“Have you?” His low voice at her ear made her start. He’d closed the distance between them in utter silence, a stalking tiger who’d closed on his prey. “From a legal perspective, I’ve wiped the slate clean. Officially, Nikolai Markov died six weeks ago in a gunfight with tribal mercenaries in the Congo. He’s lying in an unmarked grave, where no one’s going to find him.”
This matter-of-fact statement shafted her through the heart. Because it could so easily have been true.
“Bad luck for him,” she managed to say. “So who are you now?”
“Nikolai Kirov,” he said deliberately, “is a computer geek and electronics expert with an illustrious employment history in a handful of multinational corporations, a green card to legitimize his presence in the States, and a newly incorporated cyber security company.”
“Cyber security, is it?” Her heart was beating too quickly for any rational response to this serial list of revelations. And her voice was too breathless to suit her. “Is that…safe for you?”
“I’ll be keeping standard, nine-to-five business hours and filing a tax return.” His warm breath teased her ear and brought out goose bumps along her over-sensitized skin. “All quite respectable. You’ve turned over a new leaf as well, I gather?”
Having him this close was doing dangerous things to her body, turning her knees to liquid and igniting flickers of molten heat low in her belly. Warily she moved away, fingers fiddling with the painted shutters she’d folded open to let the floral-scented air flow through the suite.
“I’ve made my peace with the past as well.” She made her voice resolute. His sudden reappearance might have devastated her, but she was doing her damnedest to ensure he didn’t know that.
“I’ve closed the door on that past, Nikolai—and your part in it. I’d prefer if you didn’t make a habit of dropping by to visit me every time you happen to pass through New Orleans.”
Silence filled the lush spring air. But she could feel his gaze searing into her naked back, barely covered by the crossed straps of her sundress.
“I see,” he said slowly. “So you’ve been busily engaged in forgetting about me? Forgetting the night we spent eleven thousand meters above sea level in that oligarch’s bedroom? And the afternoon we spent making love on Capri?”
Her chest tightened, a lump swelling in her throat.
“I have.”
“And forgetting as well, I suppose, the way it felt when we worked together as partners to close down that smuggling network?”
She swallowed against the burn in her throat and said hoarsely, “That too.”
“And the way I made you feel? The way you felt safe and protected in my arms, the way you trusted me as you’d never dared trust a man since your father and my brother betrayed you eighteen years ago?”
He paused. “The way you felt when you loved me?”
In the months since he’d abandoned her, she’d told herself the gaping wound in her heart had scabbed over and started to heal. But his words ripped the bandage right off, making her heart bleed all over again.
“Damn it, Nikolai!” She whirled to face him, fists clenched at her side. “What do you want me to say? That I was fool enough to fall in love with you and stay in love with you even after you abandoned me in a foreign country with a dead body and a broken heart? Is that what you want to hear?”
“You were searching for me,” he pointed out calmly. Still so bloody beautiful, with his smooth suntanned skin and his silky copper-streaked hair, his face molded with an aristocrat’s sculpted elegance, his body supple with the sinewy strength of the killing machine he’d been.
“I’ve been watching you for days, Skylar. You don’t look like a woman who’s ridden off happily into the sunset. In fact, I’d venture to say you’ve been miserable.”
“Go to hell!” she blazed at him, incensed. So she hadn’t lost her mind after all, those times when she’d thought she sensed him. “Where the hell do you get off, following me? Do you derive some sort of sadistic pleasure from watching me struggle to put my life back together?”
“I needed to know if you still loved me,” he said, low and intense.
“Why?”
“Because I hardly believed it could be possible that you did. I believed all along that you’d mistaken your gratitude for my protection, your dependence on my skills, for an emotional connection I didn’t believe myself capable of inspiring.”
Before the ghosts that haunted the depths of his midnight gaze, those tortured windows into his fractured soul, something twisted in her heart. She’d always known he didn’t believe himself capable of love or worthy of inspiring it.
He’d proven himself wrong on both counts.
Painfully, she forced the words out, because he needed to hear them. And because, despite everything he was and everything he’d done, she loved him more than she’d ever loved a man, or ever would again.
“I’m a thirty-five year old woman and a PhD scientist. Give me some credit for knowing my own mind. I loved you.”
“And the reason you sent Captain Kostenko to track me down?” he pressed, focused on her face like a laser beam. “It’s because you still love me, isn’t it?”
“If I did, I’d have to be a masochist,” she said bitterly. “Who else would ever love a man who’s made it crystal clear he doesn’t love her back?”
