The Price of His Redemption

by Carol Marinelli

  She went to take down her skirt.

  ‘Slowly,’ Daniil said, and then he gave the same instruction she had. ‘Turn around.’

  Libby obliged.

  First she kicked off her shoes and then rolled the skirt down over her hips, bent and took off her skirt, and heard his low moan of approval and knew he was stroking himself.

  She stood and lowered one strap of her leotard and fought not to turn around.

  She lowered the other one and slid it down past her shaking thighs and then bent to take the leotard over her feet. Without instruction, she held that position a little longer than necessary before coming back to a stand.

  ‘Turn around.’

  Naked, she stood and she loved the examination of his eyes, over her tiny bust, down her stomach and to her small blond mound.

  Yes, she hadn’t waxed in a while but, thank God, she’d shaved her legs that morning. Then she stood, legs a little crossed and one ugly foot on top of the other as his eyes went there.

  ‘I love your feet,’ he said. ‘You know pain.’

  ‘Is that what you’re into?’ Libby swallowed.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying I like it that you persisted. Don’t be embarrassed by them.’

  ‘Phew.’

  ‘Worried I was going to spank you?’

  ‘No.’

  Technically, Libby Tennent lied.

  In truth, he could put her over his knee this minute and she’d be delighted, and that worried her because she’d never thought like that in her life.

  Yes, she was most unlike herself tonight.

  And yet, when he called her over, when he said, ‘Come here,’ she was more herself than she had ever allowed herself to be, for she did as she wanted and went easily to him.

  She climbed onto the bed but now she did not await instruction or summons. She knelt over him and kissed him, and he went to move his head but, no, she persisted, for it was her turn to kiss him now.

  His lips were relaxed and accepting and she caressed them with hers, slipping in her tongue between them to get the lovely soft taste as his fingers took care of the ache in her breasts.

  Usually Daniil did not care to linger, but tonight he dared to.

  It was a night of firsts for both of them—for Libby it was a night of pure self-indulgence, for Daniil a brief break from resistance. Tonight he let himself feel—the softness of her lips and the breath that was sweet, the moans of her pleasure just from his taste and the soft shape of her breast that warmed and swelled to his palm.

  Yes, it was a night of indulgence. Her lips never left his as she moved over him, sat naked on his stomach and kissed him more deeply. His hands left her breasts and slid down her waist but their ache was soon sated as he moved her higher and, pulling her down, took one breast in his mouth.

  She pushed up on her knees, leaned forwards and gave him the full taste of her breast and the freedom to let his hands roam over her buttocks.

  She felt incredible to Daniil—no silicone, no wobbly bits, just hard muscle beneath his fingers—and he pressed in as his mouth sucked harder.

  She wanted more of the press of his fingers and the suction of his mouth, then he eased into her cold, long fingers, and she had a heady memory of his beautiful fingers caressing a glass and they were now inside her.

  ‘Cold hands,’ Libby breathed.

  ‘Cold heart,’ Daniil mumbled, with a mouthful of breast.

  ‘I don’t care...’

  Her face was a furnace, her moans were ones of reproach as she berated herself for being so easy, so loose, and it had nothing to do with their fleeting time together, more that she was fighting not to come.

  Daniil loved a fight; he stroked her so deeply, he got right up and into her oiled, heated space till she gripped tight on his fingers, and still he did not relent, stroking her down till she knelt on him breathless.

  ‘I’d be a terrible male,’ Libby said. ‘It would all be over...’

  ‘You’d be snoring,’ he said, looking up at her shuttered eyes. ‘And I’d be lying all tense and frustrated.’

  He laughed at his own joke and lay with his fingers inside her, laughing when usually sex was a serious pursuit for him.

  And then, because this night was more pleasurable than expected, he rested on the ropes and planned the next round, for he would take her to the limit; he would enjoy the lithe body that came so easily to his hand.

  He lifted her so she sat high on his chest, her legs astride him, but he moved them so that her legs were over his shoulder and then he sat up.

  ‘What...?’

  Her eyes snapped open as she was lifted up.

  God, he was strong.

  His hands held her hips, and when she was sure she would topple he secured her with his mouth, burying his face in her sex.

  Her legs were over his shoulders and down his back, and it took a moment to balance, but when she did, oh, my. He just held her and sucked her and there was nothing to hold on to, just mid-air and his hands on her hips and the bliss of his mouth. He moved her as he wanted, he tasted her absolutely, he drew from her words that she’d never uttered with each probe of his tongue.

  ‘Never stop,’ Libby begged as she came, loving the way he pushed her to the limit.

  He had to stop, or he’d be coming to mid-air.

  Daniil loved sex, for his own pleasure, but feeling her flicker to his tongue, that musky scent had him giddy and right on the edge himself.

  He dropped her.

  And she loved that he did.

  The slam of the mattress on her back, the slight disorientation as she tried to locate the pillows, just to sheath him, but she was upside down in his bed.

