The Ultimate Seduction

by Dani Collins

  His ears rang with the impact of what she was saying. “He has that kind of influence?” It wasn’t like him to underestimate people, but his sexual enthrallment had temporarily shortened his sight of the bigger picture.

  “He’s very well connected. And I’m being overcautious,” she assured him, moving to put a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry. He wouldn’t do anything rash. Something like throwing support behind a leader who hasn’t been recognized... It’s too big a gamble going into an election. If anything he’ll be even more circumspect, couching his reaction while trying to find out everything he can. He’s not going to stir up a lynch mob or anything.”

  “No shotgun wedding?” he prompted, throat dry. How far would her father go for his daughter’s groom?

  “Absolutely not,” she assured him.

  He should be relieved. He couldn’t betray Luiza’s memory by contemplating marriage to another woman, but in the back of his mind a voice whispered, If it was for your country...

  He brushed the thought aside, trying to remind himself this was a simple fling. Two people enjoying sexual compatibility and the luxury of Caribbean waters. If he took a moment to reassess Tiffany, not just because she was lissome and golden, not simply because she had a quick, intelligent mind and a clear understanding of politics, but because she could soon be first daughter of the United States of America, that didn’t mean he was being disloyal to his one true love. Luiza had had a dream for their country, and he was obligated to consider any avenue to achieve it. That’s all he was doing.

  He watched her frown at her diving mask, lips white where she pinched them together. She’d told him about her aversion to wearing things tight against her face, but he watched her draw in courage with a deep breath and wrestle the mask onto her face.

  “I’m really worried I’ll freak out down there,” she said in a tone made nasal by the mask covering the upper half of her face. Her eyes behind the glass were anxious.

  “You’re tough,” he told her, pride and regard moving in him. “You’ll handle it.”

  “You don’t know that.” She set a hand on her bare chest. “My heart’s going a mile a minute.”

  “But you’re trying anyway, despite your anxiety. That’s why I know you’ll be fine,” he assured her.

  He quickly slipped into his own gear, not wanting to make her wait for the distraction of reef and shipwreck to take her mind off her fears. Holiday fun, he insisted to himself. Nothing so complex as wanting to coax her past bad memories because he felt compelled to share the wonder below the surface with her.

  Why it mattered to him that she go with him was a puzzle he didn’t study too closely. He could just as easily dive with one of his crew and had in the past, but he was aware of a preference for staying aboard with her over diving without her.

  That wasn’t like him. He was not a dependent person. Tiffany had been surprised the other day when he’d told her he didn’t want a wife or children. He understood the reaction. Everyone in the world wanted a lifetime companion and offspring, but after Luiza, he’d closed himself off to the idea.

  He didn’t want emotional addiction to another being. It made a person vulnerable, and he couldn’t afford such weaknesses.

  But the thought of marrying Tiffany kept detonating in his mind, trailing thoughts of sleeping with her every night for the rest of his life.

  It was because of the advantages she offered him. It would be a practical move, not something he did out of a need to connect himself irrevocably to her. He didn’t want or need family.

  He needed to stabilize his country and make good on his promise of peace.

  “You look like a frog,” she said as they readied to jump.

  “So kiss me, Daddy’s Little Princess. See what I turn into.”

  She did, quick and flirty, then bit her smile onto her mouthpiece and fell back into the water.

  He leaped after her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “THAT WAS FANTASTIC!” Tiffany panted, still breathless from their ascent from a shipwreck covered in coral and barnacles, populated with colorful fish darting in and out of fronds. Ryzard had carried a spotlight so the wash of blue-green from the filtered sunlight had disappeared, revealing the true brilliance below.

  He handed off his tank to his crewman, then heaved himself to sit on the platform at the stern of the boat, legs dangling beside her. “Up?” He offered a hand.

  “Still recovering. Give me a sec,” she said breathlessly.

  He relayed their gear as they both stripped, lifting her tank off her back, muscles flexing under the glistening latte of his tan. His black bathing suit was ridiculously miniscule, making American men such as her brother seem like absolute prudes with their baggy trunks. She’d heard people refer to those teensy tight suits as banana hammocks and budgie smugglers, but on the right man, they were sexy as hell.

  A crooked finger came under her chin, and he lifted her face to look him in the eye. Beneath the water, his foot snaked out to catch her at the waist and guide her into the space between his knees.

  “What?” she challenged, hands splaying on the steely muscles of his flexing thighs.

  “Are we staying in the water a little longer?” he asked suggestively. “You can’t look at me like that and not provoke a response.”

  She flicked her gaze downward and saw he’d filled out the tight black fabric to near bursting.

  “Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not beautiful, draga. When you smile, you light up the room, and when you’re aroused, I can’t take my eyes off you.”

  The water should have bubbled and fizzed around her, she grew so hot and flushed with joy.

  “Will you come to Bregnovia with me?”

  Oh. It was an out-of-the-blue question with huge implications, the most important being, he wanted to keep her with him.

