INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

PENNY

JORDAN

presents

The RUSSIAN RIVALS

Demidov vs. Androvonov

Let the most merciless of men win …

THE MOST COVETED PRIZE

THE POWER OF VASILII

PENNY JORDAN, one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors, unfortunately passed away on 31st December 2011. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. Penny wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, she was successful in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters.’ It is perhaps this gift for sympathetic characterisation that helps to explain her enduring appeal.

The Russian Rivals

The Most Coveted Prize
The Power of Vasilii
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

The Most Coveted Prize

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

The Power of Vasilii

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Copyright

The Most Coveted Prize

CHAPTER ONE

ALENA had known she wanted him—quite desperately—the minute she’d seen him. That had been in the foyer of this London hotel earlier in the week. The fierce surge of previously unknown and unexpected sheer physical desire that had struck had been so powerful that it had almost literally knocked her off her feet—and left her in no doubt as to its meaning or its urgency, shaking tremulously from head to foot and on fire with the force of her own desire.

He was, she suspected, everything that her elder half-brother Vasilii had so often warned her against in his own sex. He was dangerous; she knew that—any woman would know it, even if Vasilii tried to treat her as though she was still merely a girl and not a woman.

Alena sighed. She did genuinely and really love Vasilii, even if he was the most aggravatingly old-fashioned, moralistic and over-protective brother anyone could have. However, there was something about him which drew and compelled her beyond reason, beyond duty, beyond anything and everything she had ever known or expected to know. Had she been struck by love? Had she been struck by its darker sibling lust? Or perhaps a combination of both? Was it her passionate deep-running Russian blood that was responsible? Or was it a vulnerability to wickedly dangerous Russian men she had inherited from her English mother, who had fallen so swiftly in love with her own Russian father?

It didn’t matter. What was happening to her was beyond the skills of analysis drilled in to her to fit its pupils for the modern age by the teachers at her all female and very strict school. Nothing mattered other than the gathering, growing rushing need that now owned her. His air of openly raw sexuality and her need to offer herself up to it, to be consumed by it, filled her senses, leaving no room for anything else. Just the thought of even breathing the same air as him was enough to send her dizzy with delight and to make her body react as erotically as though he was already touching it, caressing it, taking it and touching it, teaching it and her everything that it meant to be a woman.

Alena shuddered in mute acknowledgement of his mastery of her responses. Any minute now he would turn and see her, and recognise the effect he was having on her. Her heart gave a fierce bound of mingled anticipation and apprehension. Oh, yes, he was dangerous—and she ached for it, hungered for it, craved it.

She might ‘only’ be nineteen, as Vasilii was so fond of reminding her, but she was more than old enough to know from the one tremulous, daring glance she had risked earlier in the week into those malachite-green eyes—so matching in colour the awesome columns of malachite in St Petersburg’s Winter Palace—exactly what the man now standing engaged in conversation with another Russian on the other side of the exclusive hotel’s even more exclusive lounge lobby was. He was living, breathing, walking sexual danger—especially to a woman like her. He lived outside convention and its rules.

Her pulse beating increasingly speedily, she studied him covertly and eagerly. He was tall—as tall as Vasilii, who was six feet three to her own five feet nine. He was also slightly younger than Vasilii, she suspected. Perhaps in his early thirties, whereas Vasilii was now thirty-five. His thick hair was a rich tawny brown, reminding her of the colour of one of Vasilii’s hunting jackets, although this man’s hair was in need of a cut to bring it to the kind of order Vasilii favoured.

Everywhere in his face—its bone structure, its contours, its expression—there were subtle traces of a heritage that said that this man came from a long line of men born to battle against other members of his own sex and to stand over their prone bodies when he had defeated them. He was pure alpha male, and a man determined to challenge anyone who questioned his right to that heritage.

His name was Kiryl Androvonov. She savoured it inside her head, unrolling it like a glittering magnificent carpet of delights for her senses. She had felt so adult, so strong and in control of her own fate, when she had asked the doorman so studiedly, mock-casually, if he knew who he was, pretending that she had recognised him as an acquaintance of her brother. The name Kiryl meant ‘noble’, but the doorman had told her only that he was a businessman and that this was his second visit to the hotel.

Kiryl hadn’t intended to look for her—the slender, gazelle-like young woman with her silky fall of dark blonde hair and her silver-grey eyes that reminded him of sunlight on the frozen Neva river in winter, or the Russian fables of the rusilki, the fatal enchantresses who rose from their watery graves to lure men to join them. For one thing she wasn’t his type, and for another he had far more important things on his mind than accepting the unspoken but implicit invitation she was giving him.

But he had looked, and she was there, in the same chair, at the same table, pouring tea from the steaming traditional samovar that the hotel indulged its Russian guests by providing.

She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring—not that that meant anything these days. A high-priced hooker, then, dangling her bait? Maybe, but Kiryl doubted it. A hooker would have moved in on him before now—time was, after all, money in any business.

She wanted him, though. He knew that. But he did not want her. Nor did he intend to allow himself to want her, even if that no doubt astronomically expensive soft silk top she was wearing was outlining the undeniably natural and highly desirable shape of her breasts with all the sensual mastery of a skilled artistic hand. The top, which covered her from her throat right down to her wrists, shouldn’t have been sexy. Those impossibly small-for-male-fingers shimmering pearl buttons that closed the neckline all the way from her throat to her breastbone should not have filled him with a desire to wrest them from their closures and lay bare to his gaze and his touch the flesh that lay beneath them—but they did. The diamond stud earrings she was wearing—if real, and he suspected that they were—would have cost whoever had given them to her many thousands of pounds. He knew that because his last mistress had tried to inveigle him into buying her a similar pair, just before he had decided that she no longer interested him.

As he assessed them—and that was all he was assessing—she looked up and right at him, the colour coming and going in her face, dark lashes sweeping down over the silver-grey eyes which had gone from shining like the frozen Neva to burning with the glow of heated mercury … or the desire of a very aroused woman. Unexpectedly his own body responded to that swift change from the winter ice of St Petersburg to the fierce summer heat of the Russian steppes, with all the passion that the land of his fathers always inspired in him, as fiercely as though she held within her the essence of all that heritage meant to him. He could feel within him the surge of his own desire to take and possess that heritage; to claim it and to refuse to yield it to anyone.

Caught off-guard by the surge of electric male arousal gripping him, Kiryl recognised that the woman, whoever she was, was causing his attention to wander from something far more important than some left-over youth fantasy about possessing a woman who would somehow be a magical link between himself and his Russian heritage, earthing him in his right to it.

‘And, as I was saying, Vasilii Demidov will be your main stumbling block to winning the contract.’

Kiryl stiffened and focused his attention on the agent he had hired to help him win the contract he was determined to have for his business. The knowledge that one of Russia’s richest men was also a contender for the contract had not put him off. Far from it. It had merely sharpened his desire to win it.

‘Demidov has not previously shown any interest in the shipping or container industry. His business interests lie mainly in owning and controlling the port side of the business,’ Kiryl pointed out. ‘Therefore he has no reason to have any interest in the contract.’

‘He hadn’t, but he is currently in China, finalising another contract, and as part of the bargain the Chinese want a controlling interest in a container shipping line. He is in a position to undercut any price you may offer, even if that means acquiring the contract at an initial loss. I have it on the very best authority that the selection process for the contract is now down to the two of you, with the dice loaded very heavily in his favour. I’m afraid that I must warn you that with Demidov as your competition you cannot win.’

Kiryl gave his agent a hard look.

‘I refuse to accept that.’

He could not and would not lose this contract. It was the final building block, the final piece in the chess game of his business life, that would establish his supremacy in his chosen field—not just in his own eyes but in the eyes of Russia itself. No one could be allowed to stop him from achieving that goal. No one. He had worked too hard and too long to let that happen.

Inside his head an image formed: a man’s profile, his eyes hard and denying, rejecting the child he had been. His father. The father who had denied him not just the right to his name but also the right to his Russian blood. Just as Vasilii Demidov would if he now denied him the right to complete the end game he had striven for so long.

‘Then you must hope for a miracle—because that is what it will take for you to beat Demidov and win this contract.’

Typically Kiryl did not allow any of what he was feeling to show in his demeanour or his voice, simply saying, in a voice as relentlessly cold as winter, ‘There must be something that would make him back off—some way of undermining him. A man does not make the money he has made without having secrets in his past he would not want exposed.’

The agent inclined his greying head in acknowledgement of Kiryl’s statement before warning him, ‘You are not the first man to look for some weakness in Demidov that can be exploited, but there isn’t one. He is armour plated. He has no vulnerability, no known past sins to catch up with him, and no present vices to use against him. He is impregnable.’

Kiryl’s mouth hardened.

‘He is impressive, I agree. But no man is impregnable. There will be a way, a vulnerability—and I promise you this: I will find it, and I will use and exploit it.’

The agent remained silent. He knew better than to argue with the man facing him. Kiryl had grown to his wealth and his present position of authority and power through the hardest and most challenging of circumstances—and it showed.

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to remind him as they parted, ‘As I have already said, what you require if you are to win out against Demidov is a miracle. Take my advice and back out now—let him have the contract. That way at least you will save face and not have to endure the humiliation of publicly losing to him.’

Back out? When he was so close to fulfilling the vow he had made to himself so many years ago? Never.

Could she risk picking up her teacup now, without her hands trembling so much that she risked spilling the hot liquid? Alena wasn’t sure. Her heart was still jumping around inside her chest cavity, and her face was still burning from the effect that one piercing brilliant green gaze had had on her. He had looked right at her. She put her hands on her still hot cheeks in an attempt to cool them down. She must not look at him again. She simply didn’t have the strength to withstand the raw maleness of such a gaze. It had melted her insides, turning them into a soft liquid pulse of longing that quivered within her still. And yet she had to look—she had to let her senses and her body drink in their fill of the dangerous excitement of all that fierce sexual masculinity.

Her pulse had started to race, and her throat was so dry that she had to swallow hard as she allowed her head to turn again in his direction, the longing and excitement beating even more fiercely than ever inside her with anticipation—only to crash down to wretched disappointment when she realised that he wasn’t there. He had gone, and thanks to her silly, immature stupidity she had missed her chance to … to what? To prolong the intensity of that mesmerising gaze until her bones melted and her heart burst with the unbearable excitement of it? He might have come over, introduced himself. He might have …

There was something on the floor—a gold pen. It must be his. He must have dropped it. Quickly Alena rose from her seat and went to pick it up. It felt cool and hard against her fingertips. She was shaking so much that she couldn’t stand up again without her head swimming. She could see him standing close to the hotel exit. The man he had been with was leaving the hotel. Was he going to follow him? Without allowing herself the chance to think about what she was doing, Alena crossed the hotel foyer.

The click of her heels alerted Kiryl to her presence. When she walked she swayed as delicately as the silver birches in Russia’s northern forests.

‘You dropped this.’

Her voice was as soft as the sigh of a spring breeze, cooling the stuffy, overheated hotel air as it brushed his skin.

She was holding out a pen to him. Not his pen, but he took it from her nonetheless. Her hand was delicately boned, her fingers long and slim, her nails buffed to a natural sheen. She had a look about her that money alone could not buy: a translucent, shimmering natural beauty allied to the kind of discreet grooming that whispered privilege and protection. This woman had been feather-bedded from the moment of her birth.

Angry with himself for being so aware of her, he punished her for that awareness by telling her mockingly, ‘And of course you would seize such a golden opportunity to return it to me, wouldn’t you? Given your interest in me. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it is the male’s role to pursue his quarry and reveal his desire, not the female’s.’

Hot colour ran up under Alena’s skin like burning fire. She deserved his mockery—and his cruelty: Vasilii would have said so. But she hadn’t been prepared for it and it hurt. Inside her head—foolishly—she had built up an image of him in which his danger was tempered by a desire for her that matched her own for him. Now she was being made to pay for that fantasy.

Kiryl watched as she struggled to overcome her humiliation, pride battling against pain as her small white teeth bit so hard into that soft bottom lip that it swelled swiftly. Just as it would swell beneath the fierce demand of a man’s kiss? Against his will Kiryl felt the ache in his groin the sight of her had aroused earlier return—with interest.

‘My apologies. That was ungracious of me.’

