The Throne He Must Take

by Chantelle Shaw

  His answer seemed to satisfy Holly. But Jarek knew that the boy in the orphanage had been called Ivan. Years after he had been adopted by the Saundersons he had returned to Sarajevo, to see if any of his friends had survived. He’d found Ivan living rough on the streets—a drug addict and as much a victim of the war as the thousands of people who had perished at the time.

  Jarek knew that he could have been Ivan, but by a twist of fate he had been taken to live at a stately home—Cuckmere Hall in England. His sense of guilt that he had escaped the hell of war when so many like Ivan had not added to the weight of guilt on his shoulders. Lorna Saunderson had rescued him from the orphanage and been a mother to him. But he had repaid her kindness with reckless behaviour that had cost Mama her life.

  He was glad to escape his thoughts as the car came to a halt in front of the entrance to the hotel. But his relief was short-lived when he noticed the bright glare of a camera flashbulb.

  ‘You didn’t mention that the goddamned press would be here,’ he accused Holly.

  A picture in the newspapers of him arriving at the ball would alert Vostov’s National Council that he was in Austria.

  ‘The photographer doesn’t work for the press. He is simply taking photos of people as they arrive. The guests will be able to buy the pictures to raise funds for the children’s charity the ball is in aid of. I know you promised your brother-in-law that you would keep a low profile until your sister has her baby, but I doubt the paparazzi will be interested in a charity ball in Salzburg,’ Holly murmured. ‘Anyway, your mask will hide your identity.’

  She handed him a black eye mask before affixing her own over her face. Her mask was an elaborate affair, decorated with sparkling diamante and feathers which drew attention to her big brown eyes. A man could drown in those velvet-soft eyes if he wasn’t careful, Jarek brooded as he stepped out of the car.

  He offered her his arm to escort her into the hotel and noted how she hesitated and took a deep breath that caused her breasts to rise and fall before she placed her hand on his arm.

  The hotel’s foyer was crowded with guests: the women were wearing elaborate ballgowns and the men resplendent in tuxedos. Double doors opened onto the ballroom, which was ablaze with lights from crystal chandeliers.

  ‘We don’t have to stay here.’ Holly spoke in an undertone as they walked into the ballroom. ‘In the car I felt that you were finally starting to open up when you spoke about your childhood friend Tarik, from the orphanage. I think we should go back to Chalet Soline to discuss the parts of your childhood that you do remember. There may be something that triggers memories of your parents.’

  Jarek kept his expression bland. He had deliberately made himself unavailable for therapy sessions all week—which was undoubtedly the act of a coward, he acknowledged grimly. But his strategy of avoiding being alone with Holly was under threat. At least while they were at the ball there would be no chance of the soul-searching conversation she was so keen on.

  And so he gave her one of the easy smiles that he’d learned as a teenager never failed to win women over. Desire jack-knifed inside him as he watched her pupils dilate, so that the eyes staring at him from behind her mask darkened with a sultry promise he knew he would ultimately have to resist.

  ‘It would be a pity to leave now that we are here—especially when you are the belle of the ball. You look stunning in your ballgown,’ he murmured.

  It was not an idle compliment. Her lovely face and gorgeous figure evoked an odd tightness in his chest, and a rather more predictable tightening in his groin.

  ‘Working on uncovering my past can wait until another day.’ Preferably another millennium, Jarek thought to himself. ‘Tonight I’d much rather focus on the present.’

  The orchestra struck up a waltz and he swept her into his arms before she could argue.

  As he steered Holly around the dance floor Jarek was grateful to his adoptive mother for teaching him the social graces that had allowed him to fit in with high society. He had been a feral boy who had lived off his wits to survive in a war when Lorna Saunderson had persuaded her husband to adopt him. Now, at this grand ball, he suddenly felt an odd sense of recognition.

