The Man She Shouldn't Crave

by Lucy Ellis

  The last time Plato had seen a woman cleaning a house it had been a good fifteen years ago, and that woman had been his grandmother. Not the woman he had been fantasising about for the past forty-eight hours. Usually those women were wearing a great deal less than Rose. But not one of them had the effect Rose had on him dressed from neck to knee.

  Why the sight of that round bottom shifting with the thrust of her body backwards and forwards struck him as sexually provocative he couldn’t have said, but it told him this was only going to end one way. He had tried to ignore it, because this girl was so far from his usual playing field it would have been the right thing to do to walk away before he started anything he couldn’t finish. Even driving over this morning he had told himself to keep en route for the airport. Protect her from himself. As she had tried to protect herself in that odd little message she’d given him last night over the phone.

  But he was here, and the line he’d fed himself as he pulled up opposite her house—that he had just come to say goodbye, maybe they could hook up next time he was in town—as he’d climbed the stairs, knowing she was only a few steps away, had broken down.

  One look at this warm, curvy woman and she’d shoved all his excuses sidewards. Even separated from her by several feet he could feel the vibrancy that was alive inside her. He hadn’t imagined it. It was all there, burning hotter than ever. He told himself he was just going to warm himself against the fire that was in Rose before he went out into the more prosaic world of deals and cold-blooded decisions. Just a little taste and he would go…it would be unfair to her to ask for anything more…

  He leaned down and yanked the cord.

  The vacuum died and Rose straightened up. ‘Shoot!’

  ‘Rose.’

  She literally leapt, dropped the vacuum nozzle, and clapped a hand over the vicinity of her heart.

  ‘Lordy, Plato, give a girl a fright, why don’t you?’

  Her eyes were huge and her mouth was trembling, although he couldn’t tell whether she was trying not to laugh or cry.

  Her face was scrubbed clean of make-up but her cheeks were red from exertion. Rosy, he thought, and something squeezed tight across his chest. She looked rosy.

  Then his gaze dipped. The grandfather shirt was unbuttoned, so that he had a shadowy glimpse of a whole lot of cleavage, and as she stepped towards him her breasts sort of swayed ever so slightly under the soft, clinging cotton jersey. Her large, soft, amazingly rounded breasts…

  How old are you, man? Thirteen?

  ‘Well, cowboy, does a girl have to ask twice?’ she asked a little breathlessly, all eyes.

  She looked so wary and hopeful and knocked off-balance he just couldn’t help himself.

  He knew he should say something. You just didn’t walk in and grab a woman. You were supposed to have a modicum of sophistication in these situations…

  He stepped over the vacuum—if he’d been thinking straight he would have noted the novelty factor in that act—put his hands around her soft little waist and hauled her in.

  Two days of anticipation hadn’t prepared him for the full impact of Rose’s made-for-sin body. He hadn’t known what breasts and round thighs and a whole lot of woman was going to do to his self-control. Now he knew, everything went a little blurry with lust.

  But first he needed to do the gentlemanly thing. He dragged his hands off her body to frame her face—her lovely, big-eyed, pert-nosed, lush-lipped face—and lowered his head.

  She came up on her toes to make it easier for him.

  Her kiss was soft and questioning. He couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t had the last couple of frustrating nights he’d endured, or the rousing sight of her vacuuming under her bed.

  But he had.

  As their mouths touched, slid, fused, he opened her up and delved inside, exploring the sweet taste of her, the softness of those ruby lips, hearing the little sounds of approval she made deep in the back of her throat that vibrated against his mouth.

  Perfect. Goddamn perfect.

  She tasted like sunshine.

  And sweet, dark liquor.

  He deepened the kiss.

  Rose reached up and wound her arms around his broad neck. In a minute she’d stop kissing and demand to know what he thought he was doing, just walking into her house unannounced when she’d spent a sleepless night wondering if he was ever going to call. But that was in a minute. When they stopped.

  The kissing…

  Lordy, the kissing.

