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Remember.
Then with a mighty thrust, he pushed the rest of the way inside and Ophelia knew there would be no forgetting.
How could she ever forget the way the muscular planes of his beautiful body felt beneath her fingertips, or the glimmer of pleasured pain in his dark eyes, or the catch in her throat when at last he entered her? And the fullness, the exquisite fullness. She felt complete. Whole. Healed.
She knew it didn’t make sense, and yet somehow it did. With Artem moving inside her, everything made sense. Because in that moment of sweet euphoria, nothing else mattered. Not her past, not her future, not even her disease. Nothing and no one else existed. Just she and Artem.
Which was the sort of thing someone in love would think.
But she wasn’t in love with him. She couldn’t be in love. With anyone. Least of all Artem Drake.
This was lust. This was desire. It wasn’t love. It couldn’t be. Could it?
No. Please no. No, no, no.
“Yes,” Artem groaned, gazing down at her with an intensity that made her heart feel like it was ripping in half. Two pieces. Before and after.
“Yes,” she whispered in return, and she felt herself nodding as she undulated beneath him, even as she told herself it wasn’t true.
You don’t love him. You can’t.
She could feel Artem’s heartbeat crashing against hers. She was free-falling again, lost in sensation and liquid pleasure. Her breath grew quicker and quicker still. She looked into his eyes, yearning, searching, and found they held the answers to all the questions she’d ever had. Somewhere behind him, snow whirled in dreamlike motion as he reached between their joined bodies to stroke her.
“Die with me, Ophelia,” he whispered.
La petite mort.
Die with me.
With those final words, she perished once again and fell alongside Artem Drake into beautiful oblivion.
Chapter Eight (#u480fde13-6669-5c69-acd7-44a4a02c15ad)
Artem slept like the dead.
Hours later, he woke to find Ophelia’s shapely legs entwined with his and the pink ballet shoes still on her feet. Moonlight streamed through the windows, casting her porcelain skin in a luminescent glow. He felt as though he had a South Sea pearl resting in his arms.
What in the world had happened? He’d done the one thing he’d vowed he wouldn’t do.
He wound a lock of Ophelia’s hair around his fingers and watched the snow cast dancing shadows over her bare body. God, she was beautiful. Artem had seen a lot of beauty in his life—dazzling diamonds, precious gemstones from every corner of the earth. But nothing he’d ever experienced compared to holding Ophelia in his arms. She was infinitely more beautiful than the diamonds that still decorated her swan-like neck. Thinking about it made his chest ache in a way that would have probably worried him if he allowed himself to think about it too much.
There would be time for thinking later. Later, when he had to sit across a desk from her at Drake Diamonds and not reach for her. Later, when all eyes were on the two of them and he’d have to pretend he hadn’t been inside her. Later, when he walked into his office and saw the portrait of his father.
He wasn’t Geoffrey Drake. Artem may have crossed a line, but that didn’t make him his father. He refused to let himself believe such a thing. Especially not now, with Ophelia’s golden mane spilled over his pillow and her heart beating softly against his.
He let his gaze travel the length of her body, taking its fill. Arousal pulsed through him. Fast and hard. What had gotten into him? She’d reduced him to a randy teenager. Insatiable.
He should let her rest awhile. And should remove the pointe shoes from her feet so she could walk come morning.
He slipped out of bed, trying not to wake her, and gingerly took one of her feet in his hands. He untied the ribbon from around her ankle, and the pink satin slipped like water through his fingers. As gently as he could, he slid the shoe off her foot. She let out a soft sigh, but within seconds her beautiful breasts once again rose and fell with the gentle rhythm of sleep.
Artem cradled the pointe shoe in his hands for a moment, marveling at how something so lovely and delicate in appearance could support a woman standing on the tips of her toes. He closed his eyes and remembered Ophelia moving and turning across his living room. Poetry in motion.
He opened his eyes, set her shoe down on the bedside table and went to work removing the other one. It slipped off as quietly and easily as the first.
