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  A raw sound escaped from Kiryl’s throat just before he bent his head to take her nipple between his lips, to rake it with his teeth in an agony of male desire that had what was left of her self-control splintering into a hundred thousand shards of aching longing. It ricocheted through Alena’s own body. It was a sound of denial and demand, of agonised longing and the desire to resist that longing, of a need that could not be controlled or contained, and it echoed everything that she felt herself. It was the cry of his heart and her own heart, was crying back to it.

  Kiryl told himself that he must remember this was her first time—that he must make her pleasure so great that what she so obviously felt for him now was intensified. He must and he would—but still an inner voice warned him that, despite the importance of that, it was surely not really necessary for him to slide his hand the silky-smooth length of her inner thigh and feel the responsive quiver not only of her flesh there but of her whole body, for him to follow that caress with the exploration of his mouth. But he was doing it, and he didn’t want to stop—couldn’t stop—even though Alena had tightened her fingers into his skin and was begging him to stop. Because she could not endure the intensity of the pleasure he was giving her.

  It shocked him that those throaty, sobbed words, driven with female arousal and never heard by him before, could have such a savagely erotic effect on him. No other woman he had ever known had revealed a helpless inability to withstand the desire he aroused in her so openly or so honestly, and certainly no other woman had said to him as Alena was saying now, ‘But I want to please you. I want to hold you and touch you and …’

  Kiryl’s hand cupped the softly swollen flesh of Alena’s sex as he kissed the top of her thigh. His fingers stroked apart the deep pink flushed lips that guarded what lay beyond them.

  ‘This pleases me,’ he told her truthfully, his own voice thickened by what he told himself was his satisfaction in her desire for him. ‘Your response to me, your desire for me, the sweet hot wetness of you here, where you welcome my touch and make those little sounds of need you are making now, please me, Alena. This …’

  His thumb stroked slowly along the moist, sensitive valley and caressed the pulsing centre of her female sexuality, his touch making her cry out, torn between her need to press herself closer to his caress and her fear of doing so because of the intensity of that need.

  ‘This pleases me. It pleases me and it makes me want to do this …’

  Alena cried out again when she felt his mouth against the place where his thumb rested.

  ‘And this …’ His fingers slid slowly and carefully into her.

  It was the wildness of Alena’s response, her lack of control and her desire that was affecting him and snapping the cords of his own control, Kiryl told himself. Nothing else.

  Lost in the waves of pleasure that were pounding through her, each one deeper and more intense than the one before, Alena could only cling helplessly to Kiryl and plead with him, ‘I want you, Kiryl, I want you now. Please now …’

  The answering surge of his own flesh in its need to feel the soft warmth of her sheathing and holding it had Kiryl for the first time in his life fumbling slightly with urgency as he reached towards his discarded clothes to retrieve the condom he had brought with him. There was, after all, nothing he did not know about the way Alena lived her life—and that included the knowledge that she did not use any form of birth control. It was not, though, the urgency of his body to complete the journey that it had begun that had him tensing in the act of opening the foil packet so much as his unwanted but unignorable ache of need to be with Alena without any barriers between them—to feel her flesh around his with every intimacy there was.

  This was a feeling so alien to him that it locked his breath in his throat. He never, ever had unprotected sex. The thought of doing so was wholly repugnant to him. It simply wasn’t a risk he had ever wanted to take—and yet right here, right now, there was something … a need, a compulsion, a longing … something within him that wanted his flesh to be at one with hers, and it ripped into what he believed he knew about himself.

  It was as though he had looked deep into a mirror and seen reflected there an image of all those things he had buried so deep inside himself that he had convinced himself they no longer existed.

  Whatever was responsible for those feelings it had to be ignored. Kiryl knew that, but his fingers still hesitated over a task so familiar to him that it should have taken a mere breath to accomplish—instead of so long that Alena was sobbing her own need against his ear, her body shuddering with the need for the satisfaction he was denying it.

  Finishing his self-appointed task, he turned towards her.

  Alena was cast adrift in a new world—a world of sensation and delight and longing and love. Surely the most complete love she would ever know? Certainly the only love she would ever want to know. Kiryl was kissing her breasts, and then he tongued her nipples, the gentle caress a form of torture and torment when all she wanted was the immediate satisfaction of the savage clawing need he had unleashed inside her. But then his teeth again raked her nipple, causing her back to arch, and her cry of molten agonised pleasure was taken by Kiryl’s kiss as he took her mouth in a deeply passionate kiss.

  The slow, penetrative thrust of his tongue against hers was mirrored by the thrust of his body within her own. And how she welcomed that intimacy. How her body opened and quivered with delight and longing—how her flesh clung lovingly to his, holding it and tightening around it, her muscles moving rhythmically against each movement of his until Alena felt as though she was weightless, soaring higher and higher on the wings of her pleasure, dazzled by the brilliance and the wonder of it. Like a journey to the stars, the feeling was so magical, so perfect and so filled with pleasure, that with each increased surge of that pleasure she felt there could be no more—only to discover that there was.