His apology was deliberately insincere. He didn’t have either the time or the desire to deal with the fragile ego of an emotional woman—no matter how desirable. He knew himself too well, and he knew that in the mood he was in now, thanks to Vasilii Demidov, the darkness within him that he had never wholly been able to control would unleash itself and seek a victim. Over the years Kiryl had taught himself to think of that darkness as something of a mental vampire, an echo of himself that, when aroused, could only be calmed by feeding off the emotional pain of others. No doubt there were those who would say that that dark need sprang from his childhood, but Kiryl had no intention of dwelling on a time when he had been vulnerable. Instead he preferred to live in the present, and living in the present meant securing that contract. The girl was simply a spare pawn in the game, and as such he had no use for her other than as a momentary outlet for his pent-up inner frustration with regard to his bid and the competition he was up against.

For Alena, though, his caustic cruelty was unbearable. She retreated from him, feeling too upset and too humiliated to defend herself, merely shaking her head and turning away to hurry back to her table.

Once there she asked for her bill and proceeded to gather up her coat and her bag. She had shown herself up most dreadfully. She deserved the punishment he had meted out, she told herself. She was just glad that her half-brother hadn’t been there to witness it. Fresh tears blurred her vision.

Automatically Kiryl tracked her uncoordinated, anxiously urgent movements. Because he wanted to distance himself from her, that was all. And yet his gaze and his senses were somehow reluctant to let her go. Even now, when she was plainly upset, there was still a grace about her, a breathtaking natural sensuality, a pliable softness—from the top of her shining fall of dark blonde hair to the delicacy of ankles so fine Kiryl suspected he could easily close his hand around them—that said the whole of her could be bent to the will of the man who possessed her.

And did he want to be that man? It wasn’t so much a matter of wanting as of taking advantage of what he was being offered so blatantly. Kiryl shrugged aside his inner criticism of himself. He was, after all, a man—with a man’s needs. And it was obviously what she wanted. She had practically been begging for it, and it would be one way of ridding himself of the anger he felt at having his plans threatened by Vasilii Demidov. He had taken the savagery of the sharp raw edge off it via his mockery of her. He could make amends quite easily. He knew the format. She would initially pretend to refuse to allow him to do so. He would then flatter her and she would give in. It was a game as old as life itself, and an hour or so in bed with her in his suite would surely be enough to satisfy the ache in his groin.

A brief movement of his hand summoned a waitress. Giving her his instructions, he made his way over to the table.

Alena was just about to leave, her back to him as she waited for another waitress to bring her bill.

‘You didn’t drink your tea earlier, and since I am very much in need of a cup why don’t we share a samovar together? Two Russians together, sharing a tradition from our homeland?’

The unexpected sound of his voice had Alena spinning round, her shock intensifying when he reached out and closed long fingers around her wrist, his thumb on her unsteady, far too fast pulse.

His smile was pure megawatt charm. It softened the earlier arrogant harshness of his features and turned him into every woman’s fantasy of a bad boy grown into an adult male. It gave him the sensuality of a Cossack, the romance of a gypsy, the wild devilry of a pirate and the alpha allure of a hero. With that smile he was all of them and more. And she would be a fool to give in to him.

‘No, thank you.’ She tried to sound distant and cool, but she knew he had heard the vulnerable huskiness of her voice, the note of doubt and longing that undermined her will-power. Her throat felt dry and raw with emotion and tension. She wanted to wrench her wrist free of his hold but somehow she couldn’t.

He was smiling at her again, more intimately this time, the malachite eyes darkening and gleaming.

‘I was rude and I upset you, and now you are angry with me. You think, no doubt, that I do not deserve your company. And you are right. After all, such a beautiful woman can easily find a far more pleasant and appreciative companion. But I think you have a kind heart, and that that kind heart will whisper to you to take pity on me.’

Oh, yes, he could be very charming—as well as very cruel. And Alena didn’t need Vasilii to tell her how dangerous that made him. Every woman carried within her DNA the instinctive knowledge of just how dangerous such a man could be. And just how compellingly and demandingly irresistible.

The smile that accompanied his apology revealed strong white teeth and crinkled the skin around his eyes. Its effect on her locked the breath in her lungs and started a stampede of small butterfly movements of shocked but exhilarating excitement fizzing in her stomach. The hurt he had already caused her had left its mark, though—like a bruise against pale vulnerable skin and her brain warned her to be careful.

He was massaging her skin, stroking that place where her pulse was thudding so tempestuously, but far from soothing her his touch was only increasing her agitation and her awareness of him. She must escape from him whilst she still could. He was dangerous, and she was not equipped to deal with that danger.

‘I must go. I …’

Her English was refined and unaccented. Despite the samovar he had seen on the table she did not look or sound Russian, except for those silver-grey eyes that reminded him so intensely of the Neva and the city of his birth. And the pain he had known there …

‘I have ordered our tea. See—the waitress is bringing it now.’

Two waitresses were heading for the table—one carrying fresh tea, the other bringing her bill. The waitress with her bill smiled at her and said politely, ‘I am sorry, Miss Demidova. I thought you wanted your bill.’

She was Russian. She had to be with that surname. And not just any Russian surname either. The irony of her sharing the same surname—a relatively common one in Russia—as his rival for the contract he wanted so badly was not lost on Kiryl. Perhaps it was an omen. The voluntary foster mother or babushka, who had raised him after the death of his own mother, along with several other orphaned and unwanted children, had set great store by old superstitions and beliefs, but he did not. He was a modern man, after all.

‘You’re staying here in the hotel?’ he asked, pulling out a chair for Alena with his free hand and firmly guiding her into it, leaving her no option other than to remain at the table.

He was even more magnificent, more imposing, more heart-stoppingly male close up than he had been at a distance. In the rarefied heated air of the hotel he somehow managed to smell of the clean air of the Russian steppes, with an underlying note of their wildness that brought the tiny hairs up along her skin. Oh, yes—he was dangerous.

‘Yes.’ She answered his question. ‘My brother Vasilii has a concierge apartment here in the hotel for when he’s in London on business.’ Her half-brother was something of a nomad, and although he had similar apartments all over the world, and his most permanent address was an apartment in Zurich, there was nowhere that he really called home.

Alena wasn’t quite sure if she was so pointedly introducing her brother into the conversation to warn Kiryl that she was not unprotected and alone, or to remind herself how Vasilii would judge her own behaviour were he to learn of it. Vasilii, who thought she was safely in the care of the now retired matron of the girls’ school Alena had attended, whom he had hired to stay with her whilst she was away. Poor Miss Carlisle, though, had been rushed into hospital with appendicitis, and was now recovering from an operation in the comfortable nursing home where Alena had insisted she go to to recuperate.

Her absence was giving Alena a brief period of unexpected freedom, but Alena did feel guilty about the way she had deceived Miss Carlisle by letting her think that the niece she had begged Alena to contact on her behalf was now standing in for her. It wasn’t her fault that Miss Carlisle’s niece had left for New York the day before Miss Carlisle had fallen ill. She should have told Vasilii what had happened, of course, but she hadn’t. Her brother was still under the illusion that Miss Carlisle, who flatly refused to have anything to do with modern technology and thus would not use a computer or a mobile telephone, was staying in the apartment with Alena to look after her.

Kiryl’s heart had jerked to a standstill, almost cutting off his breath and leaving him feeling almost as though he was at a hangman’s mercy. Surely it was beyond coincidence that there could be two Vasilii Demidovs—both of whom were wealthy enough to maintain a suite in one of London’s most expensive hotels? Perhaps there had after all been some grain of truth in his old babushka’s superstitious beliefs about the workings of fate?

Kiryl, though, had not built up his business and his own status as a billionaire by making assumptions that were not based on properly sourced fact.

After waiting for the waitress to pour their tea and then withdraw, he asked casually, ‘Your brother is Vasilii Demidov? Head of Venturanova International?’

‘Yes,’ Alena confirmed, a small frown puckering her forehead as she asked anxiously, ‘Do you know Vasilii?’

Was she concerned—anxious—about the possibility of him knowing her brother? Like all hunters Kiryl had a good nose for vulnerability in his prey.

‘Not personally. Although naturally I do know of him and his reputation as a successful businessman. Is he here in London?’ Kiryl knew that he wasn’t, but he wanted to know how much the girl would tell him.

‘No. He’s in China. On business.’

‘Leaving you, his sister, to amuse herself here in London, enjoying its nightlife?’ he suggested with another smile.

Immediately Alena shook her head. ‘Oh, no. Vasilii would never allow me to do that. He doesn’t approve of that kind of thing—especially for me,’ she admitted, immediately flushing guiltily. She was saying far too much. Certainly saying and doing things that Vasilii would most definitely not have approved of, because she felt so nervous and so excited.

‘He sounds a very protective brother,’ Kiryl told her. A very protective brother who believed in guarding something—someone—who was very important to him. He needed to find out more about her and her relationship with her brother.

‘Yes he is.’ Alena answered Kiryl’s question, caught off guard. ‘And sometime …’

‘You find that irksome and inhibiting?’ he guessed. ‘You are young. It’s only natural that you want to enjoy the same kind of life as other people. It must be lonely for you—left here on your own here in an anonymous hotel whilst your brother goes about his business.’

‘Vasilii is very protective. He doesn’t leave me on my own. At least not normally. This time, though … This time he had to.’ Again Alena felt that pang of guilt she had every time she thought about how she was deceiving her brother. But, much as she liked Miss Carlisle, she was very old and very old-fashioned. Everything had been so different when their parents had been alive. Their father had been so energetic, so filled with an enjoyment of life, and her mother had been so loving, and so understanding. Alena missed them both dreadfully, but especially her mother.

* * *

Something was going on here. Kiryl’s sharply keen senses told him that. Some undercurrent the meaning of which with regard to his own plans he had yet to divine and define.

He lifted one eyebrow and joked, ‘He sounds more like a gaoler than a brother.’

Alena immediately felt guilty again. She was being horribly disloyal to Vasilii, but at the same time there was a sense of relief and release for her in talking about how she felt. Something about this intense stranger had her opening up about things she’d never confided to anyone before. Even so, her love for her brother insisted that she defend him and correct Kiryl’s misconceptions.

‘Vasilii is protective of me because he loves me, and because … because he promised our father when he was dying that he would always look after me.’ She dipped her head. ‘I worry sometimes that it is because of that promise that Vasilii has never married. Because of the business and because he worries so much about me that he has never had time to meet someone and fall in love.’

Fall in love? What planet was the girl living on if she actually thought that the marriage of one of Russia’s richest men would involve ‘falling in love’? Not that he blamed Demidov for that. When the time came for him to marry himself his wife would be carefully chosen, by a logical process, not by some temporary burn of desire in his loins. Not that he was going to tell Alena that. The more she revealed to him the more convinced he became that this young woman—this girl, really—just might be his rival’s Achilles’ heel.

Kiryl wasn’t someone who gave in to his own emotions, though. Always back up gut instinct with hard facts before acting—that was his own personal mantra, and he wasn’t going to go against that now, no matter how urgently the voice inside him was demanding that he now secure without delay his bait he might be able to use in a trap set against his rival for the contract.

Hard facts closed traps. A mixture of gut instinct backed up by hard facts was what he lived by.

Alena’s emotional defence of her brother had warmed the silver-grey of her eyes. They were like deep clear pools within which he could see each and every one of her thoughts, Kiryl recognised, as she looked at him over the rim of her teacup and then flushed, quickly concealing her gaze with the dark fan of her eyelashes.

It had been wrong of her to discuss Vasilii with Kiryl. He was, after all, a stranger, and she knew how Vasilii felt both about protecting her and protecting his own privacy. She put down her teacup.

‘I really must go.’

Kiryl nodded his head, and then got up.

‘Thank you for the tea,’ Alena told him as he summoned the waitress.

‘It was my pleasure—and it was just the first of many pleasures I hope we shall enjoy together, Alena Demidova.’

Before Alena could guess his intent, he reached for her hand and lifted it to his mouth. Just the sensation of the warmth of his breath on her trembling fingers was enough to send hot molten quivers of sensation racing up her arm, making her feel weak with awareness of her vulnerability to him. He was flirting with her, and more than fulfilling the fantasies she had been indulging in ever since she had first seen him with the sensual promise implicit in his words.

As she moved she caught sight of her watch. Vasilii! There would be e-mails from him and he would worry if she did not reply speedily to them.

‘It’s four o’clock. I really must go. My brother …’ ‘Ah, like Cinderella fearing the stroke of midnight you rush to leave me—and without so much as a shoe to trace you by. But we shall meet again. Have no doubt about that. And when we do I shall be tempted to ensure that the promise I have seen in your eyes when you look at me becomes more than just a look.’

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE privacy of his own suite Kiryl telephoned his agent, announcing the minute the older man answered the call, ‘Alena Demidova, sister of Vasilii Demidov—I want to know everything there is to know about her.’

