CHAPTER NINE
And for a brief moment Red Riding Hood was happy. She was proud of the relationship she’d forged with the wolf, proud of what she’d accomplished. But, as we all know, pride comes before a fall, and Red Riding Hood couldn’t see the chasm before her. Only him. Only the wolf.
The Truth About Little Red Riding Hood
—Roz Fayrer
ELLA HAD NEVER gone back to her room in the house. Since the night of the ballet she had shared his bed, waiting for him while he was away in Russia and delighting in him as he returned to her in France.
And each time he did, he marvelled that what had once been a small, almost imperceptible presence around her abdomen was now most definitely there and had required yet another shopping trip exclusively for maternity wear. Roman thought she might have only a few more weeks before being visibly pregnant, provided she wore very loose clothing. And part of him couldn’t wait until the moment he could see it, the constant proof that his wife was carrying his child.
They’d had the second scan—the first for them both together—and the scariest. But the tests came back clear and they had both heaved an emotional breath, reached for each other in that moment, seeking and finding support, and Roman felt another stone in the wall around his heart break loose.
But as the stones fell, fear came with it, slipping through the cracks. Insidious whispers and thoughts he fought valiantly to keep from his wife. His innocent wife, who had been punished enough for his actions. She had tried to keep her own disappointment at failing to secure the client from him, but he had not missed the worried phone calls to her business partner, Célia. That Ella sought to protect him from the responsibility of it ate at him. He might have lived his whole life walking his path of vengeance alone, but he no longer felt like the Great Wolf—a name he had once delighted in.
He had found himself a pack, and Dorcas had taken to fiercely protecting Ella, following her everywhere she went, resting her head on her lap when Ella would sit, almost as if guarding their child.
Her words from the night of the ballet performance had run through his head as if on a loop, in time with his breathing and heartbeat. Her assurance that he could be enough, that he could be more than he had been. For her. With her. It had been a seductive call and it had somehow morphed into being his want and need.
He realised he wanted to embrace all the things that he had hidden from for so long. That he wanted a future with her, not just because of their child, but because of her. In the days since he had spoken to her of his mother, other memories had surfaced. Fractured moments of his mother laughing, the feel of her hand on his cheek, the way she had swept back the hair from his forehead and placed a kiss there. For years he’d only remembered the sadness, and now he saw that his mother had given him so much more. And, rather than pushing the memories back down as he had as a young man—as he’d needed to—or quickly refocusing his mind on some damned pursuit of vengeance, he took the time to remember, to hold them up and inspect them, feel them and embrace them. And it had caused a painfully sweet yearning for the love he’d forgotten.
None of which would have happened without his wife’s belief that there was something worth saving within him, something worth preserving there for their future. For their child’s future. His mother had once made him feel like that and now Ella was making him feel the same way.
And he wanted, needed, to give her something back, but felt it had to be perfect, that he had to do everything in his power to give her what she so greatly deserved.
Which was why, he justified to himself, he had made the call. Loukas Liordis was a Greek billionaire with a bad-boy reputation to match. And Roman, after a particularly intense drinking session in his New York club three years before, knew Loukas needed to redeem that reputation. It was that which made him the perfect client for Ella and Célia. Loukas had agreed to keep his involvement a secret, more than happy if it would lead to the redemption of his reputation, and promised to find a way to reach out to Ella through official channels.
But as the days wore on, without any word from Ella about a surprise new business contact, Roman began to regret his impulsive decision.
Instinctively, he knew that Ella would see it as an act of deceit, of going behind her back in precisely the way she had forbidden. Even in his attempts to make things right, to do and be better, he was starting from an act of betrayal. He’d even begun to hope that Loukas would have forgotten, would somehow have changed his mind.
Until he heard the most unlikely scream of delight from his wife and cursed inwardly, because he knew. All his hopes had been in vain. Because whether Loukas revealed his involvement or not, he knew that Ella would find out. And she would never forgive him.
Better to ask forgiveness than permission, his inner voice whispered seductively, even though something in his chest cried foul.
Ella came running down the steps, pausing midway when she saw him in the grand hallway of their house in France. The pure joy shining from her eyes and lighting her features made his heart drop, even as a smile pulled at his lips.
‘Can we go to Fiji?’
‘What?’ he replied, not quite expecting her request.
‘Fiji—can we go? Célia can’t, and I…we might have a client,
