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  She wanted him. She wanted him so badly. His tenderness towards her and the way he had expressed that tenderness made the whole of her ache with love for him. She had always secretly dreamed of a man who would arouse her sensuality until her need for him was beyond her own control and yet at the same time be so noble that she would know she could trust him even when she could no longer trust herself. But she had never expected to find one.

  ‘You are the missing piece that will complete my life, Alena. I believe that more strongly than I have ever believed anything.’

  He was only speaking the truth—even if that completion referred to a goal that had nothing to do with loving her, Kiryl acknowledged inwardly. He had no place for love in his life. Love made men vulnerable, and the vulnerability he had experienced as a child had left him determined never to be vulnerable again—to anything or anyone.

  ‘You are my destiny, Kiryl,’ Alena responded, her voice choking with emotion.

  ‘And I want control of that destiny to lie in your own hands,’ Kiryl told her, holding her gently as he bent his head to kiss her on the forehead.

  She was alone in her suite. Alone and yet not alone. She would never be alone again because of Kiryl. She could smell the scent of his skin, hear the sound of his voice inside her head, feel her body kick into excited, aching longing at the thought of his touch.

  Her mobile phone chirruped—an incoming text.

  Reaching for it, she felt a small pang of guilt when she saw that it was from Vasilii. Vasilii, who thought she was in London—in his apartment. But there was no need for her to feel guilty, she assured herself. After all Vasilii would not dream of telling her if he was spending time with a woman. She was an adult, with every right to keep her private life private. When Vasilii did get to know about Kiryl he would like and admire him, of course. How could he not do so? He would be relieved, too, that she had given her love to someone he could respect—someone who shared his business values and his hard-working mindset.

  Vasilii had no time for playboys and the like—young men with wealthy fathers who had no need to earn their own living. If anything, he despised them. But even they didn’t merit the degree of contempt her brother felt for the kind of fortune-hunting young men several of the girls she had been at school with had become involved with—Z-list celebrities in the main, who had attached themselves to the girls at one or other of London’s hot nightspots. Such liaisons damaged the reputations of the girls concerned and that of their families, Vasilii had told her. Her half-brother held certain somewhat old fashioned views about family reputations. Their father had often teased him that those views came from Vasilii’s mother’s family and its nomadic warrior traditions, where family pride and good name was so very important.

  Her text back to her brother assured him that she was all right, and then she looked at her watch. In forty-five minutes she would be dining with Kiryl—which meant that she had better hurry up and have a shower … although of course she had nothing to change into. Tomorrow she would be able to buy herself something from the expensive and exclusive designer shops on Nevsky Prospect, but for now she would have to continue to wear her cashmere jumper and taffeta skirt.

  Guessing that the double door in the wall next to the room’s huge king-size bed must lead into the bathroom, Alena opened them—to discover that a dressing room lay beyond them, with another pair of double doors on the far wall, which were standing open to reveal the bathroom. As she walked towards it a note stuck to one of the doors of the dressing room’s wardrobes caught her eye. Pausing to look at it, she read, ‘Alena—open me.’

  Hesitantly she did so—only to stare at the contents of the wardrobe in delighted amazement. Hanging from the rails were the clothes she had bought at the beginning of the winter season from her favourite London shops. Or rather brand-new versions of what she had bought, Alena recognised as she looked at them more closely. Brand-new and in her size.

  Kiryl had organised this, she marvelled. But how? How had he known exactly what she had bought for herself? Bemused, and torn between laughter and disbelief, Alena checked through the clothes hanging there, clutching the skirt of the silk dress she had only minutes before been wishing she had with her to wear this evening. Releasing the dress, she pulled open one of the drawers—her favourite underwear, all discreetly tissue-wrapped, and in another drawer her favourite toiletries.

  Ten minutes later, after a quick shower, she removed the cream silk dress from its padded hanger. She had fallen in love with the dress the minute she had seen it in the shop, but now it wasn’t excitement about the dress that made her hands tremble as she slipped it on over the nude satin and lace underwear she had changed into. No, it was Kiryl who was responsible for her excitement—her excitement and her longing to be with him.

