Tak-Sin had prepared an exotic fruit salad for dessert, and Ella helped herself to slices of mango and passion fruit, relishing the sweet, fresh flavours on her tongue. Vadim shook his head when she offered him the fruit bowl, and instead drained his champagne glass and refilled it. He had lapsed into silence—a brooding silence she felt reluctant to break. She sensed that his thoughts were far away, and she wondered what memories from his past had caused him to look so grim.
The weather seemed to be reflecting his mood. While they had been eating the evening sunshine had been replaced by ominous-looking clouds, and now the air was still and heavy, the atmosphere charged with electricity that made the tiny hairs on Ella’s arms stand on end. Through the French doors she saw the sky was black, and she caught her breath when lightning seared the heavens and briefly filled the room with brilliant white light. She flinched when a low growl of thunder sounded from across the river.
‘I hate storms,’ she admitted shakily as Vadim returned from wherever his thoughts had taken him and focused his piercing blue gaze on her. ‘When I was a child, one of the gardeners at Stafford Hall was struck and killed by lightning.’
He frowned. ‘You saw it happen?’
‘Oh, no—fortunately; but it was all the other staff talked about for weeks afterwards. They said his violent death would mean another ghost would haunt the Hall.’
‘Did you have many staff?’ Vadim asked curiously. ‘I’ve seen photographs of Stafford Hall and it looks a vast place.’
Ella nodded, thinking of the great grey-walled house with the stone gargoyles over the front door that had given her nightmares as a little girl. ‘It is—seventeen bedrooms, numerous reception rooms and a chapel in the grounds where it was rumoured that a priest was murdered on the orders of the King, hundreds of years ago. When my father first inherited the Hall from my grandfather we had a small army of cooks, butlers and maids, but as the money ran out he sacked the staff until there was only the housekeeper, Mrs Rogers, left. She was about a hundred,’ Ella added ruefully, ‘but she helped to care for my mother, and as my father wanted as little to do with Mama as possible, he allowed dear Betty to stay.’
Thunder rumbled again, louder this time, so that it seemed to reverberate around the room. ‘Did you believe the house was haunted?’ Vadim murmured, sensing Ella’s tension as the storm approached.
She hesitated, and then gave a reluctant nod. ‘I was a very imaginative child, and because my mother was often unwell I spent a lot of time on my own. I convinced myself that the stories I’d heard about the headless baron and the Grey Lady, who was said to have been stabbed to death by her cruel husband, were true. The room at the top of the tower where she was supposed to have met her death was thought to be the most haunted room in the house. It was always cold, and none of the staff would go up there.’ She paused again, and then revealed in a low tone, ‘My father used to lock me in that room as punishment for any misdemeanour I committed. And, as I only had to walk into the same room as him to incur his annoyance, I was punished pretty often when he was home.’
Vadim felt a violent surge of dislike for Ella’s father. ‘Did he know you were scared?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Ella said grimly. ‘I would be hysterical with fear when he dragged me up there—that’s why he enjoyed doing it. Refined cruelty was his forte.’
It was obvious that Ella had feared her father as much as she had feared the ghosts she had believed roamed her childhood home, and some indefinable emotion tugged on Vadim’s heart as he imagined her as a terrified little girl. ‘Did he ever punish you physically?’ he asked harshly.
Ella gave a start as a thunderclap shook the room, and she glanced nervously out at the black starless sky that seemed to smother the garden beneath a heavy cloak. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘He never hit me, but sometimes my mother would have bruises… She always said she’d fallen, or banged into the door… But I knew it had been him. Fortunately he never stayed at the Hall for long. He only came back from his house in France when he was short of money and needed to sell off another family heirloom, and it was a huge relief when he went away again.’
‘But if your father treated your mother so badly, why did she remain married to him?’
