by Lynne Graham
Recognising the resentful note in her twin’s voice, Alissa breathed, ‘I don’t want your clothes because they’re not my style—’
‘You don’t have a style,’ her more fashionable sister retorted tartly. ‘You wear cheap comfy clothes and that’s not what a rich man expects. If you’re going to carry this pretence off, you have to get the image right.’
‘If you added a set of wings I’d look just like a fairy off a Christmas tree!’ Alissa exclaimed in mortification, twirling so that the short skirt of the black dress flew out and exposed the cerise-pink layers of net edged with lace beneath. The net was scratchy and uncomfortable and the towering pink peep-toe shoes she also wore forced her to walk in little mincing steps. Plus, she was a good deal curvier than her sister and her breasts were straining against the snug fit of the bodice. ‘This dress is too small for me!’
‘It’s fine. I have a much slimmer figure. You can’t expect the dress to look anything like as good on you as it does on me. Try to remember that it’s not cool to stuff yourself if there’s food around,’ Alexa reprimanded her. ‘You’re welcome to my clothes. After all I am pregnant and they won’t fit me much longer. Make sure you don’t lose that coat by leaving it down somewhere. There are thieves everywhere.’
A towering man, who was as tall as he was broad, came to the door of Alexa’s apartment to announce that a car was waiting downstairs for Alissa. Alexa was careful to stay out of sight. He had a heavy accent and minimal English at his disposal, so Alissa’s initial chatty efforts to find out what his name was, how long he had worked for his employer and where she was going fell on stony ground. During the journey, however, he turned in the front passenger seat, eased open the partition and pointed carefully to himself. ‘Borya,’ he told her, having worked out what she wanted to know.
‘Alissa,’ she responded cheerfully, striving not to surrender to the nervous chill steadily spreading through her.
The vehicle came to a halt outside a nightclub where a sizeable gathering of stylish people were already queuing for entry. A protective presence by her side, Borya swept her in past the doormen. Mindful of her twin’s strictures about the coat she wore, Alissa came to a halt at the cloakroom check and removed the garment, determined to take no risks with it. Borya broke into a voluble speech but she was none the wiser as to what he was telling her and she passed over the coat.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ she asked the attendant, who was coughing into a handkerchief and shivering in the corner behind the counter.
‘I’ve got a rotten cold and it’s freezing in here,’ the girl spluttered miserably and Alissa felt desperately sorry for her; while she had been a student she had often worked in low-paid part-time jobs to make ends meet.
Surrounded by his aides and his entire security team, Sergei was in a private room watching football on a giant wall television plasma screen. But the instant his bride-to-be walked through the door backed by Borya, he shook himself by totally forgetting the game. Indeed unfamiliar words like exquisite and dazzling briefly shone a glow of inspiration over Sergei’s more usually prosaic thoughts. He was initially off-balanced by the reality that Alissa did not seem to bear much resemblance to her photo. In the flesh she was so much more than merely attractive. In fact she was incredibly feminine with a beautiful heart-shaped face, delicate features and aquamarine eyes as blue-green and mysterious as the sea. Long golden blonde hair tumbled halfway down her back. She was also tiny, the dress drawing attention to her minuscule waist and the pouting upward swell of the surprisingly full curves above it. His attention rested on her lush Cupid’s bow mouth and the firm rounded globes of her breasts. The tightness at his groin shifted into the heaviness of solid arousal and his galloping attack of cold feet just vanished there and then. Somehow the photo had lied: she was gorgeous and very beddable.
When Alissa saw the big dark male sprawled on the sofa, she fell still and had to be urged forward. In slow motion he came fluidly upright, well over six feet of long, lean, powerfully built masculinity unfolding before her intimidated gaze. He was a stunningly handsome guy. Black hair was brushed back from his lean bronzed face, which was dissected by the arrogant blade of his nose and complemented by high carved cheekbones and an aggressive jaw line. Her ability to swallow and breathe was arrested while she stood there staring. He was blatantly male in an age when that primal attribute was becoming more and more rare. Glittering, very dark eyes flared down into hers and her heart succumbed to a nervous bounce behind her ribcage.
