The Power of Vasilii

Right now, though, it wasn’t the past that was making him frown, it was the present. The present and a certain Miss Laura Westcotte.

If it had been unfortunate that his PA had had to take compassionate leave for six months to be with his sick wife, then it had been irritating that the temp hired to take his place had gone down with a particularly vicious form of the norovirus bug—just when Vasilii had been at the most delicate state possible of negotiations with the Chinese, and thus most in need of a PA who was not only fluent in Mandarin but also in Russian, and of course English, and who understood the protocol and etiquette complexities of negotiating with high-ranking Chinese dignitaries and officials. Vasilii might be fluent in all three languages himself, but one of the things one did not do when negotiating with high-status Chinese officials was risk losing face or, even worse, risk causing them to lose face by doing one’s own translating.

Vasilii had quickly discovered that when dealing with the Chinese the existence of an impressive retinue of personnel was extremely important. Which was why right now he was waiting to interview Laura Westcotte, the applicant best qualified to suit his needs according to the headhunters he had hired to find someone.

However, there were excellent reasons why Laura Westcotte was not the applicant or the PA Vasilii wanted. The first was that she was female—Vasilii never took on female staff to work closely with him. He had quickly learned that female graduates were far too likely to see him—unmarried and extremely wealthy—as potential husband material, and Vasilii had no intention of getting married—ever.

A muscle flickered in his jaw, as though he’d had to tense his body against a surge of unwanted emotion. Marriage, like any close relationship, meant giving something of yourself to others. It meant commitment, and it meant being vulnerable to loss and thus to the most terrible pain.

The contradiction within him that came from his dual heritage meant that living alongside the modern Russian was a fierce desert warrior, whose handed-down moral code and beliefs were hopelessly out of step with modern-day life. And why should he marry? There wasn’t any need. His half-sister Alena’s recent marriage to a fellow Russian meant that in all probability there would at some stage be children from that marriage, to work for and take over the family business in due course.

But it wasn’t just his aversion to having a female PA that made him antagonistic towards having Laura Westcotte as his PA. Despite her impressive CV, what he’d learned about her through Alena, along with the investigations he’d had made about her, proved she lacked both responsibility and ethics, and therefore could not be trusted. In short, morally she was everything he did not want in his PA. Unfortunately, though, there was no other applicant for the post who was anywhere near as well qualified for it.

It wasn’t just that her Mandarin and Russian were, according to all the enquiries he had made about her, beyond compare, it was also that her grasp of the manners and customs of both the modern-day-business and diplomatic Chinese worlds was so nuanced as to be in a class of its own. Those skills were exactly what he desperately needed right now if he was to secure the Chinese contract he had been pursuing for the last fifteen months. Not to secure it wouldn’t just affect his business empire and its profits, but also its future growth potential

No, he had no other choice. He would have to offer Laura Westcotte the job.

It was the incredibly swift upsurge of the lift that was responsible for the unwanted fluttery sensation in her stomach, and not the thought of coming face to face with the man who had been responsible for those embarrassing to remember feverish teenage fantasies and romantic daydreams, Laura assured herself as she waited for the outer door to Vasilii Demidov’s serviced apartment to be opened. This was a job interview she was attending, after all—for a job she desperately needed, she reminded herself. She simply could not afford to show any kind of nervousness—no matter what the cause. Given what she had read about Vasilii’s ice-cold clinical ability to slice through anything that stood in the way of his targeted business goals, he was obviously not someone who would be sympathetic to uncertainty or nervousness in others. He was far more likely to use that vulnerability to his own advantage.

The clicking and whirring of internal locks accompanied by a mechanically controlled voice instructing her to ‘enter when the green light shows’ had Laura stepping as confidently as she could into a marble-floored rectangular inner hallway brilliantly lit by concealed modern lighting.

A pair of double doors off the hallway opened automatically, and a disembodied voice from within the room beyond them commanded curtly, in an upper class English accent, ‘Come.’

It was hardly the warmest of welcomes, Laura recognised as she stepped towards the doors and then through them, into the smartly modern room beyond. Her attention, though, wasn’t focused on the expensive designer furniture and decor of the room. Instead it had flown like a homing pigeon to the man standing in front of one of the room’s two tall balconied windows, with his back to her.

Like her, he was wearing formal business clothes—a dark suit. His equally dark hair just touched the white collar of his shirt. His hands, which were at his sides, were tanned and ring-free. His head was angled slightly to one side, so that the light from the window caught the sharp bone structure.

The flutters she had felt in her tummy when she’d got out of the lift had turned into a distinct and discomforting curl of sensation—not, of course, awareness of him as a man, and certainly not helpless female appreciation of that maleness. That could not be allowed to be possible. Not with the very personal knowledge she had of herself and the way other people might translate it were they to know. It wasn’t as though she had actually chosen to be that way. And it certainly didn’t have anything to do with Vasilii Demidov and those teenage feelings she had had for him.

