EMILY SPENT A long time in the shower, clearing her muddled thoughts.
Pascha Virshilas was the enemy. She had to remember that.
But she was hanging on to her hate by the tips of her fingers, the threads she’d gripped her loathing onto loosening to such an extent she couldn’t keep a proper hold on them.
Simply enjoying his company felt like stepping into enemy territory. This was the man who hadn’t given her recently widowed father the chance to defend himself before suspending him without pay; the man who’d left her father to flounder in a pit of despair rather than start the investigation which would have cleared his name. This was the man who had left her father to rot.
He’d looked out for her, though.
Donning a knee-length black dress—when had her wardrobe become so dark? She really needed to inject some more colour into it—she went back into the main part of the shelter and found Pascha sitting on the sofa reading a book.
‘I thought there wasn’t any form of entertainment here,’ she said mock-accusingly.
He held the book up. ‘I’m afraid all the reading material in here is in Russian.’
‘Never mind.’ She wandered past him and over to the kitchen.
She needed something to do, something to keep her mind occupied so it wouldn’t be so full of him.
‘If I’d known I would be having an English guest, I would have arranged for some books of your own language to be stocked.’
‘I’m hardly your guest, though, am I?’ She said it for her own benefit as well as his—a reminder to them both.
He put his book down and raised a brow. ‘While you are on this island, you are my guest and you will be treated as such.’
It was on the tip of her tongue to rebuke him, to point out that guests were generally allowed to communicate with the outside world. And that, oh, as a rule, guests weren’t usually forced on to their host’s island.
For once she kept her tongue still.
They both knew the facts. There was little point rehashing them.
They had a long night ahead of them. Better to try and sustain the strange kind of harmony they’d managed to establish.
As long as she continued to keep her guard up, she would be fine.
Rooting round the kitchenette for something to do, she found a large tub of vanilla ice-cream in the freezer. There was nothing better than ice-cream to aid harmony.
‘Do you want some?’ she asked, holding it up for him.
‘Sure,’ he replied with a shrug, closing his book and placing it on the arm of the sofa.
Grabbing two spoons, she took it over to the table.
Pascha pulled out the chair opposite her and nodded at the tub. ‘No bowls?’
‘Saves washing up.’
‘It’ll melt.’
‘No, it won’t. I guarantee that in ten minutes it will all be gone.’ She might not have been able to manage much of her dinner, but ice-cream...now, that she could happily eat, however fraught her emotions. ‘If you want a bowl, help yourself.’
Rolling his eyes, he got himself a bowl, sat down and methodically scooped some ice-cream into it.
‘Is that all you’re having?’ she asked with incredulity. He’d only put two scoops into his bowl.
He quelled her with a look. ‘It’s hardly a healthy food.’
‘It’s ice-cream. It’s not supposed to be healthy. It’s supposed to be comforting.’
‘I’ll be sure to tell my arteries that.’
They ate in silence but, unlike over dinner, this silence didn’t have an uncomfortable edge to it. Probably because no one could be uncomfortable whilst eating divine vanilla ice-cream. The sweetness was soothing.
While they ate, Pascha checked his phone.
‘Did you manage to get hold of your lawyer?’ she asked.
‘Just. The battery died after a couple of minutes.’ He gave it a shake, as if hoping it would miraculously charge itself.
‘You do realise you’re torturing yourself by checking it?’ she said.
He pursed his lips. ‘It’s pointless, I know. I just find it incredibly frustrating.’
‘Have some more ice-cream.’
‘Will that help?’ he asked mockingly.
‘Nope. But it will make the frustration taste a bit sweeter.’ To make her point, she put a delicious spoonful into her mouth.
His lips twitched.
She grinned to see him scoop a little more into his bowl, but only a little. ‘Have you always been a control freak?’
His eyes narrowed a touch. ‘I like to control the environment in which I live,’ he answered slowly.
‘We all do that to an extent,’ she agreed. ‘But you seem to be quite extreme about it.’
He put his spoon down. ‘I had leukaemia as a child,’ he said simply.
Startled, Emily felt her eyes widen.
He’d had leukaemia...?
‘Being so close to death so young...’ He raised a shoulder. ‘It shapes you. It shaped me.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said starkly. ‘Are you okay now? I mean...’
‘I know what you mean and, yes, I am in good health.’ He hadn’t escaped unscathed, though, Pascha reflected with a trace of bitterness. Five years of chemotherapy and all the other associated treatments had given him a future but had also come with one particular cost, a cost that no amount of money could ever fix.
‘But I do not take my good health for granted. I freely admit I like to take control of my life, but when you have spent five of your formative years with no control over your body or your treatment, and no control over how it affects those you love...’ He shook his head and scraped out the last of the ice-cream in his bowl. ‘Now I am in control. Just me. To use business jargon, I will not outsource it.’
