The Man She Shouldn't Crave

by Lucy Ellis

  He gave his attention to the document. ‘Pen?’ he said crisply.

  Rose thought he was speaking to her, but the coach handed over his clipboard. Both the coach and Sasha were observing the rink, the seats, one another—everything but her—and there was a strange atmosphere, as if everyone except Plato was embarrassed. Right now Rose was feeling a little pressure. ‘I think I should tell you Sasha has already shot the commercial. We did it this afternoon.’

  Plato said, ‘Da? What happened to Denisov?’

  ‘Cold feet,’ said Sasha casually.

  Rose stared. ‘You knew?’

  Plato shrugged. ‘If you’d hung around over dinner last night, detka, we could have cleared it up.’

  Rose felt herself blushing a little. Did he just have to announce to the world they’d had dinner? Even if she was just a little bit pleased he wasn’t hiding it.

  ‘I should thank you, then,’ she said coolly.

  There was a pause. ‘You haven’t thanked me, Rose?’

  ‘No.’

  Plato handed the clipboard over to the younger man. ‘You still want to do this, bratan?’

  Sasha shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  Plato’s dark eyes took up with hers again, and his mouth tilted in a half smile. ‘I’ve been saying the same thing,’ he said, and Rose got the impression he wasn’t talking about Date with Destiny.

  If one of her clients had reported a man’s approach as being ‘Why not?’ she would have thrown up her hands and immediately lined up new prospects. Which made the thrill that raced up and down her spine completely and utterly wrong.

  Repressing a smile, Rose retrieved her contract and replaced it in her handbag. She smoothed her hair and cleared her throat. ‘Thank you very much, gentlemen. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.’

  Plato gestured to the bench. ‘Take a seat, Rose. Rykov, hit the showers.’

  Medvedev muttered something in Russian, and Plato grinned and replied in the same language. Rose watched cautiously as something passed between the two men and the coach actually smiled.

  ‘What did you just say about me?’ she demanded as the older man ambled away, refusing to sit down and let the king of the world dominate her.

  Plato gazed down at her, all thick lashes and firm mouth and broody testosterone.

  Rose tried not to lose ground just thinking about how that mouth would feel pressed to any pulse-point on her body.

  ‘I don’t appreciate being discussed in another language in my presence when we both know you said something sexual about me!’

  She rushed all her words out whilst keeping her eyes hovering somewhere around shoulder level. She was feeling a little embarrassed but she didn’t want to admit it. If he was saying sexual things, she was certainly thinking them—and up until this point in her life she hadn’t been that sort of girl at all.

  Not that she didn’t think sexual thoughts—of course she did. They were just never this graphic and not about one man in particular. The man who happened to be standing in front of her.

  ‘I did not say anything sexual about you,’ he said tautly.

  He actually sounded offended.

  ‘Sure you did. Your coach is obsessed with my bosoms, and he thinks I’m running some sort of sexual service for athletes. As for you…’

  ‘Da, Rose, what about me?’ He sounded interested.

  Why didn’t you call me? She cringed inwardly at the teenage girl she had once been choosing this moment to come out. Honestly, this man was in Toronto for a few days and she was supposed to be rebuilding a life for herself. This wasn’t part of that picture—or was it? Funny ol’ matchmaker she was—single and alone. But all of a sudden none of that seemed to matter all that much.

  ‘You wouldn’t let me get dressed last night,’ she said uncomfortably.

  There was a brief silence. ‘Rose.’ He was suddenly very close, and his hand curled under her chin, nudging it up so that she was forced to look at him. ‘I thought we’d had our little discussion about your underwear.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she lied, moistening her lips.

  ‘Just now I told Coach you were a force to be reckoned with, and that you could teach the Canadian officials a thing or two about getting the best deal out of us.’

  Rose rolled her eyes. ‘You think my daddy raised a numbskull? Yes, right. And I’m sure you mentioned my female assets.’