It was a question Ella has asked herself countless times, and she had never come to terms with the only answer she’d ever been able to come up with. ‘I suppose she loved him,’ she said at last. ‘She once told me that she had fallen in love with him the moment they met, and I think that whatever he did, however many times he broke her heart with his infidelity and his indifference, she never stopped loving him.’ She shook her head. ‘My mother was such a sweet, gentle person. I don’t understand why my father didn’t love her the way she loved him,’ she cried angrily.
‘Maybe he couldn’t,’ Vadim said quietly. He stared unseeingly across the dark garden while the familiar demon, guilt, stirred from its slumber. Irina had been gentle, and her sweet, shy smile had been the first thing he had noticed about her each time he’d walked into the grocery store where she had worked. He had loved her, he assured himself, but the painful truth was that he hadn’t loved her enough. He had known he was the centre of her world, but, much as it shamed him to admit it, she hadn’t been his.
His business, the pursuit of wealth and success, had been his mistress. He had not been unfaithful to his wife, as Ella’s father had been to her mother, but could he really say he had been a better husband than Earl Stafford when he had not spent enough time with Irina and Klara?
‘The reason he didn’t love her was because he was selfish and only cared about his own interests,’ Ella said bitterly.
Her words echoed in Vadim’s head and his guilt choked him.
Ella shivered. ‘I never want to be like my mother and fall in love with someone so desperately that I lose my pride and self-worth. Loving my father didn’t make Mama happy, and ultimately I believe it destroyed her. No man is worth that,’ she stated fiercely.
As she spoke, lightning zig-zagged across the sky and the crash of accompanying thunder was so loud that she screamed and dropped the glass of water she had just picked up. It smashed on impact with the tiled floor, but as she jumped out of her chair and bent to collect the shards Vadim strode around the table and pulled her to her feet. The room was plunged into darkness as the wall-lamps went out; the candles continued to flicker bravely for a few seconds before a gust of wind whipped through the open doors and snuffed out the flames.
‘It must be a power cut. Wait there while I find a torch.’
He was back within seconds, shining the torchlight in front of him as he took Ella’s hand and guided her over the broken glass. ‘I’ll clear it up later, when the power’s restored.’
The storm was directly overhead now, and thunder boomed like pagan drums while the darkness was rent apart periodically by flashes of lightning. Vadim could feel the tremors running through Ella as he led her over to the French doors and turned her so that she was looking out over the garden. ‘The power of the elements is awesome, but you are safe from the storm here with me,’ he murmured, sliding his arms around her waist and drawing her close, so that her back was pressed up against his chest.
From the storm outside, perhaps, Ella thought shakily. But her instincts screamed that she was not safe from Vadim—or herself. The storm raging inside her was equally violent as the tumult in the skies above, and the pressure of Vadim’s hard thighs pushing against her bottom evoked a burning heat in her pelvis. She could feel the erratic beat of his heart, and it seemed to pulse through her own veins as the drumbeat of desire thudding through her built to a crescendo.
He was a man like her father, warned a voice in her head, a heartless playboy who used women and discarded them when he had tired of them. But she could no longer deny the sexual chemistry that had simmered between them since the night they had met in Paris and was now at combustion point.
There was no danger she would fall in love with him, she assured herself, desire
shivering through her when he pushed her hair aside and trailed his lips up her neck to the sensitive spot beneath her ear. She would never repeat the mistake her mother had made. The hard ridge of his arousal nudging insistently between the cleft of her buttocks was irrefutable proof of his hunger for her, and at this moment, as the storm crashed and trembled around them, her whole being quivered with the need for him to assuage the longing inside her that was as old and insistent as mankind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE NEEDED a woman tonight. Correction—he needed this woman, Vadim acknowledged as he turned Ella to face him and stared at the tremulous softness of her lips. He did not want to dwell on the past, and he had learned that the future was never assured. For him, the here and now was all that mattered, and at this moment the urge to make love to Ella burned like a fever in his blood. He slid his hand beneath her hair, the feel of the soft silky strands against his skin causing a sharp stab of desire in his gut, and with a muttered oath he cupped her nape and brought his mouth down on hers.
