‘I know that,’ Georgie said, making puddles of milk on the table as she ate her cereal. ‘Okay.’ She looked again at Aleksi and rephrased her question. ‘If you marry my mum—will I be a bridesmaid?’
Oh, God, she could feel every follicle on her head jump. Her teaspoon rattled against her cup as she stirred her coffee and, worse, she could feel the sting of tears, too.
Georgie was so happy, so accepting, so trusting—and it was her own mother who was setting her up for this hurt.
‘I am quite sure,’ Aleksi said, his voice kind because it was Georgie asking, ‘that when your mother marries you will be her absolute first choice as a bridesmaid.’
Delighted with his response, Georgie finished her breakfast and scampered off to put on her new uniform as Kate sat with the unfamiliar feeling of not having to scramble together a lunch box—it was already packed and in Georgie’s bag, Sophie informed her, and then she headed out to her little charge, which left Kate and Aleksi alone.
‘I’ve been thoughtless.’
Kate frowned. Aleksi was never thoughtless—arrogant, perhaps, rude, often, but his words were never without thought.
‘I am used to…’ He shrugged as he tried to locate the word, except there wasn’t just one. ‘I’m not used to being with someone who has other things to think about.’
‘Other things apart from you, you mean!’ Kate tossed back, and when he smiled she couldn’t help just a little one too.
‘I am usually the sole focus,’ he admitted. ‘You have moved home, changed your daughter’s school, dealt with your family, with mine, with your daughter and all the changes she is going through…’ Kate blinked at this rare glimpse of sensitivity. ‘It is no wonder you were tired last night.’ And then she realised he wasn’t being sensitive. He was about to more clearly spell out the rules. ‘So you need to take things more easy—don’t worry about going into work.’
‘I’m not to work?’ she gasped.
‘You’re my fiancée. You can hardly be my PA too.’
‘I thought you needed me working!’
Aleksi closed his eyes for a brief second. He did not like being argued with, but more than that he didn’t want to examine the truth behind what he was saying—that he might more simply just need her.
‘My needs are more basic than that, Kate,’ he settled for saying instead. ‘You need some time to get used to your new surroundings, to concentrate on Georgie, make sure she is settling in okay.’ He glanced at the bathrobe. ‘To sort out your wardrobe and to get some rest.’
She looked away, blushing at his innuendo but Aleksi hadn’t finished yet.
‘Oh, and Kate…’ He waited and he waited and he waited, until finally she looked at him. He wanted to ensure he had her full attention as he addressed a pertinent point. ‘You haven’t banked that cheque.’
She felt a blush spread over her cheeks. ‘I meant to,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it today.’
‘Good,’ he clipped, and then she frowned, because he smiled.
A real smile.
Only it wasn’t for her.
‘Wish me luck!’ Georgie stood beaming in her new shoes and school uniform and little straw hat.
‘You don’t need luck,’ Aleksi told her. ‘You’re going to have a great day in your new school. But good luck anyway.’
‘Do you think they’ll like me?’ Georgie checked with Aleksi as Kate sorted out her socks, that were already slipping.
‘Do you like you?’ Aleksi asked.
‘Yes!’ Georgie laughed.
‘Then you’ve got a friend already.’
It was times like that, Kate thought as she and Georgie were driven to school, when it would be so easy to love him—except that wasn’t allowed in their rules.
Still, if ever she had doubted as to whether what they were doing was right, Kate had some confirmation that morning that they were.
Oh, it was all new, and of course Georgie’s little classmates were curious about her, but there was a different air to the place—a feeling of rightness as Georgie proudly showed off her pencil case contents to the little girl sitting next to her, who did the same.
‘She’ll fit right in,’ Mrs Heath, her new teacher, assured Kate. ‘Go home and don’t worry.’
And she would have done that—except just as she felt she could breathe and didn’t feel like bursting into tears there was something new to worry about. Two vertical lines appeared between her eyes as she crossed the playground, reading the unexpected text she’d just received.
