  His response did nothing to appease the concern rising within her breast and suddenly she longed to call Célia. To tell her about her marriage, to hear words of reassurance that Ella couldn’t be sure would be forthcoming. Her mind became unaccountably blank, as if choosing to think of nothing rather than the fears that were brewing.

  * * *

  In a limousine, they travelled stretches of tarmac drawing them away from the small private airfield outside of Moscow towards Vladimir’s estate. Roman’s usually single-minded focus was fractured. As much as he tried to force his thoughts to his goal, he couldn’t rid himself of the awareness of his bride. He could sense her withdrawal—one of his own making. He knew that his curt answers and almost brutal brooding had affected her.

  It both was and wasn’t intentional, for he no longer needed the pretence of the doting husband. He had what he wanted—the key to his revenge. Now he just had to turn the key in the lock. Everything in his life since the age of thirteen had been about this moment. Every dark thing he’d ever done, educational achievement, business deal, his sole focus had been leading to this point.

  He’d identified Ella as the only thing that Vladimir cared about other than his company. He’d watched from afar, seeing how Ella was showered with everything that his mother had not been. Suddenly he felt a surge of resentment towards her, knowing that to be unfair. It wasn’t her fault, but she was connected to that man’s world—her ignorance was no excuse. But, if Vladimir gave him everything he wanted, then perhaps she might escape with as little hurt as possible.

  If Vladimir gave him the company that was his by right, to do with as he wished, to destroy in front of the very man whose sole focus had excluded his daughter, then Roman would retreat from Ella’s life—leaving her untouched and their wedding annulled. She might never even know the true depth of his actions.

  But only if Vladimir had even an ounce of sentiment towards the girl. Roman hoped he did. For her sake.

  Roman found it strange that he recognised the roads leading towards the estate. As if everything about that day, all those years ago, had been indelibly printed on his soul. The way the sun had beat down on him for every single one of the twenty minutes it had taken him to walk from where the bus had stopped. The way his chest had ached from leaving his mother behind and spending the precious little time they had left on his quest. The way his rough clothes had felt against his skin. The way that hope had bloomed in his chest as he felt convinced that the old man would repent, would save his mother.

  The slice of devastation, humiliation and agony that had torn through him as the door had been slammed in his face was still fresh. As was the bitterness and anger he’d seen in the old man’s eyes, the resentment. That was the night Roman had been truly born.

  As they passed through wrought-iron gates Roman remembered Ella asking him on the plane if everything was okay. Now he mentally answered that it was more than okay. That it was perfect.

  * * *

  As they drew to a stop, Ella almost excitedly launched herself out of the limousine. She had decided that once they got this meeting out of the way, everything would go back to how it had been before. That the man she had fallen in love with would return to her, and she would never see this dark, brooding wolfish figure again. Dorcas loped along beside her and if Konstantin—her guardian’s housekeeper—thought anything strange about the presence of the animal he was too well trained to say.

  Kissing the gruff man on the cheek, she blindly grasped Roman’s hand and hurried into the mansion before she could see Konstantin’s dark look at the man she had married. As always when she entered the sprawling entrance hall, she was stunned by the marble flooring and sweeping spiral staircase in the corner, the grandeur nothing like what little she remembered of her one-time childhood home with her parents. Releasing Roman’s hand, she gave in to the desire for her childhood ritual of spinning in a circle in the centre of the hall. It had started as a way to stop from buckling beneath the awe of it all, the unfamiliarity of it, and Ella suddenly found she needed it now. A self-conscious giggle rose up in her chest at her own silliness as she drew to a halt, expecting to see Roman’s soft in
dulgent, understanding smile that she had grown to depend upon. But instead he was looking about him as if disappointed.

  ‘He is in a meeting, miss, and asked that you wait for him in the living room.’

