Not Just the Boss's Plaything

When she looked at him again, her dark eyes were soft, undoing him as surely as if she really had eviscerated him with a hunting knife. He would have preferred the latter. She made it incalculably worse by reaching over and smoothing her warm hand over his cheek, offering him...comfort?

“You look like you’ve swallowed broken glass,” she said.

Kindly.

Very much as if she cared.

Nikolai didn’t want what he couldn’t have. It had been beaten out of him long ago. It was a simple, unassailable fact, like gravity. Like air.

Like light.

But he couldn’t seem to stop himself from lifting his hand, tracing that tempting mouth of hers once more, watching the heat bloom again in her eyes.

Just one night, he told himself then. He couldn’t help it. That smile of hers made him realize he was so tired of the cold, the dark. That he felt haunted by the things he’d lost, the wars he’d won, the battles he’d been fighting all his life. Just once, he wanted.

One night to explore this light of hers she shone so indiscriminately, he thought. Just one night to pretend he was something more than ice. A wise man didn’t step onto a land mine when he could see it lying there in front of him, waiting to blow. But Nikolai had been through more hells than he could count. He could handle anything for a night. Even this. Even her.

Just one night.

“You should hold on,” he heard himself say. He slid his hand around to cup the nape of her neck, and exulted in the shiver that moved over her at even so small a touch. As if she was his. That could never happen, he knew. But he’d allowed himself the night. He had every intention of making it a long one. “I’m only getting started.”

* * *

If only he really had been a wolf.

Alicia scowled down at the desk in her office on Monday and tried valiantly to think of something—anything—other than Nikolai. And failed, as she’d been doing with alarming regularity since she’d sneaked away from his palatial penthouse in South Kensington early on Sunday morning.

If he’d really been a wolf, she’d likely be in hospital right now, recovering from being bitten in a lovely quiet coma or restful medicated haze, which would mean she’d be enjoying a much-needed holiday from the self-recriminating clamor inside her head.

At least I wasn’t drunk....

Though if she was honest, some part of her almost wished she had been. Almost. As if that would be some kind of excuse when she knew from bitter experience that it wasn’t.

The real problem was, she’d been perfectly aware of what she was doing on Saturday. She’d gone ahead and done it precisely because she hadn’t been drunk. For no other reason than that she’d wanted him.

From her parents’ back garden to a stranger in a car. She hadn’t learned much of anything in all these years, had she? Given the chance, she’d gleefully act the promiscuous whore—drunk or sober.

That turned inside of her like bile, acidic and thick at the back of her throat.

“I think you must be a witch,” he’d said at some point in those long, sleepless hours of too much pleasure, too hot and too addicting. He’d been sprawled out next to her, his rough voice no more than a growl in the dark of his cavernous bedroom.

A girl could get lost in a room like that, she’d thought. In a bed so wide. In a man like Nikolai, who had taken her over and over with a skill and a thoroughness and a sheer masculine prowess that made her wonder how she’d ever recover from it. If she would. But she hadn’t wanted to think those things, not then. Not while it was still dark outside and they were cocooned on those soft sheets together, the world held at bay. There’d be time enough to work on forgetting, she’d thought. When it was over.

When it was morning.

She’d propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at him, his bold, hard face in shadows but those eyes of his as intense as ever.

“I’m not the driving force in this fairy tale,” she’d said quietly. Then she’d dropped her gaze lower, past that hard mouth of his she now knew was a terrible, electric torment when he chose, and down to that astonishing torso of his laid out before her like a feast. “Red Riding Hood is a hapless little fool, isn’t she? Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Alicia had meant that to come out light and breezy, but it hadn’t. It had felt intimate instead, somehow. Darker and deeper, and a different kind of ache inside. Not at all what she’d intended.

She’d felt the blue of his gaze like a touch.

Instead of losing herself there, she’d traced a lazy finger over the steel plates of his harshly honed chest. Devastatingly perfect. She moved from this scar to that tattoo, tracing each pucker of flesh, each white strip of long-ago agony, then smoothing her fingertip over the bright colors and Cyrillic letters that flowed everywhere else. Two kinds of marks, stamped permanently into his flesh. She’d been uncertain if she was fascinated or something else, something that made her mourn for all his body had suffered.

But it wasn’t her place to ask.

“Bullet,” he’d said quietly, when her fingers moved over a slightly raised and shiny patch of skin below his shoulder, as if she had asked after all. “I was in the army.”

“For how long?”

“Too long.”

She’d flicked a look at him, but had kept going, finding a long, narrow white scar that slashed across his taut abdomen and following the length of it, back and forth. So much violence boiled down to a thin white line etched into his hard, smooth flesh. It had made her hurt for him, but she still hadn’t asked.

“Kitchen knife. My uncle.” His voice had been little more than a rasp against the dark. She’d gone still, her fingers splayed across the scar in question. “He took his role as our guardian seriously,” Nikolai had said, and his gruff voice had sounded almost amused, as if what he’d said was something other than awful. Alicia had chanced a glance at him, and saw a different truth in that wintry gaze, more vulnerable in the clasp of the dark than she’d imagined he knew. “He didn’t like how I’d washed the dishes.”

“Nikolai—” she’d begun, not knowing what she could possibly say, but spurred on by that torn look in his eyes.

He’d blinked, then frowned. “It was nothing.”

But she’d known he was lying. And the fact that she’d had no choice but to let it pass, that this man wasn’t hers to care for no matter how it felt as if he should have been, had rippled through her like actual, physical pain.

Alicia had moved on then to the tattoo of a wild beast rendered in a shocking sweep of bold color and dark black lines that wrapped around the left side of his body, from his shoulder all the way down to an inch or so above his sex. It was fierce and furious, all ferocious teeth and wicked claws, poised there as if ready to devour him.

As if, she’d thought, it already had.

“All of my sins,” he’d said then, his voice far darker and rougher than before.

There’d been an almost-guarded look in his winter gaze when she’d glanced up at him, but she’d thought that was that same vulnerability again. And then he’d sucked in a harsh breath when she’d leaned over and pressed a kiss to the fearsome head of this creature that claimed him, as if she could wash away the things that had hurt him—uncles who wielded kitchen knives, whatever battles he’d fought in the army that had got him shot, all those shadows that lay heavy on his hard face. One kiss, then another, and she’d felt the coiling tension in him, the heat.