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Roman was still out wrapping up things with the bank and Kolikov Holdings as Ella watched the sun begin its descent into the South Pacific Ocean. It felt so strange to have the night sky begin to glow about three hours earlier than France, adding to the feeling of a stolen moment outside of time. Ella shivered a little, remembering the last time she had felt like this—before her marriage to Roman. A time that she had felt just belonged to them.
But this was different, she told herself. This was their second chance. How it should have been all along. With a hand soothing over the gentle bump of her abdomen, Ella marvelled at just how much
had changed since she had met him that day in the woods near her grandmother’s cottage. In some ways, everything she had wanted back then had come to pass. Her marriage to Roman, her business, even their child, she acknowledged.
She might not have liked how they’d got here, but she couldn’t wish it away. Had it not been like that, she might never have got to know the real Roman. Neither the one who had appeared perfect nor the one who had appeared monstrous had been the man she had come to...had come to...
Love.
With a surety that shocked her, the knowledge raced along her veins, fizzing in her blood and lighting something like pure joy within her. She did love him. She loved the man who would do anything to protect their child, the man who had confessed the deep pain hidden beneath his quest for vengeance, the one who still slept lightly in the hope that his mother would one day come and wake him and dance for him in the moonlight. The man who brought her exquisite pleasure and the man who had given her the ability to secure the business she and Célia had worked so hard for.
Energy raced through her body and she wanted to move, to dance, to take this moment and embrace the sheer happiness of it, having reached such a low shortly after her marriage. She picked up her phone and found a song on her music list, one that would perfectly echo everything she feared she might never capture in words.
As the song began the notes swept around her, filling the space and echoing in her heart, asking that she feel love. And she did. Paying no heed to the thought that someone could come upon her, dancing around the beautiful living space, with the most incredible backdrop, Ella danced and danced and danced, an almost intoxicating high running through her veins.
She performed another twirl, the layers of her skirts spinning out from her waist, making her feel like a child again, which was perhaps why she didn’t see Roman at first. Didn’t see the look on his face that might have stopped her in her tracks had she not been so caught up in her joy.
* * *
Roman knew she hadn’t seen him yet, and was thankful for it. Because it gave him time. Time to adjust to the fact that, as she spun round the room, he saw his mother. Ella’s movements were not the elegant sweeps his mother had made beneath the night sky. Her arms didn’t extend and reach out for something intangible, as if the gesture would never end, never stop reaching. Because, he realised, Ella believed she had already found what she was looking for.
The happiness and joy he could almost see vibrating on the air about her, as she moved in time with the song that taunted him, cut him off at the knees.
She turned to him then, eyes seas of sparkles that would rival the night sky, and he knew. He didn’t want to, almost asked her not to say what she clearly wanted to say. But his words wouldn’t come, while hers poured from her lips like raindrops.
‘I’m so happy,’ she said, almost strangely apologetic, or embarrassed. But those feelings were apparently put aside or pushed down as he watched her transform into someone assured, confident, someone owning her own sense of self. It was like watching a flower unfurl to bask in everything the sun could give.
‘I couldn’t have done it without you,’ she said as she closed the distance between them. A distance that he wanted, needed, coward that he was. He wanted to explain that she was wrong. He wanted to ask her what she thought she might have been able to do had he not nearly destroyed her by seeking her as his tool for revenge. In a heartbeat, all the times he had seen her question herself because of him, doubt herself because of him, doubt those around her... Because of him, came to his mind.
‘I love you,’ she said. He didn’t hear the words above the roaring in his ears but he saw them on her lips, felt them against his skin.
He kissed her then because he couldn’t think of what to say, couldn’t really begin to understand why her simple declaration could have scared him so much. But one thing he could imagine was the hurt and pain and devastation she would feel when she realised what he was about to do to Vladimir’s company.
So he kissed her, stopping all words, all thoughts, all doubts and fears, as if this were the last time he would ever kiss his wife.
CHAPTER TEN
And the wolf gnashed his teeth and snarled, hissed and bit and growled. It was his nature. It was all he knew.
The Truth About Little Red Riding Hood
—Roz Fayrer
SHE HAD BEEN the root of her own downfall, Roman told himself as he marched through the offices of Kolikov Holdings in Moscow. The moment she had sold her shares to him, no matter how much she clearly felt that she had changed, had proved that she was just as innocent and naïve as she had been when he had met her over a year ago in France.
Yes, there was more there—a drive, a deeper complexity, a confidence and self-assurance that almost awed him. Almost. But she was still the same Ella who had agreed to marry a man after only one month of knowing him. And, like her, Roman was still the same as he had been when they had met. A man out for vengeance at any cost.
Ever since she’d let loose those three little words...
Too wrapped up in her thoughts and too busy since, Ella had absolutely no idea of the effect they’d had on Roman. They had haunted his dreams and sliced through his waking hours. The only other person to say such a thing to him had been cruelly torn from him without Roman being able to prevent it.
For so long he had been sure. Certain that his path of vengeance was just. For so long he had lived by the promise he’d made his mother on her deathbed. That Vladimir would be punished, that the company he’d loved more than his own child would be destroyed.
But Ella had made him want. Want things to be different, for him to be different. And he realised that for a few months he’d been living more of a lie than any he’d ever told. Because he’d lied to himself. Told himself that he could have things he didn’t deserve. Could feel things that his closed off, damaged heart would never be capable of. That he could, in some impossible way, compensate for the truly awful things he had done to Ella.
And it had lasted until she’d asked him to buy her shares. Until she’d given him the final tool to complete the journey he had started almost eighteen years before. And he’d known. Known that he could not, would not refuse to use it.
Because if he put aside his plans now, if he changed his mind, then it would mean that every single thing he’d planned, done, right down to marrying Ella in the first place...it would have all been for nothing. And that was impossible. All the things he’d given up, all of the softer parts of him he’d sacrificed in order to exact revenge against Vladimir, all of the things that Ella deserved were gone.
