The Price of His Redemption

His legs came to the sides of hers, halting their progress to his hips. Still he thrust as he trapped her thighs in his.

She went to protest, but his mouth smothered hers.

She lay there immobile and let out a sob as his pelvis opened and aligned fully with hers, his length sliding in so deep, the friction of him so relentless she lay there pinned, trying to remember to breathe, then deciding she didn’t even need to because she was floating and sinking at the same time as he said something, presumably in Russian, presumably very bad, and he unloaded within her.

‘Oh...’ It was all she could manage.

It was an orgasm so deep that she cried.

Real tears.

And Libby, during a very difficult year, had refused to cry.

Best of all, he didn’t comfort her afterwards.

He simply let her be.

It was exceptional bliss.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘NYET.’

Daniil was half-asleep when her fingers set to work on his back.

‘Shut up,’ Libby said. She had promised herself a little dalliance with that back. ‘It’s my one-night stand, too.’

He frowned at her words for usually women were only too eager to please him and yet she made it sound as if she was pleasing herself.

Libby was.

As he rolled onto his stomach she climbed on and sat on his lower back and found herself in heaven.

His back was truly beautiful and his shoulders were just so wide that she could work for hours and never unravel all the knots, but feeling some of them dissolve beneath her fingers she carried on.

‘What was that?’ he asked as one minute in he realised it wasn’t some sensual massage he was getting but a deep-tissue one. Right into his deltoid her slender fingers burrowed.

‘You’ll be in agony the day after tomorrow,’ Libby promised. ‘And the next day, but maybe by Friday you’ll remember me fondly.’

Daniil did not like massage but her hands were so precise and expert that he let himself sink into it.

They were both in bliss.

Libby loved feeling his neck loosen and how he moaned with the pleasure of pain at times as she located a tense area. Down she slid and went to his buttocks and sustaining the pressure with her thumb did a muscle-stripping technique and he let out a small curse but did not tell her to stop.

In fact, he spoke, trusting her enough to let her get on as he asked her the question she hadn’t answered.

‘Why are you most unlike yourself tonight?’

Her hands paused for a moment and she found she was frowning as she worked out her answer. ‘Maybe I’m just working out who I am without...’

Libby didn’t finish. She didn’t need to; they both knew she had been consumed by the dancing world for a very long time. She pressed her palms into Daniil’s loins, lifting up a little so that more of her weight was on him, and shifted the conversation away from herself. ‘So why are you most unlike yourself tonight?’

Daniil gave a low laugh that she felt in her hands before he answered, ‘Because I’m still awake.’

She gave him a light slap between his right buttock and thigh for his response but she laughed, too, and they both paused a moment. She felt him shift a little to get comfortable, felt the resurgence of desire, but it wasn’t sex that drew her closer to him in that moment—it was the shared moment of laughter and being herself.

Her most honest self.

She turned her head and looked out of the window and never again would she look at even a photo of Big Ben without remembering her time with him.

Today was supposed to have been the hardest day.

She had been warming up, at home alone, when her father had rung.

It had been her first day without dance class and now, when all the white noise had gone, everything she’d told her family, her flatmate, her colleagues, her friends, herself even, hushed. There, twenty minutes before the close of the day, she watched the storm over London and thick drops of water sliding down the windows, and she told him the real reason behind leaving the dance company she had loved.

‘I jumped before I was pushed.’ Libby voiced her truth. ‘I wasn’t even getting the small roles anymore.’

He didn’t turn and kiss her, he didn’t dim the pain with sex, he just let her fingers work his back. ‘At least you jumped,’ Daniil said. ‘Most people have to be prised kicking and screaming from something they don’t want to let go of.’

‘That was almost me—I took forever to read the writing on the wall,’ she admitted. ‘I should have gone six months, maybe a year ago but I clung on to the bitter end. I’m crap at dignified exits—I can’t even end a text conversation gracefully, let alone my career.’