Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Dani Collins

  The woman who answered the door might look like Ella but she was a completely different vision from the woman he’d last seen in his bed. She looked terrible, neither the woman he had married nor the woman he had slept with visible in the figure who stood before him, turning a horrible shade of pale.

  ‘Are you—?’

  Before he could get the sentence out of his mouth she rushed off, and Roman reeled at the sounds of her being sick in a bathroom he couldn’t see.

  He cursed and entered the apartment, expecting to see signs of a spectacular night out, but there were no empty bottles of wine, no signs of debauchery, only several varieties of herbal tea and what looked to be a raft of vitamins half opened on the counter.

  Frowning, he took in the small, homely apartment, so different from the wide expanses of his own. Small feminine touches marked the huge difference between Ella’s lifestyle and his own lone wolfish nature. His eyes pounced on the manila envelope, one he recognised from the morning of their last meeting. Had she signed them? Were there now two signatures on the paperwork?

  Dorcas swept around him, pawing at the door which he presumed Ella had hidden herself behind. Ignoring the half whining dog, he turned back to the sound of the boiling kettle clicking itself off. Oddly tempted by the thought of pouring the hot water into the waiting cup, his eyes snagged on one of the many vitamin bottles and stopped.

  Everything stopped.

  His heart crashed in his chest as he grasped the bottle in his hand and drew it close for further inspection, for further confirmation he no longer needed. Pregnancy vitamins. White knuckles framed the name on the bottle. Ella Riding. And in that moment, he knew. He knew from the look in her eyes when she’d seen him standing at the door, before fleeing. He knew instantly that it was his. A baby. Their baby.

  * * *

  Ella took giant gulps of air from where she sat with her back against the bathroom door, her heart unaccountably in tune with the gentle whines from Dorcas scratching at the wood. She didn’t even know how Roman had found her. She had been sharing the apartment with Célia for almost a year. Her name wasn’t on the lease, but she didn’t imagine that it would have taken much for Roman to uncover the relevant piece of information if he’d chosen to do so.

  She’d thought she might have had more time. More time to figure out what to do, to figure out what it meant to her now that she was pregnant. Now that she couldn’t have the divorce she’d wanted, that she couldn’t have her freedom.

  Because the moment she’d seen the little blue cross appear on the pregnancy test she’d known that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, keep Roman from her life, from their child’s life. Not after what they had each experienced in their own childhoods. But that hadn’t meant that she’d been able to reach out to him, to tell him about it. No. She admitted to herself now that she’d been a coward. And that just as surely as she’d taunted Roman about making his own bed, she would now have to lie in one of her own making.

  Though she did not presume to know what Roman’s reaction might be, she knew her own. She’d promised herself that she’d never be beholden to another’s whims again and she’d meant it. But she also wanted to ensure that her child had the best chance in life for a happiness neither of its parents had so far achieved. She would do everything in her power to make sure that this child never felt an ounce of what she or Roman had. The cycle of vengeance had to end. And she could only hope that he would want that too.

  Levering herself off the floor, she turned the handle on the door, only to find it immediately pressed inward by Dorcas’s wet grey nose nudging the wood aside. She buried her head into Ella’s hip and hand, her tail thrashing against the doorframe.

  The small gesture of affection—the kind of physical comfort she hadn’t known she’d needed—brought tears to her eyes but she wiped them away, knowing that she would need all her armour for the conversation that was to come.

  She rounded the corner of the small living space of the apartment and stopped under the weight of Roman’s intense gaze.

  ‘Were you going to tell me?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  She bit back a sigh, knowing that he had every right to ask such questions of her. ‘If you look in the drawer to the left of the stove, you’ll find a plane ticket to Russia booked for five days’ time.’

  ‘When did you find out?’ His clipped words lashed at her, and she took every single one with her head held high.

  ‘I guess about a month ago, but I wanted to make sure before I spoke to you.’

  Roman looked towards the drawer she had indicated, but made no move to check the truth of her words. That he didn’t touched her. Soothed her a little, fanning the dull flame of hope in her chest.

  He poured the water from the kettle into the cup of tea she’d had waiting before he’d knocked on her door, before she had been ready for him, and set it on the counter top between them as if unwilling, yet, to risk any physical contact between them.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked finally, his focus laser-sharp as she nodded.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  She sighed her yes more than said it.

  He nodded once. ‘You will return to my side,’ he declared, inflaming the rage banked momentarily by their previous detente.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, genuinely curious.

  ‘Does everything have to have a damn explanation?’

  ‘Yes. In this case it does,’ she replied, choosing to ignore the angry outburst. ‘Because, really? There’s very little between us aside from resentment and lies. And that is not something that I will inflict on my child.’

  ‘So, you are keeping it?’

  ‘Of course!’ Ella’s outraged declaration thrummed through the air between them, beating at him accusingly. ‘You would ask me—?’

  ‘No!’ He couldn’t even let her finish that sentence. The words, the thought that she would think him capable of such a thing, truly shocked him.

