Taming the Big Bad Billionaire

‘Ella,’ he warned. ‘If you try to keep all that in—’

‘I don’t think you want to know. Truly,’ she ground out.

‘I know how damaging anger can be. How it can scorch you from the inside out and twist every last good thing in you and make you dark, make you...vengeful.’ And suddenly it was the most important thing to him. He wanted, needed, to hear whatever it was she had to say, because it was killing him to see the beautiful, innocent, joyful young woman so tormented.

‘It’s perfect. It’s absolutely everything I ever wanted. Everything that I never knew I wanted until I met a man in the woods and he offered me a future I had yet to realise I desperately sought.’

* * *

She turned away from him, trying to hide the overwhelming ache that beat in her chest. An ache borne from the past, into the present and a future she now feared she’d never have. But Roman was right, she did need to find the words to explain...to release this overwhelming hurt.

‘I was young when I lost my parents. Five. Too young to articulate what I was feeling, too young to understand Vladimir when he tried to explain that my parents were never coming back. That I’d be living with him now. Too young to understand why everything hurt and why I could not stop playing with the doll’s house and the small wooden figures of two parents and a child. Why in my mind I had them eat dinner together every day. Why the mother and father used to tuck their child into bed each night and read her stories.

‘As much as you might hate to hear it, Vladimir did look after me, but mostly he was focused on material needs. And then with my grandmother... Summers with her were magical. Truly. But she was an older woman—she had raised her child and had buried her. She loved me completely, but she wasn’t exactly a suitable companion for a child. I spent more time in the woods alone, looking for fairies, hiding in the bushes, running after birds and the rabbits. I was...’ Ella twisted her hands before her, unaccountably ashamed of admitting her loneliness as if it were a mark against her perfect grandmother. ‘I was isolated. There were no children to play with, all of them already with school friends or away for their own summer holidays.’

And somewhere in those months, those long stretching summer days, she had formed an idea of her future. One that she now both had and didn’t have. She turned back to Roman, who was watching her, his usually bright eyes a deeper stormy blue.

‘When I met my fiancé in the woods he offered me everything I had always wanted. Companionship, someone to confide in, someone with whom I could have the very thing I’d always wanted, ever since it had been ripped away from me at the age of five. A home, a family.

‘You, Roman. You offered me my fantasy and this? This is too close and yet so far from what I wanted.’

‘Fantasies aren’t real.’

‘Like your fantasy of revenge?’ she couldn’t help but taunt. ‘It’s not the house, Roman. It’s the fact that after all these years, all the things I wanted...it’s so nearly there, but I can’t help but feel that I’m going to be just as lonely as I once was in the woods. Just as lonely in this perfect house.’

She dared to cast a look at him then, hoping beyond hope that he’d reassure her, that he’d have words and compassion to make all her fears disappear. His whole body stilled—as if he were made of marble, as if he too realised how important his answer would be, what she was really asking him, the truth behind her words, the question.

‘Ella,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I don’t want to make promises I cannot keep.’ She huffed out a cynical breath, and he pushed on. ‘There have clearly been enough of those between us. But you are pregnant with my child. You are my wife. You are not in this alone, not if you don’t choose to be. When I am not in this house I will be at the other end of the phone any time, any time you need me. I’ll fly back in a heartbeat if you desire it. And if you feel that my business in Russia takes me too much away from you then we will visit that if and when you choose. But Ella, that is not what is really upsetting you,’ he stated with determined simplicity, the glints of gold in his eyes firing against the blue. As if he were made of the stuff. As if he had steeled himself for an answer he already knew.

She cursed and stalked from the room, paying no heed to the lithe graceful strides that caught up to her in a heartbeat, her exit halted by the hand at her wrist, spinning her back round to almost crash against the hard chest looming over her.

‘No. It’s not,’ she said, finally owning up to the truth of what she really feared in that moment. ‘It’s you,’ she said, punctuating the statement with a strike against his powerful chest. ‘I don’t trust you. You took away the only solid, stable things I had in my life. You took away a loving guardian and replaced him with a Machiavellian monster, uncaring, unfeeling and manipulative. You took away the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, a man I had fallen in love with, a man I shared my hopes and dreams for a future with. How on earth am I supposed to believe that you won’t take this away from me now? How am I supposed to trust you?’

* * *

Roman wanted to argue with his wife’s words, deny them as lies, but couldn’t. She had been badly used by both Vladimir and himself. And while he’d tried to explain it to himself as just, as necessary for his pursuit of revenge, with the damage from his actions clear to see before him, he could no longer fight the awful truth of what he had done. That all the power and incredible self-possession he had seen the night they had conceived their child had been a thin layer of newly formed defence against the deeper devastation he had wrought on this extraordinary woman. He cursed himself to hell and back, lashing himself mentally with a thousand different painful thoughts. But this wasn’t about him, not here and now. It was about Ella. And what she needed.

‘I wanted to show you, with this house, that you can have whatever you want most in the world.’

‘But that is the problem. You know what it is that I want because you got the truth out of me when we were engaged...and I did not do the same. You know me, but I don’t know you. All I know is that you have taken decisions that I would want to have made myself away from me. You have...’

‘Taken away your freedom.’

She nodded sadly as she bit into the lower lip he wanted for himself and then castigated himself once again for his inappropriate wayward thoughts.

‘I am not used to having others to think of,’ he admitted roughly. ‘So much of my life has been lived under my own direction, my own decisions. But that will change. I do understand why you feel this way. And I know that I am the cause of it. But, if you let me, I will prove that you can trust me. I will not take those decisions away from you again. I promise you that.’ He held her gaze with his, determined to allow her to see the truth, the honesty of his words, hoping beyond all hope that he could honour that promise.

‘And you are right. I did see the truth of you before. Not just the innocence and naivety I once taunted you with, but the strength of a woman who cared deeply about her grandmother. So much so that she would put her own dreams on hold. A woman determined not to rely on the money provided by her guardian and father, who would not fritter it away on silly ephemeral comforts but create a business that would provide much needed support for charities throughout the globe. And even after events that would have cowed a great many other people, a woman who found her own strength and determination to ask for what she wanted, to demand what she was due. And that woman was incredible to me. Empowered and enthralling enough to make me beg her to take what she wanted from me and leave me wanting more. A woman who will make the most wonderful mother, caring, honest and with an integrity that leaves me ashamed,’ he admitted.

‘But you have to decide whether you can trust me. Because, if you don’t, then you will never stop second-guessing me and it will drive you mad,’ he concluded. Just like it had driven Roman almost mad in those first few months after his mother’s death—wondering, questioning whether he could have done something—anything more to save her. He could not, and would not, allow Ella to live under such a damaging weight.

He produced the keys to the house from his pocket. ‘This is the only set of keys to this house. The deeds are in your name and no one else’s. It is yours. Completely. You can do with it what you will. Sell it, rent it, keep it.’ He pressed the keys into her hands. ‘I’ll wait outside until you’re ready to leave.’

* * *

Ella felt the loss of him from the house as something physical. The hurt, angry part of her cried that she would never be able to trust him. But the softer yearning part of her looked about a house almost made from her dreams and hoped. Roman was right. She had to stop. She had to draw a line under the past if they had any hope of the future.

As Roman had painted the picture of her as he had seen her, Ella had wavered, wanting to be all that he described. Hoping that he was speaking the truth and feeling something unfurl within her, reaching to be that pe