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CHAPTER 8
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2024-10-29 19:42:56She had actually thrown herself off the side of the damned boat. Andrey stood at the rail and scowled down at her as she surfaced in the water below and started swimming for the far-off shore, fighting to keep his temper under control. Fighting to shove all of that need and lust back where it belonged, shut down and locked away in the deepest recesses of his memory.
How had this happened? Again? And yet, he was all too aware there was no one to blame but himself. Which only made things worse.
“Is that Addie?”
The voice that came from slightly behind him was shocked.
“‘Addie’?” Andrey echoed icily.
He didn’t want to know she had a casual nickname. He didn’t want to think of her
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The engine roared to life, drowning out whatever she might have said next. Addison stopped swimming then and trod water, watching in consternation and no little annoyance as the small craft looped around her, leaving her to bob helplessly in a converging circle of its wake. Addison got a slap of seawater in the face and had to scrub at her eyes to clear them. When she opened them again, the engine had gone quiet once more and the boat was much too close. Again! Which in turn meant that he was much too close. How could she be in the middle of the sea and still feel so trapped? So hemmed in?“You look like a raccoon, Miss Bryant,” he said in his blunt, rude way. As if he was personally offended by it.“Oh,” she
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There was a brief, intense sort of moment, and then Andrey leaned over, slid his hands beneath her arms, and hoisted her up and out of the water as if she weighed no more than a child. Water sluiced from her wet clothes as Addison’s feet came down against the slippery bottom of the small boat, and she was suddenly aware of too many things. The sodden fabric of her skirt, ten times heavier than it should have been, wrapped much too tightly around her hips and thighs. The slick wetness of her blouse as it flattened against her skin in the sea breeze. The heavy tangle of her wet hair, tumbling this way and that in a disastrous mess. All of which made her feel much too cold, and, oddly, something very much like vulnerable. But then she looked up, and the air seemed to empty out of her lungs. And she didn&
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Instead, Addison had let her hair dry naturally as she’d taken her time dressing, and now it hung in dark waves down her back. She’d found a pair of white denim jeans in one closet, much snugger than she liked, which was only to be expected given the gazelle-like proportions of most of his usual female guests, and a lovely palazzo top in a vibrant blue-and-white pattern in another, which was loose and flowy and balanced out the jeans. She had tossed on a slate-gray wrap to guard against the sea air now that evening was upon them and the temperature had dropped and had left her feet and her face entirely bare. Miss Bryant disappeared leaving her place to Addison. She looked like… herself. At last. Yet Andrey stared at her as if she were a ghost.“Is this another version of thr
SLAVE TO YOUR LOVE CHAPTER 12
He should’ve been happy or at the very least, satisfied. Andrey lounged back against his chair and gazed around the white linen-draped table that stretched the length of the formal dining room in the Presidential Suite of the ‘Principe di Savoia’ Hotel in Milan, surveying the small dinner he’d had Addison throw here in one of Europe’s most prestigious spaces. The rooms of the vast suite gave the impression of belonging to royalty perhaps, so stunning were they, all high ceilings, carefully selected antiques, and the finest Italian craftsmanship on display at every turn. Wealth and elegance seemed to shimmer up from the very floors to dance in the air around them. The investors were duly impressed, as expected, and that would no doubt, be reflected in the size of their
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In fact, that was all they expected of him. That was, the whole of the small town and his grandfather agreed… his destiny. His fate. That was what became of kids like him, conceived in disgrace and summarily discarded by both his parents. And yet, despite this, he had tried so hard, always looking for a kind word or just a nod from the only man he knew as being his family. His lips curled now, remembering those empty, fruitless years. He’d wanted so badly to belong, since he’d first understood, as a small boy, that he didn’t. He’d obeyed his grandfather in all things. Andrey Romanoff had excelled at school. He’d worked tirelessly in the family’s small shop, and he’d never complained, while other boys his age played soccer and roamed about, carefree, no respon
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In the middle of the night, on a terrace in Italy, Addison was forced to admit the fact that she had never truly got a handle on just how devastatingly attractive Andrey Romanoff was, or how much it had always affected her. Even before that night in Cadiz.“Oh… s-sorry… I didn’t know you were out here,” Addison said, and she could hear it in her voice, that slight quaver that gave her away. That all but shouted the things she didn’t want to admit to herself and certainly didn’t want him to know. How she melted for him, even now, even after all he did to her… or how he behaved… How she ached in all the places she wished he would touch her with those capable hands or with that difficult, addicting mouth. Her lips, her breasts… And that hu
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Andrey was in a very bad mood. He sipped his espresso, as black as his current mood, and eyed Addison over the top of it when she appeared at breakfast the next morning. He had spent what was left of the night chasing the ghosts of his past out of his head and failing miserably. Now, in the bright morning light, the opulence of the suite’s great room like a halo all around her, Addison looked her usual, sleekly professional self, and he found it profoundly irritating. The woman he’d been unable to keep from touching on the terrace in the dark was gone... like she never existed. Gone as if she had been no more than a particularly haunting dream. And still, Andrey wanted Addison. Then… Now… Always…“We are going to Bora Bora,” Andrey announced out of the blu
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She thought of Lowell’s ashes, packed away in the tin that functioned as an urn and sat in the center of her bookshelf back in London. And of the promises she’d made, to him and to herself. That she would let him go into the wind, the water. The least she could do was honor the man he might’ve been, had he made different choices, or been stronger against his own demons. And she knew that she needed closure too.“Something like that,” she said now, not quite meeting Andrey’s eyes.“Such depravity…” His tone was taunting. And it hit hard, though she should’ve been impervious to him.“A word you know well, Mr. Romanoff,” she snapped. Unwisely. Everyth