  She opened the eyes she had closed tightly when Kiryl had first entered her and looked up at him, her heart turning over inside her chest when she saw that he was looking back at her. How could there be any greater intimacy than this, their flesh united into one perfect whole? Everything that was in her heart was open and revealed in her gaze. She reached up to Kiryl and touched his face.

  ‘I love you.’ Her eyes widened, her body arching as the shock of the final pleasure seized her and took her, making her hold on to Kiryl for safety and sanity.

  It wasn’t Alena’s sobbed cry of wonderment and completion that stilled Kiryl’s body in the aftershock of his release. It was his mental reaction to the intensity of the harsh cry of discovery and loss he himself had given. With its echoes still shuddering through his head he knew that it had touched something so unbearably painful inside him that it had stripped him of all his defences. It was something he could never and must never revisit. And it was Alena’s fault. She had caused him to feel what he had no wish to feel. Something he had promised himself a long time ago he would never feel.

  The plan. He must focus on that, and on his goal, and not think about that handful of seconds when—ridiculously—he had felt as though he was holding in his arms everything he had ever wanted or would ever want.

  * * *

  She was safe, held in Kiryl’s arms, having survived the storm of desire and pleasure he had aroused within her.

  Wonderingly, Alena traced the shape of Kiryl’s lips with a slightly shaky fingertip. ‘I’m so lucky to have met you,’ she whispered. ‘So very, very lucky. I love you, Kiryl. You mean everything to me.’

  Something—a softening, a tenderness, a leap of hope like the flicker of light in the darkness—something as vague as the finest tendrils of early-morning mist—was happening inside him. Something so dangerous that he automatically jerked against its unwanted presence and steeled himself against it. Such feelings could only make him vulnerable—as he had been as a boy—and he had promised himself he would never be vulnerable again. Let Alena be as foolishly emotional as she wished. Those emotions could n
ot and must not touch him, never mind evoke emotions of his own.

  The very thought brought an inner anger against that vulnerability she had come close to causing. His voice slightly clipped, he told her the truth. ‘As you do to me.’

  The tone of Kiryl’s voice filled Alena with renewed tenderness towards him. He was clearly embarrassed about talking about his emotions—no doubt as a result of his unhappy childhood. With her love for him she would try to find a way to ease the pain of that childhood for him, and to soften the painful memories of his father’s cruel rejection of him. Love for him flooded through her.

  They had three days together in St Petersburg. The most wonderful three days Alena could have imagined having, if her imagination had ever been capable of creating such happiness—which it had not. The joy and love that being with Kiryl gave her went way beyond anything that could be imagined. She woke in the morning to his touch and his kisses, and they left her floating on a cloud of sensuality.

  They spent their days enjoying the city that she knew so well together, and to her delight she was able to show Kiryl treasures in it that he had not visited before. Only once was a shadow cast over the happiness of their time together, and that was one afternoon when they were walking arm in arm together in the old quarter, with its elegant architecture of a bygone age. When Kiryl paused outside one of the magnificently grand buildings to look towards it, initially Alena thought that he had simply paused to admire it. However, when she had said admiringly, ‘It’s a very handsome building, isn’t it?’ Kiryl’s face clouded.

  ‘This was where my father lived—where I came to see him after I discovered that he was my father.’

  The bitterness in Kiryl’s voice made Alena’s heart ache for him. How lucky she had been in her own parents, who had given her so much love. She couldn’t bear to think of how hurt Kiryl must have been by his father’s rejection, and how he must have suffered emotionally, yearning for his father’s love and being denied.

  ‘I’m so sorry that you had to suffer like that.’ she told him softly. ‘But what a terrible loss your father inflicted on himself by his behaviour in rejecting you. He could have had your love—he could have had you growing up at his side—but instead, he was too blind to see what he was denying himself.’

  ‘That was his choice,’ was all Kiryl said dismissively in response.

  Alena had come to recognise that, except for those brief occasions when something touched the still open wound deep within him caused by his father, he preferred not to talk about his father or his childhood.

  ‘I’ve been too busy working.’

  That was his response to her mock scandalised disbelief when she obligingly changed the subject and discovered that he had never visited the fabled Winter Palace or the Hermitage Museum, with its fabled art collection.

  ‘Well, you shall visit it now,’ she had told him. ‘Because there is something that you need to see.’

  That ‘something’ was the Malachite Room which, as Alena explained to Kiryl proudly when they visited it the following day, had been designed in the late 1830s by the architect Alexander Briullov for use as a formal reception room for the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, wife of Nicholas I.

  ‘It replaced the original Jasper Room, which was destroyed in the fire of 1837,’ Alena told Kiryl knowledgably when they stood together inside it, having joined one of the official tours allowed to view the famous building. ‘The minute I saw you I thought how at home you would be in here,’ she added with a smile.

  Kiryl grimaced inwardly. He doubted that his father would have agreed. He would have said that the last place an unwanted son with Romany blood would be at home would be a royal palace—unless of course it was in the position of the most lowly of serfs.