From the windows of his suite he could look out on the private garden in the square below, where the February light was now beginning to fade. A young East European woman was walking there with two children, both of them wearing the uniform of an exclusive prep school, but Kiryl had no interest in the garden or its occupants. All his intention was focused on the game plan now unfolding inside his head.

‘Everything, Ivan—from who her friends are, how she spends her time, to what she eats for her breakfast. I want to know it all. And even more importantly I want to know everything there is to know about her relationship with her brother Vasilii, and his with her. I want to know what he thinks of her and what he plans for her. And I want to know by tomorrow morning.’

Ending the call before the other man could say anything, Kiryl paced the floor of the sitting room of his suite.

He could feel his whole body tingling with a potent mixture of excitement, challenge, and the knowledge that he had embarked on a game he would win. Alena was the key to her brother’s downfall. He was sure of it. He could sense it, smell it, and feel it deep down inside himself in the Romany genes given to him by his mother and so loathed and despised by his father.

Unexpectedly inside his head he had a momentary image of Alena as she had been when they had had tea together—as fragile as a flower a man might pick and then crush in his hand, her emotions and desires plain to see. Something was struggling to come to life inside him—something that had its roots in that brief time he had shared with his mother before she had died, the only time in his life when he had been truly loved. For a moment he hesitated. But he could not afford to be weak—not now. As weak as the mother who had loved his father and conceived him against that father’s wishes. He’d had to be strong in everything he had striven so long and hard for, goaded and driven during his struggle by the memory of the man who had been his father sneering down at him as he pushed him into the gutter before walking away from him.

It was finally within his grasp. And if Alena had to be sacrificed so that he could keep the mental promise he had made his dead mother, then so be it.

‘The promise I have seen in your eyes when you look at me.’ In the grey London light of the February morning Alena lay in the bed in her expensively designed and decorated bedroom, cocooned in the highest thread-count sheets that money could buy, but feeling every bit as uncomfortable as though she were that fairytale princess lying on the discomfort of a sharp pea. Fairytales. Wasn’t that what this was all about? A young woman’s fairytale, though, rather than a child’s. A fairytale of a prince who wasn’t just handsome and kind but a prince who was also sensual and sexy—a prince who offered not the experience of a pampered, indulged lifestyle, but the experience of real raw sensuality … the kind of intensely emotional and passionate sex that perhaps was merely a fantasy.

Was that why she now felt so unnerved and afraid? Because now that she had been given a hint that she could make her fantasy reality she feared that she might discover that being sexually involved with Kiryl would destroy that fantasy? Sex with Kiryl. Intimacy with Kiryl. The intimacy of shared kisses and caresses, her skin shivering with excitement, and the enticement of his hands—his lips—on her naked body. She was shivering with that excitement now, at the mere thought of it. But wasn’t the reality that she needed to put him out of her thoughts and out of her life? That was certainly what Vasilii would want her to do.

Alena looked at her alarm clock.

She had an appointment later in the morning at the offices of a charity set up by her mother. Vasilii would prefer her to wait until she was twenty-five to step into her mother’s shoes and fully take over her role at the head of the charity, Alena knew. He felt that even at twenty-one—which she would be in just over fifteen months—she would be still too young for such a responsibility. Alena, though, was determined to prove her half-brother wrong. She had been assiduous in studying the workings of the charity since her mother’s death.

It was a big responsibility—a huge responsibility, in fact. The charity handled not only the income from the millions her parents had donated to it, but also the income that came from various sponsors and donors to the charity’s cause, which was the education of children who would not otherwise receive any. How much chance would she have of convincing her half-brother that she was ready to take on that responsibility if he ever got to know of her reckless fantasies and even more reckless behaviour over Kiryl? None at all. He would judge such behaviour as immature and irresponsible.

Her mother had often said that the charity was her ‘thank-you’ to life for giving her the happiness that meeting her Russian husband had brought her. Not even Vasilii, with his often hard-headed attitude towards money and charity, could argue with that motivation. No matter how much she sometimes objected to Vasilii’s control of her and her life, Alena knew full well that he had the power to melt her heart simply because he had loved and valued her mother so much. For such a tough, uncompromising man to be willing to admit that one slim Englishwoman had, through her love for his father and for him, transformed their lives—even if he would only admit that to her—was something that would always touch her heart. Vasilii’s love and concern for her, his protection of her, was his way of repaying the love he had received from her mother, Alena knew. She just wished that he would relax his protective guard of her a little.

Did she really want to risk everything she had worked so hard for just for the sake of a sensual infatuation that had as much reality to it as a rainbow over the Neva?

She had no need to ask herself what Vasilii would think of her present behaviour. He would be horrified and angry. But he was not going to know about it, was he? Because she was going to be very sensible and responsible and not have anything more to do with Kiryl. She was going to focus instead on the future she had been working so hard towards and prove to her brother that she was mature enough to take on her late mother’s role within the charity.

Two hours later, stepping out of her taxi outside the office block that housed the offices of her mother’s charity, Alena paused to smooth down the soft grey cashmere of her smart single-breasted coat and take a deep breath. Appearances counted for an awful lot, her mother had always said. Deals could be brokered as broken in the judgement passed on the impression one conveyed—before a word had been spoken. Alena had remembered her mother’s sage advice this morning when she had dressed for this appointment. It might eventually be her right and inheritance to take over the running of the charity, but she could not do that successfully without the support of the executives who worked for it. She needed to win their support and their confidence if she was going to be able to continue to grow the success of her mother’s charity. For that reason she had tried to dress in a way that, whilst showing something of her own individuality, conveyed maturity.

She had chosen to wear medium-height black shoes with opaque winter tights rather than high-heeled knee-length boots. Boots might be sensible in cold weather, but there were boots and boots—and she certainly did not want to be judged as an attention-seeking fashion plate. To ward off the sharp February wind she’d wrapped a darker grey woollen scarf round her neck and pulled a matching knitted hat on over her hair. A pair of fingerless grey gloves allowed her to pay her taxi fare, and her smile for the doorman who opened the glass doors to the office block for her earned her an answering smile of appreciation.

Initially, when she’d first set up the charity, her mother had wanted to locate its head office in London because it was her home city. But she’d wanted it to be in a far more modest and inexpensive place than its current Mayfair location. It had been her father and halfbrother who had persuaded her mother to accept that if the charity was to attract donors then a more prestigious location would give it gravitas. Besides which Vasilii had added a properly secured office block so it would be far safer.

Safety was important to Vasilii. But that was not surprising, given that his own mother had been the victim of a kidnap plot that had gone wrong, and which had resulted in her death. It had been after that that Vasilii’s father had relocated his business and his home to London, although it had been in St Petersburg in Russia where her parents had met. Her father had had high moral standards, both in his business and his private life. The death of both parents in a car accident had been a terrible shock and a terrible loss, but thankfully she had always had Vasilii.

It had been wrong of her to allow herself to be taken over by what she was now beginning to think of as a form of madness in her unfamiliar desire for Kiryl, and she was glad that she had decided to put the whole incident behind her—to focus on what was really important in her life, Alena told herself as she stepped into the lift and pressed the button for the tenth floor.

The work of Alena’s mother’s charity involved helping girls in poverty all over the world. A multicultural staff worked for the charity, and its South American CEO, Dolores Alvarez, had known poverty in her childhood herself. She was now in her fifties, and the lines on her face told of her compassion and her life experience.

She welcomed Alena with a warm smile as she showed her into her office, and ordered coffee for both of them, telling her, ‘We’ve had a lovely surprise this morning. You’ll know that one of your late mother’s goals for our charity was to bring in more outside donors, and that we’ve been running a campaign to that effect?’

Alena nodded her head. ‘Yes, I know how important my father and mother believed it was that we should broaden the scope of the charity.’

‘After the death of your parents we did receive some very generous donations from their colleagues and friends, but they were one off payments. However, we have now had an approach from a potential donor which sounds very promising. Before making up his mind he has stated that he wants to meet you.’

Their coffee had arrived, and after thanking the smartly dressed young male PA who had brought it Alena asked the CEO, ‘Is it because he wants to know if I am capable of heading the charity successfully?’ She gave Dolores a wry look and told her, ‘It’s exactly the kind of thing Vasilii would do.’

‘Rich men like to be in complete control of their wealth. It seems to go with their mindset and the drive that has made them rich in the first place.’

‘Control freaks?’ Alena said ruefully.

Dolores smiled, but gave a small shake of her head. ‘Maybe, but we can’t afford to look a gift horse in the mouth, or …’

‘Frighten it away?’ Alena suggested.

‘No. Not if we’re to succeed in achieving the most ambitious of your late mother’s plans. The money she left in trust for the charity brings in a good income, but …’

‘But we need more money. Yes, I know. I’ve been studying our financial statements, and the rise in the cost of living in some of the countries where we are most active has meant that the cost of providing schooling for the poorest in those countries is rising.’

The CEO gave her an approving look that Alena suspected was also tinged with surprise, before agreeing.

‘That is true, yes. Which means that it is important to find every new donor we can. From what this one has said to me he is considering making a very generous on-going annual donation to our cause, once he has satisfied himself as to …’

‘As to what?’ Alena pressed.

Dolores looked slightly uncomfortable.

‘Tell me,’ Alena insisted. ‘I have a right to know.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Dolores hesitated again, and then told her, ‘He has expressed some reservations about the fact that someone so youthful and … and untried will ultimately be in charge of the charity. Because of that he has expressed this wish to meet you personally.’

‘To assess my suitability to step into my mother’s shoes?’ Alena guessed.

‘To reassure himself that he is making the right decision,’ Dolores corrected her diplomatically. ‘Of course if you prefer not to do so then I am sure we could make a tactful excuse—perhaps tell him that you would prefer your brother to deal with the situation?’

Alena weighed up what Dolores had told her. If she met this potential donor and he didn’t think her capable of stepping into her mother’s shoes then she risked losing his support for the charity. It might be safer for her to allow Vasilii to meet him instead. But if she did that how was she ever going to be able to convince Vasilii that she was mature enough to take on her mother’s role? And, just as important, how was she ever going to feel confident about her ability to do that herself?

She took a deep breath.

‘If this prospective donor wishes to meet me, then it is only fair that he does.’

She could see from the CEO’s approving look that she had made the right decision.

‘If you could set up an appointment with him for me?’

‘That’s easily done,’ Dolores told her with a smile. ‘He is actually here now. When I told him that you were coming in this morning, and that I’d speak with you about seeing him, he announced that he would come here to meet you. I did try to put him off, but he insisted, I’m afraid.’

Just as Vasilii would have insisted in the same situation, Alena knew. Such behaviour might be considered by some to be unconventional, but in the world in which her brother moved those men who were the most successful often made their own rules and ignored convention.

‘Of course if you want us to tell him that you would prefer him to see him another time …?’

Alena thought swiftly. It was true that already she could feel a frisson of nervous energy jittering through her tummy at the thought of the responsibility she would be taking on in agreeing to meet this would-be donor. But if she wanted to be taken seriously as a woman whose maturity could be relied upon then she had to behave accordingly.

Straightening her spine, she shook her head. ‘No. I will meet him now.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that. Thank you. This donation would mean such a lot to us. Especially as it would be a regular annual income, guaranteed for the next five years. We’ve asked him to wait in the boardroom—I’ll take you there now. And of course I’ll be on hand with you, to answer any technical questions he might have.’

Alena gave her a grateful look.

The charity’s boardroom had windows that overlooked the street outside. It was decorated in a businesslike and smart colour palette of off-whites and greys shading to black, its leather furniture showing subtle gleams of brushed steel. Its appearance was very much in accordance with the accepted contemporary look apart from the fact that its table was round rather than rectangular. It was the photographs displayed on the room’s walls that caught the attention, though: photographs of children, some of them taken by children and as a result slightly out of focus. They were haunting, strike-at-the-heart photographs that told a story of how a girl in the poorest of circumstances could become a young woman who could hold her head high because of the education and support she had received from this charity.

Normally it was to these photographs and this story that Alena’s attention was drawn whenever she entered this room. Her mother had chosen these photographs herself, and every time she looked at them Alena felt almost as though she could feel her mother in the room with her.

Today, though, it wasn’t the photographs that were the focus of her immediate attention. Instead it was the man standing in front of the windows, outlined by the light coming in through them, his features shadowed and hidden. Alena didn’t need to see those features to recognise him. Her body and her senses had recognised him immediately. Kiryl.

CHAPTER THREE

AFTER the initial shock, which had frozen her to the spot, a feeling not unlike that she had felt as a child experiencing her first rollercoaster ride raced through Alena, leaving her powerless. Excitement and fear gripped her insides in equal measure, horrified dread fighting with exhilaration as her heart plunged downwards and then soared up again.

