Not that she was bitter.
“You’re so cynical,” Rosie had said with a sigh. “But I’ll have you know I’m optimistic enough for the both of us.” She’d handed Alicia a particularly well-worn romance novel, with a pointed look. “I know you sneak this off my shelf all the time. I also know that this tough, skeptical little shell of yours is an act.”
“It’s not an act,” Alicia had retorted.
But she’d also taken the book.
If she’d stayed up too late some nights, crouched over her laptop with her door locked tight, looking through all the photos of the two of them together online, she’d never admit it. If she’d paused to marvel over the way the tabloids managed to find pictures that told outright lies—that showed Nikolai gazing down at her with something that looked like his own, rusty version of affection, for example, or showed him scowling with what looked like bristling protectiveness at a photographer who ventured too close, she’d kept that to herself, too. Because if she’d dared speak of it, she might betray herself—she might show how very much she preferred the tabloid romance she read about to what she knew to be the reality.
And then there was Nikolai.
“Kiss me,” he’d ordered her a few days before they’d had to leave for Prague, in that commanding tone better suited to tense corporate negotiations than a bright little café in his posh neighborhood on a Tuesday morning. She’d frowned at him and he’d stared back at her, ruthless and severe. “It will set the scene.”
He’d been different these past few days, she’d thought as she’d looked at him over their coffees. Less approachable than he’d been before, which beggared belief, given his usual level of aloofness. He’d been much tenser. Darker. The fact that she’d been capable of discerning the differences between the various gradations of his glacial cold might have worried her, if she’d had any further to fall where this man was concerned.
“What scene?” she’d asked calmly, as if the idea of kissing him hadn’t made her whole body tremble with that ever-present longing, that thrill of heat and flame. “There’s a wall between us and the street. No one can see us, much less photograph us.”
“We live in a digital age, Alicia,” he’d said icily. “There are mobile phones everywhere.”
Alicia had looked very pointedly at the people at the two other tables in their hidden nook, neither of whom had been wielding a mobile. Then she’d returned her attention to her steaming latte and sipped at it, pretending not to notice that Nikolai had continued to stare at her in that brooding, almost-fierce way.
“They took pictures of us walking here,” she’d pointed out when the silence stretched too thin, his gaze was burning into her like hot coals and she’d worried she might break, into too many pieces to repair. “Mission accomplished.”
Because nothing screamed contented domesticity like an early-morning stroll to a coffee place from Nikolai’s penthouse, presumably after another long and intimate night. That was the story the tabloids would run with, he’d informed her in his clipped, matter-of-fact way, and it was guaranteed to drive his ex-wife crazy. Most of Nikolai’s women, it went without saying—though her coworkers lined up to say the like daily—were there to pose silently beside him at events and disappear afterward, not stroll anywhere with him as if he liked them.
She’d been surprised to discover she was scowling. And then again when he’d stood up abruptly, smoothing down his suit jacket despite the fact it was far too well made to require smoothing of any kind. He’d stared at her, hard, then jerked his head toward the front of the café in a clear and peremptory command before storming that way himself.
Alicia had hated herself for it, but she’d smiled sheepishly at the other patrons in the tiny alcove, who’d eyed Nikolai’s little display askance, and then she’d followed him.
He stood in the biting cold outside, muttering darkly into his mobile. Alicia had walked to stand next to him, wondering if she’d lost her spine when she’d felt that giant ripping thing move through her in her flat that night, as if she’d traded it for some clarity about what had happened to her eight years ago. Because she certainly hadn’t used it since. She hadn’t been using it that morning, certainly. The old, spined Alicia would have let Nikolai storm off as he chose, while she’d sat and merrily finished her latte.
Or so she’d wanted to believe.
Nikolai had slid his phone into a pocket and then turned that winter gaze on her, and Alicia had done her best to show him the effortlessly polite—if tough and slightly cynical—mask she’d tried so hard to wear during what he’d called the public phase of this arrangement. Yet something in the way he’d stared down at her that gray morning, that grim mouth of his a flat line, had made it impossible.
“Nikolai...” But she hadn’t known what she’d meant to say.
He’d reached over to take her chin in his leather-gloved hand, and she’d shivered though she wasn’t cold at all.
“There are paparazzi halfway down the block,” he’d muttered. “We must bait the trap, solnyshka.”
And then he’d leaned down and pressed a very hard, very serious, shockingly swift kiss against her lips.
Bold and hot. As devastating as it was a clear and deliberate brand of his ownership. His possession.
It had blown her up. Made a mockery of any attempts she’d thought she’d been making toward politeness, because that kiss had been anything but, surging through her like lightning. Burning her into nothing but smoldering need, right there on the street in the cold.
She’d have fallen down, had he not had those hard fingers on her chin. He’d looked at her for a long moment that had felt far too intimate for a public street so early in the morning, and then he’d released her.
And she’d had the sinking feeling that he knew exactly what he’d done to her. Exactly how she felt. That this was all a part of his game. His plan.