  Exactly on the dot of the hour Kiryl had given her, just as she had finished misting the air around her with her favourite scent, there was a knock on her bedroom door.

  When she opened the door to find Kiryl standing outside, immaculately and formally dressed in a dark fine wool suit, as though he had known that she would choose to wear something formal herself, all she could do was shake her head and gesture to her dress.

  ‘How …?’

  ‘Magic,’ he teased, refusing to say any more as he offered her his arm with old-fashioned courtesy.

  ‘I can hardly believe all this is really happening,’ Alena murmured in delight as he escorted her downstairs.

  ‘Believe it,’ Kiryl told her as they crossed the marble hallway and then went through the drawing room to the dining room beyond, where an immaculately dressed waiter was already pulling out a chair for her at a table dressed with what was obviously expensive china and crystal.

  Half an hour later, when they had been served with a first course of caviar and Kiryl had insisted on them toasting one another with champagne, Alena gazed at him in adoration.

  ‘You’ve made everything so perfect—St Petersburg, this house, my clothes. I can’t imagine anything that could be better than this.’

  There was a small telling pause, during which Kiryl looked into her eyes and then let his gaze slip to her lips and stay there.

  ‘I hope that’s not out true,’ he said softly. ‘Because I can assure you that I can—and I hope that before tonight is over it won’t just be in our imaginations that we will have experienced it.’

  Alena made a soft murmured sound and took a gulp of her champagne. She wanted Kiryl so much—far more, in fact, than she wanted her dinner. Far, far more. She wanted him so badly right now that …

  She put down the forkful of food she had been about to eat, the excitement squirming in the pit of her stomach melting into a heated longing.

  ‘What is it?’ Kiryl asked, indicating the food she had put down. ‘You aren’t eating.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Alena responded, bravely lifting her gaze to meet his as she added huskily, ‘At least not for food.’

  Kiryl looked at her for so long without saying anything that Alena wondered if he had understood what she meant—or, even worse, if he did understand but disapproved of her being so direct. She was in such new and unfamiliar territory here. She wouldn’t have wished away the happy times she had spent in her teens, being so close to her parents that it had been their company she had wanted rather than that of her peers, but not for the first time since she had met Kiryl she was regretting her sheer lack of worldly experience.

  For a handful of seconds Alena’s directness kept Kiryl still in his chair. He was used to women coming on to him in the most blatant and openly sexual of ways, just as he was familiar with the ploys they used when they wanted to appear more subtle, but the sheer open honesty of Alena’s words, combined with her uncertainty, touched and then released something within him—a sudden pang of something approaching protective tenderness. A protective tenderness that had no right to be there and that he certainly did not want to be there, he warned himself as he fought against it.

  Anothe
r unfamiliar and equally unwanted feeling followed hot on the heels of the first one—this time the knowledge that he could stop now, turn his back on his plans, let her down gently and make it easy for her to walk away from this and him with only her heart bruised.

  Give up his plans? His goal? The entire raison d’être that had dictated the whole of his adult life? For what? To save a woman who meant nothing to him from pain? Was he going mad?

  Angry with himself, Kiryl deliberately ignored the choice presented to him. There was only one road he wanted to follow, and that was the road he had mapped out for himself all those years ago.

  Why didn’t Kiryl say something? Anything? The longer he remained silent the more Alena’s heart rocked sickly inside her chest, and the conviction that she had somehow misread the situation—that the desire she had thought he had for her was merely created by her own imagination—strengthened.

  But then he removed his linen napkin from his lap, crushing it in his hand before he placed it on the table and then stood up. Watching him walk towards her, Alena held her breath, her heart thumping heavily inside her chest.

  Kiryl reached down to take hold of her hands and gently pull her to her feet, demanding with heart-shaking urgency as he did so, ‘You mean that?’