  A memory flashed into his mind. He saw himself as a child, sitting at the top of a wide staircase and peering down through the banisters on a huge room below. There was a crowd of people dressed in ornate clothes, and he could hear music and the indistinct buzz of chatter and laughter. It must have been a party, but Jarek sensed it had not taken place in Sarajevo. Where could he have been when he had observed such revelry from his secret hiding place? And where had his parents been?

  Holly had suggested that thinking about his childhood might trigger memories of his parents, but Jarek could not picture them. It was as if a curtain had been pulled across his past and he feared what he might discover if he tried to see behind it.

  He needed a distraction, and previously vodka had provided a welcome escape from his demons. But if he went anywhere near the bar tonight his personal gaoler would be right beside him to give him one of her pithy lectures.

  That left him with only one option, he brooded as he tightened his arm around Holly’s waist and pulled her hard up against his body. He would have to distract himself with his beautiful psychotherapist.

  * * *

  Holly ran the zip of her dress down her spine and dragged in a deep breath, relieved finally to be able to fill her lungs with oxygen. The ballgown’s boned bodice emphasised her narrow waist and pushed her breasts high, but after several hours of having her ribcage constricted she was glad to change into comfortable cotton pyjamas.

  Not that she felt like sleeping. It was past midnight, and she should be tired after she’d danced the night away with Jarek at the ball. But her heart was still racing as fast as it had been when he’d whisked her around the ballroom. She had felt giddy as he’d held her—so close to him that she’d felt his powerful thighs pressed up against her. At some point she had given up trying to hold herself stiffly and had melted into him, unable to resist the sexual chemistry that had burned like a white-hot flame between them.

  It had been a magical evening. But reality had caught up with her when Gunther had driven them back to Chalet Soline after the ball had finished. In the car Jarek had seemed tense and uncommunicative—in marked contrast to his behaviour throughout the evening, when he had been so charming and attentive that Holly admitted she had fallen under his spell.

  Back at the chalet, the chef had left a tray of coffee in the sitting room, where the embers of the fire had emitted a welcoming glow. She had half-expected Jarek to suggest they drink their coffee together, but he had bade her a curt goodnight and gone straight up to his bedroom, leaving her feeling deflated and rather stupid.

  What had she hoped might happen if they’d sat in the cosy sitting room with the lights turned down low? she angrily asked her reflection as she pulled the pins out of her chignon and dug her fingers into her hair to massage her scalp. The evening could not have ended any differently even if Jarek hadn’t been her patient.

  She opened her bedside drawer and took out the purse that contained her set of dilators. The surgery she’d had as a teenager had been successful in lengthening her vagina, but her gynaecologist had advised her to use the dilators a few times a month if she wasn’t having sex regularly. After Stuart had ended their relationship a year ago Holly had not dated anyone seriously. She’d continued to use her dilators, but not as often as she knew she should—because there didn’t seem much point when she seemed destined to remain single.

  Logically, she knew she shouldn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed about her body, but a little voice inside her head whispered that Jarek could have any woman he wanted, and was unlikely to want her if he found out that she was a freak.

  She shoved the dilators back in the drawer before she climbed into bed and then opened her notebook to write up Jarek’s notes. She had a job to do, she reminded herself fiercely. She’d been an idiot to fal
l for his seduction routine at the ball—which, quite clearly, had been a calculated ploy to stop her from delving into his emotions. But behind Jarek’s image of indolent playboy—an image she was beginning to realise he cultivated deliberately—she’d glimpsed the damaged soul of a boy who had witnessed the horrors of war and risked his life to protect his younger sister when he had been only a child.

  Holly knew that severe childhood trauma could have a lasting and devastating effect throughout a person’s life, and even though Jarek did not want her help she would nevertheless do her best to persuade him to start a programme of counselling sessions. Tomorrow she would not let him out of her sight, she resolved as she curled up beneath the duvet and turned off the bedside lamp.

  She woke with a start and felt disorientated to find herself in darkness. She had been dreaming that she was in a brightly lit ballroom. Her brain caught up and remembered that she was in her bedroom at Chalet Soline, and when she switched on the lamp she saw on the clock that it was four in the morning. Dawn was still three hours or so away, and while she was wondering what had woken her she heard Jarek’s voice.

