Besides, it explained why the shoes had fit. How she’d known she could dance in them. On some level, he’d known all along. Tonight hadn’t been some strange balletic Cinderella episode. These were Ophelia’s shoes. They always had been.
It explained so much, and at the same time, it raised more questions.
He studied the sublimely beautiful woman in his bed. Who was she? Who was she really?
He fixed his gaze once again on the words carefully inscribed in the shoe.
Baronova.
Why did that name ring a bell?
“I can explain.” Artem looked up and found Ophelia holding the sheet over her breasts, watching him with a guarded expression. Her gaze dropped to the shoe that held her secrets. “It was my stage name. It’s a family name, but my actual name is Ophelia Rose. I didn’t falsify my employment application, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Her employment application? Did she think he was worried about what she’d written on a piece of paper at Drake Diamonds, while she was naked in his bed?
“I don’t give a damn about your employment application, Ophelia.” He hated how terrified she looked all of a sudden. Like he might fire her on the spot, which was absurd. He wasn’t Dalton, for crying out loud.
“It’s just—” she swallowed “—complicated.”
Artem looked at her for a long moment, then positioned the shoe beside the other one on the nightstand and sat next to her on the bed. He could deal with complicated. He and complicated were lifelong friends.
He cradled her face in his hands and kissed her, slowly, reverently, until the sheets slipped away and she was bared to him.
This was how he wanted her. Exposed. Open.
He didn’t need for her to tell him everything. It was enough to have this—this stolen moment, her radiant body, her passionate spirit. He didn’t give a damn about her name. Of all people, Artem knew precisely how little a name really meant.
“Please,” she whispered against his lips. “Don’t tell anyone. Please.”
“I won’t,” he breathed, cupping her breasts and lowering his head to take one of her nipples in a gentle, openmouthed kiss. She was so impossibly soft.
Tender and vulnerable.
As her breathing grew quicker, she wrapped her willowy legs around his waist and reached for him. “Please, Artem. I need you to...”
“I promise.” He slid his hands over her back and pulled her close. Her thighs spread wider, and she began to stroke him. Slow and easy. Achingly so.
She felt delicate in his embrace. As small and fragile as a music-box dancer. But it was the desperation in her voice that was an arrow to his heart.
It nearly killed him.
Which was the only explanation for what came slipping out next. “I’m not really a Drake, Ophelia.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he realized the gravity of what he’d done. He’d never confessed that truth to another living soul.
He should take it back. Now, before it was too late.
He didn’t. Instead, he braced for her reaction, not quite realizing he was holding his breath, waiting for her to stop touching him, exploring him...until she didn’t stop. She kept caressing him as her eyes implored him. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m a bastard,” he said. “In the truest sense of the word.”
“Don’t.” She kissed him, and there was acceptance in her kiss, in the intimate way she touched him. Acceptance that Artem hadn’t even realized he needed. “Don’t call yourself that.”
His father had used that word often enough. Once he’d found out about Artem’s existence, that is. “My real mother worked at Drake Diamonds. She was a cleaning woman. She died when I was five years old. Then I went to live in the Drake mansion.”
Dalton had been eight years old, and his sister Diana had been six. Overnight, Artem had found himself in a family of strangers.
Wouldn’t the tabloids have a field day with that information? It was the big, whopping family secret. And after keeping it hidden for his entire life, he’d just willingly disclosed it to a woman he’d known for a fortnight.
“Oh, Artem.” Her lips brushed the corner of his mouth and her hands kept moving, kept stroking.
And there was comfort in the pleasure she offered. Comfort and release.
Artem didn’t know her story. He didn’t have to. Ophelia was no stranger to loss. Her pain lived in the sapphire depths of her eyes. He could see it. She understood. Maybe that was even part of what drew him toward her. Perhaps the imposter in her had recognized the imposter in him.
But he couldn’t help being curious. Why the secrecy?
Slow down. Talk things through.
But he didn’t want to slow down. Couldn’t.
“Kitten,” he murmured, his breath growing ragged as he moved his hands up the supple arch of her spine.
She was so soft. So feminine. Like rose petals. And she felt so perfect in his arms that he didn’t want to revisit the past anymore. It no longer felt real.
Ophelia was the present, and she was real. Nothing was as authentic as the way she danced. Reality was the swell of her breasts against his chest. It was her tender voice as she whispered in his ear. It was her warm, wet center.
Then there were no more words, no more confessions. She was guiding him into her, taking him fully inside. All of him. His body, his need, his truths.
His past. His present.
Everything he was and everything he’d ever been.
* * *
He didn’t know what time it was when he finally heard the buzzing of his cell phone from inside the pocket of his tuxedo jacket, still in a heap on the floor. Pink opalescent light streamed through the windows, and he could hear police sirens and the rumble of taxicabs down below. The music of a Manhattan morning.
Artem wanted nothing more than to kiss his way down Ophelia’s body and wake her in the manner she so deserved, but before he could move a muscle the phone buzzed again. Then again.
And yet again.
Artem sighed mightily, slid out of bed and reached for his tuxedo jacket. He fished his phone from the pocket and frowned when he caught his first glimpse of the screen. Twenty-nine missed calls.
Every last one of them was from his brother.
Bile rose to the back of his throat as he remembered the last time Dalton had blown up his phone like this. That had been two months ago, the night of their father’s heart attack. By the time Artem had returned Dalton’s calls, Geoffrey Drake had been dead
