Instinctive Male (6 page)

Yet the affection between Ellie and Tanya couldn’t be dismissed, not the smoothing of her hands on the child’s hair, the kiss on her rosy cheek, the snuggling against her, as if the girl gave her comfort. Children often comforted, just by being near and sweet.

Thoughts of Ellie pushed against him as unrelentingly as the ocean waves rolled against the pier.

Seagulls gleamed ghostly white in the fog, settling in to watch the man prowling the pier. In the off-season, he was alone.

Mikhail inhaled the salty, frigid air and scanned the fog sliding along the shoreline. He’d grown up here, wild and free, digging for razor clams with Jarek, netting Dungeness crabs and selling them.

Other than the few Stepanov furniture workers, the employment opportunities had been slight in the small oceanside community then, but now, the Amoteh Resort brought tourists and work. Trinny, a bold, big woman with a brood of growing children, was even now placing the Amoteh’s strawberry logo on cups to be used in the resort and sold in the gift shop. In the summer, the pier’s shops would be filled with tourist goods, keepsakes to remind them of their visit. The air would smell of excitement, salt and clam chowder; the sounds of vacationing families mixing with that of the townspeople running the shops.

Ed and Bliss, Jarek’s in-laws, would be happy hawking worry stones and tie-dyed T-shirts.

And by summer, Leigh, his wife, would be showing off the baby to be born next month. Leigh was round and glowing, and both fearful and happy. Jarek watched her every move. According to their mother, Stepanov men were excellent “hoverers” and spoiled their wives without caution.

Mikhail would never know how it felt to hover and spoil a pregnant wife. He fought the clench of bitterness that his own child had been destroyed before its first breath. He wondered when that emptiness would leave. The need to have children and a home ran deep in the traditional Stepanov males, and Mikhail had used the resort to fill that need.

He shrugged slightly within his peacoat and tugged the collar higher against the damp cold. He had what he wanted—the success of the Amoteh.

If he protected Ellie and Tanya, gave them shelter, he could lose everything he’d worked for, endangering the resort and the people he loved.

The boards creaked beneath his feet; an icicle broke free from a shop, shattering on the ice and snow that would quickly melt with the warmth predicted for the day. The fog stirred, and out of it came a man as tall and powerfully built as Mikhail. “Jarek.”

The brothers stood together as men, bound by blood and boyhood, watching the day light, skimming the shore, the seagulls already searching for fresh food on the shoreline.

“Dinner at the folks’ was good last night,” Jarek said quietly.

“Um.” Mikhail sensed his younger brother picking through words, and he sensed that at the end of the trail there would be Ellie.

“Stroganoff. Lots of cookies…those little gingersnaps filled with raspberry jam that Dad likes. Apparently Tanya and Mom have a baking thing going. Ellie was too quiet. She’s waiting for something, and at each sound she looked toward the door, as if expecting the only missing member of our family—you. She’s tired and afraid, too afraid, as if
she’s run on nerves for a long time. She never let that show to the girl, though. From her clothes and that car, I’d say she’s down on her luck. The heiress of the Lathrop fortune, down on her luck. Makes you wonder why she’s here, doesn’t it?”

Mikhail sighed. His family wanted to know why he’d missed his favorite meal. The chosen emissary was Jarek.

“She’s a disaster, you know. She has been since I met her in Paul’s Seattle office almost eleven years ago. About five years ago, she fouled a big business deal for Mignon International. They were set to buy a high-priced piece of land for a resort near Cannes. The contract had been negotiated and renegotiated. Ellie knew the terms and Paul’s plans to build on the part of the property he needed, split the rest and sell it off at premium prices. The seller decided to split it himself and squashed the deal. If Ellie’s around, there is trouble.”

Jarek’s shoulder nudged Mikhail’s. “You’re brooding, so she’s evidently troubling you, big brother. She stayed in the showroom last night. Georgia said you’d fixed a tray for her that evening, and ordered one this morning. There were two cups used.”

“Georgia talks too much.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re afraid Ellie will run. Before coming here, you stopped at the house just long enough to lift the hood of her car. I’d say it’s not going anywhere for a while. Could it be that she’s got your motor revved?”

