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There was blood on the toes of her ballet tights, even though she had worn in her shoes and bandaged her feet carefully. He caressed the soles of her feet and her sore heels and then he ran warm hands up her aching calves too.
Roman felt the cramped muscles beneath his fingers and he smoothed and soothed them for a couple of moments and Anya held onto his shoulder as she wished his hand would move higher.
‘Come on,’ he said in that deep low voice that made her throb, and as he stood so too did Anya and she lifted her arms.
Roman knew to be careful and his fingers found the small concealed zip and slid it down.
She stepped out of it and stood as he hung up her costume.
‘Don’t tell me I’m too thin...’
‘Shh,’ he said. He did not want to relive that final row. Instead he went to the waist of her ballet tights and slid them down. She was naked save for the bandages on her feet.
Again she sat on her dressing chair and he dealt with the bandages. Anya couldn’t help herself, she reached and touched his gleaming black hair, unable to believe he was really here after all those years apart.
Still kneeling, he looked up and observed her body. He saw the small breasts and she closed her eyes as he licked at one and then blew, and then toyed with her nipple between his lips.
She held onto his head as he took her breast in his mouth and sucked and then did the same to the other, took it so deep that it hurt, and her thighs shook but his hands held them down.
‘Roman...’
She was drunk on him, aching to be with him, and when he removed his mouth she caught her breath and watched as he parted her thighs and looked at her. Oh, she ached for him to bury his head there but he stroked her for a moment and slipped his fingers inside and then ran a figure of eight with one damp finger around her clitoris. They smiled at the memory of their first time and her telling him where it was.
Roman had cared only for his pleasure back then.
At first.
Then he had discovered the sanctuary of her bliss.
Now he removed his finger and stood.
She could see his erection and then she felt it for herself, running her hand over and over it as he unbuckled his belt. She took it out as he removed his tie and undid the buttons of his shirt so his chest was bare, but he left his shirt and jacket on.
Such beauty, she thought as she licked her lips and lowered her head to take just one small taste.
That turned into more.
The feathers of her headdresses moved and shivered and teased against his toned stomach, soft and tender, unlike the feel of her skilled mouth that gave rapid flicks and enslaved him. Roman’s breathing tripped into a moan that was a familiar one and turned Anya on totally.
She took him deeper but now more slowly as his fingers worked the pins of her headdress and, care forgotten, he tossed it aside and pushed her head lower.
His fingers were busy freeing her hair, and then he lifted her head. He was so close to coming and she licked her lips. He raised her, lifted her body against his and kicked away the chair. He brushed away all her carefully placed trinkets in one motion and then placed her on the dressing table. Anya stroked him as he carefully angled the mirrors so that there were hundreds of them and then he pulled her bottom to the edge of the table and parted her legs, and in his deep gravelly voice he told her that he was going to fill her with ecstasy.
He did.
Anya gripped tight to the edge of the table and arched back as he drove in.
He tore into her and the pain and bliss of their first time was replicated.
Roman had always loved to watch them, and now he looked down and widened her legs for better exposure, so that he could see himself glide in and out.
Anya looked at the mirror.
There they were, an endless stretch of Anyas and Romans but there were hundreds of images when instead there should be hundreds of memories, all denied to her by him.
‘I hate you for leaving,’ she sobbed as he started to thrust faster into her, and then she pressed her lips together so she would not reveal more of her hurt.
He did not look to the mirrors, he simply looked down and then when he had to have her body closer, he scooped her in to him and her skin was against his naked chest as her mouth found his.
Anya wrapped her legs around him and she was no longer on the table. She moved on him, and for all she had danced tonight, she did so again. Gripping him, grinding herself on him, wrapping toned legs tightly to his loins, and she held on as his powerful thighs allowed him to thrust harder.
She was fit enough not to require holding and now Roman’s large hands cupped her buttocks and he stroked them in deep rhythm till she shivered from the inside.
‘Stay still...’ he told her.
‘I can’t.’
‘I want to feel you.’
He knew she was almost there and now his hands held her rigid and would not allow her to move. He knew her body, and he was right, because as he held her still she felt him swell and he let out a primal grunt as he did what he had promised, filled her with ecstasy. The feel of him coming long and deep into her brought Anya to her own intense climax. It raced the length of her spine, she seized in his arms and pulsed and dragged out from him every precious drop and ached as still she fought for more.
They kissed and even now, Anya knew, she could have him again.
Such was their endless desire that, as they rested their foreheads on each other, Anya knew she could bring him back with just a few shifts of her hips—they could resume and chase oblivion again.
Their mouths meshed and their tongues mingled as her hips did just that, and she gripped and massaged him back, but there was knocking at the door.
Anya closed her eyes in frustration as she was informed that the car would soon be there to take her to the after party.
Their lips parted in regret and as Roman lowered her she never wanted her feet to hit the floor, but they did. She rested her head on his chest and drank in the scent of him, of them.
‘Did you love me?’
Anya had to know but he did not answer.
Almost fourteen years later and she still didn’t know.
Fourteen years without seeing him.
