The Russian Rivals: The Most Coveted Prize / The Power of Vasilii

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 (#ulink_773f8a26-e65e-5402-9112-9a11cfeb4fbc)

‘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?’