“Not a chance,” Mikhail lied to avoid his younger brother’s teasing. Younger brothers had a way of taunting and paying back. “Lay off. How’s Leigh?” Mikhail asked to waylay Jarek and the knowing grin spreading across his face.

The grin turned into a soft woozy smile of an expectant father. “Cute. Beautiful. More than beautiful. I love her. She is my life,” Jarek finished simply and looked out over the tide frothing nearby and across the ocean’s black swells as if longing for her.

He held up a sack with the Amoteh’s logo and the grin widened. “Leigh’s favorite breakfast—strawberry jam and sardines and buttermilk. I had to raid Georgia’s pantry. We’re out and we’re having breakfast at the folks’ this morning. I’m holding out for Mom’s blueberry pancakes.”

In the other direction loomed the narrow passage of water necessary to reach Strawberry Hill, a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific. When the tide was up, Deadman’s Rock marked the passage and Strawberry Hill could only be reached by boat, or the curving roundabout road by land.

Jarek’s brief look toward Deadman’s Rock said he remembered his first wife, who believed in the curse, and who had died, in love with the chieftain. Yet Leigh had traveled the same stretch of water, and Deadman’s Rock had not taken her life. She had danced before Kamakani’s grave, a woman who knew her own heart and who would protect those she loved.

“Ellie wants my help. If I give it, I’ll endanger the Amoteh,” Mikhail said quietly, wanting his brother to know why he brooded. “Paul won’t be happy.”

Jarek nodded. “You’ll do what you think is right. You always have. She’s chosen you because you’re a match for Paul.”

“Yes. But she’s trouble. I’ve seen her in action.”

“She trusts you. You are a man to trust. And she disturbs you. I’ve seen it before, at the opening of the Amoteh. She sets you off and you her. I was enjoying flirting with her, but you were in her sights. Ellie wanted to take you down. She’s not like JoAnna, Mikhail. She’s got a heart and she’s a natural mother. Her entire world is that little girl.”

Mikhail shook his head. “There’s too much at stake. But I’m thinking.”

He was thinking about Ellie, about touching her and taking her to fill the sharp need within him now.

It was only a need, Mikhail thought as Jarek nodded and moved silently off into the fog, eager to return to his wife.

The tide frothed and ebbed against the sand as Mikhail
stood locked in his thoughts. Then a slender figure delicately picked its way around the driftwood logs, down to the shore and he found himself moving toward Ellie and trouble.

“Ellie.” Her name was a flat statement on Mikhail’s lips, not a greeting, as if she were on his problem list and had to be solved. Even before he spoke, she’d known he was near—her body had tensed, the hair on her nape rising. She shivered within her light jacket, the hood up over her hair.

Chilled in her damp jeans and canvas shoes, she kept her gaze locked on the dark swells, the white line of foam marking the bridge between water and land, the seagulls hunting for food, sandpipers scurrying here and there. Clumps of seaweed on the beach almost seemed alive and moving as the water slid through them.

The sound of the waves and the fog marked an eerie time, a lonely one, and a reckoning with a hope that couldn’t be reality. Mikhail wasn’t likely to endanger everything he had worked for, or the income of people depending on them. Last evening at the Stepanovs, she understood how vital the community had become, lives affected by Mikhail’s resort, the tourists it brought.

She’d been crying in the lonely hour, letting her fears envelop her. She didn’t want him to see her weakness; she’d exposed enough of herself already. He was enough like Paul to move in to pick over the pieces and find the most tender, raw ache of a loving parent.
She couldn’t provide for her child.

Ellie could feel Mikhail behind her, the warmth of his body, the intimacy of the fog wrapping around them. “We can’t stay here. I have to find work, and I won’t be responsible for keeping you from your family by staying there. Whatever you might think of me, I don’t live off other people. I paid my dues with Paul. I practically raised Hillary for him, and I didn’t do a very good job. And so help me, I still love her and I’m fighting to keep Tanya
from being messed up like my sister and myself. So I’m not feeling up to you this morning, Mikhail.”

“Shut up.” The command was unexpected, fierce.

She turned on him, hands clenched into fists. “You’re so like him.”

