The Throne He Must Take
Her eyes were drawn to that strip of bare torso, covered with a fuzz of dark blond hair that disappeared beneath his trousers, and heat swept through her as her wayward imagination pictured where the hairs grew more thickly...around the base of his manhood.
His voice jolted her from her thoughts, and she flushed, praying he had not guessed her wanton imaginings.
‘While I am touched by your desire to save me,’ he drawled, ‘I can’t help wondering if your concern is more about proving to Professor Heppel that he was justified in offering you a job at his clinic. Gunther mentioned that you were only recently appointed at the Frieden Clinic.’
‘Believe it or not, I care about doing a good job and I genuinely want to help you.’ She tried to ignore her guilt that there was an element of truth in his words.
To her relief he said no more as he picked up his jacket and followed her out of the bar. A tense silence filled the four-by-four while she drove them to Chalet Soline, and she could think of nothing to say to lighten his mood—which had become grimmer still when they arrived at the alpine lodge and were greeted by Karl.
The chef-butler ushered them into the wood-panelled sitting room, where a fire was blazing in the hearth and deep leather sofas piled with colourful cushions created a sense of stylish informality. Jarek gave a cursory glance at his surroundings as he crossed to one of the tall windows and stared out at the dark winter’s night.
‘It goes without saying that I will hold everything you choose to tell me during our sessions in absolute confidence,’ Holly said quietly as she watched him prowl around the room.
He was like a caged wolf, simmering with silent fury. She was surprised he wasn’t showing any obvious signs of being drunk, even though he had consumed enough vodka to render him unconscious. Thankfully he hadn’t staggered out of Bibiana’s Bar—or, worse, needed to be carried out to the car by burly security staff. She did not want Professor Heppel to find out that her client had been caught drinking in a bar within an hour of checking into the Frieden Clinic.
‘I hope you will be comfortable at Chalet Soline. Karl is an excellent chef, and the maid, Beatrice, will take care of the house. I’ll show you up to the master suite. You’ll probably want to take some time to settle in and freshen up before you meet Professor Heppel this evening.’
She dared not suggest that he might need to sober up, but the hard gleam in his eyes told her he had understood perfectly well what she’d meant.
‘I don’t need a nursemaid or a babysitter.’
He crossed the room in long strides and halted in front of her, so close that she breathed in the spicy scent of his aftershave and her senses went haywire.
‘And I definitely do not need a prissy, much too pretty psychologist to patronise me.’
Holly was disgusted with herself for the way her heart leapt at his offhand compliment. Flirting was second nature to him, she reminded herself. He hadn’t singled her out specially, and she would not respond to the blazing heat in his eyes.
‘I know what you need,’ he drawled, his voice lowering so that it became wickedly suggestive and sent a shiver of reaction down her spine.
She arched her brows. ‘Enlighten me.’
He gave a wolfish smile. ‘You need to buy a bigger blouse.’
Holly followed his gaze down her body and was mortified to see that a button on her blouse had popped open and her lacy bra was showing. Blushing hotly, she attempted to refasten the blouse, but Jarek moved faster and his knuckles brushed the upper slopes of her breasts as he slid the button into the buttonhole.
The brief touch of his skin on hers made her tremble. Goosebumps rose on her flesh and her nipples jerked to attention. The mocking gleam in Jarek’s eyes dared her to make the excuse again that she was cold, now they were inside the warm chalet.
She was tempted to wipe the smug smile off his face with the sharp impact of her palm against his jaw, but managed to restrain herself from behaving so unprofessionally.
He swung away from her and raked a hand though his hair, almost as if he had been as shocked by the bolt of electricity that had shot between them as she had.
His manner changed and he said abruptly, ‘Is there a room that I can use for an office? I want to get on with some work.’
‘There’s a small study along the hall. But you are supposed to be using your stay at the Frieden Clinic as a retreat from the stresses of your everyday life—and that includes taking a break from work so that you can focus on exploring your emotions.’
Jarek gave her a sardonic look. ‘My company, Dvorska Holdings, employs several hundred people. I am also the executive director of a charity, and take an active role in the day-to-day running of the organisation. I can’t abandon my responsibilities to my staff—or to the great number of volunteers who give up their time to support Lorna’s Gift.’
He laughed softly.
‘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
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.
Somehow he forced himself to turn and walk into the house, and he grabbed a towel before retracing his steps back across the decking.
Holly held out her hand for the towel, but Jarek did not pass it to her immediately. ‘First let your hair down,’ he growled.
‘Are you kidding?’ Her brown eyes widened.
There was shock, anger and something else that was harder to define but made him ache even more, in her expression.
‘Do you want me to catch pneumonia?’
She didn’t wait for him to reply—which was probably a good thing, he acknowledged, because he would have to admit that what he wanted was her legs wrapped around his back.