  She rubbed herself up against that big hard chest, hooked her arms over his shoulders and virtually climbed him, so he was forced to splay his hands under her bottom and she had nowhere to put her legs but to wrap them around his lean hips.

  ‘Chert, Rose.’

  She’d surprised him—but not for long. Within seconds she was flat on her back on her newly made bed with two hundred pounds of lean, muscle-packed male bearing down on her. This was new…

  He probably really could take his hands off her bottom now, but he didn’t seem inclined to do so and Rose wasn’t complaining. She wasn’t sure if she was rubbing her pelvis against him or he was doing it himself with those big hands, but… Oh, my Lord, he really was happy to see her—and now she knew he was built to scale.

  Feeling a little heady with it all, female power surging along with happy chemicals, she reached down and explored him through expensive denim—big and hard, like the rest of him.

  Plato went still as a rattler just before it struck.

  ‘Holy Hell, Rose,’ he breathed, and grasped her hand and eased her off, returned her hand palm-down to his taut belly. ‘You need to slow down, dushka, or I’m not going to last.’

  He was breathing hard, and Rose took it as a compliment. She grinned at him and Plato looked a little thrown, as if something about all this was not what he’d expected. Maybe in his world girls didn’t take the initiative? Which didn’t make a lick of sense. For a moment her confidence gave a little under the weight of her past. Clear as crystal she could hear her ex-fiancé Bill giving her fledgling sexuality a beating. ‘There’s something wild in you, Rose. No man wants a wife who can’t control herself.’

  She darn well could control herself. She could control herself around Bill and every other good ol’ boy who thought the woman he’d married would settle in like a mare at stud whilst he got on with his career and his carousing. Not that Bill had ever caroused. He was too uptight for that.

  She just couldn’t control herself around this particular man.

  Wasn’t that supposed to be a good thing?

  She let go of him and lay back against the pillow, feeling all sorts of confused. Maybe she’d read the messages wrong? It wasn’t as if she was in this situation every day of the week. Or the month. Or actually even the year. And really she wasn’t just the sum of her erogenous zones, and she’d only just met him, and wasn’t he only passing through…?

  ‘Don’t stop, Rose,’ he told her, capturing her chin in his hand, forcing her to look into his eyes as if he knew her thoughts had gone galloping off in the wrong direction.

  She blinked.

  ‘Just slow down a little, malenki,’ he assured her, his voice an octave deeper than she had ever heard it.

  The sound thrummed through her senses as if he were plucking every pleasure string in her body.

  ‘Okay,’ she replied breathlessly, not sure what she was agreeing to. ‘Slow…’

  A rueful smile softened his eyes, and he was looking at her as if he’d never seen her properly before. She realised she hadn’t thrown him at all. He looked intrigued.

  ‘It’s all about the journey, Rose,’ he told her in that deep, dark voice of his. ‘I want to make this good for you. There’s no rush to our destination.’

  What that journey would involve and where it would end wasn’t clear to her, and Rose wanted to tell him that if he touched her she didn’t think she could slow down. All the pleasure points in her body were so sensitised she was beginning to ache. But he was
softly fingering the ebony curls lying in the curve of her throat, and it was crazy but she could almost sense him thinking.

  ‘You are so incredibly beautiful. I want to appreciate every inch of you, malenki,’ he said, almost to himself, in an accent that had thickened progressively since they’d hit this mattress.

  And Rose believed him. She not only believed him, she wanted to go on this journey with him…

  ‘Cowboy, you say the sweetest things.’

  He was so big and strong, yet that only made his hands in her hair seem incredibly gentle, pulling her kerchief loose, running his fingers through the silky curls, making her scalp tingle. She reached up and spread her own fingers through his sun-streaked brown hair. It was so thick, and surprisingly soft. It made her feel she’d discovered something about him no one else knew.

  Her eyelashes fluttered closed as his mouth dipped over hers again. Maybe this slowing down was a good thing. Yes, definitely good…

  Rose got a little lost in the kissing, the nipping, the grazing, the tasting. She could feel his hands under her shirt, rucking it up, and she smoothed her hands over his back, feeling the shift of muscle, the heat of his big body.

