She found herself praying that he wouldn’t hurt her—before vowing that she wouldn’t ever allow herself to get hurt.
His hands moved to her hips, urging her even closer, and her nipples grew hard against his chest. She could feel the heavy weight of his erection pushing against her belly and her face grew hot. The blood in her veins seemed to be growing thicker. She could feel the molten heat between her legs and when he slid his fingers there, she writhed with pleasure—moving her body against him in a silent message of invitation.
‘You like that, don’t you, milaya moya?’ he whispered and when she nodded eagerly, he whispered into her ear. ‘Then tell me.’
‘I...love it,’ she whispered shakily. ‘You know I do.’
Somehow he found a condom but his hands were unsteady as he slid it on, before entering her with such exquisite precision that Erin gasped.
He moved slowly at first—as if he had all the time in the world. And wasn’t that exactly what it felt like? That for once there were no constraints, or questions. That she could simply enjoy this for what it was.
She was aware that his eyes were open and she felt confident enough to hold his gaze as each thrust took her higher. Every time he moved it increased her pleasure—tightening it, notch by delicious notch. And just when it became almost unbearable her orgasm hit her in waves so powerful that it felt as if it were tearing her body apart. Her fingers tightened around him as he shuddered inside her with a ragged groan of his own.
It seemed like ages before he withdrew and Erin had to fight the urge to claw at him—wanting to bring him back inside her. She turned to look at him. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping—and she knew him well enough to realise that he’d probably like her to turn over and go to sleep, too. She remembered once overhearing him saying to his friend Ivan: The trouble with women is that they ask too many questions.
For a long time she had tried to abide by his preferred diktat, because she’d wanted to be the perfect secretary. She had questioned him only when absolutely necessary—but those days were gone. Even if the intimacy they’d just shared didn’t give her any rights—surely the fact that they had a son between them allowed her the luxury of asking questions for once. Wasn’t it time he told her stuff—instead of making out that it was presumptuous of her to dare ask?
‘Dimitri?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I want to ask you something.’
He opened his eyes. ‘Must you?’
She ignored that, positioning herself more comfortably on the pillows so that she was in the direct line of his cool gaze. ‘You know when you were going off the rails?’
‘What about it?’
‘You just never told me why. What made you do it?’
‘Does there have to be a reason, Erin?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
He was so quiet for a moment that Erin wondered whether he was just going to ignore her question, when suddenly he started talking.
‘It was a combination of factors,’ he said. ‘I was living in London—and that was the world I was inhabiting at the time.’
She rested her chin on his chest and looked up at him. ‘What kind of world was that?’
He shrugged. ‘The world of success—and excess. My company was doing better than I could have ever dreamed. Suddenly, I had more time. More money. More everything, really. Whatever I touched seemed to turn to gold. My stocks were touching the stratosphere. Women were throwing themselves at me—’
‘How unbearable that must have been.’
‘At first I can’t deny that I enjoyed it,’ he said, skating over her sarcasm. ‘But it doesn’t take long for an appetite to become jaded. For too much to become not nearly enough. Suddenly, nothing ever seemed to satisfy me. I tried gambling, and then vodka. But nothing seemed to do it. Nothing could take away...’
His voice trailed off as if he’d said too much but Erin was onto it in an instant.
‘Take away what?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter,’ she said stubbornly.
His voice hardened. ‘The discoveries I had made. The ones which made oblivion seem like a good idea.’
‘What kind of discoveries?’ she persisted.
‘Erin, is this really relevant? We’ve just had some pretty amazing sex...’ he trailed his finger down over her torso until it came to rest comfortably in her belly button ‘...and now you’re ruining it by hurling all these questions at me.’
‘How can talking ruin what’s just happened?’ She pushed his finger away. ‘And it is relevant. It isn’t just prurient curiosity on my part, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s about a need to know more about my son’s heritage—so I don’t have to look at him blankly when he asks me the questions he will one day inevitably ask. Because I want to be able to tell Leo the truth from now on.’
‘I don’t think these are the kind of things you’d want to tell an innocent young boy,’ he said bitterly.
‘But I’m a grown woman,’ she said. ‘You can tell me.’
Dimitri stared into her green eyes, thinking how catlike they looked against her flushed skin. Her dark hair was tumbling over her tiny breasts and every instinct in his body was urging him to block her questions and make love to her again. But some of her words were stubbornly refusing to shift. Didn’t matter how much he wanted them to go away; they weren’t going to. Because she was right. As the mother of his child didn’t she deserve to hear the truth?
He gave an expansive flick of his hand—as if to draw attention to the dimensions of the huge room in which they lay. ‘You can see for yourself how privileged my background was. I was the only son of a hugely successful businessman and his devoted wife.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Or that’s what I thought I was—until the whole pack of cards came tumbling down.’
For once she was silent, but he felt her grow very still beside him.
‘I discovered that my life was nothing but an illusion based on lies and deception,’ he said. ‘It was all smoke and mirrors and nothing was as it seemed. My father wasn’t the respectable businessman I’d always thought. His respectability was just a front for his underworld dealings. He made the bulk of his money from drugs and gambling, and from human trafficking and misery.’
He could see her eyes widening in shock, but he forced himself to continue—as if suddenly recognising the burden of having kept this to himself for all these years. Because wasn’t that another legacy of criminality—that the secrets it created tainted everyone around with the sense of nothing being as it should be?
‘My relationship with him wasn’t good. He was the coldest man I’ve ever encountered. Sometimes I used to wonder if it was just something inside him which made him so distant—or whether it was something to do with me. I wondered why he sometimes looked through me as if I was invisible, or worse. As if he actually hated me.’ He paused. ‘It took a long time for me to discover why.’
‘Why?’
He could hear her holding her breath.
‘Because he wasn’t actually my father,’ he said slowly. ‘I was the cuckoo child. A product of a passionate liaison between my mother and the family gardener.’
‘Your mother had an affair with the gardener?’
He nodded and waited while she processed this piece of information.
‘And what was he like? This gardener.’
Dimitri frowned.