There would be time for thinking later. Later, when he had to sit across a desk from her at Drake Diamonds and not reach for her. Later, when all eyes were on the two of them and he’d have to pretend he hadn’t been inside her. Later, when he walked into his office and saw the portrait of his father.
He wasn’t Geoffrey Drake. Artem may have crossed a line, but that didn’t make him his father. He refused to let himself believe such a thing. Especially not now, with Ophelia’s golden mane spilled over his pillow and her heart beating softly against his.
He let his gaze travel the length of her body, taking its fill. Arousal pulsed through him. Fast and hard. What had gotten into him? She’d reduced him to a randy teenager. Insatiable.
He should let her rest awhile. And should remove the pointe shoes from her feet so she could walk come morning.
He slipped out of bed, trying not to wake her, and gingerly took one of her feet in his hands. He untied the ribbon from around her ankle, and the pink satin slipped like water through his fingers. As gently as he could, he slid the shoe off her foot. She let out a soft sigh, but within seconds her beautiful breasts once again rose and fell with the gentle rhythm of sleep.
Artem cradled the pointe shoe in his hands for a moment, marveling at how something so lovely and delicate in appearance could support a woman standing on the tips of her toes. He closed his eyes and remembered Ophelia moving and turning across his living room. Poetry in motion.
He opened his eyes, set her shoe down on the bedside table and went to work removing the other one. It slipped off as quietly and easily as the first.
As he turned to place it beside its mate he caught a glimpse of something inside. Script that looked oddly like handwriting. He took a closer look, folding back the edges of pink satin to expose the shoe’s inner arch.
Sure enough, someone had written something there.
Giselle, June 1. Ophelia Baronova’s final performance.
Artem grew very still.
Ophelia Baronova?
Ophelia.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. That he knew with the utmost certainty. It wasn’t exactly a commonplace name. 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.