  Surging upward, she straightened her arms and let her chest plaster into his, meeting his hot kiss with open-mouthed, passionate joy.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  One big hand came up to cradle the back of her head and the other dug into her waist, holding her steady while his calves pinched her thighs, bracing her in the awkward position. Their kiss went on for a long time, sumptuous and thorough.

  With a tight sound of frustration, he jerked back. “No condom,” he muttered.

  “What? There’s plenty of room in that suit for one.”

  “Not much room at all, actually,” he growled. “You’ll take the lead into the cabin.”

  Laughing unreservedly, she let him pull her the rest of the way out of the water and onto his lap. “At least we know what you turned into down there.”

  He raised his brows in query.

  She whispered, “Horny toad.”

  He pinched her bottom as he urged her inside.

  * * *

  The landscape from the airport was one of a country in recovery. When her brother had said Bregnovia could use their firm’s expertise, he hadn’t been kidding. They left the partially bombed-out tarmac, wound past a scorched vineyard and turned away from one end of a shattered bridge that spanned a canyon to zigzag into the riverbed, where they four-wheeled over a makeshift crossing before climbing the hairpin curves on the far side to enter a city that looked like a child had kicked over his blocks.

  But what a city it had been. Bregnovia’s capital, Gizela, was a medieval fairy tale on a river that, until dammed for electricity and irrigation, had been a trading arm in and out of the Black Sea. Low canals still lapped at the stone walls in its village square. Beyond that quaint center, stark communist housing stood next to even more modern shopping malls, but nothing escaped the wounds of recent war. Rubble punctuated in a small landslide off a facade here, crooked fencing kept children out of a teetering building there.

  Fascinated by
the contrast of beauty and battle, Tiffany barely spoke until they drove through gates that were twelve feet high and thirty-six feet wide. Their ornate wrought-iron grillwork with gold filigree appeared startlingly new and grand.

  “This is your home? It looks like Buckingham Palace.”

  “It is a palace,” Ryzard confirmed casually. “Built as the dacha for a Russian prince during tsarist times. The communists spared it—a KGB general appropriated it—but it was the last stand for my predecessor. We’re still repairing it from the siege. It’s only mine while I’m president, but I’m paying for the refurbishment, as my legacy.”

  Despite the bullet holes and the pile of broken stones that might have once been a carriage house, the palace made the White House look like a neglected summer cottage, especially with its expansive flower bed that formed a carpet beneath a bronze statue of a woman with an arm across her breast, the other outstretched in supplication—

  Tiffany read the nameplate as the limo circled it. Inexplicably, her heart invaded her throat, pulsing there like a hammered thumb. Luiza.

  Ryzard had said she was his country’s martyr, revered like their Lady Liberty, but this statue wasn’t staid. It didn’t project a state of peace and optimism with a torch to light the way forward. It was anguished and emotional and raised all the hairs on her body. This statue wasn’t a symbol or an ideal. She was a real person.

  Whose name was tattooed on Ryzard’s chest.

  Not wanting to believe the suspicion flirting around the periphery of her consciousness, Tiffany left the car and walked inside to confront an oil portrait of the same woman in the spacious drawing room. Here, Luiza’s serene smile was as exquisite as Mona Lisa’s, only eclipsed by her flawless beauty.

  Again it didn’t seem like a commemorative pose that a country hung in the National Gallery. There was a wistful quality to the painting. It was the kind of thing someone lovingly commissioned to enshrine a memory.

  Luiza’s eyes seemed to follow Tiffany as she accepted introductions to Ryzard’s staff. Thankfully they quickly left her behind as Ryzard and his porters took her up the stairs and along the colonnaded walk that circled the grand entrance below and brought her to a place he called the Garden Suite.

  “It’s the only one in the guest wing that’s habitable,” he said with a minor twist of apology across his lips. “But your work space is here.” He left the bedroom and crossed the hall to push through a pair of double doors into a sitting room that had been tricked out with office equipment and a replica desk that Marie Antoinette would have used if she had run a modern international construction firm. “You won’t have any problem working outside your country? With the different time zone?”

  “We’re global and I’ve been working from the family mansion. The advantage to living like a recluse is that no one will expect me to show up in pers— My umbrella!” The stained glass piece hung at a cocked angle in front of the window, just high enough for her to stand under it. “You said we slept through the auction,” she accused.

  “I placed a reserve bid before we left.”

  Moving in a slow twirl, she closed her eyes and imagined she could feel the colors as they caressed her face. “You’re spoiling me.”

  “I want you to be happy. You will be?”

  She opened her eyes to the window and the back of Luiza’s bronzed head beyond the glass. Her floating spirits fell like a block of lead. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Ryzard had a statue of his old girlfriend on the lawn.

  “Tiffany?” he queried, voice coming closer.

  “Where will you be?” she asked, leaving the window and leading him back across the hall to the bedroom. Here, at least, the windows faced the river.

  “Too damned far away,” he replied.

  “Why? Security? No outsiders in the president’s bedroom?” she guessed.

  “Certain customs remain quaintly adhered to.”

  “Mmm.” She pushed her mouth to the side, hiding that she was actually quite devastated. “I don’t suppose our president could get away with bringing women home, either.” The porter had gone so she jerked her chin at the door, saying, “See if that door locks.”

