The Man She Shouldn't Crave

by Lucy Ellis

  Except he couldn’t be thinking what she thought he was thinking.

  Because why would a man get overheated about a dress when he’d already seen her in her hot-to-trot underthings?

  Men looked at her. She couldn’t walk down a city street without second glances, a wolf whistle, something that cheered up her day. But she well knew the pitfalls of being judged on her bra size, and she dressed to diminish rather than play up any sex appeal she might possess. Men appreciated aspects of her body, but none of that had prepared her for how Plato Kuragin was looking at her now, or the effect it was having on her.

  ‘In the cupboard just above—next to your head.’ He was so tall nothing was actually above him.

  He stared back at her blankly.

  Oh, my Lord, this is so silly. ‘I’ll get them,’ she said, a little embarrassed, and crossed to him, reaching up to open the cupboard door.

  He barely shifted, just looked down at her, ever so slightly poleaxed. ‘I was told you run a dating agency,’ he said in a rough voice. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Date with Destiny.’ For some reason this less-than-sure-of-himself Plato Kuragin was letting the real Rose uncurl herself from hibernation for the first time since he’d arrived. She even angled up her chin and gave him a curious look, which was a mistake because they were awfully close all of a sudden.

  She brought down her arms with the glasses in her hand and her right breast brushed very definitely against his arm. She felt his bicep contract and saw his eyes go hard and hot as they dipped lower. Her nipples came out to play, and suddenly her brains just scrambled.

  She turned to set the glasses down with a clatter and put some physical distance between them. The bench. There. No one could get through wood and Formica—although looking at the heavy musculature in those arms she wouldn’t bet money on it. Stop staring at his arms, Rose. What on earth was wrong with her?

  ‘I was at the Dorrington Hotel drumming up business, if you really want to know,’ she said a tad awkwardly, because suddenly it really mattered that he thought well of her. ‘And that’s the total extent of this agenda you say I have.’

  ‘Drumming up business?’ he repeated, but Rose got the impression she could have said anything.

  He was intent on appreciating the look of her—her hair, her face, the cling of the dress down her legs. Was it her imagination or did he literally rip his gaze away from her as he held up the wine to check its label?

  Rose stifled a groan, her attention shifting to how downmarket all this must seem to him. The house, the wine, her… ‘It’s just a regular white from the supermarket,’ she explained, her voice tailing off. It was an echo from her other life—the one in Houston where she’d never been quite good enough for Bill and his hoity-toity family—and that it should assail her here and now dumped a bucket on her fantasy.

  Dammit, if she wanted a fantasy she could have it! She wanted to enjoy Plato Kuragin whilst he was here, because goodness knew he could vanish as abruptly as he had arrived.

  Plato reached into his pocket and whipped out a cell phone. She watched as he thumbed the keypad.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Sorting out food. We can do better than pizza and cheap wine, detka.’

  ‘You’re ordering a meal? For both of us?’

  ‘Da, is there a problem?’

  He’d had her thrown out of the Dorrington, invaded her home, virtually forced her to sit in front of him in her underwear, threatened her with legal action…and now he wanted to share a meal with her! Was there a problem?

  ‘I guess that would be all right,’ she murmured, looking down at her bare feet, tracing circles with her red-painted big toenail on the tiled floor.

  You could almost call this a date, a little voice whispered in her ear.

  Stop it, Rose.

  ‘We will sit in a restaurant and relax and talk,’ said Plato, rounding the bench.

  Rose told herself to hold her ground, play it cool. She wasn’t going to hop about like a frightened rabbit. Truth be told, this was so much more than she had hoped for when she’d crashed the Dorrington press conference this afternoon.

  He closed a big hand over her wool-clad shoulder and for a moment the gesture lingered, as if he was learning the delicacy of her bone structure, the roundness that was so much a part of her, as if his touch was about to turn into something else. He turned her effortlessly towards the door.