  ‘Not a word.’ He pressed his thumb briefly to her lips and then dropped his hand away.

  Their eyes met and a smile bracketed his mouth appealingly. She dropped her chin and laughed.

  Suddenly everything felt a little too intimate. A little too much like the beginning of something…

  Plato’s head shifted. He lifted the tiny headset he had connected to his shirt collar and listened. Rose made out a blur of sounds. His eyes never left hers but his expression grew tense.

  He pulled out his cell. ‘Izvenitye, Rose, I have to make a call. I’ll make it brief.’

  He walked away from her, big shoulders shifting as he moved, those long powerful legs taut beneath the cling of faithful dark denim. He took care of himself, that was for sure. He could take care of you too, a little inner voice murmured, and Rose cursed her suddenly very active libido.

  He was walking back towards her, closing up the phone. His expression was shuttered.

  ‘I apologise, Rose, there’s something I have to take care of.’

  His eyes didn’t leave hers as he retrieved a card from his inside pocket and slid it between her index and middle fingers. She noticed he didn’t release her hand.

  ‘This is my personal contact number. At eight o’clock tonight a car will pick you up and bring you to me. I’ve leased a house on the lake. We can resume the dinner that was so unfortunately rent asunder last night.’

  He exerted the softest pressure on her hand, lifted it to his mouth and brushed his lips over her fingers folded around his card.

  ‘Which was, of course, entirely my fault.’

  He released her and gave her one of those killer smiles, and it took Rose a few moments to realise he was waiting for her response. She had one. She just wasn’t sure it was anything he would understand. She didn’t quite understand herself. She had never been in receipt of quite this much controlled male intent, and it rendered what should be insulting incredibly enticing. She struggled to hold her defences in place. The only thing keeping her from melting in a puddle at his feet was his assurance that she was his for the night.

  ‘Can I walk you to your car?’

  He sounded so formal her defences did a little slip-slide, because he was being such a gentleman…even as he insulted her intelligence.

  ‘No, you go,’ she said slowly. ‘You do what you need to do.’

  He hesitated infinitesimally but Rose made herself smile nonchalantly, put a hand on her hip, playing up to the expectations he seemed to have of her for all she was worth because she had her pride. But deep inside her something she didn’t know had been unfurling curled itself up again.

  She turned away and looked down at the card in her hand. How many contact numbers did a man like this have? she wondered.

  Apparently only one.

  She swallowed hard, wondering if this was the number he gave all the women he lined up for a little light entertainment on a tour. She knew what sending a car meant, and he hadn’t even been subtle about it. She might not have had much romance in her life, but that didn’t mean she’d given up on it completely—nor was she going to drop her standards.

  Her hands dropped away from her hips. All of a sudden acting on her passionate nature with this man seemed a little too like getting in way over her head.

  * * *

  Rose came home to twenty-four yellow roses.

  Rita Padalecki had brought them in when the delivery had arrived.

  ‘You weren’t home, Rose,’ said the little note, ‘so I used my key. Twenty-four roses, dear. He’s thinking of you.’

  Rose sat a
t her kitchen bench with a coffee and stared at Plato’s card. Just his name. In Cyrillic. She traced the ink with her index finger, wondering if he had written it. Possibly…probably. She doubted the local florists were literate in Russian.

  He was thinking of her. Without Mrs Padalecki’s note and understanding of the language of flowers she would never have known that. She would have thought he was greasing that slippery pole he expected her to go sliding down.

  A house on the lake and dinner. Bed.

  He wasn’t even picking her up. He was sending a car.

  She scowled, and then her face crumpled because for a moment there with him this afternoon it had felt close to something…

  But she couldn’t go on that date. Even if he was thinking of her. This was clearly his modus operandi. She knew his reputation. She was just a face in a crowd to him, and she knew what kind of girls he dated. The non-permanent, non-stick variety.

  She picked up the vase of roses and transferred it to her study, where she wouldn’t have to face temptation. Then she thumbed in his number. He picked up almost immediately.

