Gregori was so much in love with his wife that he rarely disagreed with her on any subject. The other man would be even less inclined to do so now that Gaia was pregnant.
To the extent Gregori was allowing the well-intentioned, if delusional, Gaia to play matchmaker between himself and Daisy?
Nikolai was pretty sure that was what was happening here.
The question was, why had Daisy accepted this job when she must have known it would bring the two of them into contact on an almost daily basis?
Nikolai now took an involuntary step back as Daisy began to walk—step stealthily?—toward him, green eyes glittering with purpose. “I thought you said you were about to leave for the day?”
“I was,” she confirmed softly.
“Well?”
She shrugged. “I changed my mind.”
Nikolai’s back came up against the book-lined wall of his office, preventing him from going any farther.
Daisy came to a halt mere inches in front of him. “I have no intention of going anywhere, Nikolai.”
He shrugged. “There’s no reason for you to stay when Gaia and Gregori are to remain at home this evening.”
She gave a half smile. “I meant I have no intention of terminating my employment with Gaia.”
Nikolai’s heart sank at the stubborn determination he could see in Daisy’s expression. Damn it, the Markovic family had been his life, his family, for the past twenty years. He couldn’t envisage not working for and with Gregori.
I won’t have any choice if Daisy refuses to leave.
He had numerous successful business interests of his own, was rich enough that he didn’t need to work as head of Markovic security. He did it because he enjoyed it.
That would no longer be the case if he had to go through the torment of seeing Daisy every day.
His eyes narrowed. “Why are you doing this?”
Daisy wished she knew. Nikolai was certainly doing very little to encourage her.
But he had done all those other things he didn’t know she knew about.
It was now up to her to make the next move.
A move she had waited four impatient weeks to make.
Now that Nikolai was finally here, fear of rejection wasn’t an option. It was now or never.
Nikolai drew in a hissing breath as she lifted her hand and placed it on his shirt over the warmth of his heart, knowing a feeling of exhilaration as she felt the way his heartbeat suddenly increased rapidly. As proof that Nikolai was far from indifferent to her? Either that or he just didn’t like the feeling of being cornered. By anyone.
Fear is not an option, she reminded herself.
“Why am I doing what?” she queried mildly as she moved even closer still. So close she could feel the heat being given off by his body, smell the delicious spice of his aftershave and that earthy smell that was pure Nikolai.
His nostrils flared. As if he was as equally aware of her. The light floral of her perfume, the lemon of her shampoo, and that deeper, underlying heat that was her arousal.
Because Daisy was aroused. Had become so the moment she heard Nikolai’s voice again. Four weeks, four long lonely weeks without so much as a sight of him, and the moment she heard his voice again, her body had recognized and welcomed him home. Her breasts were swollen and aching inside her bra. Her heart was beating as rapidly as his. Between her thighs was a hot ache.
Could Nikolai smell her arousal? The nerve pulsing in his jaw and the hungry heat of his gaze on her lips said that he did.
And no matter what he might try to say to the contrary, he was responding to it.
“Why, Nikolai?” She gazed at him searchingly.
“Why what?” he replied gruffly.
“Why are you so determined not to be with me?”
“I’m not—”
“Did I do something wrong when we were in New York? Did I, even for a second, do or say anything that made you think I expected or wanted more from you?”
“No!”
“Then why?” she said again.
“I told you from the beginning, you aren’t my type—” He broke off as she began to laugh. “This isn’t funny, Daisy.”
“Of course it is.” She continued to chuckle ruefully. “You aren’t fooling anyone anymore with that claim.” She sobered as she felt his heart beating erratically beneath her hand. “I know, okay, Nikolai? I know you refused to let anyone near me after I’d been shot. That the same thing happened in the ambulance and once we reached the hospital. I also know you almost paced a hole in the carpet waiting for me to come out of surgery. That you’ve paid all my hospital bills.”
“That bullet was meant for me. I had a guilty conscience, okay?”
“No, it is not okay!” She stepped back, eyes glittering. “None of that is okay!” Her hands clenched at her sides. “It’s not okay that you have a guilty conscience. You aren’t responsible for what other people choose to do. And it’s really not okay that bullet was meant for you. Do you have any idea how I would have felt if you had been shot?” Tears stung her eyes. “Do you?”
Nikolai knew how he’d felt when he held her limp body in his arms that day, when he saw the blood soaking into her dress and thought she was dead.
And the hours of agony as he waited to see if she would survive the operation.
He could never go through that again. Ever. “Sudden death is always unacceptable—”
“Stop it, Nikolai.” Her voice rose angrily. “Just stop it!”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want you to stop treating me like an idiot. Or that one- or two-night stand you wanted me to feel like in New York. A ‘reasonably good fuck,’” she repeated accusingly.