Can we meet—need to talk.
Say hi to Georgie from me.
And then, even as she erased it, another text pinged in.
As soon as you can. Really do need to speak with you.
She rang Craig straight back. ‘There’s not much to say!’
‘Kate, just listen.’
‘No, you listen.’ She was beyond furious with Georgie’s father as she stalked towards her driver. ‘Not a single word from you for months and now you want to talk!’
‘I read in the paper about you and Kolovsky,’ Craig said. ‘I’m pleased for you, Kate, it’s just…’
‘Just what?’
‘I can’t say this on the phone.’
‘Then it can’t be said,’ Kate responded curtly, then ended the call and turned off her phone.
‘Everything okay?’ Phillip, her driver, checked.
‘It’s fine,’ Kate said, then forced a smile. ‘It’s early days yet, but she seems really happy to be there.’
Craig wasn’t going to spoil it, Kate swore to herself. If it was money he was after—and when hadn’t he needed a loan?—then he’d better not be holding his breath.
She was doing this for Georgie.
Not Craig, not Aleksi. She was doing it for Georgie.
And maybe, Kate conceded, she was also doing this for herself—though not for the money.
She was, Kate realised, buying a little bit of time with Aleksi, for herself.
It should have been a relief not to work.
She was tired.
And not just from the whirlwind that had taken place in her life in the past few days.
As the days ticked by, and her stomach turned from paper-white to lobster-pink, to honey-brown as she lay on the lounger between trips to boutiques and beauticians, it was, Kate reflected, no wonder she’d spent the last few years feeling permanently exhausted.
It took three full-time staff and one part-time person, on top of Aleksi’s regular crew, to perform all that she routinely had.
Sophie sorted out books and clothes and homework and readers and, concerned about her charge’s love for processed cheese and juice boxes, bizarrely spent entire mornings while Georgie was at school sculpting carrots into mini-carrots and celery into mini-celery and making heart and star-shaped ice cubes to liven up the water for Georgie’s after-school snack!
Bruce was returned unrecognisable from the groomers. Shampooed, washed and clipped, he was walked twice a day by Kate’s occasional driver, but lay mainly dozing and scented on the decking as Kate tried to summon the energy to flop into the pool.
And, of course, with a child in the house an extra cleaner was employed.
Yes, the days were full of pampering and indulgences—like catching up on the pile of books she had meant to read. But there was only so many treatments at the day spa and only so much lounging one could do.
The afternoons were the most wonderful.
She always waiting at the school gates for Georgie—even though Sophie thought it was her job. Kate could never willingly miss the sight of her daughter in a sea of children, smiling, laughing as she came out at the end of the day, once even waving a party invitation. It was so nice to take ages over her reader, to go for a walk on the beach together.
It was the nights that were hell.
Last night they’d been out to dinner, holding hands across the table, with a kiss for the cameras, but then, after a blistering row, when she really had had a headache,
Aleksi had stormed off to the city and spent the night in a hotel—at least that was what she’d hopelessly assumed. Now he was back, had taken the afternoon off work, and was in the blackest of moods.
He thumped balls over the net as she lay on the lounger trying to relax, trying not to turn on her phone and see if Craig had called again. Kate knew she was a bit of a poor excuse for a bought and paid for fiancée—to Aleksi’s intense annoyance she jumped out of her skin every time he came near her. It was her mind that didn’t want this, battling with her body that so desperately did. No, she was a very poor excuse because, despite her extremely pressing finances and having already received a bill from the school for next term’s fees, she still hadn’t cashed his cheque.
He really was pounding those tennis balls; every time the machine slammed one out he slammed it back—slicing his shots, brimming with suppressed rage.
Long-limbed, his black hair shiny with sweat, his top off, he was incredibly beautiful, Kate thought, hiding her wistful expression behind dark glasses. Thanks to his time recuperating in the West Indies his hospital pallor had long since dimmed, and the wasting on his leg was diminishing rapidly with his punishing exercise schedule. If she didn’t know better—if she didn’t lie beside him at night and feel him tense in pain, hear him swim at three a.m. just to ease the cramping—then she’d think he looked a picture of health.