  ‘Da, Rose.’

  The sound of his growly Russian voice threatened to buckle her knees. She leaned against the door frame between study and hallway.

  ‘I don’t think dinner is a good idea, Plato. It’s not something I’m interested in. Please don’t send a car for me.’ She took a deep breath. This sounded awful. ‘You’ve been so kind helping me out, and I really do appreciate it, but I’m not really your kind of gal.’

  She had expected him to interrupt her, but there was silence on the other end.

  ‘I hope the Wolves win tomorrow night,’ she said inadequately, and then pressed ‘end’ and flattened the cell phone against her lips.

  If she stood very still and kept her mind blank this awful feeling of having thrown something important away would subside.

  Rose jumped when her cell buzzed almost immediately. She closed her eyes, tried to bring down her anxiety levels before she answered. But when she looked at the screen she realised it wasn’t Plato.

  ‘Phoebe.’

  Several of her girlfriends, two of whom also happened to be working part-time at Date with Destiny, were going out for drinks tonight at a new bar downtown to celebrate the future success of the business.

  ‘Okay—yes. Sure.’ She heard herself agreeing to it even as a tiny voice whispered that he might come round, might just turn up…

  Oh, honestly, Rose. He hasn’t called back. He’s not going to come. It’s over before it began.

  No, much better to go out and just get on with things. Except…

  When she was eleven her brother Cal had put her on her first bull calf. She’d been scared half to death but she’d known better than to show it. The little brown beast had thrown her first buck. She’d barely stayed on more than a few seconds. The longest three seconds of her whole life. Dusty and battered, she’d been scooped up from the dirt and made to promise not to tell Dad. She’d nodded, dirt on her face, a graze on her cheek, through tears she refused to shed. Her other brother Brick had told her she was pretty brave for a girl. She’d felt ten feet tall.

  Right now she felt about an inch high. Rose Harkness, she thought with an odd little pang, when did you become this scaredy-cat?

  * * *

  The bar was noisy and full of executive types. It really wasn’t Rose’s sort of thing at all, but her girlfriends seemed to enjoy it. Her deep, dark little secret was that she liked honky-tonks and places where they knew your name and your daddy, and if a guy hit on you he kept it polite because he knew there’d be consequences.

  Maybe this was why she was still single almost two years after she’d arrived in Toronto. She dated, but nothing with a view to the future. Not that she was in any hurry. Getting yourself disastrously engaged to a man twelve years your senior barely a year into college, having your life taken over by his ambitious family and your sexual self-confidence rubbed into the ground under his fake cowboy boot heel could leave a girl gun-shy.

  But it did have a certain irony, given she had spent her whole life matchmaking. An accident on the ranch had left her motherless at six years old, and she had spent her eighth summer plotting to bring her father and her new teacher together. Through fate, her brother Cal falling off the roof and an overnight stay at her teacher Melody’s house, all of Rose’s work had come to fruition. Dad had been married in the fall and from that moment on Rose had been hooked.

  Tomorrow morning Date with Destiny would be flashed around Toronto in a high-profile way. Her website would have more hits. Phoebe and Caroline, her girlfriends who worked on the site, would be hooking up new clients, she would continue to consult in private practice and life would go on.

  And suddenly it all seemed rather…empty. Because she would still be alone.

  She knew she had to take her own advice to others: be brave, take chances, allow her heart freedom. But it was hard. Bill Hilliger had taught her to doubt herself. Whilst her brothers had been overbearing at times, they had never made her feel inferior or unable to make her own decisions.

  Looking back, she could see how very young she’d been—a girl with no experience of the world, of men and relationships. She had been not much more than a child with a head full of romantic notions. She gave herself credit that her belief in love and the importance of romance hadn’t died with those lessons Bill had taught her. She knew better. She knew she was worth more than that.

  A man across the bar was trying to get her attention and Rose swivelled on her seat, smiling blankly at whatever Caroline was saying.