  Thrusting aside her fears, Ella instead reached once again for Roman’s hand and drew him towards the room indicated by Konstantin. She chose to cling to the threads of her own happiness. A happiness she hadn’t realised was missing from her life before Roman. She’d been going through the motions at school and university, Ella had realised. The roughly sketched-out company she’d been talking to Célia about just a way to pass the time. But now Ella was about to start a new chapter in her life. As a woman. As a wife. As someone in her own right. All this joy she desperately clung to, ignoring the fact that Roman’s hand had slipped from hers.

  She turned to find him pouring himself a drink from the small bar area and felt oddly disquieted by the way he seemed to feel so at home in a room she had never really liked. As if it was his. As if he had the right. It was such a contrast to the almost humble man she had come to know. The arrogance somehow made her feel embarrassed on his behalf as Konstantin took in the same action with something like disdain.

  ‘Would you care for a drink?’ The simple request had come from her guardian’s housekeeper, not her husband, making it almost impossible for Ella to ignore that something was wrong. Very wrong.

  ‘I think that would be a good idea,’ came a gravelly voice behind her. ‘I have a feeling she’s going to need it.’

  She turned to find her guardian looming in the shadows cast from the doorway to the hall. The smile on her lips wavered at Vladimir’s proclamation. Even though he was nearing eighty, her guardian had always stood tall and proud. Stocky rather than softly rounded, and always shockingly dark-featured compared to her pale skin and blonde hair from her mother’s side. He had always seemed formidable to her but now, here, he felt almost menacing.

  ‘So this is the man you have married?’ he demanded as he stepped into the room. The Russian words were harsh against her heart in comparison to the month spent with the softer, warmer French of her grandmother.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking back at her husband, hoping to have him stand by her side, but feeling an unbreachable distance between them across the room. ‘Please let me introduce Roman Black. My husband.’

  ‘Black?’ queried her guardian. ‘Not a surname I’m familiar with.’

  Vladimir’s gaze bored into Roman’s unrelentingly. And Ella wondered why the man who had charmed her, who had eased her grandmother’s concerns aside with smooth words and confidences, was not now attempting to do the same with her guardian. Instead, he appeared as if carved from stone, holding fast against the battering winds being thrown in his direction by Vladimir Kolikov.

  It was as if the temperature in the room had dropped, a hostility she had never before felt covering her skin in goose bumps.

  ‘I would like a moment with your new husband, Ella.’

  The dismissal was perhaps not unusual, but most unexpected. She was about to protest, but one quick glare from Vladimir cut the words before they could form. Roman had yet to take his eyes from her guardian and Ella felt as if she were at sea, being pushed and pulled by invisible currents that she let carry her from the room.

  But she refused to be so easily dismissed and instead paused in the hallway, leaving the door ever so slightly ajar.

  ‘You said you would be back.’

  Ella frowned from where she stood, hidden in the shadows beside the door. Roman knew her guardian?

  ‘I did,’ Roman replied, his voice almost unrecognisable.

  ‘And you have married my ward.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘That is entirely dependent on you, Kolikov.’

  Ella struggled to understand what was going on. The words she could hear as easily as if had she been in the room, but the meaning? It was completely lost on her. The shifting sand beneath her feet made her feel nauseous as she struggled to wrap her head around the conversation taking place through the door. Her heart beat fiercely against the invisible threat that hovered above her like a sword.

  ‘Why Black?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The name. Why Black?’

  ‘It was the colour my heart turned when you kicked me off your property. It was the depth of the darkness my heart became when she died.’

  ‘I see you are just as fanciful as that girl.’

  ‘That girl was your daughter!’ Roman raged and in that moment an overwhelming force of horror struck Ella hard and fast. Roman was Vladimir’s grandson?

  ‘She stopped being my daughter the day she chose you over me,’ the old man spat.

  ‘Well, now this is your choice. Your reckoning.’

  ‘Really? Pray tell.’

  ‘I have what you value most in this world. I wouldn’t say love, because clearly you are not capable of such a thing. Or perhaps that is reserved only for your company. Either way, now you must choose. You can hand over control and ownership of Kolikov Holdings and I will let her go. The marriage will be annulled. Or—’ Roman paused, as if ensuring he had the man’s complete attention ‘—I will leave Ella Riding ruined and destitute, just like my mother was.’