Was it merely a coincidence that Kiryl was here? Her heart spun dizzily like a plate spinning clown or a magician. Calm down, she warned herself. Of course it was a coincidence. She wouldn’t be doing herself any favours as the adult she wanted to be if she allowed herself to think otherwise. Kiryl simply wasn’t the kind of man who would try to impress a woman in such a way. Every instinct she had told her that. It was simply coincidence that he was here.

She didn’t know whether telling herself that made her feel better or worse. The truth was that she no longer knew what to feel. Or what she actually did feel. He moved slightly, so that the light now fell on him. His expression was unreadable, his green eyes gleaming, and the movement of his body as he came towards her reminded her of the deliberate stalking of a powerful, sleek-muscled hunting animal before it made a controlled leap on its chosen prey.

‘Alena, this is Mr Andronov,’ Dolores began formally.

‘I …’

I know, Alena had been about to say, but Kiryl forestalled her, saying politely, ‘Miss Demidova, thank you for finding the time to see me. I appreciate it.’

She felt faint, dizzy, light-headed—as though her body and her senses had been whirled about in a giant fairground machine and then flung into freefall.

Kiryl was reaching for her hand. She had a reactive, defensive, almost childish desire to hide her hands behind her back, so that he couldn’t touch her, such was her immediate and intense awareness of what any kind of physical intimacy between them might do to her. Was it only this morning that she had sworn to herself she was in control of her own reactions to him? How deluded she had been.

Dolores was watching her, waiting for her to shake Kiryl’s hand. Reluctantly she extended her own, shielding her eyes from his inspection as she did so, not wanting him to read the vulnerability she feared they would betray.

His hand engulfed hers, his fingers strong and warm, curling round it, holding it and her captive. Against her will her body remembered how he had held her the previous day, seeking out the pulse in her wrist and then …

Swallowing quickly against the heady fizz of sensual excitement rushing up inside her, she spoke. ‘Dolores tells me that you are considering becoming a donor to our charity.’ It was all Alena could manage to say. She must be sensible and mature. She must think not just first but only of her mother’s charity, and the debt of responsibility she owed it.

‘Yes,’ he confirmed increasing the tension she was already feeling when he went on, ‘I thought we could discuss the matter over lunch.’

‘I …’ On the point of saying that she had another engagement, Alena saw the hopeful and pleased look in the gaze Dolores had fixed on her, and remembered that she had told her CEO that she had a completely free day.

‘It would give me an opportunity to learn more about the charity and its work—and about your commitment to it. It would be a shame if you were unable to spare the time, as I shall be leaving the country very soon on business.’

Was he testing her? Daring to suggest that she wasn’t committed to her mother’s charity?

‘Yes, of course.’ She gave in, adding quietly, ‘I am free to have lunch with you.’

‘Excellent. I took the liberty of assuming your acceptance and have arranged things accordingly—if you are ready?’

Ready for what? A business lunch, or …? Stop thinking like that, Alena warned herself. She must think of this purely as a business exercise—a means by which she could show her half-brother that she was capable of controlling her inheritance. The fact that Kiryl could affect her so dangerously, so sensually, was a vulnerability she must conceal from both him and her brother.

‘Yes. Yes, I’m ready,’ she agreed, giving Dolores what she hoped was a calm and reassuring smile as Kiryl held open the boardroom door for her. She could see that Dolores looked relieved by her acceptance of Kiryl’s request that she have lunch with him. The CEO had indicated that Kiryl’s donation was likely to be an extremely generous and ongoing one, and one that they could not afford to risk losing.

To walk through the door she had, of course, to walk past him. The discreet scent of his cologne couldn’t mask the scent of him—at least not from her. Her body reacted immediately and intensely to it, her nipples rising into hard peaks of sexual arousal to push impatiently against the constriction of her pretty satin and lace bra. For a dangerous heartbeat she almost lifted her hand to cover her own betrayal, her face flooding with colour as she recognised how easily she could have given herself away.

What was it about this man and only this man that gave him the power to affect her as no other man had ever done? She could feel the wild, reckless surge of her own desire to know the answer to that question, and was equally aware of the far more cautious and conservative side of her nature that urged her not to get involved in a situation that instinct told her she could not control.

It was just a lunch she had agreed to, she reminded herself as Dolores escorted them both to the lift. Nothing more. And a business lunch at that. The fact that he was considering making a donation to her mother’s charity was merely a coincidence.

But, despite telling herself that, once they were alone inside the lift an impulse she couldn’t control had her asking shakily, ‘What made you choose my mother’s charity for your donation?’

The uncertainty in her voice, combined with the colour coming and going in her face, pleased Kiryl—although of course he was not going to let her see that. It confirmed what his male instincts had already told him, and that was that she was vulnerable to him as a woman. He liked that. He liked it very much indeed. It was time to play with her a little now—to unsettle and unnerve her whilst holding out a tiny piece of bait to tempt her closer.

‘You are taking it for granted that I will make a donation—even though I’m sure your CEO has made it clear to you that I am simply contemplating doing so. Isn’t that rather dangerous?’

Caught off-guard, Alena could only protest. ‘No. I mean, I wasn’t taking it for granted. I just meant … I was just curious about why you had chosen my mother’s charity.’

‘Were you? Or were you perhaps hoping that I had chosen it because of you? Because I wanted to … please you?’

‘No!’

The lift had come to a halt and the doors were opening. Hot-faced, Alena was glad of the fact that several other people were waiting to get in. Blindly she stepped out of the lift, her head down, feeling both embarrassed and exposed, stripped bare of her defences. She felt somehow as though he could see right through into the vulnerable heart of her. His penetrating green gaze was far too keen and astute. But then it had probably looked upon many women who had been as sensually aware of him as she was now. Many, many women. For her, though, all this was very new—taking her up to the heights and then plunging her down into the depths until she was so shaken up that she felt in danger of losing the power to reason.

Instinctively heading for the main doors to the building, she was brought to a halt when Kiryl reached for her arm, holding it in a firm grip and half turning her towards him. He was standing so close to her that she could feel the power of his male sensuality engulfing her. Like a force-field it surged round her, locked round her effortlessly, holding her captive.

‘I am considering your charity because of my own mother.’

His words were so unexpected that it took Alena several seconds to grasp their meaning. Her lungs greedily sucked in the air she had briefly denied them before she was able to question, ‘Your own mother?’

Good—he had her hooked now. But then, given what he knew about the close relationship she had had with her own parents—especially her mother—it had been a foregone conclusion as far as Kiryl was concerned that to bring his own mother into any conversation he had with her was bound to elicit both her interest and ultimately her sympathy. Right now, though, having piqued her interest, it was best to keep her guessing a little, so Kiryl shook his head.

‘This is not the time for such a discussion,’ he told her. ‘It is something better discussed over lunch. Do you mind riding back in a taxi? Only when I’m in London I prefer to use taxis rather than to have a car and driver following me around. I like the freedom it gives me.’

‘No,’ Alena assured him, forced into a small self-conscious half-laugh as she admitted, ‘I love London taxis. And I’d much rather use them than have a car and driver too.’ She pulled a small face. ‘Vasilii doesn’t understand that, and doesn’t really approve.’

It was a small thing to know that he too loved the freedom that being in London gave her. A small thing, and yet immediately it made her feel more relaxed in his company—as though they shared something.

Watching her, Kiryl smiled secretly to himself. He knew perfectly well, from the information garnered by his agent, every single like and dislike Alena possessed. His goal now was to disarm her to such an extent that she ended up trusting him.

Once they were inside a taxi he told her, ‘I thought we’d have lunch back at your hotel.’

Alena nodded her head. The hotel did have an excellent restaurant, she knew. The kind of restaurant where important business was conducted on a regular basis. A man’s restaurant, Alena often felt, with a menu that was heavy on traditional gourmet meat and fish dishes and portions which she found far too generous. It was silly of her to feel disappointed. This was, after all, a business lunch and not a date. Kiryl was obviously a busy man, just like her brother, and she knew that in similar circumstances Vasilii would have done exactly the same thing.

The reminder to herself that their lunch was a business lunch had her sitting up straight on her own side of the shiny leather taxi seat as she automatically adopted what she hoped was the right pose for a businesswoman.

From his own side of the seat Kiryl, who had relaxed into the darker shadows of the corner of the seat refused to allow himself the mistake of looking at her. Not yet. That would come later. As a boy, running wild with other boys like himself—poor, ragged, half-starved boys, living hand to mouth under the aegis of their elderly foster grandmother, some of them lucky enough to have mothers who worked—he had learned to fish. Sometimes the fish he’d caught had been the only meal there was, so he had had to learn how to take his time and to wait for the right moment to catch his prey unawares.

He knew his silence now was bound to add to the tension he could see Alena was already feeling, and that suited him. Fate had handed the very best wild card he was ever likely to get when it had brought Alena Demidova into his life—without her brother.

The traffic was building up; one of London’s many sets of roadworks had brought their taxi to a standstill. Kiryl looked from under his lashes at Alena. His agent had done his work well, and Kiryl knew everything there was to know about her—from the fact that her brother believed her to be currently under the safe care of an elderly ex-matron of an exclusive girls’ school to the fact that she was probably still a virgin. He knew all about her parents’ marriage, and her English mother’s passion for her charity, just as he knew to the last pound how many millions of pounds there were in her trust fund, and how many shares in the businesses of her late father and her half-brother would come into her control when she reached twenty-five.

She was a valuable asset—a valuable pawn, indeed—to the man who controlled her future, and it was no wonder that her half-brother was so protective of her and of her eventual inheritance. With such an asset as his half-sister to barter Vasilii Demidov had a great deal of persuasive power at his command. Via her marriage Vasilii would be able to broker even more power for himself than he already had. There would be many, many men who would want to form an alliance with him via marriage to her. It wasn’t her virginity that would be important, either to her brother or the man who married her. It was the power of the alliance that would be created.

He most certainly did not want to marry her. He did not want to marry anyone. But he was quite prepared to let Alena think that he did to win her over.

What he really intended to do was seduce her into falling for him—which would be easy, given the susceptibility to him he had already seen in her and her innocence—and then offer to end their relationship provided her brother backed off from the contract they were competing for. Kiryl’s assessment was that he was the last person her brother would want as a brother-in-law—a man born not just on the wrong side of the tracks but brought up in the gutters of those tracks. In his judgement her brother would far rather lose one contract than a pawn as valuable as a sister who, married to the right man, would bring far more assets into the family than merely one contract.

He wouldn’t like what Kiryl was doing, of course. He wouldn’t like it one little bit. But he would have to accept it, because his sister’s vulnerability to Kiryl was his Achilles’ heel. Kiryl had no doubts about that. No man would guard his sister as Vasilii Demidov guarded his unless she was extremely important to him.

And Alena herself … She would have the sexual pleasure those longing looks she had been giving him said she wanted. And when her brother exchanged her hand in marriage for an increase in his power and wealth she would be able to remember that pleasure when she lay in the arms of a husband she might not particularly want.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, inside his head he could see an image of his mother’s face—the anguish in her eyes when she had told him about how she had trusted his father and how he had deserted her and refused to recognise Kiryl himself. He dismissed it as swiftly and ruthlessly as he always despatched any kind of emotional weakness he found within himself.

The taxi pulled off the main road and into the designated drop-off area outside the main entrance to the hotel. Whilst Kiryl paid the driver, a uniformed doorman opened Alena’s door for her and helped her out. Following her into the hotel, Kiryl tipped him generously. The man would no doubt remember seeing him with Alena—and that would add further reinforcement to his eventual challenge to her brother either to back out of the contract race or risk seeing his besotted sister marry him.

‘This way,’ he told Alena, taking a firm hold on her upper arm to turn her in towards the lifts, when she would have walked past them towards the entrance to the hotel’s restaurant.

Taking advantage of her confusion, when the lift doors opened he guided her inside it, ignoring the faint resistant stiffening of her body.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘I thought we were supposed to be having lunch together?’

‘We are,’ Kiryl agreed equably. ‘But not in the restaurant. I thought it would suit us both better if we had lunch in my suite.’

Suit them both better? What exactly did he mean by that? Alena could feel guilty, excited heat flooding swiftly through her body. Even her face felt as though it was burning with her awareness of how the thought of such intimacy with him was affecting her. And very concerned and wary of that feeling she ought to be, Alena reminded herself as the lift rose swiftly upwards.