  ‘It’s your eyes, you see,’ Alena continued, unaware of what Kiryl was thinking. ‘They are exactly the same colour as the malachite columns, and when you make love to me,’ she told him huskily, ‘they glow with green fire, and that tells me that you want me as much as I want you. Oh, Kiryl you’ve made me so happy—so much happier than I ever believed possible. I wish we could stay longer in St Petersburg.’

  ‘So do I, but we have to return to London tomorrow.’

  ‘You have business to attend to, I suppose.’ Alena pulled a small face.

  ‘I do have business to attend to,’ Kiryl agreed. ‘But that would not stop me remaining here. No, the reason I want to return to London is because your brother will also be there, and there is something very important I need to discuss with him.’

  ‘You mean me? Us?’ Alena guessed.

  Kiryl nodded his head, and the two of them stood close together whilst the other sightseers moved past them. For once the magnificence of the Malachite Room failed to command Alena’s full attention and admiration.

  ‘It is only right that I inform your brother of our relationship and my future plans for us.’

  Alena felt as though her heart was melting. ‘He will probably say that we are rushing things,’ she warned Kiryl.

  ‘And I will convince him of how vitally important our relationship is,’ Kiryl assured her. ‘Just as once we return I intend to show you how important you are to me.’

  Listening to him, and much as she loved the Hermitage, all Alena wanted was the privacy of the bedroom they were sharing, and the intimacy of his possession of her body. ‘Let’s go back to the island,’ she whispered.

  The look he gave her made her heart race and her body ache deliciously in anticipatory delight.

  Later, lying in his arms whilst he traced a delicate pattern of sensual pleasure over her naked body as he leaned over her in the bed, making her body quicken again even though they had already made love once since their return, Alena told him helplessly, ‘I love you so much.’

  ‘Good,’ Kiryl replied, cupping the soft warmth of her breast and kissing the pulse at the base of her throat, before teasing her with nibbling little kisses that sensitised the receptive flesh of her shoulder and neck. ‘That means that my plan is working.’

  ‘What plan?’ Alena demanded as she tried valiantly to remain as in control of her arousal as he obviously was of his.

  ‘The plan to make you love me, of course,’ he responded mock-seriously.

  ‘Oh, so you planned to make me love you?’ Alena murmured back. She was having trouble concentrating on their wordplay because of the effect Kiryl’s kisses were having on her, stealing away her self-control.

  ‘Helplessly, wholly and besottedly,’ Kiryl confirmed. ‘To the point where you would give yourself completely to me and deny me nothing.’

  ‘Mmm …’ was the only response Alena could manage, and even that was lost beneath the suddenly fierce male possession of Kiryl’s mouth of her own as his knee nudged her thighs apart and her body melted with eager anticipation.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AS SHE stepped into the taxi, ahead of her meeting with Dolores Alvarez at the charity’s headquarters, Alena could feel nervous butterflies filling her tummy. In four hours and ten minutes’ time exactly Kiryl would be meeting Vasilii at the apartment, and then he would tell him about them. Kiryl had insisted that she wasn’t to say anything to Vasilii about their love for one another until then. It was his duty and his pleasure to tell her half-brother of what had happened between them, he had insisted, and Alena had conceded that role to him quite willingly. It had been hard, though, not to say anything. The temptation just to speak Kiryl’s name out loud for the pleasure of feeling it on her tongue and hearing it in the air was so strong—even if she only had to do so for a couple of days.

  Now, though, with Vasilii back from his business negotiations, Kiryl had an appointment to see him this afternoon, and whilst she was nervous—it was important to her that the two men she loved so much got on well—she was also excited and happy. She wanted their love to be out in the open so that they could make plans. A small private wedding was what she wanted—not a fuss—and then … and then she and Kiryl would have the rest of the
ir lives to spend together.

  Alena’s toes curled into the warmth of her boots at the thought of such bliss, but the ring of her mobile interrupted her happy plans. The call brought news that her morning meeting had had to be cancelled as Dolores had gone down with a winter vomiting bug and was confined to her bed.

  Leaning forward, Alena instructed the cab driver to take her back to the hotel. She would while away the time whilst she waited for Kiryl to arrive in reading the latest reports from those people overseeing the charity’s projects. She was still determined to convince Vasilii that she was mature enough to take over the charity now.

  As she let herself into the apartment the sound of male voices came from the half-open door of the room in the apartment that her brother used as his office. That wasn’t unusual—but the unexpected discovery that one of those voices belonged to Kiryl was enough to stop Alena in her tracks. The now familiar joy of knowing he was close cascaded happily through her. She had no idea what had brought Kiryl to the apartment so far ahead of his appointment with her half-brother, but her heart still sang. Perhaps he had been so impatient to be with her that he had brought his meeting with Vasilii forward, so that he could surprise her on her own return? She started to walk towards the door.

  * * *

  Oblivious to Alena’s return, inside the room Kiryl faced Alena’s half-brother as he waited to deliver his ultimatum.

  He had changed his appointment with Vasilii deliberately, so that he could see him without Alena being there. That way he would be long gone before Alena got back from her meeting at the charity’s offices and it would be left to her brother to tell her about the reality of Kiryl’s relationship with her and its purpose.