  He wasn’t really asking, but he didn’t strike Rose as the kind of guy who asked. He seemed just to issue directives and take what he wanted—and why that should send happy messages to her lace-clad regions she wasn’t going to second-guess or question. Besides, this wasn’t about him controlling her, because this was what she wanted.

  ‘We’re going out?’ she asked redundantly.

  ‘Da, is that a problem?’

  ‘I guess not,’ she prevaricated.

  ‘You can tell me about this business of yours,’ he said, in that growly, sexy Russian voice of his.

  Rose glowed.

  I will. And whilst you’re being all he-man and Russian I’ll convince you that being my Date with Destiny is the least you can do, seeing as you burst in here and scared me out of my wits, you big lug.

  ‘I guess that would be okay,’ she responded with a little smile.

  Being foreign, Plato Kuragin obviously didn’t understand that if you gave a Texan woman an inch she’d take a mile.

  Yes, this was definitely a date.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE night was finally making sense.

  He’d laid eyes on her—what?—four hours ago? Now he had her in his car. He was taking her to dinner. He would possibly be introducing himself to the delights of her body in a few more hours.

  Everything that had seemed murky, uncertain, almost out of character, suddenly fitted. A beautiful woman with an agenda… He’d had her investigated, he’d narrowed down and dismissed the problem, and now he could move in to enjoy what was on offer.

  And she had a lot to offer.

  But she was peering at him as if he might vanish at any moment. He wanted to tell her she had nothing to fear on that score. He was hers until he sent her home in a cab tomorrow morning.

  The thought brought his attention to those small hands curled together in her lap. Uneasily he took in the modest, classic cut of her dress. The only concessions she had made to highlighting her appearance were dangling earrings and a midnight-blue bolero jacket she’d replaced the cardigan with. Little details, but they were cutting through his hard-won cynicism like a scythe.

  There would always be women of a certain type hanging around elite sports teams. He didn’t take advantage of it. That wasn’t why he’d bought the club. That had been personal. A way to hold on to his roots.

  He wasn’t interested in a woman who had so little self-respect she would throw herself at a man simply because he had some fame and she wanted publicity.

  Rose wasn’t one of those women.

  Sure, she was after a little star athlete for her hobby/business/whatever, but she wasn’t selling herself. When he’d looked up and seen her standing there in a long dress, her hair tidied, her lips gleaming, she’d knocked his half-arsed suspicions sideways. Rose had gone to some trouble with her appearance—the sort of trouble that told him she was embarrassed about being found in her satiny nothings and was trying to remedy the impression. She also clearly had no idea how incredibly sexy she was, or she wouldn’t have put on that romantic dress.

  Women usually took more clothes off when they were trying to play up their sex appeal. Somehow with Rose the inverse was true—or maybe it was something to do with how he was responding to her?

  He’d used to dream of dating girls like this once upon a time, back in the Urals mining town he’d grown up in. Even then he’d come with a warning sign—not the sort of boy any of the neighbourhood parents had wanted their daughters bringing home.

  Something stirred uneasily in the back of his mind. Ros
e smiled across at him. A nice middle-class girl going out to dinner. With him.

  Someone really needed to warn her.

  Maybe not a cab. Definitely not a cab. He’d drive her home himself.

  Da, that was sorted. He waited for some of the tension he was holding in his shoulders to trickle away. It remained stubbornly where it was.

  Unaccustomed to scruples when it came to hooking up with women looking to profit by their association, he applied his mind to something that wasn’t soft and warm and playing footsie with his conscience—tomorrow’s schedule. At 5:00 a.m. he had a conference call from south-east Asia that would take him through to seven. Then a breakfast dialogue with Canadian NHL representatives. Then he had to deal with the legal issues surrounding the Sazanov brothers being arrested for drug possession—huge red tape there. He had a lunch with investors from the Arab Emirates, who were flying up from Washington for the privilege, and a meet-and-greet with local mayoral officials, and then the Wolves’ last practice match before they took on Canada’s finest on Friday night.