“Am I?” His answer was too quiet, so quiet, she could hear water drip from a stack of driftwood…plop, plop…

This morning, in the intimate dawn, he was even taller and more ominous than in his resort. A muscle clenched in his jaw, covered by stubble. His usually well groomed hair was waving, beaded with mist. His eyes were narrowed, dark gleaming pinpoints that burned her face, looked inside her fears and tore them out of her….

“I have to get work, Mikhail,” she said unsteadily. “I’m going to wire a friend for money—just enough to get us out of here. All I’m asking is two or three days in which you don’t call Paul.”

He was silent and she frowned. “I’m sorry that I’m too tired and on edge and that I can’t give Tanya what she needs, a wonderful home like your parents’, or like Jarek and Leigh’s. Not just now. But I will. I thought about it, and it just won’t work here. Hillary is one thing and Paul another, and together they are cruel, selfish people. I can’t risk what they could do to Tanya if you turned us in.”

Mikhail’s dark look took in her hunched shoulders and ripped down her body, heating it oddly, and then back up to her face. “You’re shivering and you’re wet.”

She laughed unsteadily, resenting the panic that had slipped through her. “Life has been hectic for the last six months. I had to have time to think this morning, Mikhail. Alone. You’re in my personal space, buddy. Shove off.”

“It’s a public beach, and not all that crowded either,” he said slowly, studying her.

He was standing too close and whatever pulsed hot and alive between them hitched up a notch until it burned Ellie’s skin and her senses tingled. “
You’re
crowding me.”

“There’s always that between us, isn’t there?” he asked quietly as if to himself.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

But she knew exactly. If Mikhail was within striking distance, she had to tear at him, taunt him, anything to shake through that control. “If you weren’t so afraid—”

Now the fog seemed to stop moving, and the world stilled around them. “Of what am I afraid?” he asked very slowly.

The need to lash out at him was too strong. Right now, she was on edge and frightened for Tanya, and regretting that she had stripped her pride for a man who wasn’t likely to help her. Ellie ripped off her jacket’s hood and lifted her face to the damp mist. She didn’t want to let him into her inner thoughts, especially concerning him. “Forget it.”

“I am not afraid of Paul.”

“I know. You’re a match for him. He admires you. That’s why I thought—”

The mist seemed to hover, still and alert between them as Mikhail spoke quietly, “Then, of what am I afraid?”

What did anything matter now that she had bared her fears to him and had asked him for help? She might as well serve him a reality check—her opinion of him as a sensitive man. “Look. Your love life is no concern of mine. I haven’t got time or energy for your problems. But here it is—you got married, you got hurt and now you’ve wrapped yourself up in that resort so you’ll never be touched by life—and love. Oh, you love your family, of course, but you’ve sworn off women. You’re afraid to get involved. Anyone can see that.”

“Can they?” Mikhail asked darkly, studying her with that close, burning intensity that seemed to make the sand shiver beneath her sodden shoes. The waves seemed to slow and stop, the fog still and intimate, and Ellie could only hear the sound of her quickening heartbeat.

Then with a rough, reluctant sigh, he tugged her to him
and took her mouth with enough heat to make her forget everything but taking as he was taking….

Mikhail’s lips were hard and open and savage and claiming and hot, so hot and fierce and possessive that Ellie arched up to meet him. Everything that she had sensed hidden beneath Mikhail’s sleek cold exterior was just beneath the surface, hot and real, and it was hers at last. She knew exactly why she had to fight him, to taunt him, to find this man, raw and true and strong within her arms. His passion was enough to burn away everything else.

He was just what she needed, as strong as she was, as fierce in his dark mood, the balance she needed to anchor her. He was big and hard and real and hungry.

Ellie sank into the hunger, the taste, the wild, free need to meet Mikhail, to capture him, to devour him—no gentle, sweet claiming, but a primitive reality of needs and heat. She pushed him away slightly, an instinctive feminine test to see how much the male desired, how much he would take in the game, the hunger, and Mikhail brought her closer.

Mikhail held her tight, just as she wanted, locked against him.

She found his hair with her fingers, gripping hard to hold him, to keep what she wanted close and hers.

Mikhail slanted his kiss, taking it deeper, one hand cupping her head, the other open and possessive on her body. The kiss was glorious, wild and free and strong. It was as if she were being devoured and returning the favor, as if the lid had been torn free from everything she wanted and all she had to do was take and take.