‘Come and sit down,’ Sergei murmured, his accent purring over syllables that took more concentration than usual to pronounce. ‘I’m watching my club play. Do you follow football?’
‘No, not at all,’ Alissa admitted, scanning his appearance. He wore a black striped designer shirt, the sleeves of which he had pushed up his arms, and well-cut black trousers. The jacket of his business suit lay in a heap and his silk tie was in the process of falling off the coffee table onto the floor. She could tell at a glance that he was untidy and that he most probably had a low tolerance threshold for any kind of restriction. His tightly leashed energy hummed in the air like a building storm while he automatically took up a strong stance of authority.
Sergei, who was accustomed to women who raved about football for his benefit, was stunned by that careless response. ‘You don’t like football?’ he repeated, giving her another chance to reconsider and ingratiate herself.
‘I’ve never thought about it one way or the other. I wasn’t one of the girls who wanted to play it at school anyway,’ Alissa confided as she lifted his jacket, folded it and set it neatly aside so that she could sit down. The tie on the floor irritated her but she struggled not to pick it up. After all, she wasn’t his maid. ‘I wasn’t the sporty type.’
She was small-boned and fragile and the idea of her on a football pitch struck him as ludicrous. He snapped imperious fingers like a potentate presiding over a court and the waiter hovering by the door hurried over to take his order for pink vodka. A tall bottle arrived and drinks were poured. Alissa accepted a glass and wished she were able to ask some of the dozen questions brimming on her lips, but she could not afford to expose her ignorance and risk blowing her cover. Trying not to wince at the strong taste of the drink, she sipped.
‘You don’t like vodka either?’ Sergei quipped, wondering why she was so uptight, sitting perched on the very edge of the sofa and maintaining a careful distance from him.
At that comment, which strongly suggested that she was not meeting his expectations, Alissa deemed it wisest to tip her head back and down what remained in the glass in one go. It was like swallowing flames and she thought her burning throat would never be the same again. Another bottle arrived with a fresh pair of glasses.
‘Try this one and see if it is more to your taste-it’s made in Scotland,’ Sergei informed her lazily.
‘I’m okay—I don’t drink an awful lot.’ Alissa continued to clutch her empty glass to make it easier to avoid the offer of another.
‘You should enjoy alcohol while you still can,’ he told her.
Alissa wondered what on earth she was supposed to make of that piece of advice. What did he mean? That if she signed on the dotted line as his wife she would no longer be allowed to drink? The sudden outcry from the men in the room accompanied by a full-throated roar from the spectators of the game on the television stole her attention.
‘Oh, someone’s scored, have they?’ she commented brightly, forgetting that odd remark of his in her eagerness to make conversation. Nobody needed to tell her that her sister, Alexa, would not have been sitting there by his side as quiet as a little mouse. ‘How exciting…’
‘Alissa,’ Sergei said gently, ‘it was the other team, not mine, which scored.’
Colour flamed in her cheeks. ‘Oh, dear…’
Sergei closed long fingers round the small hand curling into the sofa by her side and used that connection to propel her across the space separating them.
Unperturbed, Sergei drew her right up to him and brushed the golden hair back from her cheeks with confident fingers. All big eyes and fluctuating colour, she was breathing rapidly. It was not the flirtatious or amused reaction he expected to receive from an experienced woman and he was intrigued. ‘What do you think?’ he mocked.
She collided with dark eyes flaring lustrous gold and a tight clenching sensation in her pelvis made her shift uncomfortably in her seat. She gazed up at him, terrified that any attempt to go into retreat or call a halt would have the same provocative effect on his intrinsically dominant nature as a gauntlet thrown down in challenge. As her nipples tightened into stinging prominence she sucked in a ragged breath and pressed her thighs tensely together. She knew what was happening to her and she didn’t like it at all. Her body was attracted to him, not her brain, she told herself angrily. Her brain had nothing to do with the desire that was assailing her in a seductive tide.
