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

If her brother was responsible for spiking his plans with his text message, then she herself was to blame for the raw ache of need within him that was also disrupting those plans. It was certainly not part of the plan that he should physically want her. A cold, clear mind and a totally controlled body were what he needed. He had invested too much of himself—too much of what he had been and where he had come from, too much of where he wanted to go and what he had done to get there—in the goal he was so close to reaching to risk failure now. Especially not because his body was howling for the possession of one single woman. One single woman who somehow or other had managed to touch the emotional darkness of the vampire within him—that part of himself that somehow remained beyond his control.

Alena was looking tense and clutching her handbag, her manner making it plain to him that she wanted to leave—thanks to her brother reaching out across the ether to claim her allegiance.

‘I’ll walk you back to your suite,’ Kiryl told her, holding up his hand when she started to object. ‘Please. It isn’t perhaps the correct thing to do to refer to such things, but I believe in plain speaking and I think our afternoon took a turn neither of us was fully expecting. A turn that led a flirtatious kiss to a place that has certainly left me feeling … Well, let’s just say that what happened between us touched something within me, and that means that right now I don’t want any other man looking at you and guessing what we have just shared. So for that reason you must allow me to be protective and a little possessive and see you safely back to your own door.’

Since he put it like that, how could she possibly refuse?

Five minutes later, escorting Alena along the corridor that led to her half-brother’s apartment, after sharing the journey up to it with a uniformed member of the hotel staff whose presence had made any kind of intimate conversation impossible and Alena herself self-conscious, Kiryl recognised that if he was going to be able to seduce her so completely that she gave him her absolute trust, as well as her body, he needed to do so somewhere he could have her completely to himself, where the realities of life and her loyalty to her brother could be banished.

They had reached the double doors to the apartment. If he suggested that she asked him in she would balk at his request, Kiryl sensed, once again mentally cursing the interruption which had meant their intimacy had been brought to an end sooner than he would have liked.

Outside the door, Alena turned towards Kiryl. She had felt acutely self conscious standing in the lift with him under the gaze of the uniformed porter, her body still on fire from the intimacy they had shared. ‘Thank you for your donation,’ she told him, her voice softening as she added, ‘And thank you for telling me about your mother and for letting me talk about mine and St Petersburg.’

St Petersburg. Of course! She had already told him how romantic she thought the city, and it would certainly be private at this time of the year, with its elite wealthy citizens having decamped for warmer climates to escape the icy grip of its winter.

Kiryl smiled at her—a slow, warm smile that had Alena’s toes curling helplessly into her shoes and the blood beating up under her skin.

‘You weren’t disappointed, then, in our time together?’

Alena tried to look nonchalant and relaxed, but her heart was thudding so heavily and unsteadily she suspected that he must be able to hear it.

‘I …’ She shook her head.

‘Will it help if I go first and say that I enjoyed every minute of it and I hope we can repeat that pleasure?’ Kiryl asked her in a tender voice, and continued without giving her the chance to reply, ‘I don’t want to rush you or pressure you, Alena, but I don’t think either of us was prepared for … for the chemistry between us. It was very special. You are very special. See—you’ve got me talking and feeling like a raw boy who has never desired a woman before. But then no woman has ever made me feel the way you do.’

That, of course, was true. Because of her connection with Vasilii she aroused in him feelings that no other woman was capable of arousing.

‘I want to see you again—tomorrow, if you will let me?’

‘Yes.’ The single word was exhaled on the pent-up breath Alena had been holding. She truly felt as though she was entering a new world—a truly magical world whose axis was Kiryl and the way he made her feel.

‘I can hardly bear to let you out of my sight.’ Kiryl shrugged and gave a small laugh, as though at the un-familiarity of his own feelings. And it was true—he was reluctant to let her go. But because she was so important to his plans, and not because there was an ache in his groin that said his body had plans of its own for her. A flash of inner irritation rebuked his flesh for its inconvenient and unwanted awareness of her.

‘There is so much I want to share with you and show you.’

He made his voice deeper and slightly ragged. And then he discovered that his words were reinforcing—uncomfortably—the surge of desire that had caught him off-guard earlier. His body’s rank disloyalty irked him, but he had more important things to deal with right now. After all no man in his thirties worthy of calling himself a man did not know how to control his own sexual arousal.

‘So much I want to belong exclusively to us,’ he continued softly, ‘and to what we’re beginning to feel for one another. It’s making me selfish. I don’t want to share it or you with anyone else. Not yet—not until I know that you …’ Deliberately he let his words trail away meaningfully.

And of course Alena knew exactly what he meant. The attraction between them might be compelling and urgent to them, but she couldn’t see Vasilii, for instance, seeing it that way. The minute she mentioned meeting Kiryl her half-brother would launch into an avalanche of questions that she didn’t want to face. The newness and delicacy of the discovery of their shared feelings needed the privacy of being shared only by the two of them to be nurtured—not exposure to her brother’s well-intentioned but potentially over-analytical and forensically intense questioning.

‘I feel the same way,’ she assured Kiryl. His admission was giving her a new confidence. She was not alone in her desire. They were connected by a mutual need. That was something they shared.

‘Then it will to be our secret—for now.’

Alena’s keycard had opened the door, which she was holding in one hand. She turned to look at Kiryl, her gaze brimming with the heady joy she was feeling. Still holding the door, she reached out and placed her hand on Kiryl’s arm, looking up at him as she did so.

