The Power of Vasilii

The Power of Vasilii
PENNY JORDAN

He has the power to protect her – by making her his mistress!Laura Westcotte is the only suitable candidate for the job as Russian tycoon Vasilii Demidov’s PA. He may be forced to hire Laura, but Vasilii is far too cynical ever to trust a woman – particularly one with such a dubious reputation… Desperate for work, Laura knows she must impress her cool and complex new boss.However, it’s not the chillingly ruthless Russian’s legendary reputation that terrifies her, but the magnetic power of her attraction to him! And when Laura realises she’s in terrible danger, she finds herself at Vasilii’s mercy…RUSSIAN RIVALS Demidov vs Androvonov –let the most merciless of men win…

Oh, yes, she needed this job—a top-of-the-tree job working for Vasilii Demidov as his PA on a six-month contract that carried a salary that made her catch her breath.

Everything she knew about Vasilii Demidov suggested that he was a man immune to the kind of vulnerabilities experienced by the rest of the human race. A powerful, hard-headed man who was completely focused on the success of his business. Not the kind of man who was likely to welcome the knowledge that a fourteen-year-old had had such a huge crush on him that she …

That was enough!

Laura checked her watch and quickened her walking pace. She must not be late for this all-important appointment—and she definitely must not be late because she was daydreaming about the man who would be interviewing her.

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty-five years and has an outstanding record: over 185 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She says she hopes to go on writing until she has passed the 200 mark—and maybe even the 250 mark.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager, and has continued to live there. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her Crighton books. She lives with her Birman cat Posh, who tries to assist with her writing by sitting on the newspapers and magazines Penny reads to provide her with ideas she can adapt for her fictional books.

Penny is a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors.

Recent titles by the same author:

PASSION AND THE PRINCE

A STORMY SPANISH MARRIAGE

THE MOST COVETED PRIZE

(linked to THE POWER OF VASILII)

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Power of Vasilii

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

SHE really should not be doing this. She really shouldn’t.

It was a job—that was all. A job she needed now, thanks to what had happened, and needed badly.

A job working closely with Vasilii Demidov. Very closely. As his temporary PA, in fact. Mid-stride, Laura Westcotte stopped walking along London’s Sloane Street.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

She wasn’t fourteen any more, and in the grip of a massive crush on the very grown-up and breathtakingly, spine-shiveringly, far too excitingly male older half-brother of one of the new intake of day pupils at the school where her aunt was the matron and she’d been a pupil by virtue of her aunt’s post, was she?

No, she wasn’t.

Nor was she still the same silly girl who had secretly and eagerly searched the internet for every scrap of information she could find about Vasilii Demidov, committing to memory every single piece of information she’d managed to find about him. Thank goodness the big social networking sites hadn’t existed then, for her to make a total public fool of herself with, Laura thought wryly. Snatching that photograph of him to daydream over in private had been bad enough.

She’d taken it when he had come to the school to collect his half-sister one Friday afternoon. Her hands had been trembling as she’d watched him walk from his car to where his half-sister had been waiting for him, the muscles of his male body moving so powerfully beneath their covering of denim jeans and a black tee shirt that the sight of him had made her go hot with longing. It was a wonder that the resultant photograph hadn’t been so blurred as to be unrecognisable. She had hidden the print in her most sacred of special places: the ‘secret’ drawer of the jewellery box that had originally belonged to her mother, and which had always somehow held an echo of her mother’s special scent. She still had that jewellery box.

And the photograph?

Now she was being ridiculous. If she did then it was simply because she’d never thought to throw it away. No other reason.

She had been such a very young and idealistic fourteen-year-old that worshipping from afar had come as naturally as breathing.

She had woven such ridiculous fantasies about the two of them meeting—the kind of fantasies that only an over-romantic, lonely girl with her hormones burgeoning into reckless life could weave. In her imagination she had even allowed herself to believe that because they had both lost their mothers there was a special bond between them.

All that and she had never even come face to face with him properly, never mind spoken with him. She had, though, dreamed endless daydreams about him, torn between an aching longing for him to notice her and the thrill of fear she had felt at the thought of that happening, and how she would cope with that level of sensual excitement.

So what? That had been then. This was now. She had just mentally said his name several times without her heartbeat going into fifth gear and then overdrive, hadn’t she? No, she wasn’t fourteen any more, Laura assured herself. But she still couldn’t stop herself from glancing into the window of the expensive designer shop she was hurrying past on her way to her interview, as though she needed to reassure herself that the reflection she could see there was that of an assured twenty-four-year-old woman, and not a fourteen-year-old girl. A woman, moreover, whose brunette hair swung sleekly and under control to her shoulders, and whose blue-green eyes in her heart-shaped, Celtic pale-skinned face, like her soft full lips, were discreetly made-up—as befitted a careerwoman about to undergo an interview for a job upon which her immediate financial security depended.