“Let me guess what that word means,” she’d said after a moment, trying to sound tough but failing, miserably. She’d been stripped down to nothing, achingly vulnerable, and she’d heard it clear as day in her voice. There’d been every reason to suppose he’d read it as easily on her face. “Is it Russian for gullible little fool, quick to leap into bed with a convenient stranger and happy to sell out her principles and her self-respect for any old photo opportunity—”
“Little sun,” he’d bit out, his own gaze haunted. Tormented. He’d stared at her so hard she’d been afraid she’d bear the marks of it. She’d only been distantly aware that she trembled, that it had nothing to do with the temperature. He’d raised his hand again, brushed his fingers across her lips, and she’d had to bite back something she’d been terribly afraid was a sob. “Your smile could light up this city like a nuclear reactor. It’s a weapon. And yet you throw it around as if it’s nothing more dangerous than candy.”
Here, now, staring out at the loveliest city she’d ever seen, as night fell and the lights blazed golden against the dark, Alicia could still feel those words as if he’d seared them into her skin.
And she knew it would be one more thing that she’d carry with her on the other side of this. One more thing only she would ever know had happened. Had been real. Had mattered, it seemed, if only for a moment.
She blinked back that prickly heat behind her eyes, and when they cleared, saw Nikolai in the entrance to her room. No more than a dark shape behind her in the window’s reflection. As if he, too, was already disappearing, turning into another memory right before her eyes.
She didn’t turn. She didn’t dare. She didn’t know what she’d do.
“We leave in an hour,” he said.
Alicia didn’t trust herself to speak, and so merely nodded.
And she could feel that harshly beautiful kiss against her mouth again, like all the things she couldn’t allow herself to say, all the things she knew she’d never
forget as long as she lived.
Nikolai hesitated in the doorway, and she held her breath, but then he simply turned and melted away, gone as silently as he’d come.
She dressed efficiently and quickly in a sleek sheath made of a shimmery green that made her feel like a mermaid. It was strapless with a V between her breasts, slicked down to her waist, then ended in a breezy swell at her knees. It had been hanging in her room when she’d arrived, next to a floor-length sweep of sequined royal blue that was clearly for the more formal ball tomorrow night. And accessories for both laid out on a nearby bureau. She slid her feet into the appropriate shoes, each one a delicate, sensual triumph. Then she picked up the cunning little evening bag, the green of the dress with blues mixed in.
He’s bought and paid for you, hasn’t he? she asked herself as she walked down the long hall toward the suite’s main room, trying to summon her temper. Her sense of outrage. Any of that motivating almost-hate she’d tried to feel for him back in the beginning. There are words to describe arrangements like this, aren’t there? Especially if you’re foolish enough to sleep with him....
But she knew that the sad truth was that she was going to do this, whether she managed to work herself into a state or not. She was going to wear the fine clothes he’d bought her and dance to his tune, quite literally, because she no longer had the strength to fight it. To fight him.
To fight her own traitorous heart.
And time was running out. By Monday it would be as if she’d dreamed all of this. She imagined that in two months’ time or so, when she was living her normal life and was done sorting out whatever Nikolai fallout there might be, she’d feel as if she had.
A thought that should have made her happy and instead was like a huge, black hole inside of her, yawning and deep. She ignored it, because she didn’t know what else to do as she walked into the lounge. Nikolai stood in front of the flat-screen television, frowning at the financial report, but turned almost before she cleared the entryway, as if he’d sensed her.
She told herself she hardly noticed anymore how beautiful he was. How gorgeously lethal in another fine suit.
Nikolai roamed toward her, his long strides eating up the luxurious carpet beneath his feet, the tall, dark, brooding perfection of him bold and elegant in the middle of so much overstated opulence. Columns wrapped in gold. Frescoed ceilings. And his gaze was as bright as the winter sky, as if he made it daylight again when he looked at her.
There was no possibility that she would survive this in anything like one piece. None at all.
You can fall to pieces next week, she told herself firmly. It would be Christmas. She’d hole up in her parents’ house as planned, stuff herself with holiday treats and too much mulled wine, and pretend none of this had ever happened. That he hadn’t happened to her.
That she hadn’t done this to herself.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Define ready.” She tried to keep her voice light. Amused. Because anything else would lead them to places she didn’t want to go, because she doubted she’d come back from them intact. “Ready to attend your exciting whirl of corporate events? Certainly. Ready to be used in my capacity as weapon of choice, aimed directly at your ex-wife’s face?” She even smiled then, and it felt almost like the real thing. “I find I’m as ready for that as I ever was.”
“Then I suppose we should both be grateful that there will be no need for weaponry tonight,” he said, in that way of his that insinuated itself down the length of her back, like a sliver of ice. The rest of her body heated at once, inside and out, his brand of winter like a fire in her, still. “This is only a tedious dinner. An opportunity to make the donors feel especially appreciated before we ask them for more money tomorrow.”