‘Thank you,’ she told him softly. ‘Thank you for the donation to my mother’s charity, and thank you most of all for this,’ she whispered huskily as she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

Taken off-guard by the sheeting feral male need her kiss drove through him, the only thought Kiryl could formulate was illogically angry—didn’t she realise that she shouldn’t be so open and trusting with him? How vulnerable she was making herself? How open to being used and hurt? But what concern was it of his that she might be hurt? When had he ever cared about anyone being hurt? Never—and he never intended to care either. That way lay the road to vulnerability and self-destruction. He needed to remain single-minded because it was only by being single-minded that he would reach his goal. And it was only once he had reached that goal that he would finally be able to stand free of the dark shadow of his father’s contempt for him and walk away from it.

Pushing her firmly away from himself, he told her truthfully, ‘If you don’t go inside now you won’t be going in alone. And your brother’s apartment is not the place I want to …’

Alena shook her head, not wanting him to spell out what she knew he meant. Because if he did the effect on her of knowing he wanted to make love to her so badly would make it as impossible for her to leave him as he was hinting it would be for him to leave her.

‘Tomorrow,’ Kiryl told her. ‘Tomorrow I shall come for you, and when I do …’

‘When you do I shall be ready,’ Alena assured him, bravely and truthfully.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_73e283e8-63e6-5b6f-92a4-0460dccf41e7)

SHE was so happy. If she had ever thought before that she had known happiness she had been wrong. That happiness had only been a pale shadow of what filled her now. Filled her and spilled out of her, to surround her with the blissful shining excitement of Kiryl.

She had barely slept, and she’d been up early this morning—adrenalin-filled, and with a surplus of energy that had had her pacing the floor whilst clutching her mobile phone, waiting impatiently for the contact Kiryl had promised her. And that contact would come. She knew that. Yesterday had not been some fantasy-fuelled creation of her own imagination. No, it had been real, shared—a commitment made and given to the journey they would make together. A journey to a shared future?

The knifing, twisting, yielding hot sweetness of her emotional and sensual response to that question told her what she wanted, but she was not going to let her hopes run away with her. Instead she was going to live for the moment, for every heartbeat, every touch, every kiss and every intimacy they would share.

The bell to the apartment’s security system rang, followed within a second by the ring of her mobile phone.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s me.’

She heard Kiryl’s voice in response to her own tremulous answer to the phone’s summons.

‘I’m outside. Let me in.’

Her hands were all fingers and thumbs as she struggled with the door’s lock system, and the small handful of seconds it took her to open the door was a lifetime of impatient longing.

Kiryl swept her up into his embrace the moment the door was open, closing it with a kick of his foot and then leaning back against it whilst he kissed her with all the passion and hunger her own heart felt.

For several minutes the hallway was filled with the soft sounds of Alena’s pleasure, the sweetly shocked gasps of her breath and the aching cry of her female delight when Kiryl’s hand found her breast beneath the pale grey cashmere of her jumper.

‘I want you. I ache so much for you that I have no self-control. All last night I lay awake, thinking what a fool I’d been for not snatching you up there and then and taking you with me. But you—us—what we will have together—deserves far more than the anonymity of a hotel bedroom for its culmination and our shared commitment to it. When we sacrifice our individual selves to become united as one I want it to be somewhere very special.’

Each word Kiryl whispered into her ear, between small erotic kisses bitten delicately into the soft skin of her throat, whilst he caressed her nipple into a tight excited peak of eager surrender, sent a fresh surge of sensual longing and urgency through her. Low down in her body the ache that had merely been tamped down overnight burned hotly into new and impatient life. What he was saying to her, promising her, was lovely—but Alena knew that if he had said he was so impatient that he was going to take her here and now, against the wall in the hallway of the apartment, she would have given herself to him without a second’s hesitation.

It made her feel unbearably tender towards him that he should seek to contain their mutual desire in order to give it the right setting, and that feeling increased when he told her, ‘I want to make it special for you.’

‘You are what makes it special,’ Alena replied shakily, her voice betraying her emotions. ‘You are special, Kiryl. Special, and wonderful, and … and I am so lucky to have met you.’

Instinctively Kiryl tensed—against both her words and her emotion—wanting to reject them, wanting to tell her that the last thing he wanted from anyone was an emotional connection. Emotional connections had no place in his life. They never had and they never would. He had learned young that it was safer to shut himself away from his emotions. Except, of course, those that drove him to obliterate the memory of his father’s rejection by achieving for himself what his father had not been able to achieve.

Alena’s open vulnerability irritated him like a piece of grit in his shoe, demanding his attention even though he didn’t want to give it. It had been her parents’ responsibility to prepare her for the harsh realities of life. Now it was her brother’s. If they hadn’t taken care to do that then why should it irk him so much? Especially when her vulnerability was the foundation on which he was building his plans to win that all-important contract.

What was it that was really causing his irritation? Surely not his conscience? Kiryl shrugged aside that thought. He did not have a conscience—not where the all-important task he had set himself was concerned. So why the irritation? After all, it would make things far more difficult for him if she were suspicious of him and his motives.

And, no matter how ready she might be to let him see how she felt about him now, she would be more than suspicious, a few weeks from now, when he walked away from her with his prize, leaving her with her dreams and her pride shattered.