Harlequin Presents January 2015 Box Set 1 of 2(255)

He should never have given in to his desire, should have fought it harder. And now he had to hurt a woman who had already been through too much pain. But the alternative would only cause her far more.

‘Emily, I’m sorry; you and I can never be together.’ He needed to spell it out to her. He didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings. She deserved the truth.

That familiar groove appeared.

‘I need you to understand. It isn’t you. It’s me.’

Now her features darkened, her lips thinning, her shoulders hunching together.

‘I know that’s a line a lot of men use, but in this case it’s the truth.’ He reached out to capture a lock of ebony hair. She flinched away from him, stepping back. ‘Emily, we can return to Europe and pick up where we leave off here—enjoy each other’s company and have fantastic sex—but nothing can ever come of it. We have no future. I can’t give you a future.’

‘How do you know that?’ she whispered.

‘Because I can’t give you the babies you want.’

She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I don’t recall us ever discussing children.’

‘We didn’t need to. I know you and I know family is everything to you.’ He remembered the light in her face when she’d been swinging little Ava in the air. If there was a woman made to be a mother, this woman was it. ‘I know you want children, and one day you will have them, but I can’t be the man to give them to you. I almost destroyed my ex-fiancée over it and I won’t destroy you too.’

Emily loosened her arms, a questioning frown appearing.

‘Yana and I were together for years,’ he said, needing to help her understand. ‘She’d always wanted children—we both did—so when we became engaged we thought it be best I get tested. I’d always known I could be sterile but I needed to be sure before we made that final commitment.’ He shook his head, remembering how the results had knocked him sideways.

While he had always known he could be sterile, he’d never truly believed that he was. He’d come out the other end of treatment physically unscathed, so how could life throw him this at so late a turn?

It was as if fate had turned around and stuck a fork in him for daring to hope he could have a future with a family of his own.

‘For two years I watched her suffer and turn into a shell of herself.’ His voice had become hoarse. ‘I would cringe to hear about any of her friends and family becoming pregnant, knowing it was another knife in her heart. But I thought I should be enough for her, that her yearning for a baby was something she should just forget about for my sake.’

‘Couldn’t you have adopted?’

‘That’s what Yana suggested, but I’m afraid adoption is not a route I will go down.’

‘Your father adopted you,’ she pointed out softly.

‘And wasn’t I made to know it? Hardly a day went by when Marat didn’t rub my nose in the fact that he shared Andrei’s blood and I didn’t, that I was the cuckoo in the Plushenko nest. Andrei himself used the fact of Marat being his blood to undermine my point of view about bringing him onto the board at Plushenko’s.’ He raised his shoulders. ‘I can’t do that to a child. I won’t see another person suffer for their blood not being the same as the family they live with.’

‘How ridiculous.’

Whatever reaction he’d expected from Emily, scorn most definitely was not it.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he refuted tightly.

‘Rubbish. You have your mother’s blood for a start—’

‘Which meant nothing to her when she took Andrei and Marat’s side.’

‘You put her in an impossible situation. What was she supposed to do? Tell you that your irrationality was justified? I don’t care what your father said, I’m certain he never meant it in the way you took it. He worked his fingers to the bone to keep you alive. If that isn’t love then I don’t know what is. For goodness’ sake, he even got his hands on black market copies of Top Cat for you to watch when you were too weak to do anything else. Blood doesn’t come into it.’

Her words were like tiny barbs being thrown at his skin, all landing straight in his chest. It took all his control to stop his hands from shaking.

He’d always been able to temper his anger but now...now he could feel it slipping.

She’d done this to him. He didn’t know how or why but Emily pushed buttons in him that no one else could even find.

‘You think because we’ve made love that you have a right to tell me how I should feel, is that it?’