The Throne He Must Take

‘As for exploring my emotions... ‘I’ll quote a famous female American journalist and advice columnist called Dorothy Dix, who said, “Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.”’

What had he meant by that? Holly wondered as she watched Jarek stride out of the room. She couldn’t keep pace with his mercurial changes of mood. Just when she had been convinced that he was the disreputable playboy portrayed by the tabloids, and a shameless flirt with a ready line of sexual innuendo, he had surprised her by sounding as if he genuinely cared about his role with a charity.

She knew that he was co-director with his sister of Lorna’s Gift—a charitable organisation that raised money to support children living in orphanages around the world. But she had assumed that Jarek was simply a figurehead for the charity, and it was disconcerting to discover that he took some things seriously.

It would be easier if he was nothing more than fodder for the celebrity-obsessed paparazzi, she thought, because then she could dismiss her reaction to his potent sensuality as a temporary aberration.

Holly rubbed her hand across her brow to try to ease her tension headache and glanced at the clock. Professor Heppel was due to arrive for dinner at Chalet Soline in two hours, which gave her time for a soak in the hot tub and a chance to get a grip on her wayward emotions.

The next time she met Jarek she was determined to be coolly professional.

* * *

Jarek switched off his laptop, having finalised another successful business deal. The one thing he could rely on in the grim mess that was his life was his ability to make money, he thought cynically. Although he had not always been lucky.

Over the past two years his instinct for correctly guessing how global markets would perform had catapulted him onto the list of the world’s top ten most successful traders, and enabled him to recoup the huge losses he’d made at Saunderson’s Bank.

That embarrassing episode had resulted from an unfortunate combination of events. He had taken a particularly risky gamble on the Asian stockmarkets, and an earthquake in Japan had led to a temporary suspension of trading on the Nikkei—with disastrous consequences for his investments and the near-collapse of one of England’s oldest and most prestigious private banks.

Ralph Saunderson had probably turned in his grave, Jarek thought sardonically. He had been a feral boy of nearly ten when he had been taken from war-ravaged Sarajevo to live at Cuckmere Hall, and his resistance to authority had meant that there had been no love lost between him and Ralph. Following his adoptive father’s death, he had been shocked to discover that he had been excluded from Ralph’s will, and that Cortez Ramos—Ralph’s biological son—had inherited Cuckmere Hall and the chairmanship of Saunderson’s Bank.

He knew why Ralph had chosen Cortez to be his heir. Ralph had blamed him, Jarek, for Lorna Saunderson’s death, and Jarek had for once agreed with his adoptive father.

He was haunted by memories of when his adoptive mother had been fatally shot by an armed raider during a robbery at a jeweller’s. The four years that had passed since that terrible day had not dimmed the images in his mind of Lorna lying crumpled on the floor, and Elin kneeling beside her sobbing hysterically. The keening cry his sister had given when she’d realised that her adored mama was dead would echo in his head for ever.

In Sarajevo, Jarek had seen the bodies of dead soldiers and heard the rattling last breaths of young men—some of whom had been teenagers, only a few years older than him. He’d thought that nothing could be worse than the atrocities he’d seen in that bloody and brutal civil war, but the knowledge that Mama had died because of his reckless attempt to overpower the gunman was an agony that would be with him for ever.

He would never forgive himself, even though Elin loyally insisted that he wasn’t to blame.

It had been his idea to set up a charity to support orphans in honour of Lorna Saunderson and, ironically, his willingness to take risks on the stockmarket meant he had earned a fortune for Lorna’s Gift. It was some kind of reparation for what he had done, but nothing would ever ease his guilt.

God knew what a psychologist would make of him if he ever revealed the dark torment in his soul, Jarek thought grimly. But he had no intention of exploring his emotions with the deliciously sexy Dr Maitland.

Some things were best left alone—which was why he had decided not to respond to the request he had received from the head of the National Council of Vostov, asking him to have a DNA test which might prove that he was related to Vostov’s royal family, who had all perished in a car accident twenty years ago.

There was no possibility that it could be true, he assured himself. The idea was ridiculous. But what if his nightmares were not simply horrific figments of his imagination? his conscience whispered. It would mean that the images in his mind were of real events, real people...his parents.

At the orphanage he had been told that his mother and father had been killed early in the war, when the apartment block where they’d lived had been destroyed by a bomb. Jarek and his baby sister had been pulled from the rubble and the trauma had wiped out all his memories of his life before that day.

He’d accepted the explanation eventually—after he had been beaten by the orphanage staff whenever he’d talked about his strange dreams. But now his nightmares had returned, more vivid and terrible than when he was a boy. And if the scenes that played out in his subconscious mind were real events then he had something even more devastating than his adoptive mother’s death on his conscience.

Jarek pushed his hair off his brow and acknowledged that if he had not been stuck halfway up a mountain he would have headed to the nearest bar and sought to escape the demons inside him with another bottle of vodka and an attractive blonde—or two. He remembered the girls at Bibiana’s Bar and for a moment was tempted to take the four-by-four parked outside the chalet and drive himself to Arlenwald, to hook up with Halfrida and her friends.

It would be worth it just to ruffle Dr Maitland’s feathers.

His lips twitched as he remembered Holly’s outraged expression when she’d discovered him in the bar. The truth was he would like to do more than ruffle her, he brooded. His body stirred as he pictured her delectable curves. She was an intriguing mix of uptight schoolmistress and sensual siren, and Jarek couldn’t remember the last time he had been intrigued by a woman.

