Claiming His Own

by Olivia Gates

  Needles pricked behind her eyes, threatening to dissolve down her cheeks at any moment. “You hid it well.”

  His eyes widened in dismay. “I didn’t have to hide anything. I never felt anything anywhere near aggressive around you. But the mere possibility of losing control of my passion carried a price that was impossible to contemplate.”

  He never said emotion. Did he use passion interchangeably, or was everything he felt rooted in the physical?

  “You have to believe me. You don’t have to look back and feel sick thinking you’d been in danger and oblivious of it.”

  She shook her head, needing to arrest his alarm. “I meant you hid that increasing passion. I never sensed that you felt a different level from what you had always showed me.”

  His nod was heavy. “That I hid. And the more I tried not to show you what I felt, the more it...roiled inside me. And if I felt like this when you were still carrying my child, I couldn’t risk testing how I’d feel after you had him.”

  He must have been living a nightmare, worrying he’d relive what had happened with his father, reenact it.

  A vice clamped her throat. “Abusers don’t fear for their victims’ well-being, Maksim. They blame them for provoking them, make themselves out to be the wronged ones, the ones pushed beyond their endurance. They certainly don’t live in dread of what they might do. You’re nothing like your father.”

  The pain gripping his face twisted her vitals. “I couldn’t be certain, couldn’t risk a margin of error.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  He inhaled sharply, as if he hadn’t expected that request, as if he loathed talking about his father.

  He still nodded, complied. “He was possessive of my mother to madness, insanely jealous of the air she breathed, suspicious of her every move. He begrudged her each moment alone or with anyone else. It got so bad he went into rages at the attention she bestowed on his children. Then came the day he convinced himself she was neglecting him on our account, because we weren’t his.”

  “And that was when he...he...”

  He nodded. “After he beat us to a pulp, he rushed us to emergency. On the day he was told my sister was dead, he walked out onto the street and let himself be run over by a truck.”

  God, the sheer horror and sickness, the magnitude of damage was...unimaginable. How had his mother survived, first sustaining the brunt of her husband’s violence then suffering such an incalculable loss because of it? Had she survived? At least emotionally, psychologically? How could she have?

  She finally whispered, “How—how old were you then?”

  “Nine.”

  Old enough to understand fully, to be scarred permanently. And to have suffered intensely for far too long.

  “And you’ve since been afraid you’d turn into him.”

  His eyes loathed the very thought that he might be so horrifically infected. She stopped herself from reaching a soothing hand to his cheek. Not yet. It wouldn’t stop at a touch this time. And he needed to get this off his chest.

  “Your mother didn’t realize he was unstable before she married him?”

  The loathing turned on the father who’d blighted his existence. “She admitted she’d seen signs of it while he was courting her. But she was young and poor and he was a larger-than-life entity whose pursuit swept her off her feet. She did realize he was disturbed the first time he knocked her down. But he was always so distraught, so loving afterward, that she kept sinking deeper into the trap of his diseased passion. It was a mess, a never-ending circle of fear and abuse. Then came Ana’s unforeseen pregnancy.”

  Like hers, with Leo. Yet another parallel that must have poured fuel on his untenable projections.

  “She thought of aborting her, terrified her pregnancy would trigger a new level of instability, as it did. The best thing he ever did was step in front of that truck, ridding her of his existence. But after all the harm he’d inflicted, it was too little, too late.”

  It was unthinkable what his father had cost them.

  But... “Stepping in front of that truck might have rid her of his physical danger, but that he seemingly forfeited his life to atone for his sins must have robbed her of the closure that hating him unequivocally could have brought her.”

  His eyes widened as if she’d slapped him awake. “I thought I dissected this subject, and him, to death a million times already. But this is a perspective I never considered. You could be right. Bozhe moy...you probably are. That bastard. Even dying, he still managed to torture her.”

  There was no doubt Maksim loved his mother, felt ferociously protective of her. Would defend her to the death without a second thought. And this, to her, was more proof that he’d always been wrong to fear himself.

  “But why did you even think you’d one day develop into another version of him? When you hate what he was so profoundly?”

  “Because I thought hating something didn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t become it. And the evidence of three generations of Volkov men was just too horrifically compelling. I learned about them later on, so they had no impact on shaping my life. I made my decision never to become involved with anyone that night Ana died. I didn’t question my resolve for the next thirty years, never felt the need to be close to anyone. Then came you.”

  The way he kept saying this. Until you. Then came you. As if she’d changed his life. As if...he loved her?

  No. He was being totally honest, and if this was how he felt, he would have confessed it.

  “I left, determined to never come back, even when all I wanted was to stay with you...to be the first to hold Leonid, to be there every single second from then on for you and him. But I couldn’t abide by the sentence I imposed on myself. I started following you, like an addict would the only thing that could quench his addiction. I had to see that you and Leonid were all right, to be near enough to step in if you ever needed me.”

  We needed you—I needed you every second of the past year.

  But she couldn’t say this. Not yet.