So why the need to check? Surely she didn’t really fear that somewhere within her that lonely, overly idealistic and romantic girl she had once been still existed, and that by some dangerous alchemy Vasilii Demidov could resurrect that girl and her crush on him just by the mere fact of them breathing the same air?

Instead of thinking about the past she should be focusing on her own present, Laura reminded herself. To mangle that famous Oscar Wilde quote, to be rejected and dismissed for one job for which she was well qualified might be overlooked as merely unfortunate, but to be rejected for a second would be a bad mark against her that would lie on her career history for a long time to come.

She was under no illusions, of course. She knew exactly why she hadn’t been given the verbally promised promotion in her previous job. The reasons had, after all, been made more than clear to her by the company’s new CEO.

The pain and humiliation of what she had undergone momentarily drove the colour from her face.

Oh, yes, she needed this job—a top-of-the-tree job working for Vasilii Demidov, as his PA, on a six-month contract that carried a salary that had made her catch her breath. It was nearly twice as much per month as she had been earning, plus it would open doors for her and enhance her CV—not to mention distance her from the present calamity to her career.

The fact that she had recently been on the internet once again, researching Vasilii Demidov, meant nothing other than that—like any candidate for a new job—she wanted to arm herself with as much knowledge about the business for which she hoped to be working as she could. And, in the case of Vasilii Demidov’s business, Vasilii himself was the business.

And what a business. Vasilii had taken charge of the business portfolio originally begun by his late father and had turned it into a multinational empire. The head office of this empire might technically be located in Zurich, but from what Laura had been able to learn the reality was that the head of the empire still adhered to the traditions of the Nomad desert warriors of his maternal family. He travelled almost continuously between all the places in which he had business and financial interests.

Unlike so many other Russian oligarchs, Vasilii did not own lavish homes all over the world. Instead he stayed in hotel suites or concierge apartments, as though at heart his spirit needed to move as ceaselessly as the sands had once moved beneath the feet of the camels in the camel trains of his mother’s people.

How intrigued and awed she had been at fourteen to learn that Vasilii, whilst being half Russian through his Russian father, could trace his roots back through his mother’s family to one of the most noble and ancient races to travel the deserts and the rugged terrain of the southernmost part of Russia’s old territories. There was a legend she had read saying that this tribe of light-skinned and light-eyed desert warriors had once mixed their blood with that of a lost Roman legion, and that their centuries-old pride in their warrior skills came from that time. There had been other stories on the internet about the tribe, and its fierce pride and equally fierce adherence to its own code of honour.

Like so many of the old desert tribes its numbers had been reduced by war and disease long before Vasilii’s mother had been born. She had fallen in love with Vasilii’s father, and then been lost to both her husband and her son in the most tragic of circumstances. She had felt such a surge of idealistic love when she had learned from her aunt the story of the kidnap and subsequent death of Vasilii’s mother.

But that had been then, and this was now—and everything she knew about Vasilii Demidov now suggested that he was a man immune to the kind of vulnerabilities experienced by the rest of the human race. A powerful, hard-headed man, who was completely focused on the success of his business. Not the kind of man who was likely to welcome the knowledge that a fourteen-year-old had had such a huge crush on him that she …

That was enough!

Laura checked her watch and then quickened her walking pace. She must not be late for this all-important appointment—and she definitely must not be late because she was daydreaming about the man who would be interviewing her.

From his exclusive concierge apartment on the top floor of one of London’s most prestigious hotels, Vasilii had an excellent view of Sloane Street and the surrounding neighbourhood as he stood at the window of the apartment’s smart boutique-hotel-style sitting room. A shaft of late July sunshine falling across his face threw into relief the harsh scimitar-sharp angle of his cheekbones and the taut line of his jaw.

To his Russian compatriots the golden warmth of his skin and the autocratic boldness of his nose might mark his genes as those of an outsider—someone who belonged more to the Arab world than their own—but he had grown up just as much of an outsider to the world in his late mother’s family as he had his father’s: truly accepted by neither, marked physically by his mother’s genes and mentally by his father’s brilliance as a businessman. An outsider who had learned young to walk alone and to trust no one other than himself. Especially after his mother had been kidnapped and then murdered by her kidnappers in a rescue attempt that had gone wrong.

To have been as emotionally dependent on his mother’s love as he had been as a child, and then to lose that love, had taught the man he had become the necessity of protecting himself against such vulnerability. And that was exactly what he had done, holding other people at a distance and promising himself that he would never allow himself to become vulnerable to the pain of love and loss again.