As he turned to place it beside its mate he caught a glimpse of something inside. Script that looked oddly like handwriting. He took a closer look, folding back the edges of pink satin to expose the shoe’s inner arch.
Sure enough, someone had written something there.
Giselle, June 1. Ophelia Baronova’s final performance.
Artem grew very still.
Ophelia Baronova?
Ophelia.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. That he knew with the utmost certainty. It wasn’t exactly a commonplace name. Besides, it explained why the shoes had fit. How she’d known she could dance in them. On some level, he’d known all along. Tonight hadn’t been some strange balletic Cinderella episode. These were Ophelia’s shoes. They always had been.
It explained so much, and at the same time, it raised more questions.
He studied the sublimely beautiful woman in his bed. Who was she? Who was she really?
He fixed his gaze once again on the words carefully inscribed in the shoe.
Baronova.
Why did that name ring a bell?
“I can explain.” Artem looked up and found Ophelia holding the sheet over her breasts, watching him with a guarded expression. Her gaze dropped to the shoe that held her secrets. “It was my stage name. It’s a family name, but my actual name is Ophelia Rose. I didn’t falsify my employment application, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Her employment application? Did she think he was worried about what she’d written on a piece of paper at Drake Diamonds, while she was naked in his bed?
“I don’t give a damn about your employment application, Ophelia.” He hated how terrified she looked all of a sudden. Like he might fire her on the spot, which was absurd. He wasn’t Dalton, for crying out loud.
“It’s just—” she swallowed “—complicated.”
Artem looked at her for a long moment, then positioned the shoe beside the other one on the nightstand and sat next to her on the bed. He could deal with complicated. He and complicated were lifelong friends.
He cradled her face in his hands and kissed her, slowly, reverently, until the sheets slipped away and she was bared to him.
This was how he wanted her. Exposed. Open.
He didn’t need for her to tell him everything. It was enough to have this—this stolen moment, her radiant body, her passionate spirit. He didn’t give a damn about her name. Of all people, Artem knew precisely how little a name really meant.
“Please,” she whispered against his lips. “Don’t tell anyone. Please.”
“I won’t,” he breathed, cupping her breasts and lowering his head to take one of her nipples in a gentle, openmouthed kiss. She was so impossibly soft.
Tender and vulnerable.
As her breathing grew quicker, she wrapped her willowy legs around his waist and reached for him. “Please, Artem. I need you to...”
“I promise.” He slid his hands over her back and pulled her close. Her thighs spread wider, and she began to stroke him. Slow and easy. Achingly so.
She felt delicate in his embrace. As small and fragile as a music-box dancer. But it was the desperation in her voice that was an arrow to his heart.
It nearly killed him.
Which was the only explanation for what came slipping out next. “I’m not really a Drake, Ophelia.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he realized the gravity of what he’d done. He’d never confessed that truth to another living soul.
He should take it back. Now, before it was too late.
He didn’t. Instead, he braced for her reaction, not quite realizing he was holding his breath, waiting for her to stop touching him, exploring him...until she didn’t stop. She kept caressing him as her eyes implored him. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m a bastard,” he said. “In the truest sense of the word.”
“Don’t.” She kissed him, and there was acceptance in her kiss, in the intimate way she touched him. Acceptance that Artem hadn’t even realized he needed. “Don’t call yourself that.”
His father had used that word often enough. Once he’d found out about Artem’s existence, that is. “My real mother worked at Drake Diamonds. She was a cleaning woman. She died when I was five years old. Then I went to live in the Drake mansion.”
Dalton had been eight years old, and his sister Diana had been six. Overnight, Artem had found himself in a family of strangers.
Wouldn’t the tabloids have a field day with that information? It was the big, whopping family secret. And after keeping it hidden for his entire life, he’d just willingly disclosed it to a woman he’d known for a fortnight.
“Oh, Artem.” Her lips brushed the corner of his mouth and her hands kept moving, kept stroking.
And there was comfort in the pleasure she offered. Comfort and release.