Throwing him a look of sheer irritation, she lifted her hands up and released the clip on top of her head so that her hair tumbled down around her shoulders in glossy waves of rich chocolate-brown. ‘Satisfied?’
He doubted he would ever be satisfied again with the too thin, too blonde, brittle women who came and went from his bed in an endless stream of unmemorable sexual encounters. They always came, he thought sardonically. He was as good at sex as he was at making money, yet neither activity ever filled the emptiness inside him.
Finally he heeded his common sense, aware that indulging his sexual desire for Holly might satisfy him temporarily but that he would soon grow bored of her. It was just how he was: ‘a restless soul’, Mama had once described him, while his adoptive father had accused him of being reckless. Ralph had been proved right.
He gave Holly the towel and she immediately dragged it around her shoulders to hide her gorgeous body from him before she stepped out of the hot tub and stalked back to the chalet.
Jarek caught up with her in a few long strides. ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded, placing his hand on her arm to prevent her walking through the door that led from the gym annexe into the main part of the house.
‘Where else would I be?’ She tensed beneath his hand and with obvious reluctance raised her eyes to his face.
‘I assumed you had gone to wherever you live. Do you rent a place in Salzburg? Or is there staff accommodation at the Frieden Clinic, where we met earlier?’
She frowned. ‘I live here—at Chalet Soline. When I’m in London I share a flat with a friend, but for my job with the Frieden Clinic I am required to live at one of the clinic’s residences so that I can provide psychological support around the clock. Every member of the clinical team is assigned to a chalet, where they treat patients on an individual basis. Professor Heppel came up with the radical approach of providing access to twenty-four-seven treatment, rather than sessions which last for an hour once or twice a week. His highly successful method is explained in the brochure that you didn’t bother to read—and I also explained the set-up when I met you at the clinic’s reception centre earlier today. But you seemed more interested in reading a story in the newspaper than listening to me.’
Holly’s disapproving tone reminded Jarek of the headmistress who had expelled him from his exclusive private school at the age of fifteen, after he had been caught smuggling alcohol into the school and selling it to the other boys. He had argued that his business venture had shown entrepreneurial spirit, but the headmistress had warned that his rebellious nature would ultimately be his ruin.
He thought of the newspaper headline that had seized his attention when he had arrived at the Frieden Clinic.
What did happen to Vostov’s royal children?
Jarek feared the answer was buried in his subconscious mind, and that his nightmares might reveal a truth that was too shocking for him to contemplate. Certainly he could not risk Holly hearing him shout out in his sleep, as had happened on one of the rare occasions when he had spent a whole night with a woman he had picked up in a bar.
The next morning Tara... Tyra—he hadn’t taken much heed of her name—had said he’d kept her awake with his shouting and maybe he should talk to a psychiatrist or something about the crazy stuff in his head.
Jarek’s chosen method of preventing his bad dreams was to drink enough vodka until he was unconscious. But without access to alcohol God knew what his nightmares might reveal.
He realised that Holly was speaking again. ‘I believe you will find it beneficial to be able to discuss issues with your therapist whenever you need to, instead of having to wait for an allotted time for treatment sessions. If you want to talk to me in the middle of the night you can ring through to my room and wake me up. Part of my job is to be available whenever you want me.’
‘Is that so...?’
Jarek felt the hard thud of his pulse and knew he had to resist it—had to resist her. There was a curious innocence about Holly that made him want to protect her from himself.
‘There is only one reason why I would wake you in the middle of the night, angel-face,’ he drawled, ‘and it wouldn’t be because I want to talk.’
He watched a scarlet stain spread over her face and wondered when he had last seen a woman blush. For a few seconds he felt a tug of regret, because he could not allow this shimmering, ephemeral thing between them that was something other than sexual attraction—something more—to flourish. He was who he was: reckless, rebellious, with a knack of destroying everything that was good in his life.
‘There you go again with the sexual innuendo.’ She put her head on one side and studied him intently. ‘Are you trying to frighten me? Because I have to tell you that you aren’t succeeding.’
‘You should be afraid of me,’ he said roughly. ‘I am everything you have read about me and worse.’ He wanted to shout at her that he didn’t deserve the sympathy he could see in her velvet brown eyes. His jaw clenched. ‘This is a complication I don’t need right now.’
She wrinkled her nose and Jarek swore silently. He didn’t do cute, his brain insisted, but his body paid no attention.
‘What do you mean by “this”? she asked, looking puzzled.
He stretched out his hand and jerked the edges of the towel she was clutching around her from her fingers. With a cry of protest she tried to snatch it back, but he whipped it away from her body and trailed his eyes with slow deliberation over her skimpy swimsuit. Desire kicked hard in his gut as he stared at her lush breasts, half-spilling over the top of the swimsuit, and the hard points of her nipples that betrayed her so sweetly.