  ‘I’d better warn you...’ He didn’t need to. She saw he was more than ready as he slipped the condom on and he could come now and he’d still be her best lover.

  His lips were shiny from her as he came over her and kissed her, and had she had any manners she’d have parted her legs, but she loved the roughness of his hairy thigh as he dealt with that.

  She lay, a lazy, drunk-on-lust lover, hazy and giddy from two orgasms and trying to find brief pause, but there was none. There was a shrill of nervousness in her as she looked into ice and then surly lips spread into a ghost of a smile and she knew that she was about to find out what it was to be taken.

  * * *

  ‘Oh...’ Libby said, as she was rapidly stretched, and she looked up into those cold grey eyes that were open to hers and she didn’t need kissing, she just drowned in his pleasure and chose to enhance it—her arms raised as she gripped the wooden slats at the foot of the bed.

  Rough were the hands that pulled her down but she held on firmly.

  ‘Libby,’ he said, and tugged her down again but she did not let go, holding on as he took her, shackled by their thoughts, and it was a decadent bliss.

  Oh, one night was not enough. It was her only tangible thought as he swelled within her, but still he did not give in.

  ‘Come...’ she begged, because she would at any moment. The noise alone signalled the end, he was so fast and so pumped, but still he would not unleash. He slowed and she clenched around his thick tip, gripped and released and watched his lips part as she played him at his own game, a game where both won, for he drove fully into her then, a punishment for daring to goad him, a delicious internal wrestle to take the lead.

  Beneath him, she still came out on top, for Libby arched into him, pressed her hands into his buttocks, urged him and fully partook, but then, as her legs went to wrap around him, as she went to cling to him and share in the journey home, he took the lead.

  His legs came to the sides of hers, halting their progress to his hips. Still he thrust as he trapped her thighs in his.

  She went to protest, bu
t his mouth smothered hers.

  She lay there immobile and let out a sob as his pelvis opened and aligned fully with hers, his length sliding in so deep, the friction of him so relentless she lay there pinned, trying to remember to breathe, then deciding she didn’t even need to because she was floating and sinking at the same time as he said something, presumably in Russian, presumably very bad, and he unloaded within her.

  ‘Oh...’ It was all she could manage.

  It was an orgasm so deep that she cried.

  Real tears.

  And Libby, during a very difficult year, had refused to cry.

  Best of all, he didn’t comfort her afterwards.

  He simply let her be.

  It was exceptional bliss.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘NYET.’

  Daniil was half-asleep when her fingers set to work on his back.

  ‘Shut up,’ Libby said. She had promised herself a little dalliance with that back. ‘It’s my one-night stand, too.’

  He frowned at her words for usually women were only too eager to please him and yet she made it sound as if she was pleasing herself.

  Libby was.

  As he rolled onto his stomach she climbed on and sat on his lower back and found herself in heaven.

  His back was truly beautiful and his shoulders were just so wide that she could work for hours and never unravel all the knots, but feeling some of them dissolve beneath her fingers she carried on.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked as one minute in he realised it wasn’t some sensual massage he was getting but a deep-tissue one. Right into his deltoid her slender fingers burrowed.

  ‘You’ll be in agony the day after tomorrow,’ Libby promised. ‘And the next day, but maybe by Friday you’ll remember me fondly.’

  Daniil did not like massage but her hands were so precise and expert that he let himself sink into it.

  They were both in bliss.

  Libby loved feeling his neck loosen and how he moaned with the pleasure of pain at times as she located a tense area. Down she slid and went to his buttocks and sustaining the pressure with her thumb did a muscle-stripping technique and he let out a small curse but did not tell her to stop.

  In fact, he spoke, trusting her enough to let her get on as he asked her the question she hadn’t answered.

  ‘Why are you most unlike yourself tonight?’

  Her hands paused for a moment and she found she was frowning as she worked out her answer. ‘Maybe I’m just working out who I am without...’

  Libby didn’t finish. She didn’t need to; they both knew she had been consumed by the dancing world for a very long time. She pressed her palms into Daniil’s loins, lifting up a little so that more of her weight was on him, and shifted the conversation away from herself. ‘So why are you most unlike yourself tonight?’

  Daniil gave a low laugh that she felt in her hands before he answered, ‘Because I’m still awake.’

  She gave him a light slap between his right buttock and thigh for his response but she laughed, too, and they both paused a moment. She felt him shift a little to get comfortable, felt the resurgence of desire, but it wasn’t sex that drew her closer to him in that moment—it was the shared moment of laughter and being herself.

  Her most honest self.

  She turned her head and looked out of the window and never again would she look at even a photo of Big Ben without remembering her time with him.

  Today was supposed to have been the hardest day.

  She had been warming up, at home alone, when her father had rung.

  It had been her first day without dance class and now, when all the white noise had gone, everything she’d told her family, her flatmate, her colleagues, her friends, herself even, hushed. There, twenty minutes before the close of the day, she watched the storm over London and thick drops of water sliding down the windows, and she told him the real reason behind leaving the dance company she had loved.