  ‘Don’t act all outraged. The lengths to which you have gone to get what you want are well documented by this point, don’t you think?’

  ‘Is that why you waited this long to tell me?’ He had turned away despite his probing question, unable and unwilling to see the look on her face, to read the truth in her eyes.

  ‘No. I waited this long to make sure my baby was safe.’

  He heaved out a weighted breath which was half relief and half frustration. ‘Our.’

  ‘Our what?’

  ‘Our baby, dammit.’

  * * *

  Roman cursed, already feeling a step behind, already feeling cut from his own child’s life by her simple declaration, and it scalded him from the inside out. A child, the presence, the reality of which he simply couldn’t wrap his head around. His hand flew to his hair, sweeping it back from his forehead, only just resisting the urge to grasp it in a fist and display his frustration for the quick gaze of his wife, consuming his reaction to this sudden news as if it were a test. One that he really feared he might fail.

  He had never wanted children. Couldn’t even fathom how it had happened because he knew they had used protection each and every time. But he also knew that protection failed, plans failed, and that nothing in Ella would have willingly bound herself to a monster such as him. And now he had somehow tied an irrefutable bond between him, her and…their child. An innocent child brought into his world, a world formed only from anger, vengeance, hurt.

  He was going to be a father.

  ‘What are you planning?’ he asked, focusing his confusion on her rather than himself and the thoughts their child had conjured.

  She sighed, delaying her response by taking a sip of the tea she cradled carefully within her hands. Refusing to let her hide from him, he stared her down, taking in all the emotions passing across her face. Emotions that echoed within him.
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  ‘I honestly don’t know. I have a barely-off-the-ground business, half-signed divorce papers, no home of my own and a baby on the way.’ As if by listing her current predicament had somehow brought it all to bear down upon her shoulders, she swayed a little where she stood and he cursed. He reached for her then, stopping a few inches from actually touching her and guided her towards the small sofa and chair set of the open-plan living area.

  The moment she sat down Dorcas resumed her guard of his wife, placing her large head in Ella’s lap and staring between them, adoringly and accusingly, depending on the focus of her gaze. He didn’t have to see where Dorcas placed the blame. He felt it down to his toes.

  ‘You are pregnant and will return to me,’ he asserted, as if it were that simple. As if that would somehow make sense of everything that was swirling through his mind and heart.

  ‘What will you threaten me with this time?’ she asked, her words at odds with the almost numbness of her tone.

  ‘I’ve never once threatened you. And you can say that I coerced you into marriage, but I sure as hell did not coerce you into bed.’ The lack of emotion behind her words somehow ignited his own.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I would never say that.’ The pretty blush on any other woman could have been considered coquettish, but in Ella he knew it to be real. As real as the baby that they were to have. That she could still prevent him from having access to. And though Roman might never have wanted even the abstract idea of a child—now that Ella was carrying his heir, his flesh and blood joined with hers, it was as if something primal, something raw and ancient had gripped his heart and made him more sure of this one thing than he’d ever been in his life. That he needed his wife and child with him. So, he would do, say whatever it was that Ella needed him to say in order to secure that.

  ‘You lost your parents at a young age. And I do not for one moment dismiss the tragedy of that,’ he insisted vehemently. ‘But my…father chose to take money instead of staying with my mother. He left her pregnant and alone. Knowing this, knowing that he chose her father over her and her child, it devastated my mother.’

  * * *

  Through his words, Ella heard and felt the echoes of pain that such a thing would have, in fact had, inflicted on Roman as a child. A pain that still held such a grip he had distanced himself from the effect of his father’s actions.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Any finer feelings on the matter I have long since dealt with.’

  ‘Please don’t. Please don’t fob me off. I need to understand, to know what raising our child together means to you,’ she begged.

  He exhaled harshly through thin lips, as if desperately fighting his own self-preservation instincts against giving her what she wanted. She could tell that this was a vulnerability that he didn’t reveal to many, if at all. But, from the look in his eyes, she sensed that he understood her need to know.

  ‘I grew up as the illegitimate son of a single mother. And, yes, there are many, many others who grow up exactly the same way. But it was different for my mother. She lost too much, sacrificed too much for me…’ He trailed off, shaking his head. ‘She blamed herself,’ he continued through gritted teeth. ‘I blamed myself, until I was old enough to understand the selfishness of my father’s actions. Growing up, my mother did everything she could to make sure that I was loved enough. She worked three jobs to keep a roof over our heads, to keep food in the fridge, and it was just us against the world. So when she got ill…’

  ‘It was just you,’ Ella concluded for him. And in that moment she realised why Roman had been so good at helping her with her grandmother. Why he had known and seemed to understand what she needed even before she’d realised it for herself. ‘And you were thirteen?’ she asked, pulling other details from their time together in France, adding it to what she knew had happened after Roman had gone to see Vladimir, and her heart ached for him. Ached not only for his loss and the cruel actions of his grandfather, but for what it had caused him to become, how it had forged the path his life had taken.