  But right now, strapped into his borrowed baby, the very nice Ferrari, was his reward for taking a little trouble tonight and dealing with one of the finer points of the tour personally.

  He’d wine and dine her, and plunder her incredible treasure chest, and give her what she wanted in the morning: a little access to the players.

  Da, baby, he thought as she peeked one of those curious glances at him, play your cards right and I’m all your Prince Charmings come at once.

  * * *

  Rose had never ridden in a sports car. They were certainly different. She felt as if she was very close to the road but at the same time gliding at speed over water because the ride was so smooth. Plato was doing that guy thing of making everything he did with the gears look effortless, but he was clearly doing it to impress her.

  She could have told him just turning up had impressed her. She wasn’t going to forget having six feet six inches of gorgeous Russian male in her kitchen in a hurry.

  She hadn’t liked his pushing his way into her house, or refusing to let her go and change out of her underthings, or the way he’d made all sorts of lewd accusations about her motives. Although, actually, that had given her a bit of a thrill. She thought she’d left confident, take-charge men behind in Texas. Apparently they bred them in Russia too.

  She’d missed it, and she’d missed this part of herself. It had been a long time since a man had challenged her. After her four years in Houston she was super-sensitive to any man trying to get his way with her, but she just didn’t get that vibe from Plato. He was so incredibly confident she got the impression he assumed the world would bend his way—and it probably did.

  Besides, it was past time to trust her instincts, and she told herself she could turn tail at any time. Not that this was going anywhere. A guy who looked like this, with money and power and prestige, didn’t date girls like her. He handed them his coat or a tip.

  He didn’t wrap them up in their coat, keep an arm around them as he escorted them outside, and put them in a luxury car as if they belonged there, his big body radiating heat and security and protection.

  Rose repressed a little sigh. She wouldn’t be confusing tonight’s little fantasy with anything more meaningful. Plato Kuragin was hardly going to hole up in Toronto and date her! Besides, she was here for the business. She had some funds to raise and this guy was big in funds. She could take a little jump into the unknown, enjoy herself for a while, but the bigger picture was the business.

  Good to get that straight.

  Twenty minutes later, as he seated her at their table, she was still thinking business even as her inner princess did a pirouette. The restaurant was on the seventy-fifth floor of a famous building. Rose had read about it in a glossy magazine recently. She just hadn’t expected she’d ever be dining here.

  ‘You could have just asked, you know,’ she said with a little smile.

  ‘Asked?’ Plato took his seat opposite her and leaned in closer, his focus intent on her face as if she fascinated him.

  ‘To have dinner with me.’

  ‘Is that what this is about?’ he asked.

  ‘What else could it be?’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘I apologise for making assumptions,’ he said, in that deep, dark voice.

  ‘I hadn’t realised you’d made any.’ But they both knew he had. ‘Oh, you mean the groupie comment? Sorry to disappoint you. I’m about as interested in sport as you are in lipstick.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he replied, his voice pitched low and intimate.

  He eased forward, bringing his forearms down on the table, and suddenly it felt awfully small and insubstantial between them—although if she looked around the restaurant their table was no smaller than anyone else’s.

  ‘I could develop a fascination for the subject.’

  It was a clichéd line and they both knew it. Plato didn’t back off, though. If anything the space between them seemed to get smaller and smaller, until all she could see was the suggestion of what his firm mouth could do to her lipstick and the gleam of purpose behind those rain-dark eyes.

  Rose knew it was her birthright as a Southern woman to flirt, but this man was outside her experience—and she also wasn’t sure if overt flirting was going to get her what she wanted. Although at this point she wasn’t entirely certain what that was.

  Plato leaned back and gave the maître d’ instructions about their meals, but his eyes never left hers. Rose was glad of the low lights in the restaurant, the candles between them, the shadows that hopefully went some way to disguising how susceptible she was to him.