If you ignored the black rings beneath his eyes and the tension etched in his features, the dangerous energy to him that wasn’t abating…Kate was sure it wasn’t just the lack of action in the bedroom that was fuelling him.
Belenki was still permanently unavailable when Aleksi tried to communicate with him, and Aleksi wasn’t a man used to being left on hold. Add to that the takeover bid against him, and Kate somehow knew there wasn’t enough tennis balls on the planet to quell what was fuelling his anger.
He was walking towards her now, barely limping, yet it must surely be an effort. His breath was hard from exertion, his naked chest rising, and he fixed her with a smile that didn’t reassure her in the slightest. Then he lowered his head, his mouth hard on hers. His skin was hot but his mouth was cool, and she closed her eyes—not from passion but to try to blot the tears. Because she had seen the glint of a camera lens too, and knew this display of affection was only for them.
‘I think they just got their picture,’ she whispered.
‘Then let’s give them another.’ He dragged a chair over with his foot and sat opposite her, toying with the tie on her sarong.
‘Please don’t…’ She closed her eyes in shame at the thought of being exposed in just her bikini in the paper.
‘Why not?’ Still he fiddled with the tie on her sarong, and she struggled to find her voice.
Her mind was not on the cameras now, but on his hand, his palm grazing her nipple, which was thick and swollen. She wished it were different. She hated her body—hated its passionate responses to him, hated that even after a passionless, manufactured kiss still she flared for him.
‘Maybe I don’t want to be made a fool of. Where were you last night?’ She reached for his hand and removed it.
‘Don’t question me,’ he ground out.
‘Then don’t expect me on tap,’ she snapped back.
‘Hardly!’ came his sarcastic reply, and still he played with the knot.
‘Maybe krasavitsa Kate doesn’t want to read about her fiancé’s indiscretions in the paper.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You’re going to publicly dump me anyway once this is over, once you’ve convinced the board you’re respectable.’
‘Leave it.’ He could not think about then. Could not stand to think about the day when all this would be over—when everything he had would perhaps be gone. When nothing remained, when she knew his shame, she would hate him too. He looked into her troubled blue eyes and he was angry. Because she knew nothing—none of them, not one of them, knew the danger, knew the trouble. He carried it all…
‘In a couple of months,’ she persisted, but her voice was strangled when he finally undid the knot, her hand reaching to close together the flimsy material. ‘Please don’t, Aleksi.’
‘I would be forgiven for straying,’ he said nastily. ‘As all we do is kiss, and always you are covered to the neck.’
‘Sorry I’m not as blatant as your usual scrubbers,’ she hissed.
‘Take it off,’ Aleksi demanded, his voice silken, his mouth soft. But he was the smiling assassin, and she sat there, shivering in her own misery. It wasn’t the camera she feared, wasn’t her cottage cheese thigh on the cover of a magazine, but his scrutiny, his distaste she dreaded right now. ‘It’s warm; you need oil.’
When she didn’t or rather couldn’t move, Aleksi did, his hands removing hers from the sarong. His mouth, warm now, kissed her shoulder as he parted the sarong and then dropped it.
‘Lie down.’
She could feel his breath on her shoulder, could feel the sweat trickling between her breasts, feel his hand on her stomach, and she wanted to weep in shame. But that would only shame her more, so instead she lay there.
Always her body had captured his attention.
He poured oil into his hand before he looked properly at her, and he saw that his hand was shaking a fraction. Those breasts he had once caressed naked were behind fabric and he wanted them exposed. But he wouldn’t do that to her here, with paparazzi watching, so he oiled her shoulders and resisted the urge.