  All the while she was subtly moving against him, her jeaned thighs wrapped around one of his. This was like the making out you were supposed to do as a teenager, but she’d missed out on it.

  One-handed, he pulled her loose and stretchy top down to expose a pale shoulder and a portion of her practical beige reinforced bra that in all the sexy goings-on she’d forgotten all about.

  Darn!

  Plato made no comment. His thumb was pushing under the thick workaday strap, working it down her arm until he’d exposed the fulsome curve of flesh pushing up above the top of her bra.

  ‘Your skin, Rose,’ he groaned, his breath hot against her flesh as he laid open-mouthed kisses over the plumped-up upper slope of her breast. ‘It’s like fresh milk.’ He seemed to be describing her to himself as he dragged the ugly nylon a little lower. ‘And you taste so good.’ Another hot kiss. ‘And you’re so soft…so incredibly soft.’

  Was she? Rose thought she’d die if he didn’t reach her nipples soon. She began to make little breathy noises she didn’t recognise as her own. He was nuzzling the deep valley between her breasts, growling her name. A moan escaped her and she decided sexy lingerie was overrated anyway.

  Vaguely Rose became aware of another voice calling her name. Not one of those pesky ones from her past, telling her she was behaving like a wanton, rolling around on her bed in broad daylight with a man she’d only known forty-eight hours, giving him access all areas to her girls. No, this one was a little more immediate, and it seemed to be coming from her downstairs hallway. In fact it sounded as if it was coming up the stairs…

  ‘Oh, my Lord!’ She lifted her head like a Setter sensing a change in the wind.

  She fought to sit up on her elbows, still half wedged under Plato’s big, pulsing body. She was breathing hard, and she was aware that her hair was all over the place and she probably had stubble rash all over her cheeks and chin and chest.

  ‘It’s Rob,’ she blurted out. ‘One of my clients.’

  Plato said something not very nice in Russian and rolled off her.

  Rose propelled herself out of bed. Or she would have if her legs hadn’t felt like jelly.

  ‘You stay here,’ she ordered, patting down her hair, pulling her top back into some sort of order.

  Rob was in the stairwell, his eyes lighting up as he saw her.

  ‘Sorry, Rose. The door was wide open so I came on in.’

  ‘Um…did we have an appointment?’

  ‘Not exactly, but it was a nice day and I was passing.’ He climbed another two stairs. ‘Were you taking a nap?’

  In any other circumstances Rose would have paid attention to this being a weird conversation and her barriers would have all been in place. At his last appointment Rose had picked up on inappropriate boundary issues with this man, and clearly she hadn’t been wrong. Except right now she didn’t much care about his problems. She needed him out of her house.

  ‘I think you need to go, Rob,’ she said a little airlessly, walking towards him with her arms held out to shoo him down her stairs. He was a tall man, or Rose had thought so. But after a couple of days’ exposure to Plato he seemed almost slightly built. She didn’t feel threatened by him.

  She knew the moment Plato appeared because Rob lost a lot of colour.

  Blast, she should have locked him in the bedroom. Telling Plato to stay put was kind of like issuing orders to a killer shark. It was best just to stay out of the water altogether.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Plato’s tone of voice was one he had never used in her hearing, and Rose lost a little ground herself as she looked from Plato to Rob and then back again.

  It wasn’t just a question. It was a threat and a statement of ownership. His shirt was open, his hair was rumpled, and those Slavic eyes of his were narrowed, his mouth a firm, drawn line of aggression. He looked mean.

  Rob retreated a step, then another. ‘I’ll return when it’s more convenient, Rose.’

  Plato just kept coming, brushing past her without a word and literally driving Rob down the stairs.

  Rose knew it was cowardly to just stay where she was. She could hear Plato speaking in that low, menacing way, but not a squeak from Rob. It was out of bounds for a client to just waltz in like that uninvited, without even an appointment, but Plato was being more than slightly territorial—which the woman in her was enjoying immensely even as the professional in her head told her she needed to intervene.