He winced. “I never meant to hurt you.”
She snorted. “Yes, you did. That’s exactly what you meant to do when you spoke to me and of me so disparagingly.”
He drew in a harsh breath. “You were not meant to hear what I said to Gregori.”
“You shouldn’t have said it at all!”
“I regret you overheard those remarks, but… It was better that it ended then rather than later.”
“Better for whom?”
“For both of us.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“That is your prerogative.”
Daisy breathed deeply. “Would you have behaved the way you did if it had been Gregori or Lijah who had been shot? If it had been Gaia?”
“Of course—” Nikolai broke off, knowing he would be lying if he finished that sentence. His reaction would have been different if any one of the three people Daisy mentioned had been shot.
Nikolai Volkov would have known exactly what to do and how to behave.
When Daisy had been shot, her lover Nikolai had felt completely helpless. To ease her pain. To stop the bleeding. To stop her from dying.
He turned away to pace across the room and stare blindly out the window into Gregori’s darkened garden. “I want you to leave now.”
“I want doesn’t always get,” Daisy told him softly.
His shoulders tensed. “My mother used to say a Russian version of that to me when I was a child.”
“Tell me about her,” she invited softly.
“I already told you. She was a whore—”
“Don’t do that to yourself.” Daisy quickly crossed the room to curve her arms about his waist as she pressed her body against the stiffness of his back. “Have you ever thought that she didn’t have to keep you? She could have had an abortion. Or taken you to an orphanage when you were born. Or just left you to starve in the streets. She didn’t have to keep you,” she repeated huskily.
“Maybe it would have been better if she hadn’t.”
“She did the best she could. Who’s to say you would have fared any better in an orphanage.” She’d heard of the hardship in Russian orphanages. “Your mother must have loved you very much, Nikolai. And you loved her, in spite of everything.”
“Of course I loved her, and then she fucking died!” His hands moved to clasp tightly on to Daisy’s as they pressed against his chest. “You have no idea, no concept of what it was like, how I survived for the next three years. The things—the things I had to do, just to stay alive. The things I’ve done since.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t,” he bit out bitterly. “My life in Russia is as dead to me as my mother. My life in England has been one of violence and danger.”
“And all those things have helped to make you the person you are now.” The man she loved to the very heart of her.
“And you, with your doctor father, warm and loving mother, two protective older brothers,” he scoffed harshly, “could never understand, accept, the way that I’ve lived.”
Daisy already understood, and accepted, so much about Nikolai’s past from the small amount he had already told her. As for his life in England… It didn’t take too much imagination to fill in the gaps he refused to tell her. To know that his life had differed vastly from her own.
None of it made the slightest difference to how she felt about him.
Fear isn’t an option.
Her arms tightened about his waist, and she buried her face against the heat of his back. “I do accept, Nikolai.”
“You can’t.”
“Oh, but I can. I know, from talking to Gaia, that Gregori had started to change the Markovic organization before his father died, that it’s a legitimately run business now that Gregori is in charge. I—I’ve killed in the past too, you know. When I was in the army.”
“That was in battle.”
“And being head of security for the Markovic family isn’t a battle? By accepting this job with Gaia, I’ve become a part of that life too. I’ve also worked with hardened men on a daily basis at Grayson Security for the past couple of years, and I know that sometimes—sometimes there just isn’t a choice. It’s kill or be killed.”
“Last month, I aided Konstantin Orlov to take over as head of the Orlov family after Boris Petrov died.”
“Aided…?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t kill Petrov?”
“I wanted to.” He grimaced. “But no, Konstantin wanted that privilege himself.”
“It doesn’t matter who killed Petrov, or why. He tried to kill both of us. He would have kept on trying.”
“And is that enough reason for him to die?”
“If he had succeeded in killing you, I would have gone after him myself.” There was no hesitation in Daisy’s claim. Absolutely none. Her arms tightened about his waist. “I love you, Nikolai.”
Nikolai felt as if his legs were going to buckle beneath him.
Never, in the whole of his life, had anyone ever said those words to him.
He knew that, as Daisy had guessed, his mother had loved him. That Dimitri Markovic, Gregori’s father, had cared for him, as did Gregori and his sister, Katya. But no one had ever said the word love to him.
Until now.
Until Daisy.
His Amazon warrior.
His.
Yes, damn it, for better or worse, Daisy was his.
He had tried to push her away. To keep her away. He had tried, damn it. These past seven weeks had been hell, and he just didn’t have enough strength left to fight against Daisy as well as himself. He didn’t want to fight her.
“I made a promise,” he spoke gruffly, “when I thought you were going to die. I offered my own life for yours, and when that didn’t happen, I promised to let you go if you survived.”