Emily had stopped eating, her spoon held in mid-air. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She shook her head, a dazed expression on her face. ‘That must have been awful for you. Terrifying. And your poor parents. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? It’s hard enough watching your parents suffer but when it comes to your own child...’ Her words tailed off and she seemed to give herself a mental shake, sticking her spoon back into the tub.
‘Yes, it was hard for them,’ he agreed, his voice dropping, his mind wandering back to a time when his mother had seemingly aged overnight. One minute she’d been a young mother with an easy laugh, the next a middle-aged woman with lines on her face.
The memories had the power to lance his guts.
His mind drifted back to those—literally—dark days, when they’d been so poor his parents could only afford to heat his bedroom. That had been when Marat’s disdain for his younger, adopted brother had turned ugly. How clearly he recalled Marat whispering to him when their parents had been out of earshot, ‘Why don’t you just die and save us all this trouble, Cuckoo?’ Pascha might have been only seven years old but he’d known his brother meant it.
‘Cuckoo’: Marat’s secret nickname for him.
He looked down at his empty bowl.
To hell with it.
He could allow himself one night of sweetness.
He stuck his spoon into the tub and ate straight from it.
Something flickered in Emily’s eyes as she did the same, their spoons clashing as they dived into the tub a second time.
The flickering darkened and swirled, their eyes locked.
She really was incredibly beautiful. And incredibly easy to talk to.
With a stab, he realised he’d shared more of his past with her this evening than he had ever done with anyone. His childhood illness was history, not something he talked about.
He looked at his watch. ‘Half an hour.’
A groove he was starting to recognise formed on her brow. ‘Half an hour...?’
‘That’s how long it’s taken us to finish this tub of ice-cream. You said ten minutes.’
‘Too much talking, not enough eating. And it’s not finished.’ She yanked the tub up and peered into it. ‘There’s at least a spoonful left.’
‘You finish it.’
‘How very magnanimous.’
He watched as she seemingly scraped out every last drop of the by now melted remnants.
His blood thickened at witnessing her pink tongue dart out to lick the spoon.
Mentally taking a deep breath, he got to his feet. Tonight he was also going to say to hell with his strict diet and limited alcohol consumption. ‘How about we open another bottle of wine?’
‘Why not?’ she agreed, pushing the tub away from her. ‘It’s more exciting than milk.’ She placed a hand on her middle. ‘Do you think it’s any good for stomach-ache?’
Why did that action automatically make him think of a pregnant woman rubbing her swollen bump?
He blinked the image away, unsettled at the imagery.
‘Has someone eaten too much ice-cream?’
‘Mmm...maybe,’ she said, elongating the first syllable.
‘I hate to say I told you so...’
She pulled a face. ‘I know, I know, too much ice-cream is unhealthy. That didn’t stop you from eating half of it.’
‘Not quite half,’ he said with a wry smile, pushing his chair back. He’d eaten more ice-cream in one sitting than he’d consumed in the past decade.
Emily was right. It made bitterness much easier to swallow.
Or was it that she was such a good listener that it made it easier to spill the secrets of his past?
When he sat back down with the bottle and two clean glasses, she leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands. ‘Being stuck in here with me must be a nightmare for you. First the engine of the yacht breaking, then the storm... It must be driving you mad, all these things occurring that are out of your control.’
He laughed. ‘I’m coping.’ To his surprise, he realised, he was coping remarkably well.
Under normal circumstances, an event like this would elicit a vigorous amount of pacing the room, waiting for the danger of the storm to pass. But instead he was content to sit back, relax and just...talk.
When had he ever taken the time just to talk?
No wonder he wasn’t going mad when he had Emily to distract him, something she managed to do effortlessly.
He gripped the stem of his glass, fighting a sudden compulsion to reach over and touch her hair. She’d left it loose. Her curls had dried since her shower, a mass of long ebony ringlets springing here, there and everywhere.
What did that gorgeous hair smell of? he wondered. What, he wondered, would she do if he were to capture one of the locks and wind it around his finger?
Every sinew in his body tightened.
He took a large swallow of his wine, watching as she reached for her glass and did likewise, running a finger over the flesh of her bottom lip to wipe a drop away.
He took another swallow and forced a smile at her questioning look.
He wished there was another tub of ice-cream in the freezer. Maybe he could spoon it straight onto his lap and kill the heat simmering in him.
* * *
Emily sat curled up in the armchair she’d dragged over to the wall so she could peer out of the porthole-like window. Only the dim glow from the outside lights enabled her to see the trees bending under the assault of the wind. Rain lashed down like a sheet, more powerful than anything she’d ever witnessed.
She shivered.
‘Are you cold?’
She shook her head, keeping her face pressed to the window.
‘I’ll get you a blanket.’
‘I’m not cold.’ It was looking at the storm that had made her shiver. All the same, when Pascha gave her the soft fleece blanket, she wrapped it around her shoulders with gratitude, murmuring her thanks.