Artem didn’t know her story. He didn’t have to. Ophelia was no stranger to loss. Her pain lived in the sapphire depths of her eyes. He could see it. She understood. Maybe that was even part of what drew him toward her. Perhaps the imposter in her had recognized the imposter in him.
But he couldn’t help being curious. Why the secrecy?
Slow down. Talk things through.
But he didn’t want to slow down. Couldn’t.
“Kitten,” he murmured, his breath growing ragged as he moved his hands up the supple arch of her spine.
She was so soft. So feminine. Like rose petals. And she felt so perfect in his arms that he didn’t want to revisit the past anymore. It no longer felt real.
Ophelia was the present, and she was real. Nothing was as authentic as the way she danced. Reality was the swell of her breasts against his chest. It was her tender voice as she whispered in his ear. It was her warm, wet center.
Then there were no more words, no more confessions. She was guiding him into her, taking him fully inside. All of him. His body, his need, his truths.
His past. His present.
Everything he was and everything he’d ever been.
* * *
He didn’t know what time it was when he finally heard the buzzing of his cell phone from inside the pocket of his tuxedo jacket, still in a heap on the floor. Pink opalescent light streamed through the windows, and he could hear police sirens and the rumble of taxicabs down below. The music of a Manhattan morning.
Artem wanted nothing more than to kiss his way down Ophelia’s body and wake her in the manner she so deserved, but before he could move a muscle the phone buzzed again. Then again.
And yet again.
Artem sighed mightily, slid out of bed and reached for his tuxedo jacket. He fished his phone from the pocket and frowned when he caught his first glimpse of the screen. Twenty-nine missed calls.
Every last one of them was from his brother.
Bile rose to the back of his throat as he remembered the last time Dalton had blown up his phone like this. That had been two months ago, the night of their father’s heart attack. By the time Artem had returned Dalton’s calls, Geoffrey Drake had been dead for more than four hours.
He dialed his brother’s number and strode naked across the suite, shutting himself in his small home office so he wouldn’t wake Ophelia.
Dalton answered on the first ring. “Artem. Finally.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, wondering why Dalton sounded as cheerful as he did. Artem wasn’t sure he’d ever heard his brother this relaxed. Relaxing wasn’t exactly the elder Drake’s strong suit.
“Nothing is wrong. Nothing at all. In fact, everything is right.” He paused. Long enough for alarm bells to start sounding in the back of Artem’s consciousness. Something seemed off. “You, my brother, are a genius.”
Now he was really suspicious. Dalton wasn’t prone to flattery where Artem was concerned. Although he had to admit genius had a better ring to it than bastard. “What’s going on, Dalton? Go ahead and tell me in plain English. I’m rather busy at the moment.”
“Busy? At this hour? I doubt that.” Artem could practically hear Dalton’s eyes rolling. At least something was normal about this conversation. “I’m talking about the girl.”
Artem’s throat closed. He raked a hand through his hair and involuntarily glanced in the direction of the bed. “To whom are you referring?”
The girl.
Dalton was talking about Ophelia. Artem somehow just knew. He didn’t know why, or how, but hearing Dalton refer to her so casually rubbed him the wrong way.
“Ophelia, of course. Your big discovery.” Dalton let out a laugh. “She’s not who we think she is, brother.”
So the cat was out of the bag. How in the world had Dalton discovered her real name?
“I know.” But even as he said it, he had the sickening feeling he didn’t know anything. Anything at all.
“You know?” Dalton sounded only mildly surprised. “Oh. Well, that’s good, I suppose. Although you could have told me about her connection to the Drake Diamond before I had to hear about it from a reporter at Page Six.”
Artem froze.
The Drake Diamond? Page Six? What the hell was he talking about?
“I can’t believe we’ve had Natalia Baronova’s granddaughter working for us this entire time,” Dalton said. “You did a good thing when you recommended her designs. A really good thing. Like I said, genius.”
Baronova. No wonder the name had rung a bell. “You mean the ballerina who wore the Drake Diamond back in the forties? That Natalia Baronova?”