  Following him downstairs, she found him standing on the doorstep.

  His expression was grim. ‘Get your passport.’

  ‘Wh-what? Where’s my client?’

  ‘Likely Alaska,’ Plato responded coolly. ‘Do all your clients just walk in off the street and go on up to your private quarters?’

  ‘No—only the big, bossy Russian ones.’ She settled her hands on her hips. ‘Now, before you go any further, cowboy, you and I need to have a little talk.’

  ‘Da, we talk. In the car. Get your passport, detka. I’m taking you with me.’

  ‘Hold on. Taking me where?’

  ‘Moskva,’ he said shortly, as if it were obvious.

  ‘Moscow? Are you out of your cotton-pickin’…?’

  ‘You will spend a few days with me. It will be nice for us.’ He slid his hand around her waist, casual as you like, and she had to tip back her head to look him in the eye. That pesky woman inside her was doing a major melt.

  ‘What about the match tonight?’

  ‘I must return home. I was on my way to the airport when I detoured here.’

  Rose blinked in receipt of that little bit of news. ‘Detoured?’ she repeated slowly, the melt temporarily on hold.

  ‘Da. I couldn’t resist.’

  He smiled at her, his eyes reflecting everything they had been doing upstairs in her bedroom. Everything she had been happy to do until she’d realised she was only a detour.

  ‘How incredibly fortunate for me,’ she said, her voice at chiller level. ‘That explains why you didn’t bother to call me first.’

  Plato shrugged. ‘If I’d called you we would have had one of those boring conversations about why you felt compromised by having dinner with me. I would have driven around. We would have ended up in bed.’ He brushed a lock of hair from her face. ‘I like you, Rose. I want to be fair to you. You have your life here. I live—there. But I find I’m liking you a little too much to resist. So we fly to Moskva and see what happens, yes?’

  Rose sifted through all those extremely male assumptions and decided that one, Plato Kuragin had an amazingly strong sense of entitlement, but being gorgeous, rich and sought-after he probably had a lot of stuff to back that up with, and two, he was far too arrogant for his own good.

  A little Thanks, but no thanks would help him look at those issues.

  “You�
��re so bossy,” she said instead.

  “Da, and you love it, detka.”

  She did. She was enjoying it far too much. Plato was being utterly outrageous, expecting her just to up and follow him across the world, and she really shouldn’t be so compliant. She’d fled Houston vowing she would never let other people make her decisions for her ever again. It made no sense to let Plato Kuragin call the shots now…except for the thrill it gave her. She liked it. She liked the way he knew what he wanted and went after it, and how he seemed to know what she wanted too.

  It was as if all those longings to let loose and behave wildly, repressed during her college years with a passive Bill, were rising to the surface, stirred up by proximity to this big, dominant man.

  Sure, her life was here, and his was there—as he’d put it so succinctly—but how often did a guy like this appear on your doorstep? And, goodness, she liked him an awful lot. It was just that she got the impression Plato also liked a whole lot of other things. Namely, his comfort, getting his own way, and clearly—from the tabloid reports—Nordic blondes and Scandinavian skyscrapers. She really needed to ask him about that orgy on the yacht…

  Then it struck her. For all his rather liberal sex life had been so colourfully reported over the last few weeks in the tabloids, he had been the one to slow things down upstairs. He had also been amazingly tender with her, and incredibly hot.

  If she gave way to his wishes—and something told her she would—what would happen then? It was the not knowing, she suspected, that gave her such a charge. It had been so long since she’d felt comfortable enough to let a man take the reins.

  It’s not just him, she thought, startled, it’s me. I’m changing. I feel confident enough to know I can snatch back those reins any time I see fit.

  This was her chance to let go of being the fairy godmother and step into Cinderella’s glass slippers.

  Rose moistened her lips. ‘I think my passport is in my desk drawer, but it’s a mess. It might take some time to find it.’