If she had been someone other than his psychologist... Hell, if he had been someone else—someone better than the man he knew he was—he would have enjoyed allowing their mutual sexual attraction to reach its logical conclusion and taken her to bed.

But Holly had stated that she wanted to find out what made him tick, and he was utterly determined to prevent her from uncovering the secrets buried deep in his soul.

CHAPTER THREE (#ub0e3b935-7af3-5614-bf4e-72e7edf51f4a)

JAREK FOUND AN outlet for his restless energy in the chalet’s gym. He could think of other, more enjoyable ways to get hot and sweaty than pounding his fists into a punch-bag. But he had promised his brother-in-law there would be no more scandalous stories about his personal life in the tabloids—which meant that until Elin’s baby was born he had to keep away from bars and airhead blondes who were attracted to his multi-millionaire status and bad-boy image.

The truth was he’d never cared about what was printed about him—which was mostly lies. Any publicity, good or bad, was publicity for Lorna’s Gift, and he seized every opportunity to promote the vital work of the charity.

But Elin’s husband Cortez took a different view.

‘Elin gets upset when she sees your name in newspaper headlines or on the pages of gossip magazines, invariably with intimate details of your sex-life,’ Cortez had warned him. ‘She has gestational high blood pressure, which could lead to more serious complications with her pregnancy, and her obstetrician says it is crucial she doesn’t suffer any stress that could cause her blood pressure to rise even higher.’

Jarek shared his brother-in-law’s concern. Elin and Cortez had not been together when Elin had nearly died giving birth to their first child, and it had been Jarek who had sat by her bed in ITU, willing her to pull through for the sake of her baby son in the hospital nursery.

There were worse places to spend the next few weeks than the spectacular Austrian Alps, he mused. Chalet Soline offered six-star luxury, and next to the well-equipped gym there was a sauna room while outside on the decked area stood a hot tub. He would find it relaxing after his punishing workout to lie in a bubbling hot tub and look up at the snow-covered mountains, or count the stars that glittered diamond-bright in the night sky.

But when he glanced at his watch he realised he did not have time before Professor Heppel arrived.

About to head back to his room, to shower before dinner, he glanced out of a window and noticed that the lights had been switched on around the hot tub. Steam was curling up from the surface of the water, forming wispy white clouds against the black night sky.

Jarek stopped dead and stared at the figure of a woman rising out of the steam like a mystical goddess. And what a figure! He swallowed as he watched Holly wade across to the edge of the pool. It was no exaggeration to say that she was a goddess, with an hourglass figure that was reminiscent of the silver screen sirens from a previous era, like Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor.

She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit with cut-out sections at the sides that drew attention to her slender waist. Jarek wanted to explore the tantalising areas of her bare skin on display with his hands. He lifted his eyes higher to her voluptuous breasts, barely contained within the tiny triangles of gold material that formed the bra cups of the swimsuit, and felt himself harden. He was fascinated by her daring choice of swimwear, which was such a contrast to the unexciting clothes she’d worn earlier.

Moving his gaze lower, he followed the rounded curves of her hips and her toned thighs, exposed by the swimsuit’s high-cut legs.

Who was the real Holly? he wondered. The serious psychologist, or the sizzling sex bomb who made the blood thunder in his veins? His body felt taut and energised after his gym workout and he wanted—quite possibly more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life, he discovered—to pull Holly beneath him and ease her stretchy swimsuit aside so that he could thrust his rock-solid erection home.

It was lucky he had worn loose sweatpants for his session in the gym, Jarek thought derisively. He was so turned on by the sight of Holly in her barely there swimsuit that he felt he might explode.

His common sense told him to head back to his room. But he rarely heeded good advice.

The temperature outside the chalet was way below zero, and as the icy air hit his heated skin every nerve-ending in his body tingled.

Jarek allowed the door to thud closed behind him as he stepped outside onto the wooden decking. The sound caused Holly to jerk her head round, and she gave a startled cry when she saw him, followed by a curse when she dropped the towel that she had just picked up from the deck into the water.

‘You startled me. I thought you were working in the study,’ she muttered in an embarrassed voice, as if he had caught her naked—which she very nearly was, Jarek mused as he roamed his eyes over her insubstantial swimsuit and felt the ache in his groin clamour to be appeased.

He did not reply, for the simple reason that he could not think of anything to say—couldn’t think of anything at all but how utterly perfect she was with her skin flushed pink from the heat of the hot tub and a deeper flush on her pretty face.

Her hair was piled on top of her head and loose tendrils curled about her cheeks. She was a luscious goddess, and he wanted nothing more than to drop to his knees in front of her to worship her bounteous beauty with his mouth and explore every secret place on her body with his tongue.

He was jolted from his sexual haze by the sound of her clipped voice.

‘Would you please pass me another towel? There’s a pile of clean towels on the shelf outside the sauna room,’ she said when he didn’t move, just stared at her while he tried to control the conflagration of lust that burned down to his bones.

‘Jarek, for heaven’s sake—I’m freezing.’

He couldn’t tear his gaze from the prominent points of her nipples, clearly outlined beneath her clingy swimsuit. His mouth went dry as he imagined peeling the swimsuit from her breasts to feast his eyes and then his lips on those provocative peaks.