  ‘Another mocktail, Rose?’ Phoebe yelled in her ear.

  Rose flinched and nodded, although she hadn’t finished the one she had.

  Why had she come tonight? She could be with Plato. And if he wasn’t big on romance he still had a lot to offer a girl… She was a red-blooded woman after all. Why shouldn’t she acknowledge that and act on it?

  If only he had taken the trouble to come and get her himself.

  And there was the rub. She might be responding to him on a physical level, but she had deeply ingrained notions about romance and being wooed.

  Even so, last night Plato had ticked some pretty significant boxes in that department, and it had made her think… Well, she knew it was old-fashioned, but she was an old-fashioned girl—she wanted to feel as if she were special to him in some way, not just a face in his crowd. For a couple of minutes there he’d made her feel pretty special…

  Right now she felt as if she had her nose pressed up against the glass. Was she always going to be on the outside, looking in on love and passion? Always the fairy godmother to other people’s love stories? She’d been telling herself for a little too long now that she wasn’t in any shape or condition to risk herself to a serious relationship… When, really, had she ever? It had never been serious with Bill. She’d chosen him because he’d been exactly the sort of person she was never going to lose her head over.

  Shoot! Rose’s tummy bottomed out. Was that what she wanted? For Plato Kuragin to get serious about her? He was rich and high-flying and everything a Texan girl like her with down-home values should be running from. From what she could discover he dated very beautiful, flashy girls. Yet despite all their beauty and worldliness it seemed he hadn’t been serious about one of them. Which raised the question: why the heck should he get serious about her?

  Rose bit her lip. It shouldn’t encourage her but it did. The story of her parents’ courtship was famous in their parts. Joe Harkness had parked his boots under the bed of just about every available woman in three counties before he’d walked into the Fidelity Falls diner, sat down and ordered from a new waitress by the name of Elizabeth Rose Abbott and his life had changed. It had been love at first sight. Sometimes it could happen like that.

  Rose slammed her drink down on the table.

  She’d quit without staying around for the fight!

  Before anything had even started she’d given
up!

  Her brothers would be disgusted with her. Even if you knew you were going to end up tail-first in the dirt, covered in dust, you had to mount up.

  She’d just taken a look at the size of that bull and turned tail like a little girl in pigtails.

  She jumped to her feet.

  ‘Where are you going, Rose?’

  ‘What’s going on with Rose?’

  ‘Hey, Rose, what about your drink?’

  She pushed her way through the 10:00-p.m. crowd. She knew where she was going.

  On the pavement outside she hailed a cab, and in the backseat she called Plato’s cell. It went to messages.

  ‘Plato,’ she whispered, ‘call me.’

  Was he busy? Had he left his phone? Was he screening?

  There was a huge percentage chance she was never going to hear from him again.

  But as Rose slid her cell back into her glittery little bag she felt exactly as she had the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.

  Like a rookie bull-rider taking hold of that long, braided rope for the first time, just waiting for the chute to open.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PLATO tugged on his cuffs and pushed open Rose’s little gate.

  The elderly lady he recognised from his last visit looked up from snipping her camellias.

  ‘Hello, there,’ said Rita Padalecki. ‘You’re back, then.’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Padalecki.’ Plato stopped and nodded formally.

  ‘She’s been busy this morning. Lots of banging.’

  Plato’s mouth twitched. ‘I’ll have to see if I can be of any assistance.’

  ‘You’re a big, strong lad. I’m sure you can.’

  The door was open. He walked on in. ‘Rose?’

  He could hear a vacuum cleaner upstairs. He took the stairs by threes, followed the cord into a bedroom where Rose was busily thrusting the head of a vacuum under furniture. She was barefoot and wearing the softest long-sleeved grandfather top, its tails flirting with her wide, round bottom so lovingly cupped by the same tight jeans he’d seen her in yesterday. Her hair was pulled back with a spotted red kerchief.