  ‘I jumped before I was pushed.’ Libby voiced her truth. ‘I wasn’t even getting the small roles anymore.’

  He didn’t turn and kiss her, he didn’t dim the pain with sex, he just let her fingers work his back. ‘At least you jumped,’ Daniil said. ‘Most people have to be prised kicking and screaming from something they don’t want to let go of.’

  ‘That was almost me—I took forever to read the writing on the wall,’ she admitted. ‘I should have gone six months, maybe a year ago but I clung on to the bitter end. I’m crap at dignified exits—I can’t even end a text conversation gracefully, let alone my career.’

  ‘It must have been hard to let it go.’

  And let it go she finally had, yet it hurt so much to have done so.

  He heard her sniff and tears came again and he felt the drops of her tears on his skin. He let her cry awhile before speaking on.

  ‘So now you fly solo,’ Daniil said.

  ‘I don’t want to, though.’

  ‘No choice sometimes.’

  She liked it that he didn’t fob her off, that he didn’t tell her, as others repeatedly had, that as one door closed...when the simple fact was that she’d loved being on that side of the door. Neither did he tell her how the greatest opportunities were often born from the darkest times... Being a part of a dance company had been a lifelong dream and it was an opportunity that was now gone.

  She carried on with his back and then there was silence, a lovely silence that Daniil usually only achieved when he was here on his own. And it was better than being alone because he really wasn’t thinking about where he was. Instead, he was thinking of where he’d come from, which was a place in his mind he rarely visited from the vantage point of calm.

  He’d never wanted to leave the orphanage. It had almost killed him to be prised from his friends and his twin and thrust into a world that he hadn’t wanted to inhabit, and then she spoke again.

  ‘I wanted to work with what I had,’ she said.

  In that moment he understood her and she understood him; in that moment they were both pushed reluctantly through the same portal of change and he remembered his resistance. Daniil recalled with clarity how he had wanted to be back with his brother and friends and a world he had been told he should be happy to have left. He thought of Sergio and how they’d raced from school to the makeshift gym. Of Katya and strong, sweet tea and a kitchen that had been big and always warm. Of nights spent talking into the darkness and how the four of them would speak with certainty about the world they were going to change.

  Instead, he’d had to learn to somehow coexist with a family he could never be a part of, a headmaster who had done all he could to quash rebellion and a cousin who had goaded and bullied him.

  He, too, had had to make his way in a place he would have preferred not to be.

  Libby knew there was nothing he could say that might make this better and was certain that he could never understand but then, as he spoke, she realised he did.

  ‘Being resourceful sucks.’ His response was sleepy but it hit the mark and Libby smiled unseen.

  ‘It truly does.’

  She worked his neck till it was pliant and then ran her hands down a very loose spine and then, tired now, bent and gave his shoulder a kiss and moved off him to lie down, liking the feel of his arm over her chest as he pulled her a little bit closer.

  Neither moved all night.

  In fact, Libby woke up exactly as she’d fallen asleep, on her back with his arm across her chest, and she turned to steal a look at him.

  He was starting to wake up and he needed a razor and she’d never woken to such male beauty before.

  Regret?

  God, no.

  Her whole body felt...well, it felt as if she’d been in for a tune-up.

  He woke to her stretch and
smile.

  ‘Bad girl,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever must you think of me?’

  ‘Only good things.’

  He adored that she was unashamed of her body and the pleasure that they’d had last night.

  And Libby adored it that he did not mention her big revelation about her career or her possibly rather red eyes.

  He reached for his phone and raised an eyebrow in surprise when he saw that it was after eight. Usually he would be at work by now.

  ‘I’m late,’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’s very lucky that you’re the boss, then.’

  ‘True.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Are you late?’

  ‘No. I’m meeting one agent at ten to be shown through.’

  ‘Near here?’

  ‘No, that’s not till one.’

  ‘You should have booked them the other way round.’

  ‘Ah, but I didn’t know I was going to be sleeping in your bed!’ She gave him a smile. ‘Goldilocks.’

  ‘I don’t know that one so well.’

  ‘Well, I guess you’d have grown up on Russian ones.’

  Daniil nodded and he thought for a moment of Sev reading to them, or Katya, the cook, who, when they had been little, would sometimes tell them a tale.

  Nice memories, Daniil thought.

  ‘I did,’ he said, ‘though where I come from the wolf is the good guy.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You’ve seen Firebird?’

  ‘I’ve heard about it, of course, but, no, I’ve never actually seen it performed...’

  ‘It’s on in London now,’ he said, and he waited for her to jump as most women would at the tiny line he’d just thrown them.

  She didn’t.

  She lay there her in a state of self-imposed anxiety. Rachel, her flatmate, had been to see it twice and had suggested that Libby join her many times, until Libby had broken down and admitted that, no, she just couldn’t face a full-scale production yet. Her head had let go of the dream, her heart just wasn’t ready to, and it would hurt: it would be agonising to sit and watch what she now knew she would never be a part of again.