Only that wasn’t quite true, as he regularly appeared in her dreams.
But, no, there had been that one time she had seen him since then. It was something she had tried to erase from her memory.
A sight she would have preferred never to have seen.
Yet she had.
She looked up at his mouth, at his slight smile, and Anya knew how rare a smile from Roman was.
But then she looked into his eyes and was there a glint of triumph there?
Was that a smug smile at how easily he could have her? That, after all these years, he could walk back in and she would melt like a candle to his flame?
And she was angry at him, and perhaps more angry at herself for just how readily she had succumbed. Anger took over then.
Anya knew what she had seen two years ago.
On seeing him again there had been little relief that the man she loved hadn’t died on a battlefield.
There had been rage instead and it resurfaced now.
She raised her hand and slapped him, and he took it without so much as a flinch.
And then she asked him what perhaps she should have asked earlier.
‘How’s your wife?’
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_a61ec6e1-4234-5b4a-8424-a5d5a028da99)
YES, SHE SHOULD have asked earlier.
But this was how their love had always been, so consuming and so intense that there wasn’t room for anything else other than them.
Roman was sure that had Anya been married and a mother of triplets, had she been working on the checkout, still their first meeting, after all these years apart, it would have been the same.
They had to have each other.
It was why he had let her go.
‘You know?’ Roman frowned. ‘How?’
‘I saw you in Paris, two years ago, when I was performing there,’ Anya said. ‘You were sitting in a square, having a drink with her at a café and kissing in the afternoon sun...’ It had been agony to see and it was agony now to recall it. She had been rushing from her hotel to the theatre to prepare for her performance. She had progressed to being a soloist and had been playing the part of Violente, one of the fairies in Sleeping Beauty, and had been an understudy for the Lilac Fairy, who’d played a major role in the dance.
That night, for the first time, she would be performing as the Lilac Fairy, and it had been the only thing on her mind until Anya had turned into the square and her brisk pace had come to a rapid halt.
It was Roman.
Absolutely it was.
She had stood, frozen.
Roman had been sitting at a pavement café in the late-afternoon sun, and though her heart had recognised him she had not understood the exquisitely dressed man who’d lounged in the chair. Or why there had been a middle-aged woman by his side.
Her throat had closed and her jaw had gritted as she’d watched the woman reach over and kiss him.
The glint of her wedding ring had caused Anya to frown and, for a brief moment, she had assumed that Roman was having an affair with an older, married woman.
That had caused enough pain in itself but then, with the kiss over, she had watched as he’d lifted his cup and everything in her world had seemed to dim as she’d seen that there was a ring on his finger.
The cry she had let out had gone unnoticed by passers-by. Actually, no, as she now properly recalled it, a woman had turned her head as she’d walked past.
And then, when she’d thought her heart had died, Anya had found out that it was, in fact, being tortured as Roman, her brooding, distant, lover, had taken his wife’s hand and held it and they’d shared a kiss again.
She had wanted to scream in rage, to dash over and stop them. To demand of Roman how the hell he could cheat on her. For that was exactly how it had felt—as if she had caught him having an affair.
Yet she’d been unable to bring herself to confront him. She’d been tempted to run back to the tiny hotel room, to lie on her bed and sob, such was her grief, but that night’s performance was a vital one.
For the first time in her life Anya had truly thought she could not perform. On the most vital night of her career to date, she had doubted that she could go on.
Somehow she had made it to the theatre and taken out all her tiny keepsakes, her earring, the foil from the chocolate and the label from the sheet.
Oh, she had thought about tossing them; instead she had wept on them, grieved again for the two of them.
But then she had risen.
Anya, that night, had danced better than she ever had, though her fury, to this day, remained.
‘So,’ Anya demanded as she wrapped a robe around herself and Roman did up his clothes, ‘how is she? Does she wait backstage...’ She looked at his immaculate suit. ‘She dresses her plaything well...’
‘My money is mine,’ Roman said.
‘Please...’ she scoffed. ‘You had nothing.’
‘When I knew you,’ Roman said, ‘I had nothing. I made my fortune myself.’
‘Rubbish—you found a rich wife. I saw her sitting there, dripping in jewels. So, tell me, how is she?’
‘She was wonderful,’ Roman said, and let her know in those words that his wife had died and that he would defend not just his late wife but the indefensible fact that he’d had another woman after Anya. ‘Don’t speak poorly of her again, Anya, or you shan’t like my response.’
A violent drenching of jealousy flooded Anya as he spoke.
‘Celeste died a year ago.’
There were two things that Anya hated about that statement.
That she knew his wife’s name and that she had died a year ago yet still he hadn’t sought her out.
But, then, what did she expect? Neither had he sought out his identical twin. Roman was the coldest, most complex of men, his dark eyes had always held mystery and she stared into them now.
‘Did you know I was performing in Paris, then?’
‘I did.’
‘Did you come and see me?’ Anya asked, for always she danced for him.
‘No,’ Roman said. ‘Celeste wanted to but I made an excuse not to go and she went with a friend.’
‘Why?’