Impulsively, her actions driven by sudden apprehension and the frantic pounding of her heart, she turned to him and told him unsteadily, ‘I’m not sure …’

‘You’re afraid to be alone with me? You think I might try to seduce you?’ he guessed. ‘Or is it more that you have been wondering what it would be like if I did try?’

‘No!’ Alena denied immediately.

The lift had stopped. The door was open. He was looking at her with an expression that was a mixture of amusement and something else that re-ignited the desire she had felt earlier.

‘Good,’ he told her as he guided her out of the lift. ‘Because I can assure you that for me this lunch will be strictly business.’

That much was true—even if he had no intention of allowing her to know what exactly that meant.

Torn between relief and embarrassment that he had guessed what was going through her mind, Alena reminded herself that for her the only purpose of this lunch must be the fact that she would be able to claim to Vasilii later that she had secured Kiryl’s donation to the charity, and that it proved she was mature enough to step into her mother’s shoes.

The thick pile of the carpet in the corridor muffled their footsteps as Kiryl guided her towards one of a mere handful of doors in its length, opening it on his suite and indicating that she should precede him into it.

Opposite the entry door to the small rectangular lobby in which she was now standing was a pair of double doors, which Kiryl went to open for her. The sight of natural daylight coming in through the tall windows of the suite’s sitting room brought a welcome easing of the tight constriction of her throat, which she was trying to insist to herself had come from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the small windowless space of the lobby.

The decor of the suite’s sitting room was familiar to her from staying in exclusive hotels all over the world. Luxuriously comfortable, the room contained everything a demanding guest might need—from a faux fireplace with two small sofas either side of it, through to a desk and the large cupboard which she suspected contained a concealed TV set and a mini-bar, and dining chairs placed neatly against one of the walls. The col our scheme of creams and greys was very ‘boutique hotel’, the fabrics and carpet obviously expensive.

‘I’ll ring down for our lunch. I hope you’ll like what I’ve ordered. Oh, and there’s a guest bathroom through the door off the lobby,’ Kiryl informed her.

Alena nodded her head. She was glad about that, of course. She wouldn’t have wanted to have to walk through his bedroom to find its en suite bathroom. Of course not. She wouldn’t have wanted to do that at all. Because if she had she might have looked at the bed—Kiryl’s bed—and once she had done that she might have started imagining him lying on it … naked … the magnificent body her senses insisted on repeatedly telling her lay beneath his clothes exposed to her hungry gaze.

By the time she reached the relative sanctuary of the guest bathroom Alena was breathing so heard, her heart pumping so frantically, that she had to lean on the door once she was inside and slowly count to ten inside her head in an effort to calm herself down.

Pulling away from the door, she ran cold water over her wrists to cool her overheated skin, reminding herself of just why she was there. The charity and Kiryl’s donation to it. That was the only pairing she should be thinking about, she warned herself, quickly reaching for one of the immaculate white linen towels to dry her wrists and hands when she heard the buzzer to the suite and guessed that it was announcing the arrival of their lunch.

And what a lunch!

Alena’s eyes widened when one of the two waiters who had wheeled in a hot trolley, along with a table already dressed with a starched white cloth and all the accoutrements one would expect from the most prestigious of restaurants, pulled out her chair for her. The other did the same for Kiryl, and then placed her first course in front of her. Her favourite, she realised as she looked down at the serving of warm pear and goat’s cheese salad.

‘Thank you—we shall serve ourselves from here.’ Kiryl dismissed the waiters with a discreetly given tip, before getting up once they had gone to say, ‘A drink first, I think—our national drink to start with.’ He removed a bottle of chilled vodka from the ice bucket and poured it into two waiting shots glasses.

‘Vodka?’

He was holding one of the glasses out to her across the intimacy of the small table, which was also set with wine glasses, giving her no real option other than to take it. Her fingers had to curl around his as she did so. Why had she never known before this intense difference between her own flesh and that of another? The sensation of his cool, firm skin against hers seared her senses, flooding them with the most acute awareness of him. She could smell the subtle expensive scent of his cologne, fresh and yet somehow at the same time powerfully erotic. He was so close to her that she was sure she could see the dark shadow of the body hair on his chest beneath the fine cotton of his white shirt.

She hadn’t taken so much as a sip of her vodka yet, and already she was beginning to feel dizzy and lightheaded. Because she knew how important this meeting was—for the charity and for her. Her hand started to shake, and then her body, but to her relief he didn’t appear to notice, releasing the glass into her shaky hold before reaching for his own, and toasting her.

‘Za vashe zdorovye—your good health,’ he said, before emptying the glass in one swallow.

Alena knew that she was expected to do the same. It was the tradition to do so. But even though she managed to return the toast, she could only manage to sip at the fiery ice-cold liquid.

‘They say it is less intoxicating if you drink it down in one, but I can see that you are a woman who likes to draw out and enjoy her sensual pleasures. And drinking vodka slowly is a very particular sensual pleasure for those who can bear it. One has to withstand its icy cold and then endure its burning heart. Not a task for the faint-hearted—but then I already know that you have a very brave and reckless heart indeed. You have already proved that to me.’

He was smiling at her, his gaze trapping hers and holding it easily with the same strength with which she suspected he would hold her body between his hands if he chose to do so. And surely worse than being trapped was the feeling that in his compelling dark green gaze was a knowing glint that suggested …

Alena didn’t want to risk thinking about what it was telling her.

She couldn’t help wondering feverishly if his words could really mean that he wanted to remind her of his earlier suggestion that she was afraid to be alone with him, when she had denied that suggestion.

‘I am referring, of course, to your bravery in meeting the challenge inheriting responsibility for your late mother’s charity must place on you.’

Of course he was. Why must she keep on putting a personal slant on everything he said to her? And, even worse, dragging it into the far too overheated sensual awareness of him she should be resolutely ignoring rather than encouraging. He himself was making it plain that his interest in her was not personally biased at all. Was it because she wanted him to have a personal interest in her? Because she wanted him to desire her and, desiring her, show her that desire? No. No—a thousand times no.

‘I am proud to take on that responsibility,’ Alena assured him, finishing her vodka so that she could break the eye contact he was maintaining with her, hoping she sounded suitably businesslike.

Gesturing towards her starter, Kiryl said, ‘I hope the food I have chosen will be to your liking?’

‘This is my favourite starter,’ she admitted.

Of course it was, Kiryl thought inwardly with cynical satisfaction. He had left nothing to chance about this lunch. He knew exactly what her favourite dishes from the restaurant’s menu were.

‘You mentioned your own mother when I asked you what had drawn you to my mother’s charity,’ Alena reminded him, having told herself yet again that this was a business lunch—no matter how intimate it might seem. Talking about the charity would help her to focus on that reality. So she wasn’t asking him about his mother because she desperately wanted to know more about him. She wasn’t.

‘Yes, I did,’ Kiryl agreed, reaching into the second ice bucket and removing a bottle of white wine, telling her, ‘Try this. I discovered it the last time I stayed here and I rather like it.’

Wine on top of the vodka she had already had to drink; was that really a good idea? For a moment Alena hesitated. It was very flattering to be asked her opinion on a bottle of wine. She wasn’t a big drinker—her mother hadn’t been, and Vasilii deplored the growing modern trend for young women to drink heavily.

Quickly she placed her hand over her empty wine glass and shook her head, telling him, ‘No, thank you. I’m not much of a drinker, I’m afraid. Especially at lunchtime.’

Kiryl put down the bottle and gave her another of those searching looks that seemed to probe the depths of her being.

‘Was that decision your own or your brother’s?’ Kiryl asked.

He was smiling at her again. His smile said that she could feel safe with him, but his words had sliced to the heart of her own growing awareness that a byproduct of Vasilii’s protection of her was a certain immaturity when it came to experiencing the things that other girls her age had experienced. Was that how he saw her? As someone immature and inexperienced? A girl rather than the fully sensual and adult woman a man like him was bound to prefer?

‘My own,’ she answered him. ‘Vasilii does not make my decisions or choices for me—nor would he want to do so.’

‘So why not allow me to convince you that this wine will greatly enhance your enjoyment of our time together today?’

Her heart was skittering around inside her chest. Another, more experienced woman would know whether or not Kiryl was indulging in flirtatious banter with her with words that were mundane on the surface and yet somehow held a teasing note of a deeper sensuality, but she did not. So surely it would be better to play it safe and assume that it was merely her own over-active imagination that was deepening them with a sensual promise that did not exist?

No sooner had she made that decision than the calming effect it had had on her was ripped away, when Kiryl stood up and came to her side, gently lifting her hand away from her wine glass and continuing to hold it whilst he poured her the merest half a glass of pale straw-coloured wine, before filling his own glass and then returning the bottle to the ice bucket. All the while he continued to hold her hand. And not just hold it. He was touching her fingers, stroking them lightly and almost absently.

‘You’re trembling,’ he told her.

Of course she was. He was touching her. No, not just touching her, caressing her, and because of that she was trembling—from head to toe—her heart thudding frantically.

‘Your brother must be a very stern protector if the thought of having half a glass of wine without his approval can have this effect on you.’

He thought she was trembling because she was afraid of Vasilii? By rights she ought to defend her loving halfbrother and tell him truthfully that never once in their lives together had she ever, ever had any need to fear him, that it had always been Vasilii to whom she had run with all her troubles, to be comforted by his big-brotherly love for her. But if she did tell him that then he might ask her exactly why she was trembling—and she couldn’t possibly tell him that. All she could do was make a mental apology to her brother and try to control the jagged exhaled breath of relief that shuddered through her body when Kiryl let go of her hand and returned to his own chair, lifting his own wine glass to his lips.

‘So, tell me more about your mother’s charity,’ he said.

‘You were going to tell me about your mother,’ Alena reminded him.

For a moment Alena thought he hadn’t heard her. He seemed to be looking past her into some dark place that only he could see, a fixed expression on his face.

Was that merely a shadow darkening his eyes, or was it really the ice cold look of anger it seemed?

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised uncomfortably.

‘For what? Asking about my mother?’ Kiryl gave a small shrug, his gaze hardening still further. ‘There is no need to be. It is no secret, after all. The reality of my mother’s life has been well documented by those who do not thinking it fitting that the son of a homeless Romany should become successful, because that challenges their prejudiced belief in their own superiority and the inferiority of those they choose to label in such a way.’

And that labelling, that rejection and cruelty, had hurt him badly. Alena could tell. Her tender heart immediately ached for him, and for his mother.

‘It is true that as a child she did not receive the education afforded to the more privileged in society, but that was not her fault. My father was happy to sleep with her—the beautiful gypsy girl he had seen dancing in a café in Moscow frequented by the wealthy—but the minute she told him that she was pregnant, carrying me, he deserted and denigrated her, saying that she was lying about their relationship and that he had not fathered me. He told her he would rather smother me at birth than acknowledge that he had fathered a child with Romany blood.’

Alena couldn’t hold back her gasp of emotion.

‘Your mother told you about your father’s cruelty to you both?’ she asked.

A shuttered darkness claimed the light from Kiryl’s eyes.

‘No. She died when I was eight years old. But prior to that she told me that she wanted me to know how important love was and how much she loved me. How love could bring the greatest happiness life could hold and the sharpest pain. She wanted me to be proud of what and who I was, even though we were living in the meanest kind of poverty.’

His mother had been a fool—too weak to stand up to his father and demand that he did the right thing by them both. All her talk of love and being proud of himself had meant nothing in the real world—the world that was ruled by men like his father, successful, wealthy men who controlled their own destiny and made the rules by which others had to live. As far as Kiryl was concerned it was far better to focus on that reality than to follow his mother’s advice about the importance of love. Look what it had done to her, and through her to him. No, there was no place for love in his life. Love only weakened those who were foolish enough to allow it into their lives.

‘So how do you know—I mean about how your father felt about your mother?’ Alena asked, wondering if perhaps he had misunderstood the situation. After all, surely no father could ever be so cruel to his child?

‘How do I know? I know because my father told me himself, when I finally tracked him down after the woman who fostered me told me the story my mother had told her before she died. My father was a rich man—a powerful and respected man. He told me the truth and then he threw me out on the street outside his grand mansion—like unwanted rubbish, to be swept away out of his sight. I swore then that one day—’

Kiryl stopped speaking, frowning as he recognised how much he had said to Alena. He had never intended to say it, and certainly had never said to anyone else. It was because he wanted to draw her into his plan by eliciting her sympathy towards his mother and making her believe that he had a genuine reason for choosing her charity for his donation, that was why. It certainly wasn’t because something in her expression and that shocked gasp she had given had somehow unlocked a door within him he had thought safely barred against the burned-out ashes of the pain he kept caged behind that door. It was impossible for any living human being to re-ignite those ashes. They belonged to the promise he had made himself when he had lain in the gutter outside his father’s house—that he would prove his superiority by becoming more successful and more powerful than his father had ever been.