“Those sorts of promises are meant to be broken, Nikolai.” She pressed her cheek against the rigidness of his back. “They’re a testament to one person’s feelings for another. They aren’t meant to be binding.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Oh yes,” Daisy assured him with feeling, realizing this was the reason Nikolai had left the hospital that night and stayed away for so long. “I survived for you, because you were willing to make that sacrifice, not so that we could both be alive and miserable apart.”
The last of the tension left his shoulders and back, and he turned to face her, his hands holding on tightly to hers. “I love you too, Daisy. I never thought I would ever say those words to anyone. But I love you so much, staying away from you is slowly killing me.”
Daisy could see that. Could see the same pain of separation in Nikolai’s eyes as had been in her own for so long.
Nikolai loved her. Nothing else mattered.
She gave a choked sob as she launched herself into his arms, her tears falling in earnest as Nikolai at last claimed her lips with his own.
“Where have you been since you left New York?” Daisy prompted softly several hours later as the two of them lay cuddled up naked together in Nikolai’s bed at his apartment.
They had made love for hours, murmuring words of love as they pleasured and loved each other. Daisy was exactly where she had wanted to be for so long, and so happy she felt as if her heart was going to burst out of her chest.
“I traveled.” Nikolai’s fingers played lazily with the hair at her nape. “I walked along a beach at midnight.”
Daisy raised her head to look up at him quizzically. “And?”
“And I have never felt so damned lonely in my life,” he admitted huskily. “I needed you there beside me. None of those things mattered a damn without you.” His love for her glowed in his eyes.
She gave him a lingering kiss. “We’ll travel together. Walk along a beach together at midnight,” she promised.
His arms tightened about her. “How is this going to work? Do you want us both to stop working for Gaia and Gregori? I’m sure that’s what they’re both expecting anyway,” he added dryly.
The other couple had given them knowing smiles when they made their excuses and left together earlier that evening. “Do you want to leave?” Daisy prompted.
“Not particularly.”
“Then we won’t.”
“I have enough money that neither of us needs ever work again—”
“I hope you’re not suggesting I become a kept woman?” Daisy teased him.
“I want whatever you want. Wherever you want to go or do, I want to be there too,” he added softly.
“All I want is you.” She really did feel as if her heart was going to explode with love for this man. “I—Is this, the two of us, forever, Nikolai?”
“It is for me, yes.” Nikolai couldn’t imagine ever loving anyone as much as he loved Daisy. Couldn’t imagine loving anyone else but Daisy. These past weeks without even seeing her had been the loneliest he had ever known.
“It is for me too,” she assured him warmly.
“Enough to marry me?” He eyed her uncertainly. Daisy admitting to loving him was one thing. Publicly claiming a man like him as her husband was something else entirely. He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to—
“Oh God, Nikolai. God…” Tears cascaded unchecked down her cheeks.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” he said hastily. “Your family would never approve, I get that. Your friends would all think you’re insane to marry someone like me—”
“My family all think you’re wonderful for taking such good care of me when I was shot. My friends are all employed at Grayson Security, and they all like you too. And it wouldn’t matter if they didn’t. It’s how I feel about you that’s important,” Daisy assured him emotionally. “I just never thought… Never dared to hope, to dream… Yes, I’ll marry you, Nikolai.” She kissed him deeply. “I would be so honored to be your wife.”
Nikolai, the lone wolf, the man who had closed his heart off for so long, felt the heat of his own tears on his cheeks. “Will you have my babies too?”
“Oh God, yes. Yes, please.” Daisy hugged him tightly.
Seeing Dair at the hospital with his baby daughter cradled in his arms, and now Gregori’s protectiveness toward the pregnant Gaia, had opened up a longing insi
de Nikolai he hadn’t realized was there until now. He wanted blonde-haired, green-eyed babies who looked just like their mother.
Daisy.
The woman who had melted the ice about his heart.
The woman he had come to love more than life itself.
He knew he always would.
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About The Author
Carole Mortimer is the author of over 200 novels, contemporary and Regency romance. She is a USA Today Bestselling Author. Recipient of the 2015 RWA Lifetime Achievement Award. Received the 2014 Pioneer for Romance Romantic Times Award. Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Author. She was also recognized by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for her ‘outstanding service to literature’.
She is happily married to Peter. They have 6 sons, and live on the beautiful Isle of Man. She also loves to hear from Readers!
More books by Carole Mortimer
ALPHA series:
Christmas Alpha: Novella
Dark Alpha: Full-length novel
Shadow Alpha: Full-length novel
Midnight Alpha: Full length novel
Renegade Alpha: Full length novel
Warrior Alpha: Full length novel
Rogue Alpha: Novella - Release December 2015
Savage Alpha: Full-length novel - Release March 2016
Warrior Alpha (Alpha 6) Page 20