  The relief that coursed through her was mixed with heady excitement and a fierce longing that sent its message of arousal coiling and pulsing through her lower body.

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ Her voice shook as she whispered the words to him.

  It was triumph in the success of his plan that was filling him with the emotions that were racing through him now, Kiryl assured himself. It was desire for that success that was causing his blood to pound through his veins and his heart to pump so fast. Not any real desire for her. The mental images and the physical awareness of how it would feel to have her naked body beneath his touch and his mouth meant nothing. They were simply his body’s way of translating all that the success of his plans meant to him. There was no personal significance in those images, just as he did not feel any personal desire for her. That was impossible and non-allowable.

  But knowing that did not mean he must not convince her that he wanted her—and not merely wanted her but ached and yearned for her and her alone. Each touch between them—each breath, each look and every single caress—must carry that message to her. And that was why he must make love to her as though she was his everything, his all.

  Keeping his gaze fixed on Alena’s, Kiryl lifted her champagne glass to her lips and commanded softly, ‘Drink.’

  Slowly Alena did so, her hand trembling as she placed it over his around the stem of the glass. Her gaze was molten silver with arousal when she raised it to him, her whole body shuddering with mute longing when he drank from her glass himself, so that the kiss with which he took the sweet gasp of frantic need from her lips tasted of champagne and then of him. Its sensuality rocked her back on her heels, leaving her needing his arms around her to steady her as he placed the glass back down on the table.

  If the slow and deliberate building intensity of his kiss had been a master class in subtle arousal—not that her desire for him needed to be coaxed or husbanded—the sensation it caused inside her was nothing to the shockwave of erotic response that flooded through her when Kiryl demanded, ‘Have you any idea how close I am to taking you right here and now? How knowing that makes me feel? Have you any idea just how dangerous you are to me and my self-control? How you’ve occupied every single one of my thoughts since yesterday?’

  His words so closely echoed what she herself was feeling that Alena was left unable to speak, never mind control the fireworks of savagely sweet pleasure they sent exploding through her body.

  ‘I want to take things slowly—to give you time to think about what you want—to listen to reason and logic, not my senses—but right now … I want you so much. And I have to warn you that if we leave this room now I can’t promise to let you go when we reach your bedroom door. So unless that’s what you want—unless I am what you want—’

  ‘You are. You are all I want,’ Alena insisted passionately.

  Kiryl could feel her tremble in his arms beneath the force of her words, and his own body ignited in a surge of fierce male pleasure in its knowledge of her sexual desire for him. And only because of that. Not because against his own mental will he wanted her with something that was dangerously close to going beyond logical reason. That was something he was going to refuse to hear.

  Somehow Kiryl managed the transition from dining room to the door of her bedroom with such delicacy that Alena had no real awareness of them having made it apart from the fact that they were now here, outside her door.

  Kiryl’s arm was binding her to his side as he turned her towards him, his free hand smoothing the hair back off her face as he warned her, his voice a raw low sound against her ear, ‘You must send me away now if you want me to go, sweet Alena. How well named you are—as irresistible to me as Helen of Troy was to Paris. I am no more capable of giving you up than he was her.’

  ‘I don’t want you to give me up.’ Alena trembled valiantly against the storming assault of her own longing as he pushed against the barriers of her inexperience, melting them with his heat. ‘Come with me, Kiryl,’ she begged as she reached for the handle to her bedroom door. ‘Come with me and show me … teach me … All I want is you. All I will ever want is you.’

  The bedroom door was open, standing as wide as the door to her heart and her sensuality, and yet instead of stepping forward to seize the prize he wanted Kiryl found that he was standing still, held to the spot by an alien emotion that gripped him as tightly as though a boa constrictor had coiled itself around his mind.