His father was dead now, his empire squandered by the second husband of the young wife he had married to provide him with the son she had never conceived for him—the son he had told Kiryl would be the only son he would ever acknowledge.

With the acquisition of this new contract Kiryl would finally succeed in reaching the goal he had set himself as the fifteen-year-old who had gone to Moscow to look for his father and been rejected. That goal had been to create a business empire that was both larger, more profitable and more securely stable than that of his father. Only Vasilii Demidov now stood in his way.

He looked across the table at Alena.

‘When I heard about your mother’s charity I knew immediately that it was something I wanted to be involved with as a donor.’

That was certainly true. He had known immediately he had read about the charity and Alena’s desire to become more involved in it just what a useful tool it would be in winning her trust.

‘I know how much work the charity does to help girls have the opportunity to gain an education. I admire you for wanting to take on that responsibility. Many young women in your situation would have handed that responsibility over to someone else.’ He flattered Alena warmly.

‘I could never do that. The charity was so close to my mother’s heart.’ She paused, and then said emotionally, ‘It must have been so hard for you, growing up without your mother and—’

‘According to my father I was lucky that she died, and that I was fostered by a family without the taint of Romany blood.’

Alena felt her throat clog with emotional tears. Within her head she could see that poor baby, and felt a female ache to have been able to hold and protect it. Poor, poor baby to be so cruelly treated by life.

‘I was very lucky in having the parents I did,’ was all she could manage to say.

‘But unlucky, perhaps, in having a brother who is so determined to control your life?’

‘Vasilii only wants what’s best for me.’ She defended her half-sibling quickly.

‘For you and for himself, I dare say,’ Kiryl responded, adding before Alena could question his words, ‘We’d better have our main course before it gets cold. I hope you like Dover sole.’

‘Yes, it’s another of my favourites,’ Alena began as Kiryl reached over to remove her starter, and then guessed, ‘You knew that, didn’t you? And that’s why you’ve chosen the meal you have?’

So she wasn’t entirely without either intelligence or the ability to reason analytically, Kiryl acknowledged. He gave her a small smile and told her, ‘Very well—I confess that I did ask the restaurant what your favourite dishes are. I wanted to make a good impression on you.’

Alena couldn’t look directly at him. Her heart was singing with delight and disbelief at the thought of Kiryl actually wanting to impress her, and yet at the same time his words had brought her a certain amount of self-consciousness that was making it impossible for her to look at him.

‘I’m the one who should be trying to impress you,’ she managed to tell him, albeit slightly breathlessly, her voice soft and husky with all that she was feeling. ‘After all, I’m the one who has the most to gain from our lunch.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Kiryl told her softly as he placed her main meal in front of her and removed the cover. ‘There is a great deal that I am hoping to gain from our relationship, Alena.’

As he spoke he was looking at her mouth, and as though his look was communicating an unspoken command Alena could feel her lips softening and parting as deliciously sensual ribbons of desire unrolled to flutter inside her with the movement of her breathing.

‘Tell me more about your mother,’ he invited her, abruptly bringing her back to reality, and the fact that this meeting was about her mother’s charity and not about the effect he was having on her.

‘She was a very special person,’ she answered, her voice soft with love for the mother she had loved so much. ‘Everyone thought so.’

‘Including your half-brother? After all, she was his stepmother.’

‘Vasilii loved her very much. He was fourteen when my parents met in St Petersburg, where my mother was working as an English Language teacher at a school there. Vasilii’s own mother died when he was seven. He wanted them to marry before they knew that they wanted to marry themselves, so he always says, although my mother used to say that she knew the first moment she met him that she loved my father.

‘My mother loved St Petersburg. She and my father used to take me there every winter. It’s such a romantic city. A fairytale city with the Neva frozen and the lights of the older quarters twinkling on the snow. It’s almost possible to think you’re back in the days of dashing young men in the uniform of the Imperial Guard driving their troikas, pulled by a team of three matching horses along Nevsky Prospect, ready to race one another in the morning after spending all night dancing. And then in the summer, when the sun never sets, people flock to party on the islands of the delta. I had dreamed …’

‘That you might find love there yourself?’ Kiryl suggested.

Alena shook her head.

‘I am not such a dreamer that I expect to find love there just because my mother did, but I do think that it would be a very special place to go with … with someone special to me.’ That was as close as she was able to get to saying what she meant. Somehow just to speak the word ‘lover’ in Kiryl’s presence was to run the risk of betraying her vulnerability to him, or having him guess that when she said ‘lover’ she meant Kiryl himself.

Kiryl knew the St Petersburg to which Alena referred—the St Petersburg of the rich and privileged. After all, he was one of them. But he also knew another St Petersburg. The St Petersburg of his own childhood poverty and his rejection by his father. He had turned his back on Russia just as his father had turned his back on him. Kiryl considered himself to be a citizen of the world, not of one part of it.

Not that he was going to say that to Alena. He wanted her to believe that he understood and empathised with her.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT WAS gone three in the afternoon—over an hour since they had finished their lunch and Kiryl had invited her to sit down on the sofa opposite him. Now, as she stood up ready to leave, Alena was feeling dizzy from a combination of the excitement generated inside her at the sheer amount of the donation Kiryl had told her he was going to make to the charity, and the glass of champagne he had insisted they drank to cement that gift.

‘You’ve been so generous,’ she told him, wobbling slightly on her heels—no doubt because of the speed with which she had stood up, she assured herself, and not the fact that Kiryl was now standing right next to her, his hand resting supportively beneath her elbow as he walked with her towards the door.

Kiryl had insisted on telephoning the CEO of the charity himself to tell her of his wonderfully generous donation, before instructing his bank to make the necessary transfer, and since that had somehow or other necessitated the drinking of a second glass of champagne it was perhaps no wonder that she felt a little unsteady and very, very euphoric. But what about those other feelings, clear and sharp, definitely not due in the slightest to her intake of champagne but most unmistakably caused by Kiryl’s proximity?

They must be ignored, Alena told herself sternly. They belonged to the rather reckless young woman who had seen him in the foyer and let her hormones dictate her reactions, not the far more sensible businesswoman she had now decided she wanted to be.

Alena started to make a move to the door to the hallway, but Kiryl’s hold on her elbow tightened just enough to stop her.

When she turned to him to ask him why he forestalled her, bending his head towards her. Time seemed to stand still, whilst the earth surely rocked beneath her feet. His breath was a warm, sensual touch that caressed her vulnerable flesh. Rivers of sensation flowed from that caress, like the many streams that came with the thawing of Russia’s winter, to bring the frozen earth to life once more, freeing it from the icy spell it had been under, melting away its resistance.

‘Do you remember saying when we arrived here that you weren’t afraid to be alone with me?’ Kiryl was asking her.

‘Yes …’ Her voice turned her confirmation into a small soft moan of self-betrayal. She was standing on the edge of something so very dangerous, and yet so very tempting.

Helplessly her gaze—the gaze she had so determinedly kept removed from his, knowing what she could betray to him if she looked at him—searched for and clung to his. The green eyes were dark with the knowledge of a thousand sensual mysteries that were unknown to her.

‘Perhaps you should have been a wise virgin and been afraid after all.’

The sound of his voice—deeper, rougher, strained with something elementally male, his words containing an intimate knowledge of her that she had not thought anyone else shared—made her whole body jerk visibly in response.

He knew she was a virgin? How could he?

Kiryl watched the shadow-play of light and dark dapple Alena’s silver eyes, their lucidity as illuminating as St Petersburg’s famous ‘white nights’, when the daylight never truly disappeared. Her lips had parted; the softest pink colour was warming her skin. She was trembling in his hold, held captive by his sexuality and her own response to it.

Her virginity made her an even easier target for the success of his plans. She certainly wasn’t a virgin because she was lacking in sensuality, so her chasteness must have been imposed on her—either by circumstance or her brother, or perhaps a combination of both. Kiryl gave a small mental shrug. Why she was still a virgin was immaterial. It simply made it easier for him to overwhelm her sensually and emotionally. For his plan to succeed he needed to convince her that she loved him, and of course that he loved her back. And his plan would succeed. It had to.

He lifted his free hand to her neck, gently brushing away her hair so that he could curl his fingers round her slender nape. Her eyes were pure silver now, and brilliant with emotion. Looking into them he told her softly, ‘You do know, don’t you, that I’m going to kiss you?’

Her heart seemed to jump into her throat, her stomach hollowing with an aching excitement and desire that spilled over into the lower part of her body, making it pulse with a wild surge of longing.

She lifted her hand to his face and touched the skin that was drawn so smoothly over the high cheekbones. Danger glittered in the malachite depths of his eyes, promising a treasure greater than any priceless stone. His breath against her lips commanded them to part still further, and his fingers caressing the nape of her neck under her hair were sending frantic shivers of arousal coursing through her body. Urgency leapt from nerve-ending to nerve-ending within her, spreading like wildfire, until she was possessed by it, the whole of her body one fierce wild ache of need that would not be denied. She wanted this—and him—so badly.

With a small yearning sound she moved closer to him, offering him her mouth and closing her eyes as she did so.

‘No!’ Kiryl told her, the word exploding into the sensual tension they were creating. ‘No. Don’t close your eyes. I want to look into them when I kiss you. I want to watch the pleasure we shall create together being born. Pleasure such as previously you can only have imagined, little virgin. Tell me you want that. Tell me you want me as I want you.’

How could she resist or deny him when every word he spoke only reinforced what she was already feeling? She couldn’t—but neither could she find the words to speak her need. Instead she could only press her mouth against his with passionate intensity, feeling them burn against the hard maleness of his before they were taken and possessed, shown and taught lessons of demand and desire and sensuality that were as he had promised her: a world—no, a whole galaxy—away from anything her imagination had ever created.

This need, this desire, this hunger he was creating and feeding inside her was both new to her and yet at the same time had an age-old elemental familiarity that called to all within her that was female. She knew that—and she knew something else as well. She knew that the feelings and needs that were surrounding her and filling her now were being conjured from deep within her by the only man who would ever have the power to call them into life. The only man for her for ever. She knew that so deep within herself that she felt the knowledge must have somehow been born with her, and that he must surely be her destiny.

The stroke of Kiryl’s tongue against her own—moving rhythmically, darting, lingering, thrusting with hard demand, then coaxing and teaching her to return the hot intimacy of that caress—set fresh desire exploding inside her. A dazzling banquet of new sensations to experience of which this was only the first course; a thousand new pleasures to know.

Beneath her clothes, her body ached with feverish hunger—her breasts swelling, pushing imploringly against the fabric that denied them the possession of Kiryl’s touch. Beneath the ravishment of her senses by his kiss her need brought a soft moan to her throat.

Holding her mouth beneath his own, Kiryl looked down into her arousal-drenched gaze. Her face was softly flushed, her look pleading, her body quivering like a finely tuned string instrument with the need he had created within it. He could see the outline of her breasts against the fine fabric of the primly buttoned high-necked blouse she was wearing, her nipples stiff and erect. Without saying a word he lifted his mouth from hers and placed it instead over the silk-covered crest of the breast he had cupped with his hand, and then he sucked deeply and hard on it, until she cried out and twisted frantically in his hold, gasping his name with a shuddering breath.

Still without speaking he returned his mouth to hers, nipping sensually at her bottom lip and then thrusting his tongue deep into the soft wetness of her mouth as he covered the now swollen mound of her sex with his free hand and kneaded it rhythmically. Alena clung desperately to him.

‘Is this good for you? Is it what you want? Tell me, Alena. Tell me that you want the caress of my mouth against your naked breasts, the taste of your sex against my lips.’

Alena shuddered wildly as his words unleashed shockingly intimate images inside her head, accompanied by unbearably intense surges of desire. With each word he was taking her deeper into a world in which he was her only compass, her lodestar, her only point of rationality, her guide, her leader, her saviour and her all.

‘Tell me that you want my touch, my need, my desire for you. Tell me that you want me, Alena,’ Kiryl demanded of her.

The sound Alena made was that of a woman aroused to the point where nothing else mattered. She was lost—helpless to resist the surge of biting, devouring, sensual need that Kiryl had conjured up inside her, which had savaged her self-control.

‘Yes, I want you,’ she told him in small, desperate gasped breaths that pulsated with her arousal and formed the words he wanted to hear. ‘I want you. I …’

From her handbag her mobile trilled impatiently, warning her of an incoming text. It dragged her unceremoniously back into the world of reality. She turned towards the sound.

