She caught her bottom lip between pearly white teeth. ‘How you feel about what...?’
‘You, of course!’ Jaxon lifted his head to look down at her exasperatedly. ‘Stazy, you have to be the most difficult woman in the world for a man to tell how much he loves her!’ he added irritably.
Stazy stilled, her eyes very wide as she stared up at him. ‘Are you saying you love me...?’
‘I’ve loved you for months, you impossible woman!’
‘You’ve—loved—me—for—months...?’ she repeated in slow disbelief.
‘See? Totally impossible!’ Jaxon snorted his impatience as he released her to step away and run a hand through the darkness of his hair. ‘There are millions upon millions of women in the world, and I have to fall in love with the one woman who doesn’t even believe I love her when I’ve just told her that I do!’
It was entirely inappropriate—had to be because she was verging on hysteria—but at that moment in time all Stazy could manage in response was a choked laugh.
Jaxon raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘And now she’s laughing at me...!’
Stazy continued laughing. In fact she laughed for so long that her sides actually ached and there were tears falling down her cheeks.
‘Care to share the joke?’ Jaxon finally prompted ruefully.
She leant weakly against the wall, her hands wrapped about her aching sides. ‘No joke, Jaxon. At least not on you.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Me!’ She smiled across at him tearfully. ‘The joke’s on me, Jaxon! I’m so inexperienced at these things that I— Jaxon, I fell in love with you when we were at Bromley House together. I didn’t want to,’ she added soberly. ‘It just...happened.’
Jaxon began walking towards her like a man in a dream. ‘You’re in love with me...?’
‘Oh, Jaxon...!’ she groaned indulgently. ‘There are millions and millions of men in the world, and I have to fall in love with the one man who doesn’t even believe I love him when I’ve just told him that I do,’ she misquoted back at him huskily.
His arms felt like steel bands about her waist as he pulled her effortlessly towards him, his gaze piercing as he looked down at her fiercely. ‘Do you love me enough to marry me...?’
She gasped. ‘You can’t want to marry a doctor of archaeology?’
He nodded. ‘I most certainly can! That is if you don’t mind marrying an actor and film director?’
‘Excuse me,’ she chided huskily, ‘but that would be a multi-award-winning Hollywood A-list actor and director!’
‘Whatever,’ Jaxon dismissed gruffly. ‘Will you marry me, Stazy, and save me from the misery of merely existing without you?’
She swallowed. ‘Being alone in a crowd...?’
‘The hell of being alone in a crowd, yes,’ he confirmed huskily.
Stazy knew exactly what that felt like. It was how she had felt for the past three months since she’d last seen Jaxon...
Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘I’ve been so lonely without you, Jaxon. Since my parents died I’ve never wanted to need or love anyone, apart from my grandparents, and yet you’ve managed to capture my heart...’ She gave a shake of her head. ‘I love you so much, Jaxon, that these past three months of not seeing you, being with you, has been hell.’
‘Hence the weight loss and lack of sleep?’ He ran a caressing fingertip across the dark shadows under her eyes.
‘Yes.’ She nodded miserably.
‘When you said a few minutes ago you were inexperienced in things, you meant falling in love, didn’t you...?’
She gave a self-derisive laugh. ‘I’ve never been in love. I’ve had two lovers, spent one night with each of them, and they were both utter disasters!’ She grimaced.
‘Forget about them.’ Jaxon reached up and cradled each side of her face, his love for her shining out of his liquid grey eyes. ‘We’re going to make love, Stazy. Real love. And it’s going to be truly beautiful.’
‘Yes, please...’ she breathed softly.
‘You haven’t agreed to make an honest man of me yet,’ he reminded her huskily.
‘Is that a condition of the beautiful lovemaking?’ she teased.
‘I do have my reputation to think of, after all...’
Stazy laughed huskily at the dig as she threw herself into his waiting arms. ‘In that case—yes, I’ll marry you, Jaxon!’
‘And have my babies?’
Babies. Not only Jaxon to love, but his babies to love and cherish... ‘Oh, God, yes...!’ she accepted emotionally.
‘Then you may now take me to bed, Dr Bromley.’
She chuckled at his prim tone. ‘If you think I’m going to sweep you up in my arms and carry you off to the bedroom before ravishing you then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed!’
‘I’ll do the sweeping.’ Jaxon did exactly that. ‘You can do the ravishing.’
‘With pleasure, Mr Wilder,’ Stazy murmured throatily. ‘With the greatest of pleasure.’
And it was.
Just over two years later...
‘I’m truly impressed,’ Jaxon murmured teasingly in her ear as the two of them stepped down off the stage to the rapturous applause of his peers, after going up together to receive yet another award for Best Screenplay for Butterfly Wings. ‘I think you thanked everyone but the girl who made the coffee!’
‘Very funny,’ Stazy muttered as she continued to smile brightly for the watching audience as the two of them made their way back to their seats.