  “Subtle,” he said drily, “but I can’t.”

  “I don’t know what you think I’m suggesting,” she challenged, tossing her head to cover up that she rather desperately needed to reconnect physically. The emotional hit of what looked quite literally like a monumental devotion to Luiza shook her tenuous confidence. Badly. Now he was rejecting her, inciting a quiet panic. “I only meant that if I’ll be sleeping alone, I need to feel safe.”

  “You won’t be alone.”

  “I can have a guard with me?”

  “That would be detrimental to the state of peace I’m trying to maintain,” he stated with one of his untamed smiles. “No, I will sleep with you, but right now I have to go outside and salute my flag. It’s a custom I observe when I return after being away. People gather to see it. It reassures them of my commitment. Would you do me the favor of putting on something suitable and joining me? They’ll be curious.”

  Here we go again, she thought with an unexpected face-plant into dread.

  I bet Luiza would do it, a taunting voice sang in follow-up.

  “Problem?” he asked, obviously reading something of her reluctance.

  “Just disappointed we can’t test the bed,” she prevaricated.

  “They stand at the gate, if you’re worried they’ll see you close up.”

  “It’s fine,” she assured him.

  It was. When she stood outside thirty minutes later, face shaded by a hat from the surprisingly hot sun, her entire being swelled with admiration as she watched Ryzard in his presidential garb stand tall and make a pledge to his flag. He wasn’t a man going through the motions. His motives were pure, his heart one hundred percent dedicated.

  With tears brimming her eyes, she watched him step away from the flag with a bow, taking his respectful leave. Then he turned and saluted the statue of Luiza, first pressing the flats of his fingertips to his mouth then offering the kiss to her in an earnest lift of his palm.

  Tiffany stood very still, fighting not to gasp at the slice of pain that went through her. It wasn’t the gesture that struck her so much as the anguish on Ryzard’s face.

  Her suspicions were confirmed. He loved Luiza, really loved her as a strong man loves his soul mate. His pain was so tangible, she could taste its metallic flavor on her tongue.

  She reached out instinctively, longing to comfort him, but he stiffened under her touch, catching her hand and gently but firmly removing it from his sleeve.

  “When I asked about your tattoo, you never said—”

  “I know,” he cut in, releasing her and taking one step away. “It’s difficult to talk about.”

  “Of course,” she managed, curling her fingers into a fist even though the blood was draining from her head, making her feel faint. Would she have come here if she’d known? The starkness of his rejection felt so final she could barely stand it. “I’m so sorry.”

  She meant she was sorry for overstepping, but he heard it as a lame platitude and dismissed it with an agitated jerk of his shoulder.

  “I never want to go through anything like it again. To love like that and lose— Never again,” he choked, flashing her a look that was both adamant and apprehensive.

  He quickly looked away, but that glimpse of his resolve struck like a blow. She knew what it meant: he would never allow himself to love again. It would make him too vulnerable.

  Making another quarter turn, he bowed his head toward the gates.

  That’s when Tiffany noticed the crowd of fifty or sixty people with faces pressed through the uprights of the gate, witnessing his rebuff and her humiliation. They didn’t applaud, didn’t wave, just stared at them for a few moments
before slowly beginning to disperse.

  Even they seemed to know she had no place here.

  As she followed Ryzard back into the palace, she couldn’t tell if Luiza’s portrait met her with a smug smile, or a pitying eye. Thankfully, they both had work to catch up on. She needed space, even one situated with a prime view of Luiza’s last haircut.

  Oh, don’t be bitter, Tiffany.

  Ha, she laughed at herself. Bitterness had been her stock in trade after the pain of her recovery had receded from blinding to merely unrelenting. She really had believed her life was over, but Ryzard had shown her she could have a measure of happiness.

  She considered the boundaries of her happiness later, as she soaked in a tub of bubbles. Ryzard had had to take a call, leaving her to dine alone, and she felt very much as her mother must have for much of her marriage. Not so much slighted as resigned. This was the reality of living with someone in his position. If he had loved her, the sacrifice might be worth it, but he didn’t.

  His heart belonged to Luiza. Indelibly.

  A tiny draft flickered the candles in the corner of the tub and sudden awareness made her glance toward the door, then sit up in a startled rush of water and crackling bubbles.

  Ryzard slouched his shoulder against the frame, arms folded, hip cocked. The most decadently wicked glint of admiration gave his shadowed expression a sexy cast.

  She’d set a stage for him if he chose to come looking for her. A delicate lily-of-the-valley scent hovered in the humid air and a low-volume saxophone hummed sensuously from the music player. That hadn’t prepared her for the impact of his tousled hair, wrinkled collar under a pullover sweater, or the way her heart leaped when he reached to tug his sweater over his head.

  “I came to sneak you down to my room, but you’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse. Before I forget, though...” He leaned over her, one broad hand cradling her chin while he crushed her mouth in a hard, thorough kiss that made her murmur in surprised delight.

  “You were in danger of forgetting to do that, were you?” she asked breathlessly as he straightened to take off his shirt and kick away his pants.