‘Leave it,’ Kiryl commanded her.

‘I can’t—it might be Vasilii.’

The grim look that darkened Kiryl’s eyes warned her that he wasn’t pleased, but Alena knew that Vasilii would worry if she didn’t answer his message.

Just the mere act of hurrying over to her handbag brought home to her the changes that Kiryl had already wrought within her body. Each movement reinforced the agonised ache of sensuality that now flooded it. Although he wasn’t even touching her Kiryl still possessed her senses, and through them her body. Her breast ached in torment where he had drawn her desire for his touch there to its now frantic throbbing peak. The hot swelling of her sex was something she felt with every step she took. Her whole body shook with the knowledge of how he had transformed her and how much she wanted him. So very much. Now and for always. Part of her was glad.

Her hand trembled as she removed her mobile from her handbag and checked the text, telling Kiryl, ‘It is from Vasilii.’

As he watched her read her half-brother’s message Kiryl saw a small frown pleat her forehead.

‘Something’s wrong?’ he guessed, going over to her.

‘Not really. Vasilii says that his business negotiations are taking longer than he expected and he will not now be returning to London for another five days. I was looking forward to telling him in person about your wonderful donation to the charity, but now I’ll have to text him instead.’

Kiryl tensed inwardly. The last thing he wanted was Vasilii Demidov getting wind of his presence in his half-sister’s life until he himself chose to make him aware of that fact.

‘Why not wait to tell him until he returns? Then you can do so and show him the cheque at the same time,’ he suggested with a smile.

‘Yes. Yes, I will,’ Alena agreed. Suddenly she felt acutely self-conscious. Vasilii’s text had disrupted the feeling of connection to Kiryl she had had, leaving her feeling uncertain and physically unnerved by the intensity of her sexual response to him. Without the warmth of his arms around her that intensity now felt more than she was able to handle. ‘I think I should leave now,’ she told Kiryl.

‘Running away from me?’ he taunted.

It was unfortunate that her brother had texted when he had. It was a very necessary part of Kiryl’s plan that he had Alena completely under his spell sexually, and that meant not just arousing her but possessing her as well, winning her total confidence, her total subjugation to him, so that his will mattered more to her than that of anyone else—including her half-brother. It meant giving her the very best sex she could imagine having—or ever would have.

He could take her back in his arms now and make that happen, he knew, but he wanted her to be the one begging for his touch, aching for his possession—demanding it, in fact. And right now he could see that she was too on edge for that to happen.

It wasn’t just the disruption and delay to his plan that was affecting him right now, though, he was forced to admit. The immediacy and intensity of his own arousal was causing his body to ache for satisfaction in a way that it hadn’t ached in a very, very long time. That desire was the result of his need to succeed in his plan, not any specific desire for her, he reassured himself. After all, when had he ever desired any woman to the extent that she made him ache for her against his will? He hadn’t, and he never would. It was Alena’s own foolish giving, her openly helpless sensual response to him and the fact that she had shown him she had never experienced it that was responsible for the unwontedly fierce surge.

If her brother was responsible for spiking his plans with his text message, then she herself was to blame for the raw ache of need within him that was also disrupting those plans. It was certainly not part of the plan that he should physically want her. A cold, clear mind and a totally controlled body were what he needed. He had invested too much of himself—too much of what he had been and where he had come from, too much of where he wanted to go and what he had done to get there—in the goal he was so close to reaching to risk failure now. Especially not because his body was howling for the possession of one single woman. One single woman who somehow or other had managed to touch the emotional darkness of the vampire within him—that part of himself that somehow remained beyond his control.

Alena was looking tense and clutching her handbag, her manner making it plain to him that she wanted to leave—thanks to her brother reaching out across the ether to claim her allegiance.

‘I’ll walk you back to your suite,’ Kiryl told her, holding up his hand when she started to object. ‘Please. It isn’t perhaps the correct thing to do to refer to such things, but I believe in plain speaking and I think our afternoon took a turn neither of us was fully expecting. A turn that led a flirtatious kiss to a place that has certainly left me feeling … Well, let’s just say that what happened between us touched something within me, and that means that right now I don’t want any other man looking at you and guessing what we have just shared. So for that reason you must allow me to be protective and a little possessive and see you safely back to your own door.’

Since he put it like that, how could she possibly refuse?

Five minutes later, escorting Alena along the corridor that led to her half-brother’s apartment, after sharing the journey up to it with a uniformed member of the hotel staff whose presence had made any kind of intimate conversation impossible and Alena herself self-conscious, Kiryl recognised that if he was going to be able to seduce her so completely that she gave him her absolute trust, as well as her body, he needed to do so somewhere he could have her completely to himself, where the realities of life and her loyalty to her brother could be banished.

They had reached the double doors to the apartment. If he suggested that she asked him in she would balk at his request, Kiryl sensed, once again mentally cursing the interruption which had meant their intimacy had been brought to an end sooner than he would have liked.

Outside the door, Alena turned towards Kiryl. She had felt acutely self conscious standing in the lift with him under the gaze of the uniformed porter, her body still on fire from the intimacy they had shared. ‘Thank you for your donation,’ she told him, her voice softening as she added, ‘And thank you for telling me about your mother and for letting me talk about mine and St Petersburg.’

St Petersburg. Of course! She had already told him how romantic she thought the city, and it would certainly be private at this time of the year, with its elite wealthy citizens having decamped for warmer climates to escape the icy grip of its winter.

Kiryl smiled at her—a slow, warm smile that had Alena’s toes curling helplessly into her shoes and the blood beating up under her skin.

‘You weren’t disappointed, then, in our time together?’

Alena tried to look nonchalant and relaxed, but her heart was thudding so heavily and unsteadily she suspected that he must be able to hear it.

‘I …’ She shook her head.

‘Will it help if I go first and say that I enjoyed every minute of it and I hope we can repeat that pleasure?’ Kiryl asked her in a tender voice, and continued without giving her the chance to reply, ‘I don’t want to rush you or pressure you, Alena, but I don’t think either of us was prepared for … for the chemistry between us. It was very special. You are very special. See—you’ve got me talking and feeling like a raw boy who has never desired a woman before. But then no woman has ever made me feel the way you do.’

That, of course, was true. Because of her connection with Vasilii she aroused in him feelings that no other woman was capable of arousing.

‘I want to see you again—tomorrow, if you will let me?’

‘Yes.’ The single word was exhaled on the pent-up breath Alena had been holding. She truly felt as though she was entering a new world—a truly magical world whose axis was Kiryl and the way he made her feel.

‘I can hardly bear to let you out of my sight.’ Kiryl shrugged and gave a small laugh, as though at the un-familiarity of his own feelings. And it was true—he was reluctant to let her go. But because she was so important to his plans, and not because there was an ache in his groin that said his body had plans of its own for her. A flash of inner irritation rebuked his flesh for its inconvenient and unwanted awareness of her.

‘There is so much I want to share with you and show you.’

He made his voice deeper and slightly ragged. And then he discovered that his words were reinforcing—uncomfortably—the surge of desire that had caught him off-guard earlier. His body’s rank disloyalty irked him, but he had more important things to deal with right now. After all no man in his thirties worthy of calling himself a man did not know how to control his own sexual arousal.

‘So much I want to belong exclusively to us,’ he continued softly, ‘and to what we’re beginning to feel for one another. It’s making me selfish. I don’t want to share it or you with anyone else. Not yet—not until I know that you …’ Deliberately he let his words trail away meaningfully.

And of course Alena knew exactly what he meant. The attraction between them might be compelling and urgent to them, but she couldn’t see Vasilii, for instance, seeing it that way. The minute she mentioned meeting Kiryl her half-brother would launch into an avalanche of questions that she didn’t want to face. The newness and delicacy of the discovery of their shared feelings needed the privacy of being shared only by the two of them to be nurtured—not exposure to her brother’s well-intentioned but potentially over-analytical and forensically intense questioning.

‘I feel the same way,’ she assured Kiryl. His admission was giving her a new confidence. She was not alone in her desire. They were connected by a mutual need. That was something they shared.

‘Then it will to be our secret—for now.’

Alena’s keycard had opened the door, which she was holding in one hand. She turned to look at Kiryl, her gaze brimming with the heady joy she was feeling. Still holding the door, she reached out and placed her hand on Kiryl’s arm, looking up at him as she did so.

‘Thank you,’ she told him softly. ‘Thank you for the donation to my mother’s charity, and thank you most of all for this,’ she whispered huskily as she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

Taken off-guard by the sheeting feral male need her kiss drove through him, the only thought Kiryl could formulate was illogically angry—didn’t she realise that she shouldn’t be so open and trusting with him? How vulnerable she was making herself? How open to being used and hurt? But what concern was it of his that she might be hurt? When had he ever cared about anyone being hurt? Never—and he never intended to care either. That way lay the road to vulnerability and self-destruction. He needed to remain single-minded because it was only by being single-minded that he would reach his goal. And it was only once he had reached that goal that he would finally be able to stand free of the dark shadow of his father’s contempt for him and walk away from it.

Pushing her firmly away from himself, he told her truthfully, ‘If you don’t go inside now you won’t be going in alone. And your brother’s apartment is not the place I want to …’

Alena shook her head, not wanting him to spell out what she knew he meant. Because if he did the effect on her of knowing he wanted to make love to her so badly would make it as impossible for her to leave him as he was hinting it would be for him to leave her.

‘Tomorrow,’ Kiryl told her. ‘Tomorrow I shall come for you, and when I do …’

‘When you do I shall be ready,’ Alena assured him, bravely and truthfully.

CHAPTER FIVE

SHE was so happy. If she had ever thought before that she had known happiness she had been wrong. That happiness had only been a pale shadow of what filled her now. Filled her and spilled out of her, to surround her with the blissful shining excitement of Kiryl.

She had barely slept, and she’d been up early this morning—adrenalin-filled, and with a surplus of energy that had had her pacing the floor whilst clutching her mobile phone, waiting impatiently for the contact Kiryl had promised her. And that contact would come. She knew that. Yesterday had not been some fantasy-fuelled creation of her own imagination. No, it had been real, shared—a commitment made and given to the journey they would make together. A journey to a shared future?

The knifing, twisting, yielding hot sweetness of her emotional and sensual response to that question told her what she wanted, but she was not going to let her hopes run away with her. Instead she was going to live for the moment, for every heartbeat, every touch, every kiss and every intimacy they would share.

The bell to the apartment’s security system rang, followed within a second by the ring of her mobile phone.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s me.’

She heard Kiryl’s voice in response to her own tremulous answer to the phone’s summons.

‘I’m outside. Let me in.’

Her hands were all fingers and thumbs as she struggled with the door’s lock system, and the small handful of seconds it took her to open the door was a lifetime of impatient longing.

Kiryl swept her up into his embrace the moment the door was open, closing it with a kick of his foot and then leaning back against it whilst he kissed her with all the passion and hunger her own heart felt.

For several minutes the hallway was filled with the soft sounds of Alena’s pleasure, the sweetly shocked gasps of her breath and the aching cry of her female delight when Kiryl’s hand found her breast beneath the pale grey cashmere of her jumper.

‘I want you. I ache so much for you that I have no self-control. All last night I lay awake, thinking what a fool I’d been for not snatching you up there and then and taking you with me. But you—us—what we will have together—deserves far more than the anonymity of a hotel bedroom for its culmination and our shared commitment to it. When we sacrifice our individual selves to become united as one I want it to be somewhere very special.’

Each word Kiryl whispered into her ear, between small erotic kisses bitten delicately into the soft skin of her throat, whilst he caressed her nipple into a tight excited peak of eager surrender, sent a fresh surge of sensual longing and urgency through her. Low down in her body the ache that had merely been tamped down overnight burned hotly into new and impatient life. What he was saying to her, promising her, was lovely—but Alena knew that if he had said he was so impatient that he was going to take her here and now, against the wall in the hallway of the apartment, she would have given herself to him without a second’s hesitation.

It made her feel unbearably tender towards him that he should seek to contain their mutual desire in order to give it the right setting, and that feeling increased when he told her, ‘I want to make it special for you.’

‘You are what makes it special,’ Alena replied shakily, her voice betraying her emotions. ‘You are special, Kiryl. Special, and wonderful, and … and I am so lucky to have met you.’

Instinctively Kiryl tensed—against both her words and her emotion—wanting to reject them, wanting to tell her that the last thing he wanted from anyone was an emotional connection. Emotional connections had no place in his life. They never had and they never would. He had learned young that it was safer to shut himself away from his emotions. Except, of course, those that drove him to obliterate the memory of his father’s rejection by achieving for himself what his father had not been able to achieve.