  He was shouting, as he had done the previous night—harsh, incomprehensible words. Dear God, the fear in his voice tore on Holly’s heart. What terrors stalked his nightmares?

  She threw back the covers and leapt out of bed, driven by an instinctive desire to help him. She did not even pause to grab her robe before she ran down the corridor to his room.

  The first thing she noticed when she opened his bedroom door was a table by the window, upon which three brightly lit computer monitors displayed columns of red and green numbers.

  ‘Jarek?’ she called softly.

  He did not reply, and while she hovered in the doorway, wondering if she should return to her room, he cried out again, and the tortured sound sent a shiver through her. The glow from the computer screens allowed her to make out his shape on the bed. She walked over to him and, after hesitating for a second, switched on the bedside lamp and saw that he was sprawled on top of the bedspread.

  His tuxedo jacket, she noticed, was draped over the back of a chair. He was still wearing his trousers, and his white silk shirt was unbuttoned so that it hung open to reveal a muscular chest covered with whorls of dark blond hair. Holly dared not allow her eyes to travel over his flat abdomen and lower, to where the path of body hair disappeared beneath his waistband. Instead she forced her gaze up to his face, and was struck anew by the stark beauty of his hard-boned features.

  One arm was lying across his eyes. Holly’s heart twisted when she saw a single tear slide down his cheek.

  ‘Jarek!’ she said more loudly, desperate to rouse him from his nightmare.

  She leaned over the bed and gave a startled cry when his eyes flew open and he snapped his fingers around her wrist. He gave a hard tug, so that without quite knowing how she ended up sitting on the edge of the bed, next to where he lay.

  ‘Is this an example of your bedside manner, Dr Maitland?’ he drawled. ‘I usually wear nothing in bed... There could have been an interesting development in our patient/psychologist relationship if you’d sneaked into my bedroom and found me stark naked.’

  Amusement gleamed in his bright blue eyes when she blushed, and Holly’s sympathy for him was replaced by a desire to slap the smug grin off his face.

  ‘I did not sneak into your room,’ she said tightly. ‘You must have been having a nightmare—you were shouting. You woke me up.’ She tried to no avail to tug her wrist out of his grasp. ‘I came to see if I could help. You said the name Tarik again, but I couldn’t understand anything else because you were speaking in a language I didn’t recognise.’

  ‘My first language is Bosnian,’ Jarek said slowly. He sat up and leaned against the headboard of the bed, still retaining his hold on her wrist. The teasing smile that had played on his lips a few seconds earlier had disappeared. ‘I rarely spoke it after I was adopted and learned to speak English. My sister was too young to remember any of the Bosnian language.’

  ‘The fact that you called out in your first language suggests you were dreaming about an incident in your childhood. Can you remember anything about the dream?’ Holly pressed.

  ‘No. But the recent volatility of the financial markets is enough to give anyone nightmares,’ he quipped.

  ‘I don’t think your dream was about tumbling share prices on the stockmarket.’ She swallowed her frustration and looked over at the blinking computer monitors. ‘Why is your computer system active at this time of night? Well, technically it’s four-thirty in the morning, but it feels like the middle of the night to me.’

  Jarek pushed his untidy blond hair off his face. ‘I had been working before I sat on the bed for a couple of minutes. I must have fallen asleep.’

  ‘Working?’ Holly could not hide her surprise. ‘I know you said you wanted to use the study downstairs as your office, but every time I’ve walked passed that room you haven’t been there, and I’ve never actually seen you do any work.’

  ‘I don’t make vast amounts of money by sitting around and twiddling my thumbs,’ he said drily. ‘Of course I work. Mainly at night, because most of my trading is on the financial markets in the Far East, which is on a different time zone to Europe. One a.m. here is nine a.m. in places like Hong Kong and Shanghai, when the Asian stock exchanges are open for trading.’