  Why was he hesitating? This was a vitally important step along the road to the fulfilment of his plan—more important, perhaps, than any of the other steps he had taken. Bold, invincible steps that had taken him easily through the ruins of other men’s attempts to stop his successful financial progress. If he had crushed them beneath his will-power then why was he hesitating now, when all he had to do was simply take what was being offered to him? Surely he wasn’t afraid of doing that? Afraid that the very act of taking what Alena was offering might also take from him something he had no desire to give? Afraid that somehow the taking of her heart would demand a price that would ultimately prove too heavy for him? Afraid to step over the entrance to her room because of what doing so might reveal to him about himself?

  Never.

  Bending down, he swung Alena up into his arms and claimed her mouth in a kiss that committed him to his chosen course of action, sealing behind him all the doors he had thrust open to get to the place where he now was.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEY were in her bedroom, the lights turned down low by the unseen, highly efficient staff who must have come in whilst they were having dinner to prepare her room for the evening. In the soft light the green darkness of Kiryl’s eyes as he fixed his gaze on hers set Alena’s heart beating suffocatingly fast. Having placed her on the bed, Kiryl was now sitting beside her, looking down at her. He reached out and covered the wild beat of her heart where it was lifting the soft silk of her dress.

  ‘So much excitement,’ he whispered against her throat. ‘I hope I will not disappoint you.’

  ‘I am the one who is more likely to disappoint you,’ was Alena’s unsteady response.

  ‘That is not possible. It is for me to light the way for you, so that your desire is mine, your pleasure mine and your satisfaction mine,’ Kiryl responded.

  He was kissing her again—slow, delicate kisses that he trailed from her collarbone to the corner of her mouth and then back again, gently at first, and then with an urgent rhythmic tempo that accelerated the beat of her heart and had her digging her fingers into his shoulders in an increasing urgency of need.

  The hot satin touch of male hands on her body, swiftly removing her clothes, replacing them with boldly sensual kisses, made Alena feel as though a river of molten desir
e was sweeping away whatever hesitancy and inhibitions she might have had along with her garments.

  Soon it wasn’t enough just to have Kiryl touching her, and she was the one reaching for him with trembling, eager fingers, tugging at buttons and cloth, belt and zip, until the lamplight burned golden against the magnificence of his torso, soft with dark body hair. No shadows were deep or dark enough to conceal the naked aroused thrust of his maleness—a maleness that evoked a female desire within her as primitive as his.

  Lost in a world filled with awed delight and an aching need to know the reality of his possession, Alena reached out towards him, her hot gaze embracing the thick fullness of his erection, her fingertips trembling slightly as she touched it in a hesitant exploration that grew bolder with the hot flood of delight that flowed from where she was touching him right through her body to her own eager sex.

  The unsteady breath she exhaled brushed the soft hairs on Kiryl’s skin, releasing him from the dangerous spell her touch had put him under with its combination of open female longing and inexperience. Kiryl frowned. Something was happening to him. Thoughts and feelings were growing inside him that he didn’t want—like the knowledge that this was the first time she had touched a man in this way, and that the responsibility for how she would view the pleasure of sex—or the lack of pleasure—potentially for the rest of her life lay with him.

  Whilst he hesitated Alena explored him intimately, her breasts swelling with female ecstasy in his maleness, her nipples tight and thrusting, the ache deep down within her sex growing and pulsing into a clamour of female need. Overwhelmed by the intensity of her own desire, she leaned forward and touched her lips to the engorged head of his sex.

  Like winter ice on the Neva, cracking under the force of the sun’s warmth, Kiryl felt the shock waves of her intimate touch crashing through him. Feelings, needs he was totally unable to control burst into turbulent boiling life inside him. Alena was in his arms, her naked body shimmering satin against the bed, her hair spread all around her in a tumble of rich gold, her nipples burned to the deep, dark heat of eagerness. Her thighs were splayed apart and the soft delicate line of blonde hair on her sex was dancing in the light as her hips rose and fell in a writhing agony of need. The same need that was thudding through his own body, like a pile driver sending its insistent message, making its unstoppable demand for that the soft, wet velvet intimacy that would take it and hold whilst he drove them both to the heights and kept them there.