  Ella’s legs buckled as she pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle the moan that threatened to escape her lips. It had all been lies? Every touch, every kiss, every word… Her heart severed from its moorings, cut through with a knife so sharp she felt flayed. Her husband was threatening to ruin her. The man she had fallen in love with, the man she had naively entrusted her future to. Bile rose in the back of her throat as she see-sawed between feeling devastating betrayal and hoping against hope that her guardian would come to her rescue. Would somehow defeat the beast that she had unwittingly married.

  Later she would wonder whether she should have gone, fled the estate then. But if she had she would never have known. Never have realised the true depths of the two men who had been supposed to love her the most, but had revealed themselves to have betrayed her in the greatest of ways.

  * * *

  Roman stood before his foe, using the old man’s silence to take in the changes in his grandfather over the last eighteen years. He searched Vladimir’s face, hating the strange similarities between him and his mother. Between Vladimir and himself.

  An almost dizzying sense of satisfaction roared through him as he finally held Vladimir in the palm of his hand. And the urge to squeeze, to destroy, to remove the man from the face of this earth was overwhelming. Until Vladimir laughed.

  ‘So cocky. So arrogant. And so convinced that you have everything you want. But you are wrong. All these years I knew that you would want your revenge. I saw it in your eyes that day. And if you hadn’t been the bastard son of my disowned daughter I might have even respected you for it, recognised you as part of my own flesh and blood.’

  Roman worked hard to keep his face impassive. Unease stirred in his breast for the first time as he began to feel the steel traps close around him—but, like all prey, still vainly hoping that he was wrong.

  ‘Did you know that your mother was to be married to Nathaniel Riding? That all I ever wanted was to secure our business partnership with an unbreakable bond of family? When instead she chose that carpenter it nearly destroyed the business, ruining everything that I had worked for years to achieve. Nathaniel soon got over the disappointment, but I did not. Imagine—my own daughter being my near undoing. So when I realised what a beautiful creature Ella would become, I knew that I had the perfect bait…for you. The innocent, naïve young woman who would tempt you into playing your hand. And I safeguarded that innocence. That naivety. Giving her everything she would need to be the perfect focus of your attention. All I ever wanted was the joining of the two families. Mine and the Ridings’. And you have delivered it to me on a plate.


  ‘You want the company? It’s all yours. After all, you’ve achieved what I could never have done. You have proved the lengths you will go to, the very depths, and that is what makes you worthy. Finally, I see myself in you. That is why you deserve it.’

  The rattling cackle that left the old man’s lips nearly destroyed him. Everything he’d ever wanted disappeared in a heartbeat—vengeance turned to ash on his tongue as Roman realised that all this time, all these years he’d thought himself better, quicker, smarter, and he’d done everything Vladimir had expected of him and more.

  Roman felt a helpless fury ricochet through his body, every nerve, every cell vibrating with the power of it. Refusing to give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing it, Roman stalked from the room, the sound of laughter chasing at his heels.

  He slammed the door behind him and turned, coming face to face with his bride. A bride who had clearly overheard every word.

  * * *

  Ella had stayed for one reason and one reason only. The vain hope that when she looked into her husband’s eyes she would see some kind of explanation. Some kind of reason or justification for taking the threads of her life and pulling them apart. Over the course of the conversation she had put together enough meaning, enough understanding of the need for vengeance, and the horrifying game the two men had played over the years. But still—beating deep within her—was the hope that in spite of it all there was some trace of the man she had married. Yet in his eyes she saw nothing but anger and hatred, resentment and fury. Those emotions suddenly detonated within her, forging her own rage in a flame burst that threatened to consume her.

  She slapped him. Hard and fast across his cheek, before stumbling half-blindly past Dorcas, who seemed torn between her master and her new mistress, past Konstantin, whose longstanding self-containment seemed sorely tested, and into the back of the limousine.

  When the driver asked her where to, all she could reply was Paris. After a beat, the man put the car into gear and whisked her away, saying nothing to the command to cross several countries in the middle of the night.