  ‘So you have to catch up on sleep in the daytime to make up for the fact that you stay awake working most of the night...’ Holly stared at him. ‘Why do you encourage the media to portray you as a feckless playboy?’

  He gave another shrug. ‘How do you know that I’m not exactly as I’m perceived by the press?’

  ‘I looked you up on the internet,’ she admitted. ‘Amid the countless stories of your wild womanising and partying, which seem to confirm your bad-boy reputation, I discovered just how much money you have raised for the charity Lorna’s Gift. Another little-known fact overlooked by the press is that you spend several months every year visiting orphanages around the world. You are the driving force behind a scheme in some of the world’s poorer countries to promote the idea that it is better for children who have no families of their own to be fostered rather than grow up in institutions.’

  ‘Don’t make me out as some kind of saint,’ Jarek told her harshly. ‘The truth is that there’s not much difference between financial trading and gambling. I take big risks, and I’ve been lucky so far that most have paid off. But that wasn’t the case two years ago, when I caused the near-collapse of Saunderson’s Bank.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘My adoptive father was right when he said I have a destructive streak in my nature.’

  ‘I don’t believe that is true.’ Holly looked away from him and quickly blinked away the tears that welled in her eyes. Jarek sounded so raw. ‘I wish you would allow me to try and help you,’ she said in a low tone. ‘Regression therapy might enable you to relive a traumatic event from your past, so that you can come to terms with whatever happened to you when you were a child.’

  ‘You have a soft heart, don’t you, angel-face?’

  His voice was deeper than Holly had ever heard it, and if her heart hadn’t already melted it would have done then.

  ‘You should have told me to leave Chalet Soline when you had the chance—and when I stood a chance of resisting you,’ he told her. ‘But now it’s too late.’

  She swallowed as he picked up a lock of her long hair and wound it around his fingers. The intent expression in his eyes caused her heart to slam into her ribs, and she knew he must be able to feel the erratic thud of her pulse as he stroked his thumb-pad over her wrist.

  ‘I’m not a fool,’ she told him stiffly. ‘At the ball tonight you pretended to be attracted to me to distract me from asking awkward questions which might reveal something about your past.’

  ‘Is that what you think I was doing?’

  ‘I know it was. When we returned to the chalet you couldn’t wait to get away from me.’

 
‘What do you think would have happened, Holly?’ he murmured. ‘If we had been alone in the sitting room, with the flames crackling in the hearth and both of us imagining making love on the fur rug in front of the fire?’

  Betraying colour flooded her face as she recalled her erotic fantasy. It had been exactly as Jarek had described. ‘I wasn’t imagining anything of the sort,’ she denied jerkily.

  ‘Liar!’

  His laughter was a soft rumble that tugged at something deep inside her. Her breath caught in her throat when he gave a little tug on her hair to pull her head nearer to his. Like a fish caught on a hook, she thought, except that she didn’t try to escape as he reeled her in.

  She licked her dry lips, unable to look away from his glittering blue gaze as he drew her closer to him, closer to the wickedly sensual mouth that crooked in a knowing smile.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded in a husky voice she did not recognise as her own.

  ‘What you want me to do,’ he promised.

  His arrogance should have appalled her. But Holly was beyond caring about anything other than her desperate need for him to kiss her. Time was suspended, and she had the crazy feeling that she had been waiting for this moment and for this man her whole life. She could feel her heart trying to claw its way out of her chest as Jarek’s breath whispered across her lips. He angled his mouth over hers. And then he simply claimed her—as if he was her master and she belonged utterly and entirely to him.

  His kiss was everything she had imagined it would be. Hot, hungry, demanding her response. And she was powerless to deny him. She went up in flames instantly, and in a distant recess of her mind she recognised that she had never been kissed so expertly before.

  Jarek was the Viking invader of her fantasies about him, and his kiss was no gentle seduction but a passionate plundering of her senses. He used his tongue with consummate skill to explore her mouth and thrust his hand into her hair to hold her prisoner while he kissed her with a stunning eroticism that made her tremble.