  For now, he’d answered the questions that had been burning in her mind and soul. All that remained was one.

  “What made you show yourself now, after you slipped away for months whenever I noticed you?”

  This seemed to shock him. “You did? I thought I made sure you wouldn’t.”

  “I still did. I...felt you.”

  The bleakness of dwelling on the tragic past evaporated in a blast of passion. She’d barely absorbed this radical switch when he singed her hands in the heat of his hands and lips.

  Before she threw herself in his arms, come what may, he captured her face in his hands, the tremor in them transmitting to her whole body like a quake.

  “That deal we made our first night,” he groaned against her trembling flesh, “and the one I made when you told me you were pregnant with Leonid...”

  A thunderclap went off in her chest. He wanted to reinstate them?

  “I want to strike new deals. I want to be Leonid’s father for real, in every way—and your husband.”

  * * *

  Maksim watched stupefaction spread like wildfire over Caliope’s exquisite face.

  Bozhe moy...how he’d missed that face. The face sculpted from the shape of his every taste and desire, every angle and dimple the very embodiment of elegance, harmony and intelligence. How he’d longed for every lash and fleck of those bluer-than-heaven eyes, every strand of this dipped-in-gold caramel hair, how he’d yearned for every inch of that sun-infused skin and that made-for-passion body. And then came every spark of her being—every glance, every breath, her scent, her feel, her hunger.

  His gaze and senses devoured it all, his starvation only intensifying the more he took in. It wasn’t only because he’d been deprived of her, or was maddened by the taste he’d just gotten of he
r ecstasy. He’d felt constantly famished even when he’d been gorging himself on all that she was.

  It was why he’d distrusted himself so much, feared the intensity of his need. But everything had changed. He had.

  As if coming out of a trance, Caliope blinked, then opened her lips. Nothing came.

  His proposal had shocked her that much. Though her reaction was the only one he’d expected, it still twisted the knife he’d embedded in his own guts when he’d walked away from her.

  She tried again, produced a wavering whisper. “You want to marry...” She stopped as if she couldn’t say marry me. “You want to get married?”

  He nodded, his heart crowding with too much.

  Her throat worked, as if this was too big a lump for her to swallow. “Sorry if I can’t process this, especially after what you just told me. What could have changed your mind so diametrically?” Suddenly those azure eyes that he saw in his every waking and sleeping moment widened. “Is this because of the accident you had? Has it changed your perspective?”

  He could only nod again.

  “Will you tell me what happened? Or will it take years before you’re ready to talk about it, too?”

  Unable to sit beside her anymore without taking her into his arms, he heaved himself up to his feet. He knew he had to tell her what she had a right to know. She stared up at him, a hundred dizzying emotions fast-forwarding on her face.

  He braced himself against the temptation to sink back over her, convince her to forget everything now, just let him give them the assuagement they were both dying for.

  He balled itching hands, smothering the need to fill them with her. “I’m here to offer you full disclosure.”

  She sagged back against the couch, as if she felt she’d be unable to take the rest of his confessions unsupported.

  He wanted to start, but found no way to put the emptiness and loss inside him into words.

  “Don’t look for a way to tell me. Just...tell me.”

  Her quiet words surprised him so much his heart faltered.

  Despite their tempestuous passion, he’d never felt they’d shared anything...emotional, psychological, let alone spiritual. He’d wondered if it had been because of their pact of noninvolvement, or if there was simply nothing between them beyond that addicting, unstoppable chemistry.

  But she’d felt his inability to contain his ordeal into expression, his struggle to find a way that would be less traumatic than what it had been in truth.

  Had she always possessed this ability to read him, but hadn’t employed it—or at least shown it— because it had been against their agreement? Or had he hidden his feelings too well, as she’d said, and succeeding in blocking her? Had she ever wished to come closer? If she had, why hadn’t she demanded a change in the terms of their involvement? Or was she only now reaching out to him on a human, not intimate, level?

  This last possibility made the most sense. She had shown him understanding he hadn’t felt entitled to wish for, had argued his case against his own self-condemnation with reason and conviction. When all he’d hoped for was to make a full confession, to beg for her forgiveness, to ask for any measure of closeness to her and to Leonid that she’d grant.

  Not that he’d abided by the humble limitations of his hopes. One glimpse of her and his greed had roared to the forefront. He’d wanted all of her, everything with her.

  But now that she hadn’t turned him down out of hand, he could dare to hope that an acceptance of his proposal wasn’t impossible. But he couldn’t press for one. Not now. Not before he told her everything.

  He inhaled. “You remember Mikhail?”

  She blinked at the superfluous question. For she knew Mikhail well. His only friend, the only one who’d known about him and Caliope.

  Whenever they’d gone out with him, he’d felt she’d connected with Mikhail on a level she’d never done with him. He’d felt a twinge of dismay at the...ease they shared. Not jealousy, just disappointment that, in spite of their intense intimacy, this simple connection, this comfortable bond would always be denied them.