Jaxon chuckled. ‘And after you were once so scathing about the length of the speeches made at these awards, too!’
‘Just for that, you can be the one to get up to Anastasia Rose if she wakes in the night!’ Stazy dropped thankfully back into her seat, her smile completely genuine now as she thought of their beautiful six-month-old daughter waiting for them at home. Geoffrey had opted to stay with his beloved great-granddaughter rather than accompany them to another award ceremony that he had declared would be ‘far too exhausting at my age!’
‘I’ll have you know that Anastasia Rose and I have come to an arrangement—I don’t wake her up if she doesn’t wake me up!’ Jaxon grinned smugly.
‘Really?’ Stazy turned in her seat to look at him. ‘Does that mean we can have our own very private celebration later...?’
Jaxon chuckled. ‘Insatiable woman!’
She arched teasing brows. ‘Are you complaining...?’
‘Certainly not!’ He kissed her warmly—something he had done often during their two-year marriage, whenever and wherever they happened to be.
They both knew and happily appreciated that life, and love, didn’t come any better than this...
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from NOT JUST THE BOSS’S PLAYTHING by Caitlin Crews.
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CHAPTER ONE
TORTURE WOULD BE preferable to this.
Nikolai Korovin moved through the crowd ruthlessly, with a deep distaste for his surroundings he made no effo
rt to hide. The club was one of London’s sleekest and hottest, according to his assistants, and was therefore teeming with the famous, the trendy and the stylish.
All of whom appeared to have turned up tonight. In their slick, hectic glory, such as it was. It meant Veronika, with all her aspirations to grandeur, couldn’t be far behind.
“Fancy a drink?” a blank-eyed creature with masses of shiny black hair and plumped-up lips lisped at him, slumping against him in a manner he imagined was designed to entice him. It failed. “Or anything else? Anything at all?”
Nikolai waited impatiently for her to stop that insipid giggling, to look away from his chest and find her way to his face—and when she did, as expected, she paled. As if she’d grabbed hold of the devil himself.
She had.
He didn’t have to say a word. She dropped her hold on him immediately, and he forgot her the moment she slunk from his sight.
After a circuit or two around the loud and heaving club, his eyes moving from one person to the next as they propped up the shiny bar or clustered around the leather seating areas, cataloging each and dismissing them, Nikolai stood with his back to one of the giant speakers and simply waited. The music, if it could be called that, blasted out a bass line he could feel reverberate low in his spine as if he was under sustained attack by a series of concussion grenades. He almost wished he was.
He muttered something baleful in his native Russian, but it was swept away in the deep, hard thump and roll of that terrible bass. Torture.
Nikolai hated this place, and all the places like it he’d visited since he’d started this tiresome little quest of his. He hated the spectacle. He hated the waste. Veronika, of course, would love it—that she’d be seen in such a place, in such company.
Veronika. His ex-wife’s name slithered in his head like the snake she’d always been, reminding him why he was subjecting himself to this.
Nikolai wanted the truth, finally. She was the one loose end he had left, and he wanted nothing more than to cut it off, once and for all. Then she could fall from the face of the planet for all he cared.
“I never loved you,” Veronika had said, a long cigarette in her hand, her lips painted red like blood and all of her bags already packed. “I’ve never been faithful to you except by accident.” Then she’d smiled, to remind him that she’d always been the same as him, one way or another: a weapon hidden in plain sight. “Needless to say, Stefan isn’t yours. What sane woman would have your child?”
Nikolai had eventually sobered up and understood that whatever pain he’d felt had come from the surprise of Veronika’s departure, not the content of her farewell speech. Because he knew who he was. He knew what he was.
And he knew her.
These days, his avaricious ex-wife’s tastes ran to lavish Eurotrash parties wherever they were thrown, from Berlin to Mauritius, and the well-manicured, smooth-handed rich men who attended such events in droves—but Nikolai knew she was in London now. His time in the Russian Special Forces had taught him many things, much of which remained etched deep into that cold, hard stone where his heart had never been, and finding a woman with high ambitions and very low standards like Veronika? Child’s play.
It had taken very little effort to discover that she was shacking up with her usual type in what amounted to a fortress in Mayfair: some dissipated son of a too-wealthy sheikh with an extensive and deeply bored security force, the dismantling of which would no doubt be as easy for Nikolai as it was entertaining—but would also, regrettably, cause an international incident.
Because Nikolai wasn’t a soldier any longer. He was no longer the Spetsnaz operative who could do whatever it took to achieve his goals—with a deadly accuracy that had won him a healthy respect that bordered on fear from peers and enemies alike. He’d shed those skins, if not what lay beneath them like sinew fused to steel, seven years ago now.