He loved her breasts. They were completely natural, without any telling scars beneath the areolaes. He slipped his hand up underneath her armpits, also knowing there were no scars there either. It was a little game he played, and usually his hand met the hard ridge of an implant, but there were no hard edges to Kate; she was soft, unlike him, and she was nervous but she didn’t need to be. He saw her frantically try to hold in her stomach, but despite her best efforts when his warm palm met her skin there it was soft rather than taut. Her body was nothing like the many others he had been with, which had all been the same.
Finally, after all these long days and lonely nights, she let him touch her, and it wasn’t just her body but her mind that remembered the bliss, and he felt her surrender, felt her accept what she had been resisting, and only then did he lead her inside.
‘You’re going to hurt me.’ There—she’d said it. She stood in his bedroom by his bed and she wanted him so badly. Yet she still wanted to run, because there was no simple solution for her. ‘No matter what I do—I know this is going to end up in hurt.’
‘I’m not hurting you now.’ And he wasn’t. ‘Just don’t fall in love with me, Kate.’ Between sentences he kissed her. ‘Because only then can I hurt you.’ It should have sounded like a threat or a warning, but instead it was more of plea. ‘Don’t think even for a moment that it can be like this for ever…’
‘I don’t.’ Kate swallowed. She just hoped it instead.
‘This is now,’ Aleksi said, and slid his hands around her waist. He spoke into her mouth. ‘The words I say, the words we say as lovers, don’t belong in the future.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she murmured.
‘When I say you are beautiful…’ His mouth grazed her neck, and then one hand dealt with her bikini. Her breasts tightened briefly at the rush of fanned air, then softened to his warm tongue. ‘When I say I want you…That I need you…’
‘You actually mean that you won’t in the future, right?’ She pushed him away furiously. ‘Are those words you say so you can close your eyes and go through the motions?’
‘Hell! What did he do to you?’ Aleksi demanded. ‘What did that louse do that you can doubt yourself so much?’
‘He hurt me, Aleksi, as you’re promising you’re about to.’
‘Only if you think that it can last,’ he reiterated. ‘Because we both know it can’t.’
It couldn’t—how could he tell her that soon it might all be gone? That the luxury that bathed her now might soon be over? That even with his bravado, Krasavitsa might no lo
nger be his? Oh, he would rise again, would come back from nothing, of that he had no doubt—but he would have to do it alone. Which was why it was imperative she took care of herself. But how could she want him anyway if she knew the truth?
He was back down at her breasts now, buried in them, wanting to get lost in them, but some things had to be said. ‘Cash that cheque,’ he ordered.
She slapped him in absolute fury. How dared he kiss her breast and at the same time remind her that he was paying her?
‘That’s what stopping you?’ Aleksi would not be thwarted. ‘Is that what is stopping you cashing it? Thinking I’m paying you for sex?’ Her tears were her answer. ‘Then I’ll do it for you.’ He had never been so hard, had never wanted a woman more, but it had to be business that drove them—this was his life that was crashing and burning, not hers, and he couldn’t afford to let her glimpse the darkest part of it all.
He left her naked, apart from her bikini bottoms, while he tapped into his computer, and she stood there sobbing with humiliation and shame as he erased all her problems and created a whole set of new ones.
‘There…it’s done.’
‘So now you can have sex with me?’ she flung at him.
‘Now,’ Aleksi said firmly, ‘we can forget about it for a while—forget why you are here.’
But she fought with him, avoiding the mouth that was searching for hers. He wanted to resume, to carry on where they’d left off. He had just paid her more money in a moment that she had earned in her entire life and now he expected to sleep with her!
‘I have paid for your time, for the façade, for you to hold my hand and kiss me in public. I have paid you for the invasion to your privacy and for your exclusive company over these next weeks.’ He pushed her onto the bed and pulled at her bikini while her hand strove to stop his. ‘And now it is about choice,’ Aleksi insisted when she was naked beneath him. ‘Because the money is out of the way now—it is gone, it is done and forgotten. What happens now is your choice.’
The Last Kolovsky Playboy Page 11