By the time they’d finished their wine, the atmosphere between them had shifted. A growing charge had sent her away from the dining table to where she was now, holed up by the window.
If she couldn’t look at him, she couldn’t notice how utterly gorgeous he was.
If she couldn’t talk to him, she couldn’t feel the richness of his voice seeping through her veins...
How long would the storm go on for? It seemed interminable.
They’d been in the shelter for six hours. The time was really stretching now, and so was the tension brewing between them. She could feel it with every breath. And what made it worse was that she knew he felt it too.
She didn’t know much about leukaemia other than that survival rates had improved dramatically in recent years. How old was he? Thirty-four? When he’d had it, the survival rates had been dire. The battle would have been immense. She kept imagining the small child he’d been and the desperate worry of his parents. She wanted to travel back to the past and hug that small child.
It explained so much about him.
For the first time, she tried to think from his point of view. There he was, pouring all his energy into buying the firm his adored adopted father had founded, having to do it amidst the highest secrecy, when he’d learned a sum of money had gone missing on a senior executive’s watch. He hardly knew this employee. The sum was significant by any normal person’s standards, but to a billionaire it wasn’t significant enough to warrant an immediate investigation, not when priorities lay elsewhere.
Twirling a curl absently around her finger, Emily sighed. However much she might disagree with his methods, she understood the reasons.
If only she wasn’t so aware of him. Her attention might be firmly fixed on what was going on outside but still she sensed every move he made.
He was back on the sofa, his nose buried in his book.
Even if there had been a book in English she wouldn’t have been able to concentrate. There was too much energy racing through her veins. More than that, she was too consumed with him to concentrate properly on anything.
She heard every page he turned. She knew every time he ran his fingers through his hair. She knew when he stretched his long legs out.
After another hour of silence had passed, during which the storm hadn’t abated at all, she heard him close his book.
‘I need to get some sleep,’ he said. ‘You can have the bed. I’ll take the sofa.’
‘Don’t worry about it—I’m a night owl. You take the bed. I’m happy watching the storm.’ Before he could open his mouth to argue, she turned her head and threw him a wry smile. ‘I’m half your size and probably need half the sleep you do. It’s more logical for me to take the sofa.’
Pascha wanted to argue with her but, studying Emily’s expression, he could see she didn’t look remotely tired.
He wasn’t tired either.
His body clock, usually so good at regulating his sleeping patterns, appeared to have gone on strike.
But he had to sleep—at least had to try to—even if Emily was sitting mere feet away from him.
‘If the sofa is too uncomfortable, feel free to join me in the bed,’ he said in as casual a tone as he could muster. ‘You have nothing to fear from me.’
His veins thickened anew at the thought of her climbing in beside him, her sweet scent inches from him, close enough for him to reach a hand out, touch her skin and discover for himself if it was as silky as it seemed. Close enough to discover for himself exactly what her glorious hair smelled like.
With iron will, he forced the torrent of desire away.
‘I know.’ She turned her face back to the window before he could read what was written on it.
After brushing his teeth, he poured himself a glass of water and padded around the shelter turning off all the lights bar the small lamp near where Emily sat curled like a cat.
Her concentration was firmly focussed on the storm outside, yet he could feel her awareness of him as keenly as he felt his own awareness of her.
Did she realise she’d been twirling that same curl round her finger for the past hour?
He stripped to his boxers and slid under the covers. Usually he slept nude but tonight he felt it more appropriate to wear something. He didn’t want her feeling uncomfortable with him. ‘Goodnight, Emily.’
She didn’t look at him. ‘Night.’
His eyes wouldn’t close. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop his mind drifting into what would happen if she did join him in the bed. He didn’t think he’d ever felt the blood running through his veins so keenly, a thick desire that, if he’d been alone, he’d be able to do something about. If he’d been with any other woman, he’d have been able to do something about it too. Since making his fortune, he’d never been rebuffed by a woman. But he’d never felt a woman’s disinterest in his money as keenly as he did with Emily. His wealth meant nothing to her.
She was only here on Aliana Island with him, in a storm shelter, out of sufferance.
No, he corrected himself. She was here out of love. Love for her father.
She was also a thief, he reminded himself. However good her intentions, she’d stolen her father’s pass key, incited someone into giving her the code—he would find out who as soon as he returned to the UK—and had intended to steal every scrap of data from his hard drive. If he hadn’t returned earlier from Milan than intended, she would have got away with it.
And yet...
Her actions had been born out of desperation. Born out of love.
As sleep continued to elude him, he cursed that he hadn’t sent her to the staff shelter. Forget all his good reasons not to have done; for the amount he paid them, his staff could have put up with Emily for one night. Sleep was an essential function of his life. He’d never forgotten the words of his doctors when he’d been a child. Sleep will help you get better, they’d told him. And he had got better. He’d recovered. He’d beaten the odds and he’d survived.
He heard movement—Emily quietly making herself a hot drink before settling back on the armchair.
Pascha willed sleep to come quickly.