‘You’re very sexy,’ Sergei husked, a long finger tracing the voluptuous raspberry-tinted curve of her lower lip while his hungry body reacted with almost painful enthusiasm to the sensual pull of her fragrant body so close to his. ‘Come home with me tonight. Why should we wait?’
Her aquamarine eyes flew even wider and she lowered her lashes hurriedly in self-defence. They had only met a few minutes ago and he actually thought she would be willing to sleep with him tonight? He expected her to sleep with him? He could only be asking why they should wait for the wedding. If Alexa had been sitting beside her at that moment, Alissa would definitely have strangled her twin. Exactly what kind of an arrangement had Alexa signed up for with this man? And how could Alissa challenge his assumptions without revealing her ignorance and running the risk of being unveiled as an impostor?
The atmosphere vibrated like a tautly strung musical instrument. In the midst of the frantic thoughts racing inside Alissa’s head, Sergei tugged her to him and brought his wide shapely mouth crashing hungrily down on hers. It was sweeter than sweet in intensity and hotter than flames. Fireworks of response were set off like a chain reaction of energy snaking through her slender body. She had never before got a charge like that from a kiss and the power of it shocked her. He parted her lips with his tongue and delved sensually deep in the moist interior of her mouth and she shuddered with the wicked, wanton pleasure of it. The smouldering prickle of heat between her thighs raised her temperature even more. Her fingers were lodged in the luxuriant thickness of his black hair, but she craved much closer contact than she already had. She wanted to press herself fully against his lean, hard body.
‘Enough, milaya moya.’ Sergei set her back from him with urgent hands while he scanned her hectically flushed face and the lack of focus in her eyes with satisfaction. She was seriously hot and passionate. He liked a woman who could forget herself so totally in his arms. He was already picturing that tiny lush body splayed across his bed, and the wedding he had begun to dread finally acquired a strong source of appeal. Getting his wife pregnant did, at the very least, promise to be a highly entertaining pursuit.
Disorientated, Alissa blinked, not quite ready to accept that she could have let him kiss her breathless while making no attempt to end their embrace. She was in a state of complete bewilderment.
‘The game,’ Sergei murmured succinctly as if it was the only thing in the world that mattered at that moment.
Alissa almost lifted one of the bottles off the table and brained him with it. He was talking about football! The football was more important than she was? Her soft swollen mouth snapping shut like a steel strap, Alissa murmured sweetly, ‘I like a man who has his priorities in the right place.’
Sergei would have suspected sarcasm if it were not for the fact that women were invariably too busy trying to impress him to snipe at him. He turned his attention back to the television screen. ‘I’ll take you down to the nightclub when the game is over.’
The colour in her cheeks high, Alissa stared at the television screen and childishly hoped his team would lose. She had let him kiss her in front of a room full of men. She had completely forgotten where she was, who she was with and who she was supposed to be pretending to be. How could she have behaved like that with a man she barely knew? And would he just have pushed Alexa away and gone back to watching his stupid game? Why, all of a sudden, was she thinking like a jealous insecure teenager? Wouldn’t she be better engaged wondering why Sergei Antonovich had suggested she spend the night with him? Most jobs, even unusual ones, were conducted in a more professional and considerably less intimate manner.
Sergei could feel her boredom and it irritated him. It was bad enough that his team was losing. Indeed, in spite of the millions he had poured into his football club, it was a bloodbath on that pitch! He began to explain the game to her, astonished by a level of ignorance that ensured that she even had to ask the meaning of the simplest of terms. No, she definitely wasn’t sporty and she had clearly made no effort to discover his interests and prepare for them so that she could be a good companion. He was annoyed that she had been so lazy. No Russian woman would have made such a cardinal error when it came to pleasing a man. On the other hand he was convinced she would please him very much in bed and he was strong enough to mould her like wax into what he wanted in every other field.
