It really was true that the less you did, the less you felt like doing. Sabrina was living like a sybarite in paradise, but she could barely remember a time when she had less energy. Yes, Vlad kept her awake into the wee hours every night. Her lower body clenched then flooded with remembered sensation, and she felt her breasts tighten with just the thought of the night before. Even lying on a lounger out of the sun with Vlad nowhere in sight, she could feel his warmth and craved more of what only he could give her.
What did that make her? She had ceased wondering, had resolved to live in the moment because the end of this time together was fast approaching. She didn’t truly know how she would cope when Vlad went back full time to his empire and she became an accessory to his existence. Because when she allowed herself to think about it, she panicked.
In her mind’s eye, she could see a return to endless days of late work nights or worse—more weeks when Vlad simply absented himself from the penthouse and stayed at his club.
She hung onto the fact that he said they would live together. She also counted on the fact that the sexual chemistry between them never seemed to wane.
And there were so many moments, whole days and nights even, to cherish. Vlad had been a perfect guide, touring with her and Alex through the hidden spaces on the Amalfi Coast, taking them in the dinghy to a gorgeous, unknown cove for a picnic, or some fantastic lunch in a tiny trattoria on a side street of Positano.
Sometimes, when Alex went to sleep for the night, they traveled by dinghy to Ravello or Sorrento to hillside bistros or boutique hotels for dinner, places only Vlad knew of or could get into.
After the blissful nights they shared, it was always disconcerting to awaken in an empty bed every morning, as she had back in the penthouse. But the single time Sabrina had protested it, Vlad said that when they were in bed together he never wanted to sleep, and Sabrina thought with a stab of heat deep in her core, true enough. And then she recalled the nightmare he had back in Long Island during the storm and wondered if they plagued him often and if those nightmares had anything to do with his decision to sleep apart from her. Even as she told herself she should understand, she knew the reality was it hurt that after the closeness they shared, he never chose to wake up with her in the same bed.
Sabrina was picking up some Italian, which seemed to amuse the captain and crew. Vlad stayed by her side during every interaction, and when she waved away his help in translation, he still stood mutely at her side, arms folded across his broad chest as she and Alex made a game of communicating with the crew.
Alex was absorbing the Italian language like a sponge, and so Vlad began sharing small words of Russian with him, mostly the words associated with water and swimming as Alex’s ability developed by leaps and bounds.
The only thing that kept her mind from complete ease, aside from the fact that this idyll would end all too soon, was the nagging resolution that Vlad had the right to know the truth about Alex’s parentage.
As she was now in possession of the truth and had been for some days, her lack of courage shamed her. She wanted to tell Pieter to go to hell and confess
everything to Vlad. Surely, their relationship, the sexual intimacy they shared, counted for something. But she was so afraid. She could lose Vlad and Alex both. How could she risk it?
Alex had blossomed from a shy toddler into a robust, articulate boy, and she had only Vlad to thank for that. Vlad patiently took the time to draw the little boy out, had shown interest and warmth to him when Alex never had a caring male figure in his life. Alex was getting super-attached to Vlad, Sabrina knew, and she chewed her lip thinking about the backward dive Alex might take if, when she revealed the truth, or Pieter chose to do it for her, Vlad excised them completely from his life.
What would Sabrina say to her little brother then, how would she compensate him for the loss of someone as vital as Vlad in his young life?
Moreover, there was no denying the fact of what a loss it would be to her. To know that if she revealed the truth to him, Vlad would likely push her out of his life without a second’s thought.
Vlad said he would give Alex the protection of his name, and by now, Sabrina had decided they very much wanted that. Even the illusion of being a family was better than nothing. Yet if he did adopt Alex, then Vlad would have a superior claim to her brother and where would Sabrina be then? With all of the information about her in front of him, Vlad could claim the little boy he adopted as his own and see to it that she would never see her little brother again.
It was always at this point in her guilty musings that Sabrina had to stop. She could no more imagine Alex being out of her life than she could imagine
herself ceasing to breathe. In fact, she couldn’t imagine her life without Vlad in it either.
So what was she to do? Nothing, the cowardly little voice inside her insisted. Stay in the moment, the same little voice urged.
She rose from the lounger and was reaching down for her book when a sudden dizziness hit, and she grasped blindly for something to steady her shaking legs. All at once, Captain Ferrara was there, gripping her hand in a no-nonsense fashion and settling her back down to sit in the lounger.
“Wow, thank you. Way too much sun, I guess,” Sabrina apologized, although she had been under the shade of the umbrella with her hat on. Vlad had warned her of the dangers of too much Mediterranean sun and she had taken heed. He had declared the sprinkling of freckles on her nose cute but encouraged a high factor of sunscreen for her milk white skin and even made a point of applying it for her on the hard to reach spots.
As usual, any casual touching between them rapidly escalated into a sexual game. Just yesterday, Vlad had entered the stateroom as she was changing into her bikini and offered, with an unholy gleam in his eye, to help her apply the sunscreen. Unable to resist, she had agreed, and soon that led to a more private game as Vlad spread the lotion onto her bare body. The feel of his large hands all over her skin was her undoing as Vlad, taunting her with his skillful hands, massaged the sunscreen all over her skin, and then proceeded to stroke, kiss and lick only those areas without any sunscreen—her lips, her nipples and then, inevitably, down to the soft folds between her legs. She had been gasping and quivering in his hands as he tormented her
and then when she could stand not a moment more, he’d satisfied her.
Sabrina shivered, her breasts plumping as she relived that moment. No sooner did he touch her than she was ready for him, and he knew it. She lived in a perpetual state of readiness around Vlad—he just had to look at her in a particular way for her to respond with quivering knees that were ready to part for him alone. She was shocked at herself. She wondered how she had ever thought herself immune to the opposite sex. But it was true. Before Vlad, she had been an innocent, distracted by the demands of day-to-day survival. Now, he had turned her into his own personal sex doll. She only responded to him.
But if she were accurate, Sabrina knew that went both ways. She had learned to be as demanding as Vlad, and he responded to the new sexually confident Sabrina very well indeed.
She reached for her iced tea. Just thinking about Vlad and what they did together brought a flush to her skin and a bead of sweat to her upper lip. She took a long swallow of her iced tea.
“I didn’t intend to stay out this long in the midday sun.”
“Signora Grigory, per favore, take care. Often a woman in your condition is prone to lightheadedness. I don’t want to see you fall. Perhaps if you rise more slowly…” he advised.
“My condition?” Sabrina raised puzzled eyes to
his.
“Mi dispiace, forgive me, It’s just that I have a
wife and three grown daughters, I have learned to recognize the early signs of pregnancy.” He spread his hands in a purely Latin way.