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After drinking all her pleasure in, after tasting her essence, an extremely satisfied Andrey smiled his way back up the line of her body, trailing kisses all along the way. When he reached her mouth, he kissed her long and deep and hard. Her hands, shaking with the aftershocks of her orgasm, came up to frame his face, caressing the slight stubble on his jaw. Andrey groaned at the gentle touch, feeling his own skin ripple, the muscles beneath constricting in anticipation of what would come next. Trailing his fingers over her hip and between her legs, he found her opening, slick with a mix of moisture from his mouth and her own feminine juices. Centering himself, Andrey pushed inside. Slowly. An inch. He gave a silent but heartfelt groan. Then another. His nostrils flared as he tried to school his breathing. In, out. In, out. And
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For what felt like a long time, whole ages, perhaps centuries, Addison could only stare at him, stricken, too deeply shaken even to weep. She felt cracked open by his words. “And you do, Andrey?” she asked eventually, in a belligerent tone, though her voice quaked. “You know what love is?” Andrey’s eyes were brilliant. Dark and gold and molten fire, burning her alive. He reached over and took her hands in his, and Addison should’ve jerked away. But instead, she exulted in the feel of his skin against hers after all this time. It pumped through her like heat, as though there was no part of her that wasn’t his no matter what she told herself. Or told him. “Let me tell you what I know, Addison,” he said to her, his voice low, intense, urgent. “All I know is I want you so badly that my body literally hurts. I want you in ways that I don’t understand and I
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He tracked her back to a part of London that was a world away from his three-story penthouse at the top of an old Victorian warehouse perched at the edge of the Thames. ‘This is what she prefers to a life with me,’ Andrey told himself as he caught the door from one of her neighbors and climbed the narrow, grimy stairs to her second-floor flat. ‘This dingy little place and the dim little life that comes with it.’ Andrey was so angry with her, he thought it might actually burn off the top of his head. He pounded on her door, not even pretending to be polite.“Open this damn door, Addison! I know you’re in there,” he growled. “I saw you enter this building five minutes ago.” He heard
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Andrey looked as though he wanted to take her apart with his teeth. Addison fought to control herself… Control her pounding heart, her galloping pulse, that heaviness in her stomach that couldn’t decide if it was desire or anxiety. Or some combination of both.“If you would like to beg, don’t let me stop you,” Andrey bit out after a long moment, though his midnight amber eyes gleamed. “You can begin on your knees.” Addison remembered that day in Bora Bora with picture-perfect clarity. She remembered crawling to him across the polished wood floor, smiling up at him from between his strong legs. Wanting him more than her next breath. She still did. Heat flashed over her, and Addison was afraid she turned bright red. His eyes were narrow and hot, and she knew b
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She laughed hearing him saying the word ‘clay’ referring at himself. He was anything but.“Metal that might, under certain circumstances, be welded, perhaps,” she’d said. “Never clay.”“I bow to your superior knowledge,” he’d said, swirling his sherry in his glass, his gaze oddly intent on hers. Addison had felt herself flush with heat and had felt out of control. Reckless. Yet it had felt right, even so. Righter than she could remember anything else feeling, maybe ever. He’d leaned close, then murmured close to her ear.“What would I do without you, Addison?” That was the first time, in three years, he’d ever said her name… and the last until Bora Bora
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Andrey had forgotten all about it, until now. Had she been warning him? Had she known that she would get into his blood like this, poisoning him from the inside out, making him a stranger to himself? He frowned out the window now, through the rain lashing across the glass. For the first time in almost twenty years, he wondered if it was worth it, this great empire he’d built and on which he focused to the exclusion of all else. Lately, he wondered if, given the chance, he would trade it in. If he would take her instead. Not that Addison had offered him any such choice. His intercom buzzed loudly behind him. He didn’t move. He didn’t know, anymore, if he was furious or if he was simply the wreckage of the man he’d been. And he didn’t like it, either way.
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‘If this is what it was like to love somebody,’ Andrey thought some weeks after he’d returned from Bora Bora and Addison had left him on the tarmac without a backward glance, ‘then I was absolutely right to push it away for my entire adult life.’ ‘When I decide to sabotage you,’ Addison had told him once, ‘there will be nothing the least bit passive about it.’ Andrey couldn’t help but wonder if this was what she’d meant. This… aching, annoying sense of loss, that colored everything a dull gray. ‘I hate it.’ He glared at one of his many vice presidents acros
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Perversely, it only made him want her more. He’d told Addison that she was the only person he’d ever had any kind of close relationship with, and the stark truth of that haunted him. She was the only person alive that he had EVER trusted. He had allowed her unparalleled access to all parts of his life. To him. No employee had ever been so entrenched in his personal life before and Andrey had certainly never allowed one of his women anywhere near his business. Only Addison bridged those worlds. Only Addison. And his time with her was almost up. Giving in to an urge he hardly understood, as if it might ease the sudden heaviness in his chest, Andrey reached over and took her hand. Addison’s eyes flew to his, but he concentrated on the slide of her fingers against his. The way they fitted toge
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The moment she said that Addison just hated herself. So deeply and so comprehensively it made her feel ill. She slid the wineglass back onto the table and wrapped her arms around her middle, certain she needed help to keep herself together. Andrey didn’t look away. He simply sat much too still and much too close across the table, watching her fall apart.“I’m so sorry,” he began after a moment, his voice calm.“No,” Addison interrupted him, her words feeling thick in her mouth. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it like that. How would you know? It’s just… It happened rather recently and I’ve still not managed to figure out how to talk about it. About him…”“How recent?” Andrey frowned then.