A lightning flare lit up the room and threw the sharp angles and planes of Vadim’s face into stark relief. He seemed so remote and forbidding that for a second Ella felt a surge of fear, but the first brush of his mouth and the bold thrust of his tongue between her lips obliterated any lingering doubts that this was where she wanted to be. Desire licked through her veins like wildfire, heating her blood and making every nerve-ending so exquisitely sensitive that she moaned when he cupped her breast in his palm and stroked his thumbpad over the taut nipple straining beneath her silk dress.
He deepened the kiss, taking it to another level that was flagrantly erotic, and she melted against him and wound her arms around his neck, her eyes flying open when she felt the floor suddenly disappear from beneath her feet.
‘Guide me,’ he commanded roughly as he scooped her into his arms, collected the torch from the table and handed it to her.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked shakily.
‘Bed.’
His desire for Ella had spiralled out of control, Vadim acknowledged grimly. Last night he had listened to the voice of his conscience, but tonight he could not resist her. Perhaps it was the pagan power of the storm, or perhaps it was her revelations about how her father had terrified her as a child that had induced this primal feeling to protect her and claim her as his woman. All he knew was that tonight he was driven by an instinct as old as mankind to make love to her.
The hungry gleam in Vadim’s eyes caused Ella’s heart to skitter in her chest. ‘If you object, now is the time to say so,’ he warned her as he strode out of the room and across the hall to the stairs.
Her brain told her she should demand that he set her on her feet, bid him goodnight and return to her part of the house—but her body ached with a need that decimated her thought processes and robbed her of words. Talking about her childhood had reminded her of how much she had hated her father, but she was no longer a child, and she was shocked to realise how much she had allowed her feelings about Earl Stafford to affect her adult life. He was the reason she was terrified of falling in love, the reason she had always frozen off any man who had shown an interest in her, and why she was still a virgin. But she was damned if she would allow her hatred of her father to dictate her actions any more, she thought fiercely. She was an independent woman who was capable of making her own choices, and tonight she chose to have her first sexual experience with Vadim.
But despite her brave avowal her heart thudded unevenly as he climbed the stairs. The torchlight flickered over the pale walls of the upper landing and the artwork she had chosen. She knew every inch of Kingfisher House and had decorated every room—including the master bedroom, with its huge bed covered in a navy satin bedspread that matched the colour of the carpet and complemented the ivory silk wallpaper.
The doors leading to the balcony were open, the sounds of the storm outside clearly audible, but Ella was conscious of nothing but Vadim when he lowered her onto the bed and immediately stretched out next to her. The only source of light in the room was the glow from the torch, casting shadows on the ceiling, but he found her mouth with unerring precision and covered it with his own, moving his lips on hers with feverish need and demanding a response she was powerless to deny.
Above the angry growls of thunder she could hear the ragged sound of her breathing. Her heart was pounding as her whole body was gripped with a need she could barely comprehend. The ache deep in her pelvis had become a relentless throbbing that caused her to arch her hips in a desperate invitation for Vadim to touch her and caress her…
When he finally broke the kiss and lifted his head to stare down at her she traced her tongue over her swollen lips. One kiss was not enough, she wanted more, and she slid her fingers into his thick black hair to urge him down on her. But instead of claiming her mouth he trailed his lips down her throat, to the pulse beating frenetically at its base.
‘Your skin feels like satin,’ he growled, his voice rough with desire. He began to unfasten the buttons that ran down the front of her dress, and Ella caught her breath when he pushed the silvery-grey silk aside to expose her high, firm breasts. ‘Beautiful,’ he muttered rawly. He cupped the twin mounds in his palms and revelled in their softness before he lowered his head and flicked his tongue across one nipple, so that it instantly swelled and hardened. The sensation was so exquisite that Ella could not restrain her startled cry of pleasure. No man had ever touched her as Vadim was doing, and when he transferred his attention to her other breast and drew the sensitive peak fully into his mouth she trembled with reaction.
