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Chapter9
WHEN MORNING BLUSHED THE walls of Leonidas’ room, Mila woke with a strange sense of disorientation that was followed immediately by recollection. There was nothing shameful about sex, not even wildly passionate, animalistic sex such as they’d engaged in the night before, but that wasn’t to say it wasn’t overwhelming. That wasn’t to say she didn’t need time and space to comprehend what had happened between them and more specifically, within her.
His arm was across her like a vice and her body stirred, renewed desire sparking in the pit of her stomach. Slowly, so slowly, she shifted, moving from beneath him, creeping to the edge of the mattress and then pushing her feet onto the floor.
To her delight, her ankle gave barely a hint of complaint. Testing her weight, she moved, towards the door and only when her hand was on the edge of it did she turn, casting a glance over her shoulder with more than a hint of regret.
He slept, when she wanted him to wake and call her back to bed. And would she have gone to him? In a heartbeat.
That thought had her scuttling through the door, breath held, until she was halfway down the corridor. She didn’t allow herself to think until she’d found a private space, a living room that overlooked the glorious rolling vines and fruit orchard to the west of the house. The time was still early and the air filled with pale pink clouds wisping across the azure sky, the sun weak, but promising, she knew, another day of warmth.
With her back pressed against the door, Mila was very still, as memories of the evening before filled her mind, making her gasp with her utter surrender. She had totally given all of herself to Leonidas.
And so what?
Do you trust me?
She had. She did. And she had no regrets, except one. And it wasn’t so much a regret as a fear, creeping through the recesses of her mind, demanding she pause and consider for a moment, because it was impossible to deny the strength of what had happened between them the night before.
Mila didn’t have boyfriends. She didn’t have friends.
For years, she’d focused with single-minded determination on her career, because that was all that mattered to her. It was all that could matter to her. In order to achieve as she was driven to achieve, she had to work out how to ignore the rest of the world.
“Do you know what I could have been if it weren’t for you?” Her mother’s drunken, jeering question twisted inside Mila and she squeezed her eyes shut against the familiar pain of having grown up knowing she was unwanted—that she was the reason her mother’s skating career—and her life—had fallen apart.
Leonidas fundamentally threatened everything Mila had worked towards, everything she felt she owed it to her mother to achieve. He was impossible to blot out and, even more dangerously, when they were together, she didn’t want to. The commitment she’d sworn to her career, her skating life, waned when they were together, and with the power of a solar eclipse, he pushed everything else from her mind.
She felt as though she were trying to hold crumbling earth in the palm of her hand, beneath the weight of a crashing tsunami.
With a start, she moved away from the door and began to stretch, telling herself that she could rediscover her focus, if only she got back into the rhythm of practicing, of remembering all the ways in which skating was a part of her.
And it had been, for a long time.
It was a part of her life in myriad ways; it meant more to Mila than a mere career might to anybody else. Skating had been the one thing she shared with her mother. She’d been responsible for her mother’s career ending, but every time Mila was on the ice, she felt as though she were doing something important, something her mother deserved. She skated because she loved it, but it was impossible to discern how much of that love came from the sport and how much came from a place of sadness—grief that her mother had resented her, even when she’d loved Mila, grief that her mother hadn’t been able to continue skating once Mila had been born. Sadness that her mother was no longer here to see Mila perform.
She stretched for half an hour, testing her ankle more and more. It gave a dull throb from time to time, but no sharp bursts of pain, nothing to worry her. Excitement began to hum in her bloodstream even as other thoughts shifted and took hold.
If she were better, staying here would become less justifiable. She’d simply be hiding, running, and she didn’t want to do that. Particularly not when running meant sheltering with Leonidas, who every moment was taking over a part of her mind and soul. Her heart?
She pushed the thought away with angry vehemence.
She had no heart. It wasn’t permitted. She’d been alone a long time, and she would continue to be, because the alternative was to open herself up to someone, to love someone in a way that might derail her just as her mother had been.
Her professional success was all she needed.
It was generally accepted that Mila Maxwell was the hardest working figure skater on the circuit. She trained at least twice what was considered the norm. She ran for fitness and health, and when she wasn’t on the ice, she was practicing either her dance routines or her gymnastics floor workout, both of which had been choreographed by world leaders to keep her nimble for figure skating. She also swam, and practiced some of her moves under water, to help with fluidity and timing without the high impact of other more aerobic workouts.
There was no ice rink here, but the alternative exercises were available to her. Grinding her teeth against another throb in the region of her ankle, she played one of her songs in her mind, listening to it for a moment before she began to move, modifying the routine slightly as she went, to remove the likelihood of renewed ankle injury.
It was like being rolled on the breeze. She felt the motions in her core, shifting effortlessly in time with the silent soundtrack, reminding her arms how it felt to react to the beat, her body to roll, closing her eyes and imagining the familiar feeling of gliding, of the ice-cold atmosphere against her exercise-warmed skin, the crowd’s silence and then collective gasp, and applause, the feeling of success and completion. She moved with the wind at her back, memories firing through her; she moved as she’d been born to, the skills innate, her destiny unquestionable. But her body had other memories, memories that fragmented her focus, that would flash into her mind and make her shiver, or gasp. The fevered, desperate way they’d come together, the pleasure he’d given her again and again, his body so great at anticipating her needs, at making her wild with need then answering her wants, over and over.
She trembled just remembering, and then, remembering wasn’t enough. She wanted him again, with a force that shocked her, that made her angry, too, because she couldn’t allow him to shift her focus.
With renewed determination, she moved, her ankle twinging a bit now. She ignored that as well, blotting out pain, Leo and most of all, any promise of pleasure.
The ringingof his phone woke him from the most searingly hot dream, but on waking, he realized it wasn’t a dream so much as a collection of memories, a string of recollections, hot and passionate, that made him reach out, looking for skin, to connect with Mila’s naked flesh.
Only she was gone, and the realization brought a frown to his face.