What she was feeling was simply a very natural anxiety, Laura insisted to herself. Professional anxiety because she needed this job so desperately. That was all.

And then he turned round.

The man her fourteen-year-old self had adored must have been stored in her memory in soft focus, and that focus had been gentled by idealism, Laura acknowledged, torn between wishing that there was a chair for her to steady herself on and being glad that there wasn’t as she withstood the searing, biting hostility of a gaze that felt like the coldest wind that had ever blown off the winter steppes.

She had taught in Russia for a while, just as she had in China, whilst studying the languages of both countries, and she knew exactly how that wind could burn into one’s flesh and senses, destroying those who weren’t strong enough to withstand its onslaught.

That wind and the whip of desert sand and its burning heat had surely carved the bone structure of this male face that was stripped of all softness. The tanned flesh might look velvet-warm, and human enough to tempt any woman’s yearning touch, but the flint-grey eyes warned of the fate that would destroy anyone reckless enough to attempt the forbidden intimacy of doing so. That this was a man who prided himself on not having any human vulnerabilities within his make-up, Laura already knew from her research, but seeing the reality of all that delineated so clearly and harshly in his features was still a heart-jolting shock. His tall, broad-shouldered frame might be clothed in what looked like the best that Savile Row could produce, but it was abundantly clear to Laura that beneath those twenty-first-century clothes lay not vulnerable flesh but instead a hardened steel armour.

This man had the heritage of both his mother’s people’s blood and his father’s business success soldered into him and onto him. His already critical scrutiny told Laura that. He might by his blood be of the desert, but there was a coldness about him—an air of distance, almost a total rejection of his own humanity allied to a contempt for the vulnerability of others. The sheer onslaught of the information being relayed to her by her own senses was almost too intense for her to manage.

Every warning system her body and her mind possessed was telling her to turn and leave, to run if necessary. And yet … that frisson of sensation, that unwanted but determined sensual awareness of him as a man that trembled through every nerve ending and tingled every pore of her skin meant—Meant nothing. And if it did exist, and wasn’t merely something ridiculous left over from her teens, a product of her imagination, it should be ignored, Laura told herself firmly.

The photograph of her on her CV hadn’t revealed the female delicacy and the perfection of her heart-shaped face and its features anything like as clearly as the reality of Laura in the flesh, Vasilii was forced to acknowledge as he studied the young woman standing in front of him. Intriguingly—or suspiciously, depending on your mindset, and his always veered towards the suspicious—she had no internet presence. No unseemly photographs of university antics, no gossipy posts to reveal any real aspects of her personality. But of course he didn’t need them. He already had a direct insight into exactly what kind of person she was. The kind he most despised.

She might be physically attractive, and she might have dressed her elegantly slender five feet nine inches in a smart, businesslike, summer weight off-white dress, over which she was wearing an equally smart mid-grey jacket, accessorised with mid-height grey leather pumps and a workmanlike black leather bag, but he knew the reality of her. Just as he knew that beneath the clothes that discreetly skimmed her body she had the kind of curves that most appealed to the heterosexual male’s desires, and that they were entirely natural.

Inside his head Vasilii discovered that he was making an illogical and totally unnecessary calculation as to the number of months it had been since he had last cupped the full softness of a woman’s breasts in his hands whilst he slowly kissed his way from her throat down towards them. Her skin would be creamy pale, a sensual incitement all of its own to the man who wanted her. But he of course was not that man. He controlled his own male reactions. They did not control him. The powerful lightning strike of sexual awareness jolting through him meant nothing. It was merely an instinctive physical reaction. Nothing more. He had far more important things to think about than the brief, inconvenient surge of male desire, both inexplicable and un-desired, that had surged through him.

Turning away from her, Vasilii reached for some papers on his desk, demanding curtly as he turned back, ‘I see you speak Russian as well as Chinese? Why Russian, when most Russians who need to speak and understand English already do so?’

His question caught Laura completely off guard, and made her feel self-conscious. She could easily remember how her desire to learn Russian had been fired, and by whom, but she could hardly tell him that it had been the thought of speaking to him in his own language that had motivated her all those years ago.

‘My parents were linguists. They both spoke Russian, and I started speaking it myself, picking it up from them. I thought … I felt … It seemed natural to follow in their footsteps.’ It was in part the truth, after all—even if she was not telling him the whole of that truth.

‘You decided to follow in their footsteps rather than strike out and make your own path through life? Is that what you mean? Wouldn’t you say that that shows a lack of self-determination and ambition?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Laura defended herself firmly. He was deliberately trying to make her feel uncomfortable, she was sure, but she wasn’t going to let him. ‘Certain abilities do pass down through the generations, after all. In your own case you followed your father into the same line of business, and your success has proved that you have an aptitude for it. I had an aptitude for languages. After I lost my parents, developing that aptitude and those skills and following in their footsteps helped me to feel that they continued to be a part of my life. I loved languages, and I wanted something I could hold on to that felt as though it was part of them.’