Alissa accompanied him into the lift. ‘This place is enormous.’
‘I extended it to provide VIP rooms. It’s very popular. The staff are trained to deliver the service that Russians expect,’ Sergei advanced, taking advantage of the mirrored walls to study her from all angles and finding no view that disappointed him. There was no denying that she was little, but in all the right womanly places she was deliciously rounded, which compensated for her lack of height.
‘You own this club?’ Alissa said in surprise.
‘Yes. There wasn’t a club in London able to offer the level of facilities that I expect.’
She had never met a man of such blazing assurance. She sensed that that confidence defined him. He expected the very best and refused to accept less, which was why he had bought his own nightclub and personalised it to suit his needs. So demanding and confident a male must have found an unsuccessful first marriage intolerable. Did that explain why he had chosen to opt for a businesslike approach for his second marital venture? It was unlikely, Alissa decided when she recalled the salient fact that this proposed marriage was only to last a couple of years at most. Normal marriages didn’t take off with the divorce date already in place. So, why was he bothering to get married?
‘You’re very quiet,’ Sergei commented as the lift doors purred open, letting in a flood of voices and pounding music.
From that point, there was no further opportunity for speech. Men she recognised now from his security team were standing by an empty table, keeping it reserved for their employer. But no sooner had Sergei stepped onto the dance floor to approach that table than the frontrunners in a surge of excited women engulfed him.
Alissa had never seen anything like it. She was nudged back by the tide, pushed aside, left standing while various women giggled, reached out to try and touch him and performed dance steps as though they were auditioning for Sergei’s benefit. It was no wonder that he exuded the air of a man accustomed to being the centre of attention for he very definitely was, just as there was no doubt that he could have walked away from his admirers had he so desired.
Alissa lifted her head high and left him to it, taking a seat behind the table where Borya was stationed. With two beautiful women on either side of him and visibly hanging on his every word, Sergei appeared to be in his element. And he was, Alissa acknowledged, because Sergei Antonovich was a notorious womaniser or, depending on one’s outlook, a famous connoisseur of her sex. Over the years he had appeared in a lot of tabloid pictures, always with a different gorgeous woman clinging to him as he emerged from nightclubs, stood on yacht decks or posed in front of
the impressive Antonovich building that housed his business empire in London. Although he was not known for fidelity or for the longevity of his affairs, a long list of fabulous beauties had still accepted him on those demeaning terms.
Sergei looked around for Alissa and could barely credit that she had simply walked off and sat down. In all his life a woman had never treated him to such a display of indifference and it infuriated him. They were getting married in a week! He had just organised the publicity release on that score and there was his bride ignoring him, demonstrating her inability to meet the demands of the role she had been hired to play. No normal woman in love with a man would leave him with a bevy of willing and seductive beauties milling around him.
Stony-faced and unimpressed, Alissa sipped vodka through compressed lips while Sergei danced and flirted with the collection of truly shameless and determined women. There was the fatal flaw in all that wealth, power and potent male beauty, Alissa reflected with simmering scorn. Sergei Antonovich had no manners and not the smallest idea of how to behave in public with the woman he was planning to marry. That was undoubtedly why he had to pay a woman to take on the job. No woman with any pride or dignity would tolerate such treatment, not to mention the arrogant assumption that she would be happy to watch a bunch of footballers chasing a stupid ball round a muddy pitch at their very first meeting. If it had been a real date, Alissa would already have labelled him a loser and headed for home. Now she was wondering how long she was obligated to sit in public letting him make a fool of her while he dallied with the deferential type of oversexed woman he clearly preferred.
Alissa’s fingertips began to drum a little tattoo on the table top while she watched Sergei and she decided that she was leaving within the next ten minutes. She was irritated when someone blocked her view and she glanced up in surprise as a handsome blond man in a suit spoke to her in spite of Borya’s attempts to head him off. He was asking her to dance. Well, why not? Why should she sit bored, like a prisoner at her guarded table? Alissa rose from her seat, slid out from behind the table and off she went.