When he drew close, he reached over to a nearby incidental table and picked up a long, flat box. He held it out to her without a word, his expression serious. She stared at it until he grew impatient, and then he simply cracked open the box himself and pulled out a shimmering necklace. It was asymmetrical and bold, featuring unusually shaped clusters of blue and green gems set in a thick rope that nonetheless managed to appear light. Fun. As fanciful, in its way, as this golden city they stood in.
The very things this man was not.
“I would have taken you for the black diamond sort,” Alicia said, her eyes on the necklace instead of him, because it was the prettiest thing she’d seen and yet she knew it would pale next to his stark beauty. “Or other very, very dark jewels. Heavy chunks of hematite. Brooding rubies the color of burgundy wine.”
“That would be predictable,” he said, a reproving note in his low voice, the hint of that dark humor mixed in with it, making her wish. Want.
He slid the necklace into place, cool against her heated skin, his fingers like naked flame. She couldn’t help the sigh that escaped her lips, and her eyes flew to his, finally, to find him watching her with that lazy, knowing intensity in his gaze that had been her undoing from the start.
He reached around to the nape of her neck, taking his time fastening the necklace, letting his fingertips dance and tease her skin beneath the cloud of her curls, then smoothing over her collarbone. He adjusted it on her neck, making sure it fell as he wanted it, one end stretched down toward the upper swell of one breast.
Alicia didn’t know if he was teasing her or tearing her apart. She could no longer tell the difference.
When he caught her gaze again, neither one of them was breathing normally, and the room around them felt hot and close.
“Come,” he said, and she could hear it in his voice. That fire. That need. That tornado that spiraled between them, more and more out of control the longer this went on, and more likely to wreck them both with every second.
And it would, she thought. Soon.
Just as he’d warned her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A GOLD-MIRRORED LIFT delivered them with hushed and elegant efficiency into the brightly lit foyer of the presidential suite in one of Prague’s finest hotels, filled with the kind of people who were not required to announce their wealth and consequence because everything they did, said and wore did it for them. Emphatically.
These were Nikolai’s people. Alicia kept her polite smile at the ready as Nikolai steered her through the crowd. This was his world, no matter how he looked at her when they were in private. No matter what stories she’d told herself, she was no more than a tourist, due to turn straight back into a pumpkin the moment the weekend was over. And then stay that way, this strange interlude nothing more than a gilt-edged memory.
She could almost feel the heavy stalk beginning to form, like a brand-new knot in her stomach.
Nikolai pulled her aside after they’d made a slow circuit through the monied clusters of guests, into a small seating area near the farthest windows. Outside, in the dark, she could see the magnificence of Prague Castle, thrusting bright and proud against the night. And inside, Nikolai looked down at her, unsmiling, in that way of his that made everything inside of her squeeze tight, then melt.
“I told you this would be remarkably boring, did I not?”
“Perhaps for you,” she replied, smiling. “I keep wondering if the American cattle baron is going to break into song at the piano, and if so, if that very angry-looking German banker will haul off and hit him.”
His blue eyes gleamed, and she felt the warmth of it all over, even deep inside where that knot curled tight in her gut, a warning she couldn’t seem to heed.
“These are not the sort of people who fight with their hands,” Nikolai said, the suggestion of laughter in his gaze, on his mouth, lurking in that rough velvet voice of his. “They prefer to go to war with their checkbooks.”
“That sounds a bit dry.” She pressed her wineglass to her lips and sipped, but was aware of nothing but Nikolai. “Surely throwing a few
punches is more exciting than writing checks?”
“Not at all.” His lips tugged in one corner. “A fistfight can only be so satisfying. Bruises heal. Fight with money, and whole companies can be leveled, thousands of lives ruined, entire fortunes destroyed in the course of an afternoon.” That smile deepened, became slightly mocking. “This also requires a much longer recovery period than a couple of bruises.”
Alicia searched his face, wondering if she was seeing what she wanted to see—or if there really was a softening there, a kind of warmth, that made that wide rip in her feel like a vast canyon and her heart beat hard like a drum.
He reached over and traced one of the clever shapes that made up the necklace he’d given her, almost lazily, but Alicia felt the burn of it as if he was touching her directly. His gaze found hers, and she knew they both wished he was.
It swelled between them, bright and hot and more complicated now, that electric connection that had shocked her in that club. It was so much deeper tonight. It poured into every part of her, changing her as it went, making her realize she didn’t care what the consequences were any longer. They’d be worth it. Anything would be worth it if it meant she could touch him again.
She couldn’t find the words to tell him that, so she smiled instead, letting it all flow out of her. Like a weapon, he’d said. Like candy.
Like love.
Nikolai jerked almost imperceptibly, as if he saw what she thought, what she felt, written all over her. As if she’d said it out loud when she hardly dared think it.
“Alicia—” he began, his tone deeper than usual, urgent and thick, and all of her confusion and wariness rolled into the place where she’d torn in two, then swelled into that ache, making it bloom, making her realize she finally knew what it was....
Not Just the Boss's Plaything Page 13