Something to hold on to. An image of his mother the last time he had seen her alive flashed briefly and harrowingly through Vasilii’s head before he could deny it. The fact that it had been there at all only increased the dislike and rejection he felt towards Laura. She was stirring up within him memories she should not have the ability to stir up, raising issues that no one was ever allowed to raise with him, crossing lines that no one was permitted to cross with her conversation about her parents and her foolish sentimentality. Why? And, even more importantly, how? It was absurd that a woman like her, whom he already knew he could not trust, should somehow have managed to breach the defences that not even the gentle, loving touch of his late stepmother had been allowed to breach. Absurd and dangerous. The day that a woman like Laura Westcotte could represent any kind of danger whatsoever to him would never come, Vasilii assured himself.

‘I asked you for an explanation of why you chose to learn Russian. I expected a business reason, not a self-indulgent description of your childhood emotions.’

The harshness in his voice made Laura want to recoil from it—and from him. She’d felt so sorry for him when she’d learned how he’d lost his mother. She’d even felt as a girl that it gave them a shared bond. Was that why she had mentioned her own parents? Did she still want to create a shared bond with him? No! There wouldn’t be any point, because no woman would ever be allowed to share any kind of bond with the man he actually was, Laura suspected.

His criticism had stung, and under normal circumstances—if she hadn’t needed this job so badly—it would have had her questioning whether he was the kind of person she wanted to work with. She might need this job, but she certainly wasn’t going to allow his comment to go undefended.

Straightening her shoulders, she told him spiritedly, ‘I may have chosen Russian for personal reasons, but my decision to learn Mandarin—which was not one of my parents’ languages—demonstrates that I was looking towards the future of business. My parents passed down to me an ability to learn languages, but I made the decision to study Mandarin based on my awareness of the growing importance of China in the world market.’

She was daring to challenge him? That wasn’t something Vasilii was used to at all. Not from anyone and especially not from women, who were normally all too eager to court and flatter him.

‘You attended the same school as my half-sister. As far as I am aware Mandarin was not on the syllabus there.’

He knew she had been at school with Alena? A mental image of herself trying to find out from her aunt when Vasilii was likely to come to the school to collect his sister and then positioning herself at the window that would give her the best view of his ar rival flooded her body’s defence system with guilty self-consciousness. He couldn’t possibly know about that—just as he couldn’t know how often she had mentally rehearsed walking oh, so casually past his stationary car as he waited for Alena, only to have always lacked the courage actually to do so. She was being ridiculous, Laura warned herself. Of course he would know that she had been at school with Alena, just as he would know that her aunt had been the matron there, because—naturally, as her prospective employer—he would have checked up on her.

‘No. Mandarin wasn’t on the syllabus,’ she agreed.

One dark eyebrow lifted in a manner that Laura felt was coldly censorious.

‘Private lessons must have been an added expense for your aunt.’

He really did not like her. Laura could tell.

‘I paid for them myself,’ she informed him, her voice every bit as cold as his had been. ‘Some of the private pupils stabled their horses locally, and I worked at the stables mucking out. They got an extra hour in bed every morning and I earned the money to pay for my Mandarin lessons. Oh, and before you ask me, I saved up and bought an old bicycle so that I could cycle to the stables.’

Against his will Vasilii had a mental image of a much younger version of Laura Westcotte—ponytailed, fresh-faced and determined—setting off on her bicycle every morning, no matter what the weather, in order to do the chores that girls from better off families were too indulged by their parents to want to do, before returning to the school to begin a day’s education. His own father had always insisted that he work for his spending money as a boy, and even Alena, protected though she had been, had had her own special chores to do.

Vasilii pulled himself up. He wasn’t used to thinking about other people with his emotions, never mind mentally linking their situation to his own. Quite how and why it had happened he had no idea, but he did know that it must and would not happen again.

‘I would like you to read these notes aloud to me, translating them into Mandarin as you do so,’ he told Laura, firmly dismissing the unwanted image of her as a teenager from inside his head.

Very quickly Laura scanned the first paragraph of the technical data she had been handed. As an employee of a business specialising in handling translations of and negotiations for highly complex business operations she had become very much at home with the kind of thing Vasilii had asked her to do, so there was no reason whatsoever for her hand and then her whole body to tremble slightly, or for the colour to come and go in her face—apart, that was, from the fact that Vasilii’s hand had brushed her own as he handed her the piece of paper. That was ridiculous. Vasilii’s touch couldn’t possibly have made her feel like that.

She took a deep breath and started to translate the information on the printed page.

She was good, Vasilii was forced to accept as he followed Laura’s translation. His own PA would have taken longer, despite his experience.

‘And now if you would translate it into Russian?’