He gave a ragged laugh when she gripped his hair and held his head against her breast, desperate for him to continue the erotic caress. ‘Do you like that? I knew that beneath the ice-maiden act I’d find a sensual sex kitten,’ he murmured, unable to disguise his satisfaction. Her open enjoyment of his mouth on her breasts was a massive turn-on, but it put paid to his plan for a leisurely seduction, Vadim acknowledged self-derisively. His arousal was rock-hard, and throbbing with impatience for him to spread her beneath him and plunge between her pale thighs. He had wanted her from the moment he’d laid eyes on her, but she had made him wait. It wasn’t surprising that his body was taut with desire—a desire that grew more urgent when he dragged her dress over her hips to reveal her pale, slender body; naked but for the pair of grey lace knickers that hid her femininity from his gaze.
He felt the tremor that ran through her when he traced his lips down over her flat stomach and dipped his tongue into the delicate recess of her navel. He wanted to take his time exploring each delightful dip and curve, but his feverish need was clamouring to be assuaged and he continued lower, hooking his fingers in the waistband of her knickers and tugging them down her legs with one deft movement.
Ella felt a moment’s panic when Vadim stared down at her body. It was the first time any man had seen her naked, and while the heat in his brilliant blue gaze was flattering, his undisguised hunger sent a frisson of apprehension through her. She was about to give her virginity to this enigmatic, brooding man who was almost a stranger to her. Suddenly she was beset by doubts, and tensed when he slipped his hand between her legs.
Ella’s neat triangle of pale blonde curls was silky soft against Vadim’s fingers, and the delicate scent of her arousal inflamed his senses so that he barely registered that she had stiffened. Driven by a primitive, powerful urge, he eased her thighs apart and ran his finger lightly up and down the lips of her vagina until they swelled and slowly opened, like the petals of a flower unfolding, to reveal her moist, damp heat.
Ella gasped when she felt Vadim probe the slick wetness between her legs and her fear faded. Lost in the world of sensory pleasure he had evoked, she was beyond conscious thought, her whole being focused intently on each new sensation that he created with his wickedly inventive hands. The feather-light brush of his thumbpad across her ultra-sensitive clitoris made her cry out, her breath coming in sharp little gasps when he gently parte
d her and slid his finger deep into her welcoming heat.
‘Please…’ She did not know what she was pleading for, only that his erotic exploration with one finger, and then two, easing into her and caressing her with skilful precision, was creating a raging tumult inside her that was rapidly spiralling out of control.
Abruptly Vadim ended the mind-blowing foreplay and muttered something in Russian as he sprang up from the bed. ‘I can’t wait either,’ he admitted harshly. She had tormented his dreams for too many nights, and the sight of her pale beauty, her hair falling in silky disarray over her shoulders, brushing against her small breasts with their swollen, dusky nipples, drove everything from his mind but his desperation to take her hard and fast and reach the sexual nirvana that he knew instinctively he would find with her.
He shrugged out of his clothes with urgent movements that lacked his usual grace, his gaze locked with Ella’s as he stripped. His shirt fell carelessly to the floor, swiftly followed by his trousers. Satisfaction and a heightened sense of anticipation surged through him when he stepped out of his boxers and heard her sharply indrawn breath as she stared with flattering fascination at the jutting length of his arousal.
The only naked male body Ella had ever seen had been sculpted from marble and standing in an art gallery. Vadim’s body was more beautiful than any sculpture, she thought, her mouth suddenly dry as her eyes moved over his broad chest, gleaming like polished bronze in the torchlight and overlaid with a covering of wiry black hair that arrowed down over his flat stomach. Heart pounding, she dropped her gaze lower still and felt a jolt of shock when she absorbed the awesome strength of his erection. He was all hard, muscular male, and as he walked purposefully back to the bed she tensed. What was she doing? the voice of doubt in her head demanded. She knew of Vadim’s reputation as a playboy—she must have been mad to have allowed things to get this far.
Ruthless Russian, Lost Innocence Page 9