  ‘You wanted to hear about my business?’

  ‘Da, the destiny date,’ he said easily.

  Rose couldn’t repress a smile at the way he said it in that deep, dark voice. As if it were a little children’s toy she was wheeling out when of course it was so much more.

  ‘I’m looking to sign one or two of your players up to do a publicity piece for my agency.’

  ‘You didn’t think to approach our PR people?’

  ‘Uh-huh, I’m sure that would have worked.’

  He lifted those big shoulders in a heavy shrug that said, What can I do? I’m an important man. I don’t handle the small stuff.

  Yet he had. He’d turned up at her front door.

  ‘Why did you turn up at my house?’

  Yes, why not just blurt it out, Rose?

  He seemed about to say something, then shook his head as if whatever he had been thinking had amused him. ‘My security team showed me your blog,’ he said.

  Rose scrambled to remember what she had written.

  ‘I was concerned, naturally. I thought I would check it out.’

  The blog or her? Rose peered back at him warily.

  ‘Why would you be concerned? I didn’t defame anybody. It was just a silly laugh.’

  ‘Is that what it was, Rose?’ He didn’t show it by any particular movement in his face or note in his voice but Rose sensed his sudden watchfulness.

  ‘My blog bothered you,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Let’s just say it drew attention to a couple of things the media don’t need to get wind of. But I accept you are who you appear to be, Rose. A young woman running an internet dating site.’

  ‘Is this about the Sazanov brothers?’

  He shrugged negligently. ‘It doesn’t matter now. It’s taken care of.’

  ‘Then why did you come to my house?’

  Plato drummed the table with his left hand. ‘Sometimes even grown men can behave like hormonal boys, dushka.’

  Rose forgot about the Sazanov brothers. Forgot about the embarrassment of him reading her silly blog. She even—almost—forgot about how he had bossed her around in her own home, in her underwear. Was he saying he was attracted to her? He’d wanted to see her again?

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ she said, hoping the thrill that gave her didn’t show—or her subsequent
embarrassment.

  ‘Da.’ He didn’t look embarrassed at all. ‘I meet beautiful women all the time. Many give me their contact details. You did so in an unusual way.’

  Rose’s excitement dimmed. So much for being special.

  ‘Then, of course, I learned you had done the same with each and every member of the team. I was—disappointed.’

  ‘Right.’ She struggled to find something amusing to quip back at him, but she was feeling her own disappointment.

  ‘I was concerned as to your motives, and when Security located you I decided to handle it myself.’ A half-smile tugged at that firm mouth of his. ‘As I said, my judgement was somewhat clouded by other considerations. The main one being I wanted to see you again.’

  Rose gripped her champagne flute. ‘Well, there is that,’ she said faintly.

  ‘It’s fortunate I did,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked a member of my security team coming to your door tonight, finding you in that—what do you call it?’

  Rose’s mouth felt dry and her head a little light.

  ‘Nightie,’ she said airlessly.

  ‘You wear that to bed? Alone?’

  Someone had turned up the temperature in the room. Rose jerked her glass to her lips. ‘Mmm…’ She fudged her answer and swallowed.

  ‘Such a waste.’ He was watching her with obvious interest, his eyes dark and moving over her flushed face.

  Rose almost dropped her glass. Liquid splashed. She looked about for a cloth but Plato was already reaching across, blotting the tablecloth, his eyes never leaving hers.

  ‘I didn’t ask you,’ he said, in that deep accented voice that thrilled her to her toes. ‘Are you unattached? Is there someone?’

  For almost two years she had been the most unattached woman in Toronto, and right up until this very moment she had been happy to keep it that way. ‘No, there’s no one.’ Why was her voice all breathless and girly? It made her sound like such a push-over.

  For this man I could very well be a pushover.

  ‘I celebrate that news,’ he said with a slight smile.