Nor had he missed the blush of embarrassment as if she did not know what she was wanting. And it had been that which had broken the spell.
Her beauty was undeniable and he acknowledged, reluctantly, the small part of him that wished perhaps that things were different. But they were not. He had set about this path the moment Vladimir had signed his mother’s death warrant eighteen years ago.
Searing pain gripped him hard and fast, taking him by surprise and shocking him with its intensity. A thick, heavy grief-laden nausea swirled in his gut as if he felt that terrible blow for the first time. The horrifying blankness that had descended once he’d felt the bewildering impossibility of moving forward, of surviving without the one person in his life who had anchored him, who had loved him. It had crashed over him like a wave he hadn’t already surfed. Roman struggled to breathe and forced the pressure in his chest to morph from grief to fury in a years-old practised technique.
Fury at the memory of his grandfather refusing the pleas of a thirteen-year-old boy, begging for help, for finances that would pay for the medical treatment his mother so desperately needed. Vladimir had slammed the door on him. And the consequences had been devastating.
Now Kolikov would know that same feeling. Roman wanted Vladimir to beg and plead as he had once done. Ella Riding was the only way he could take revenge against his grandfather. And he would take it by any means necessary.
CHAPTER TWO
There are many forms of disguise, some in clothing, some in nature, but the most dangerous of all are those that have the thread of truth stitched through them, making it even harder to pull truth from fiction.
The Truth About Little Red Riding Hood
—Roz Fayrer
EVER SINCE SHE had come to France, time had seemed to lose all meaning for Ella. Hours spent with her grandmother passed in a second—as if knowing it was running out, time raced headlong towards an impossible finish line. Yet mere moments spent with Roman seemed to draw out deliciously as if he held as much command over the grains of sand in an hourglass as he did over her body and senses.
But, more than that, in the last month he had become her confidant, her support. She had spoken to Vladimir on the phone, but his lack of interest in her maternal grandmother had left her feeling strangely awkward and isolated. Despite the initial fear for her health, the procedures and operations had gone incredibly well. But that relief had been short-lived as Ella suddenly found herself the only person who could, and had to, make decisions about care homes and closing up Claudette’s long-lived life in the cottage.
Ella would have found it all too much to bear had it not been for Roman. He had listened to her fears, helped her talk through the visiting of various homes, advised her on how to approach her grandmother with the best on offer. Her grandmother’s pension didn’t cover anywhere near the amount needed and Ella had been forced to ask Vladimir for an advance on her trust fund from her parents. At the age of twenty-two, she was three years away from full access to it and the monthly stipend that had seemed more than enough simply wouldn’t stretch to the beautiful care home she had found for Claudette. Only an hour away from Toulouse, it might have seemed like an extravagance—as suggested by Vladimir, who couldn’t understand why ‘the old crone’ couldn’t be left to public health care—but Ella simply couldn’t wrench her grandmother away from the looming view of the Pyrenees that she had seen every morning since birth.
Ella had been surprised when Roman had happily put aside his business interests in the area to focus almost all his fierce attention on supporting her. Never before had she experienced such a thing and if she had been concerned with how quickly and how fast her dependence on him had come into her life she thrust it aside. Daily walks with Roman and Dorcas had kept her sane and forced her out of the cottage she would have sunk into and never left. Those walks had turned into evening meals where Roman would pepper her with questions about her life in seductive tones and with enticing smiles.
‘So, tell me. What was little Ella Riding like?’
She spent hours sharing tales of her boarding school life, her hopes for the future, plans that she had only begun to discuss with her friend Célia. The business they wanted to develop by linking powerful industries and rich investors with charities across the globe. The home that Ella wanted one day. Roman had listened, smiling and laughing, and encouraging her fantasies of what it would look like, how many rooms, bathrooms, and how much land she would like. He had seemed to sense how important it was to her when she had tried to convey how difficult it had been growing up and feeling as if she’d never had a home of her own—her time shared between her boarding school, university, her guardian’s estate in Russia and her grandmother’s cottage here in France. All of which were welcoming and wonderful, but never truly hers and hers alone.
Once her grandmother had begun to rally, she and Roman began to wander further afield than the woods surrounding the cottage. It was only when she had arrived at the small airfield where a private jet waited to whisk them away to Paris for the evening that Ella realised that Roman was more than just a man of means, but someone really quite incredibly wealthy.
She was no stranger to money and had always lived with the knowledge that at the age of twenty-five she would inherit a vast trust fund from her parents. But, until that time, anything she needed had always had to be approved by her
