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She nodded, the uncertainty replaced with conviction and determination as desire overrode her concern. He picked up her hand, placing a kiss in the palm, a gesture he had never before given another woman. The smile on her lips cut him to the quick as her hand reached for his shoulder and drew him towards her with a kiss full of the trust she had offered him only for her body.
A kiss that quickly morphed into one of passion and need. Roman settled between her legs and gently, slowly entered her. He felt her muscles surround him, caught the hitch in her breath and stopped as she acclimatised to the feel of him within her. A slow exhale, slightly stuttered, burned him. He hated that he was causing her physical pain, piling it onto the emotional damage he knew he had caused.
All the hours of this evening he had seen her as worthy, never once
really understanding that it was he who was not. Not worthy of the gift of her innocence, of her body. He braced his arms, looking down at her, watching as she began to settle into the feeling of him. Locking his gaze with hers, he saw nothing but wonder, awe—all open to him, offered to him. And, bastard that he was, he wanted to take it all.
He pressed further within her and she gasped, a pleasure-drenched sound that caught at his heart. Holding himself there, glorying in the feel of her around him, joined with her in a way he’d never imagined, he strained against the leash of his control. Even without moving he could sense her arousal beginning, reaching, spreading through her body into his. Her sighs turned into moans of pleasure, and still he had not moved. Feeling her body tighten around him, his own arousal teased and taunted by hers, was an indescribable pleasure he’d never before tasted. Beneath his stillness, Ella began to shift gently against him, drawing him into her own passion, seducing him towards his own orgasm, closer and closer, and still he had not moved.
Her moans became gentle cries, words no longer possible, simply the sounds of need and want passing between them. He held himself still as inexplicably he felt the roll of her orgasm build, enticing his own, both fearing and wanting the moment it would end.
His last thought, before everything came crashing down upon them, was that he had not moved. That they had both come together in a moment of stillness that changed everything.
* * *
The sound of the shower roused Ella back to consciousness. Sunlight streamed in from the uncovered windows, warming her skin in a way that felt inadequate to how she had felt throughout the night as time and time again they had reached for each other, losing themselves in a wanton sensual dream. A dream that she did not want to wake from. A dream that her body clearly hadn’t as it throbbed with want and need anew.
She turned onto her back, relishing the stretch of muscles, the gentle ache from where Roman had been between her thighs. As she reached for the covers, seeking the soothing caress of the cotton against her heated skin, she took in the sight of his room—the windows, the long bank of cupboards on the opposite wall, the side table. And her heart stopped.
The envelope she had brought with her the night before, the one that had been nestled within her handbag, now lay on the side table, the paperwork levered open, a yellow tab pointing alarmingly to the space where no signature had previously been, but now was.
The sight of the divorce papers nearly robbed her of breath. And suddenly she needed to leave. Needed to get her things and go. Wanted to hide, not only from the papers but from what had happened last night. She hated the feeling that coursed over her skin, leaving goose bumps in its wake. She hated that she felt the need to hide...again. Roman had been right. She had set out to get her revenge and only given him his.
CHAPTER SIX
If there had been a moment when the wolf could have turned back, could have changed his mind and left Little Red Riding Hood to her own devices, it was long since gone. He’d had a taste of her now. There was no going back.
The Truth About Little Red Riding Hood
—Roz Fayrer
ROMAN HAD HEARD nothing from Ella for three months since he’d emerged from the shower, breath locked tight in his lungs, knowing that she had left his bed, his apartment. His life.
He’d made himself retrieve the papers from where he’d seen them in her handbag. He’d signed them even as his hand had shaken from the most powerful encounter he’d ever shared with a woman. Signed them as he’d promised he would. But perhaps that was why. Ella wasn’t just any woman but his wife. Apparently she hadn’t been the only one to succumb to the fantasy he’d woven about them on his path for revenge.
At least that was what he’d told himself that morning—that his unacknowledged hesitancy at the time had been down to sensual shock. But in the days and months since then, that moment had intruded on his thoughts. It was the pause—most likely imperceptible if anyone had been looking on—that taunted him. A heartbeat of a moment in which he’d seen a future, a whole lifetime of possibilities...
But each and every one of those possibilities required something from him that he was unable and unwilling to give. It had been a dangerous moment—poised on a precipice of temptation and damnation.
But he’d known then, and he knew now, that such a thing was impossible. Laughable even. As if he were or could ever be something other than what he was. The Great Wolf. The Lone Wolf.
And the sheer fact that it’d even given him pause was enough to put pen to paper, to punctuate his signature with a full stop that nearly broke through the page. But he could not deny that he’d begun to avoid his apartment. Avoid the memories of that one night as they gripped him from beyond the past into the present. A possessiveness he couldn’t shake had taken hold and every day he searched for the signed divorce papers in his mail, every day he looked for emails from her lawyers that he’d previously ignored—anything to sever a connection he feared he might never achieve—but none came.
Dorcas had resumed her sulk, seemingly betrayed by the scent of her mistress but the absence of her presence, and happily heaped the blame at his feet. Perhaps Dorcas would have been better off with Ella. It was a thought he couldn’t quite shake.
Nor could he seem to shake the almost constant state of arousal he was in. One night with his wife had not been enough to satiate the ragged beast within him, the one that prowled the edges of his mind as he had prowled the corners of his apartment in Moscow.
For three months since that night in Moscow, he’d barely been able to focus, to concentrate on what needed to be done for both his own business and the dismantling of Vladimir’s. And it was three months too long as far as Roman was concerned. Which was why he was now standing outside an unassuming apartment block in Paris. Because, more than anything, he wanted to draw a line under it all.
His fist pounded on the door, perhaps a little too harshly, but he refused to keep himself in check. Instead, he relished the fury coursing through his veins. The fury that was directed solely at himself. He never should have allowed it to happen. He never would have, but she had turned up at his business, at his home, and he’d signed his own fate the moment he said, ‘So take me.’
The woman who answered the door might look like Ella but she was a completely different vision from the woman he’d last seen in his bed. She looked terrible, neither the woman he had married nor the woman he had slept with visible in the figure who stood before him, turning a horrible shade of pale.
‘Are you—?’
Before he could get the sentence out of his mouth she rushed off, and Roman reeled at the sounds of her being sick in a bathroom he couldn’t see.
He cursed and entered the apartment, expecting to see signs of a spectacular night out, but there were no empty bottles of wine, no signs of debauchery, only several varieties of herbal tea and what looked to be a raft of vitamins half opened on the counter.