  But he’d known there’d been no element of attraction. At least on her side. On Mikhail’s— What man would not feel a tug in his blood at her overpowering femininity? But being his friend, and more, hers, had been Mikhail’s only priority. And though Maksim had felt left out when those two had laughed together, he’d been glad she could share this with his friend when he couldn’t offer her the same level of spontaneity.

  Caliope’s eyes grew wary. “How can I forget him? Though he disappeared from my life the same time you did, I like to think he became my friend, too.”

  “He did. He was.” She lurched at the word was, horror flooding her eyes. He forced the agony into words that shredded him on their way out. “He died in the accident.”

  Her face convulsed as if she’d been stabbed. Then before his burning eyes, the anguish of finality gradually filled hers, overflowing in pale tracks down suddenly flushed cheeks.

  He’d once delighted in the sight of her tears. When he’d tormented her with too long anticipation, then devastated her with too much pleasure. Her tears were ones of sorrow now, and those gutted him.

  Suddenly confusion invaded her eyes, diluting the shock and grief. “You mean you weren’t involved? But you said...”

  He gritted his teeth. “I was involved. I survived.”

  Eyes almost black, she extended her hand to him.

  She was reaching out to him, literally, showing him the consideration she’d said she didn’t owe him. His chest burned with what felt like melting shards of glass.

  Taking her trembling hand made the intimacies he’d taken tonight pale in comparison to that simple voluntary touch. With a ragged exhalation, he sagged down beside her again.

  Then he began. “Mikhail was involved in extreme sports.” She nodded. She’d known that...and had worried. “When I couldn’t dissuade him to stop, I joined him.”

  Mikhail had left it up to him to tell her he shared his pursuits. He hadn’t. The realization of yet another major omission on his part filled her eyes. Another thing he had to answer for.

  He forced himself to go on. “I felt better about his stunts sharing them, so I’d be there if something went wrong. For years it seemed nothing could. He was meticulous in his safety measures, and I admit, everything he came up with was freeing and exhilarating. It also intensified our bond when I experienced firsthand what constituted a fundamental part of what made him the man he was. Then one day, during a record-setting skydive, my parachute didn’t open.”

  The sharpness of her inhalation felt as if it had sheared through his own lungs.

  Was she unable to bear imagining his peril, or would she have reacted the same to that of anyone?

  It was at this moment that he realized. This woman he wanted with every fiber of his being, who had borne his only son... He didn’t know her.

  Not what affected her emotionally or appealed to her mentally, not what provoked her anger, what inspired her happiness, what commanded her respect.

  Right now, her eyes were explicit, overflowing with dread, awaiting the rest of the account of what had changed his life forever...and had written the end of Mikhail’s.

  He exhaled. “Mikhail swerved to help me. We couldn’t both use his parachute like in a tandem dive, as this was a record dive and our parachutes didn’t have the necessary clips. We were fast approaching the point where it would be too late to open parachutes, and I kept shouting for him to open his own and I’d manage on my own. He wouldn’t comply, forcing me to shove him away. But he dove at me again, grabbed me and opened his parachute.”

  Her hand convulsed over his. His other hand caressed her, shaking with remembered horror. “The force of the opening chute yanked him away. He miraculously clung to me with his legs, then managed
to secure me. But our combined weight made us drop too fast, and we’d strayed far from our intended landing spot over a forest. I knew we’d both die, if not from the drop, then from being shredded falling through those trees. So I struggled away, praying that losing my weight would slow his descent and make him able to maneuver away. I struggled with my parachute one last time and it suddenly opened. It felt as if it was the very next second that I crashed into the top of the trees. Then I knew nothing more.”

  He stopped, the combined agony of what had come after and her reaction to his account so far an inexorable fist squeezing his throat. Her tears had stopped, but her eyes were horrified, her breath fractured.

  He’d thought she’d only felt desire for him. Then when she’d become pregnant, he’d thought an extra dimension had been added to her feelings, what any woman would feel toward the man with whom she shared the elemental bond of a child.

  But had she felt...more? Did her reaction mean she still did? How could she, after what he’d done?

  The plausible explanation was that she’d react this way to anyone else’s ordeal. He shouldn’t be reading more into this. And he had to get this torture over with.

  “It was dark when I came to. I was disoriented, not to mention in agony. Both my legs were broken—compound fractures, as I learned later—and I was bleeding from injuries all over my body. It took me a while to put together what had happened, and to realize I was stuck high up in a tree. It was so painful to move, I wanted to give up, stay there until I died of exposure. The only thing that kept me trying to climb down was needing to know that Mikhail had made it down safely.”

  Twin tears escaped from eyes growing more wary, as if she sensed there was much more to this account than just the catastrophic ending he’d told her about upfront.

  “My phone was damaged, so I couldn’t even hope anyone would follow its GPS signal. I could only hope Mikhail’s was working, that he was okay or at least in much better shape than I was. I kept fading in and out of consciousness, and it took me all night to climb half the way down. Then it was light enough...and I saw him in a small clearing dozens of feet away, half covered in his parachute, twisted in such a position it was clear...”