And yet because his life was nothing but an exercise in irony, he’d since become a philanthropist, an internationally renowned wolf in the ill-fitting clothes of a very soft, very fluffy sheep. He ran the Korovin Foundation, the charity he and his brother, Ivan, had begun after Ivan’s retirement from Hollywood action films. Nikolai tended to Ivan’s fortune and had amassed one of his own thanks to his innate facility with investment strategies. And he was lauded far and near as a man of great compassion and caring, despite the obvious ruthlessness he did nothing to hide.
People believed what they wanted to believe. Nikolai knew that better than most.
He’d grown up hard in post-Soviet Russia, where brutal oligarchs were thick on the ground and warlords fought over territory like starving dogs—making him particularly good at targeting excessively wealthy men and the corporations they loved more than their own families, then talking them out of their money. He knew them. He understood them. They called it a kind of magic, his ability to wrest huge donations from the most reluctant and wealthiest of donors, but Nikolai saw it as simply one more form of warfare.
And he had always been so very good at war. It was his one true art.
But his regrettably high profile these days meant he was no longer the kind of man who could break into a sheikh’s son’s London stronghold and expect that to fly beneath the radar. Billionaire philanthropists with celebrity brothers, it turned out, had to follow rules that elite, highly trained soldiers did not. They were expected to use diplomacy and charm.
And if such things were too much of a reach when it concerned an ex-wife rather than a large donation, they were forced to subject themselves to London’s gauntlet of “hot spots” and wait.
Nikolai checked an impatient sigh, ignoring the squealing trio of underdressed teenagers who leaped up and down in front of him, their eyes dulled with drink, drugs and their own craven self-importance. Lights flashed frenetically, the awful music howled and he monitored the crowd from his strategic position in the shadows of the dance floor.
He simply had to wait for Veronika to show herself, as he knew she would.
Then he would find out how much of what she’d said seven years ago had been spite, designed to hurt him as much as possible, and how much had been truth. Nikolai knew that on some level, he’d never wanted to know. If he never pressed the issue, then it was always possible that Stefan really was his, as Veronika had made him believe for the first five years of the boy’s life. That somewhere out there, he had a son. That he had done something right, even if it was by accident.
But such fantasies made him weak, he knew, and he could no longer tolerate it. He wanted a DNA test to prove that Stefan wasn’t his. Then he would be done with his weaknesses, once and for all.
“You need to go and fix your life,” his brother, Ivan, the only person alive that Nikolai still cared about, the only one who knew what they’d suffered at their uncle’s hands in those grim years after their parents had died in a factory fire, had told him just over two years ago. Then he’d stared at Nikolai as if he was a stranger and walked away from him as if he was even less than that.
It was the last time they’d spoken in person, or about anything other than the Korovin Foundation.
Nikolai didn’t blame his older brother for this betrayal. He’d watched Ivan’s slide into his inevitable madness as it happened. He knew that Ivan was sadly deluded—blinded by sex and emotion, desperate to believe in things that didn’t exist because it was far better than the grim alternative of reality. How could he blame Ivan for preferring the delusion? Most people did.
Nikolai didn’t have that luxury.
Emotions were liabilities. Lies. Nikolai believed in sex and money. No ties, no temptations. No relationships now his brother had turned his back on him. No possibility that any of the women he took to his bed—always nameless, faceless and only permitted near him if they agreed to adhere to a very strict set of requirements—would ever reach him.
In orde
r to be betrayed, one first had to trust.
And the only person Nikolai had trusted in his life was Ivan and even then, only in a very qualified way once that woman had sunk her claws in him.
But ultimately, this was a gift. It freed him, finally, from his last remaining emotional prison. It made everything simple. Because he had never known how to tell Ivan—who had built a life out of playing the hero in the fighting ring and on the screen, who was able to embody those fights he’d won and the roles he’d played with all the self-righteous fury of the untainted, the unbroken, the good—that there were some things that couldn’t be fixed.
Nikolai wished he was something so simple as broken.
He acted like a man, but was never at risk of becoming one. He’d need flesh and blood, heat and heart for that, and those were the things he’d sold off years ago to make himself into the perfect monster. A killing machine.
Nikolai knew exactly what he was: a bright and shining piece of ice with no hope of warmth, frozen too solid for any sun to penetrate the chill. A hard and deadly weapon, honed to lethal perfection beneath his uncle’s fists, then sharpened anew in the bloody Spetsnaz brotherhood. To say nothing of the dark war games he’d learned he could make into his own kind of terrible poetry, despite what it took from him in return.
He was empty where it counted, down to his bones. Empty all the way through. It was why he was so good at what he did.
And it was safer, Nikolai thought now, his eyes on the heedless, hedonistic crowd. There was too much to lose should he relinquish that deep freeze, give up that iron control. What he remembered of his drinking years appalled him—the blurred nights, the scraps and pieces of too much frustrated emotion turned too quickly into violence, making him far too much like the brutal uncle he’d so despised.
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