Alena’s open vulnerability irritated him like a piece of grit in his shoe, demanding his attention even though he didn’t want to give it. It had been her parents’ responsibility to prepare her for the harsh realities of life. Now it was her brother’s. If they hadn’t taken care to do that then why should it irk him so much? Especially when her vulnerability was the foundation on which he was building his plans to win that all-important contract.

What was it that was really causing his irritation? Surely not his conscience? Kiryl shrugged aside that thought. He did not have a conscience—not where the all-important task he had set himself was concerned. So why the irritation? After all, it would make things far more difficult for him if she were suspicious of him and his motives.

And, no matter how ready she might be to let him see how she felt about him now, she would be more than suspicious, a few weeks from now, when he walked away from her with his prize, leaving her with her dreams and her pride shattered.

Kiryl tensed his mind against his own thoughts. Her future pain was no concern of his. She was no concern of his. She had her rich, protective brother to take care of her, and she had grown up with loving parents. The contrast between their childhoods couldn’t have been greater. She a child born of a union between two people who had loved one another and who would no doubt have welcomed the birth of a child to celebrate and cement that love. He a child born of a union rooted in abuse and contempt on the part of his father and gullibility on the part of his mother—a child loathed by his father and abandoned by his mother, who had died leaving him unprotected.

Kiryl frowned. He didn’t want to be dragged back to the pain of his childhood. It was over, after all, and he had severed every link that had ever connected him to it. He had re-invented, recreated himself as the man he was now. A man proud to say that his mother had been a Romany and that he had the gifts, the skills, everything he did have, to become what he now was. Unlike Alena, he had had no advantages to help him through life, but he had still been able to achieve his goals. Almost.

‘I’ve arranged a surprise for you,’ he told her.

‘A surprise? What kind of surprise?’ Alena demanded.

‘The kind that requires a passport. You do have a passport, I trust?’

A passport? He was taking her away somewhere? Alena’s heart leapt. ‘Yes, of course,’ she agreed. ‘But …’

‘No more questions,’ Kiryl told her autocratically, before looking pointedly at his plain, discreetly expensive gold watch, its strap glinting warmly against the sinewy strength of the tanned flesh of his wrist.

Kiryl had good hands—strong hands. A man’s hands, with lean fingers and clean, well-kept unmanicured nails.

‘I’ll give you five minutes in which to make your choice—either to say yes and come with me or to say no and stay here.’

‘Five minutes? But …’

‘Trust me, Alena,’ Kiryl told her fiercely. ‘Trust what you feel and trust me. Perhaps what happened between us yesterday happened too fast—for both of us. But passion—a man’s passion for a woman and hers for him—can be like that … That doesn’t make it wrong.’ His voice dropped to become hauntingly low as he told her thickly, ‘Nothing we share together could ever be wrong. All I want is the opportunity to prove to you how very special you are to me … how very special we can be together. And for that we need privacy and somewhere very special. If you will let me take you there.’

The colour came and went in Alena’s face. She knew the ‘there’ that he was talking about wasn’t just the ‘there’ of his surprise destination; what he was saying to her—what he was promising—was that he would also take her to the heights of sensual pleasure and fulfilment. Her head was spinning, her heart racing, her body aching with impatient longing. The choice was hers. He had told her that. She could refuse. She could tell him that she needed more time, that she needed more information. But Alena knew that she wasn’t going to. Overnight she had grown from a girl who had felt nervous uncertainty yesterday about whether she was strong enough for her own passion to a woman who now knew beyond any doubt that she was—and how much she wanted him.

She took a deep breath, and then asked him in a voice that only trembled very slightly, ‘What will I need to pack?’

‘Very little.’

When Alena’s face went bright red and she dropped her lashes over her eyes Kiryl laughed. He had been so intent on his plan that he had forgotten for a minute how inexperienced she actually was.

‘Ah, I see,’ Kiryl teased her. ‘You are imagining that I plan for you to wear only the minimum amount of clothing?’ He shook his head. ‘That was not what I meant at all. I should have said that you need only pack a few essentials. The rest we will buy when we reach our destination.’ He paused, and then told her softly, ‘Besides, when I make love to you it will not be “very little” you will be wearing, it will be only your own skin—because the only covering you will need will be my hands, my touch, my kiss and my body.’

Now her face was hotter than ever—and so was her body. The images conjured up by Kiryl’s words were so enticing and exciting that they made her feel giddy with longing.

‘You have three minutes left,’ Kiryl reminded her. ‘And don’t forget your passport.’

‘But I need to know something,’ Alena protested. ‘Are we going somewhere hot or …?’

‘We are going first to the airport, and for that you will need a coat. More than that I am not prepared to tell you.’

He was looking at his watch again.

The sudden reality of how awful it would be if he were to leave without her was the only impetus Alena needed to send her almost running into her bedroom. She stood for several vital seconds, too ecstatically happy to be able to formulate a single practical thought, until she remembered how little time she had.

‘A few essentials’ Kiryl had said, Alena reminded herself as she hurried into her walk-in wardrobe-cum-dressing room and removed a case, quickly sweeping her toiletries into it and then equally speedily opening a drawer to remove a couple of sets of clean underwear, grabbing her passport from her dressing table drawer to put it into her handbag and then reaching up for a quilted dark grey parka that toned with her pale grey cashmere jumper and silk taffeta skirt. Bending down to kick off her heels, she dropped them into a bag before putting them into the case and then slipping on a pair of warm lined boots.

‘Four minutes,’ Kiryl told her when she re-emerged into the sitting room with her case. ‘That’s one minute too many. For which I shall demand that you pay me a forfeit, so be warned,’ he teased her, looking pointedly at her mouth in a way that told her the forfeit he had in mind was going to be a kiss.

‘You’ve got your passport?’ he asked, holding out his hand, his manner suddenly briskly businesslike.

Alena nodded her head, automatically reaching into her handbag and passing it to him. When their fingertips touched Alena felt her whole body tingle in sensual excitement from that brief contact. And if that brief contact could have that kind of effect on her, then how was she going to feel when he really made love to her?

‘Come,’ Kiryl commanded, holding his hand out to her after he had tucked her passport away in an inside pocket of the cashmere overcoat he had previously been carrying but which he was now wearing over his suit.

Just for a second Alena hesitated, suddenly sharply aware of the symbolism of what taking his hand would mean—of the giant step she would be taking, leaving behind her the security of her brother’s loving protection to go with a man who until yesterday had been a stranger to her. A stranger who now held her heart, Alena reminded herself. A stranger to whom she felt more intimately and emotionally connected than anyone else she had ever known. A stranger who was, she was sure, the one to whom she was destined to give her heart and herself.

So not a stranger after all, but her one true love. Once she had given her hand—herself—to Kiryl she would have given them for ever, she knew.

The smartly uniformed young steward waiting for Alena at the top of the stairs into the private jet with its discreet corporate logo—Kiryl’s corporate logo—smiled welcomingly at her as he showed her into the luxuriously appointed cabin, whilst Kiryl spoke with the captain.

‘We’re cleared for take-off,’ the steward told her, stowing her small case in what looked like a wall but was in fact a bank of cupboards, ‘and as soon as we’re airborne I’ll be serving pre-lunch champagne and canapés. This is the control for your seat,’ he added, showing Alena a control unit. ‘If you’d like me to show you how to use it?’

Alena smiled politely and shook her head. She was no stranger to travelling by private jet—her brother owned one, after all—and she had recognised the private area of the airport the minute the chauffeur-driven limousine that had picked them up from the hotel had turned into it.

The interior of this one might be slightly smaller than her brother’s—Vasilii travelled extensively all over the world—but it was every bit as luxurious, if not more so. The expensive plain grey carpet with its black stripe was thick and immaculate, the leather of the charcoal-grey leather chairs so soft that Alena couldn’t resist stroking her fingertips along the arm of her own.

This section of the cabin was furnished rather like a small meeting room, with its leather chairs and a sofa, but a door in the dark glass screen at the rear of the cabin caught her attention.

Seeing her look at it, the steward told her, ‘The door leads to Mr Andronov’s workstation area, and beyond it are the bathroom and the galley. If I may take your coat for you?’

Nodding her head and returning his smile, Alena allowed him to help her off with her coat. He was a good-looking young man, with a certain look in his eyes when his gaze brushed her body that told her he was attracted to her.

Kiryl, who was on the point of entering the cabin, saw the way the steward looked at Alena as he took her coat, and the sudden, sharply savage red burn of male possessiveness that took him from the doorway to Alena’s side was so swift and overwhelming, so instinctive, that it had dictated his actions before he could even think of defying it.

It was, he told himself, perfectly natural—given the importance of the success of his plan. And, given Alena’s naïveté, he wanted to ensure that no other man showed appreciation of her. His response had been driven by practicality, that was all. Practicality. Not male possessiveness, and certainly not male jealousy.

‘You still haven’t told me where we’re going,’ Alena reminded Kiryl when he took his own seat preparatory to take-off.

‘No, and I don’t intend to tell you. It’s a surprise, remember?’

‘But you can tell me how long the flight will be?’ Alena suggested coaxingly.

‘Around seven hours,’ he told her promptly. ‘And seven hours could take us to many places. New York—one of the most vibrant cities on earth—Oman, or Dubai, where so many Russians love to go in the cold weather.’

Alena laughed. ‘Vasilii certainly loves it there. He hates the cold. His mother’s family tribe came originally from the desert.’

‘Then there is the Caribbean,’ Kiryl continued.

‘You could always simply tell me where we are going instead of keeping me guessing,’ Alena pointed out.

‘Ah, but if I did that what would you have to think about for the next seven hours?’ Kiryl asked softly.

His words might sound innocent but Alena knew that they were not—just as she also knew perfectly well exactly what was going to be occupying her thoughts for the next seven hours. And that would not be their destination so much as what would happen when they reached that destination. Kiryl holding her, touching her, taking her to bed and making her his. Kiryl, Kiryl, Kiryl. He was her journey and her destination.

Seven hours later, after an elegant lunch of smoked salmon followed by sea bass served with perfectly cooked vegetables and then champagne and orange mousse, Kiryl had flirted with her so subtly that some of the time she hadn’t been sure if he had really said or intimated what she had thought he was saying, or whether it was her own fevered longing and imagination that had made her believe his words cloaked a deliberately sensual message and the promise of shared pleasures to come.

One glance out of the jet’s window as they started to descend told Alena exactly where Kiryl was taking her. Her face alight with joy and excitement, she turned to him to exclaim happily, ‘St Petersburg! Oh, Kiryl. Thank you. You remembered what I said about it.’ Impulsively she reached out to him, her hand on his arm, her face turned up towards him.

As he looked down at her the sudden savage ache of physical desire that gripped his body shocked Kiryl into immobility. She was the one who had to want him so unbearably that her need was impossible for her to resist—not the other way around.

He reached out to push her away, but a sudden movement of the plane caught them both unaware, jolting Alena so that she lost her balance and fell against him, leaving Kiryl with no alternative other than give in to his instinctive male response to protect by taking hold of her. And once she was in his arms his body reacted to her presence there as though it was something it had hungered desperately for.

Need surged against the barriers of his self-control, its urgent arousal hardening, its ache for so much more than the feel of her mouth beneath his as he took it in a kiss that was far more intense than he had wanted it to be.

As their jet descended from the clouds to what for Alena was the most beautiful winter city in the world, it wasn’t St Petersburg that captured and held her attention but Kiryl himself. The hot, passionate swiftness with which he had taken her mouth thrilled and delighted her, and answering arousal rose up inside her to make her strain eagerly and urgently against Kiryl’s openly hardened body. His tongue caressed her own in moves as fiercely sensual and urgent as the most explicit of intimate tangos.

It wouldn’t have mattered where he had chosen to bring her, Alena acknowledged. What mattered—all that mattered for her—was being with him. The landscape of her dreams and the city of her heart was now Kiryl himself.

CHAPTER SIX

‘THIS is your room, so I’ll leave you to make yourself at home here before we have dinner, which I’ve arranged to be served in an hour’s time.’

‘My room?’

Alena was conscious of the fact that she had barely spoken since the helicopter waiting for them at the airport had dropped them off here, on one of the many small islands in the delta of the Neva, and Kiryl had shown her into a house so perfect that she had only been able to stand and gaze in delight at its fairytale interior.

Obviously dating back to the time of the early eighteen-hundreds, from its exterior architecture, the house was a perfect jewel of its era. All she had been able to say, after taking in its soft sugared-almond-blue-painted exterior and the elegance of the interior, had been, ‘This house is so beautiful! Is it yours?’

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