  ‘I was eleven when my mother first became ill. Tatiana had always been small, which was why she’d been such a wonderful dancer. Small but powerful,’ he added with a sad smile Ella was sure was purely unconscious.

  ‘What kind of dancer?’ Ella asked the man lost to memories of his childhood.

  ‘Ballet. Before she met my father and Vladimir disowned her, Tatiana was the principal ballerina at the Utonchennyy Ballet Company.’

  Ella’s shock must have shown on her face because Roman looked up and smiled, proud of his mother’s incredible achievement. A pride that was both contagious and shocking. Shocking because, for just a moment, she caught a glimpse of the fiancé who had courted her, who had—at the time—appeared proud of her.

  ‘But after Vladimir and her lover abandoned her she was alone, Ella. She had no one and no help. She worked herself to the bone and it didn’t seem to matter how much she did, or how much she tried to love me, she never felt it was enough.

  ‘So hear me now, Ella. My child will know me. They will bear my name and they will want for nothing in this world. They will never have to beg for anything, from either parent.’

  That vehemence in his tone she understood. The need to protect she felt beat strongly within her own heart. Her own loss, melding with his, made her determined to find a way for them both through this. But she’d meant what she’d said when she’d proclaimed herself no longer naïve. And that forced the next words to her lips.

  ‘I have some conditions.’ He caught her gaze and gestured for her to proceed. ‘I need to know who you are. I married out of deceit—I will not continue that way. Neither will I blindly sign my life and my child’s life away to a man who has broken every single piece of trust I had. You cannot lie to me again.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I mean it, Roman. I will not live like that.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And I also need to know that you are done with your plans of revenge. Which means that I need to know that you’re not taking down the company.’ She wavered on the edge of a precipice, half hoping and half fearing that he would agree. But she needed him to understand. ‘That company might have been Vladimir’s, but it was just as much my father’s. It is a part of our child’s history.’

  ‘A history that you would own? How on earth do you plan to explain that to our child?’ he demanded, anger vibrating within his words. ‘That company was more important to Vladimir than his own daughter and even you. How can you want anything to do with it?’

  * * *

  Everything he’d ever done, every single achievement, every single motivation, goal and broken thing within him, had been about bringing the destruction of Vladimir’s company and now she wanted him to keep it? His heart rent in two, half denying her request and half ready to do whatever she wanted.

  ‘It is the only thing I have left of my father. A father I barely remember. And, like you, that is not something I want my child to experience. So I would very much like you to agree to my conditions. But know this—if, at the end of the next five months I don’t want to be in a relationship with you, then you will buy my shares from me, give me a divorce and let me go.’

  ‘Why would I buy your shares?’

  ‘Because if I don’t want to be married to you, then I don’t want any kind of relationship with you, professional or personal.’

  ‘And the child?’

  ‘You will grant me sole custody.’

  He nearly laughed. A choking bitter laugh that caught in his throat and burned. Because, no matter what she thought, in this moment he had no intention of letting either her or their child go. And if she thought he’d let his plans for Vladimir’s company go, then she was sorely mistaken about the kind of man he was. Nothing would stop him from either goal, not her conditions, and certainly not her feeble attempt to coerce him into bre
aking the promise he’d made to his mother on her deathbed. The promise to dismantle every single piece of that damned company.

  But Roman also knew that simply giving in to her demands would appear too easy—and although he had once thought his wife naïve and innocent, she was most definitely not stupid.

  ‘If you have conditions, then so do I. If I travel for work, then I want you with me.’

  ‘And if I travel for work? I have a fledging business that will require a lot of international travel.’

  ‘What is this business?’

  ‘Do you need to know?’

  ‘In so much as you seem to need to know about most of my reasoning.’

  ‘It’s the one I told you about before,’ she said, not having to explain what ‘before’ meant to either of them. Before they were married, before Ella had become pregnant. Before he had revealed his true self.

  ‘You’ve done it?’

  ‘Yes. Well…started to,’ and Roman couldn’t help but respond to the spark of pride and excitement in Ella’s eyes. He recognised it, had seen it in his mother’s eyes when she would sometimes dance for him, beneath the stars in the night sky. ‘Célia is at the offices now—they’re being set up as we speak,’ Ella pressed on, drawing him back from memories of the past. ‘So I will need to be in Paris.’

  ‘And I will need to be in Moscow,’ he growled, chafing against the demand in her tone.

  He watched as Ella valiantly struggled with her own anger. The flame of it lit her eyes and flushed her cheeks and for a moment he was back in that bed three months before and gripped by the arousal that had plagued him ever since, in spite of the shocking revelation that had seemed to change his life in an instant. In spite of the mental decree he had placed on himself never to touch Ella in such a way again. Possessiveness cut him to the quick. Her body, cradling the life they had created, was somehow even more appealing to him, and he felt every inch the beast he knew himself to be. He wanted her with a fierceness that stunned him. The need to taste her on his tongue, to feel her beneath his hands and body was now almost painful.