Something fractured in his face. That remote façade he wore like Teflon armor split and fell away, leaving naked yearning in its place.
“Yet here I am,” he said softly. “You’re an intelligent woman, Dr. Rossi. Why else would I be here?”
Sudden hope flared in her battered heart. But she was afraid to trust it.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’ve been obsessed with you for eighteen years. At first, it was because I thought you’d betrayed my brother. Once, I won’t deny, I wanted you dead. But the more I learned about you, the more you accomplished—excelling in your studies and rising to the pinnacle of your field, renouncing your wealthy family, dedicating your entire inheritance to charity and your life to making the world a better place—the more personal my fascination became. No woman I ever met could begin to match the pull you exerted on me.”
She made a small noise, one hand rising to her throat.
He took a step toward her.
“When we first met, Skylar, on that train platform in Khimgorod, I wanted to hate you. But you were even more compelling in person. Your brilliance, your resolve, your commitment to your mission—to say nothing of the fact that you’re beautiful and sexy enough to stop traffic—you were like a drug to me. One look from you, and I was hooked.”
That made two of us, then.
Still, she was afraid to trust what she was hearing.
“Like a heroin addiction, you mean?” she said dryly. “I’m flattered.”
“Don’t.” Abruptly he closed the distance between them.
He filled the world before her, too close to avoid. The rich perfume of amber and French cigarettes filled her head as his lean hands closed over her bare shoulders. A current of electricity arced between them.
“Don’t mock me, Skylar—not for this.” Hard with purpose, his voice wrapped around her like a coiled bullwhip. “What you were feeling on Capri, what you’re feeling now? It’s a two-way street.”
A last desperate instinct for self-protection nearly choked her. A ragged breath spilled out. “I don’t know what I’m feeling now.”
“Yes you do, Skylar.” His mouth curved in a rueful grin. “You’re feeling the same thing I am, though it’s taken me forever to come to terms with it. I’m in love with you. And I don’t know how to live my life anymore without you in it.”
For a long, agonizing moment, she was afraid to believe what she was hearing. But there was simply no other reason for him to be saying it—nothing she had that he wanted, no access to secrets, no high-level position, definitely no financial assets worth mentioning after the down payment she’d jus
t sunk into that money pit of a mansion.
He had no motivation for saying he loved her—unless it was actually true.
As her incredulous disbelief dissolved, the first tendrils of joy unfurled in her wounded heart. A slow euphoria bubbled up and spiraled through her.
But she’d been through way too much over the past two months to let him wiggle off the hook so easily. As she tilted her head and looked at him, his expression raw and open, his protective barriers lowered, an imp of mischief seized her tongue.
“You’ve retired to the South Pacific. And I’m working now for big pharma. That’s not a career I can pursue from a tropical island.”
“Oh, damn the South Pacific,” he said irritably. “All I need is a reliable power source and a laptop computer with a satellite connection—and you. More than anything else, Skylar, I definitely need you.”
She thought about making him sweat a while longer. It must have shown in her eyes. With a growl, he slid his hands down her bare arms and circled her waist. Inexorably he eased her toward him.
“Do you require further persuasion, Dr. Rossi?” he asked, midnight eyes smoldering with sexual heat. “A chemical experiment to test your hypothesis? Some new phenomenon to record in your laboratory notebook?”
Feeling breathless, she spread her palms against his chest. His heat seared her skin through his cheesecloth-thin shirt. His heart slammed against her palms.
For once, she thought the formidable Mr. Markov—or Kirov, she’d have to get used to that—might be having a few problems with his own breathing.
“I am a scientist,” she said huskily, hands sliding over his muscled shoulders to circle his neck. “I draw conclusions based on a body of evidence. And the more of that, the better.”
He stepped into her, backing her against the wall, the evidence of his physical arousal a tensile bulge that nudged her belly. Heat spiraled through her and pooled molten between her legs, shielded only by a wisp of lace panty she suspected he’d quickly dispose of.
He lowered his head to nibble the sensitive column of her neck, setting off tremors of reaction along every quivering inch of skin.
“Tell me you love me,” he breathed against her neck. “I need to hear you say it.”
She could hold out no longer.
“I love you,” she murmured, wrapping her fingers in his copper-streaked hair. “But I still think we should proceed with our experiment.”
“I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”
Deftly his fingers found the zipper at her lower back and eased it down. He snagged her shoulder strap with his teeth. The entire garment whispered down her body to the floor, leaving behind a pair of emerald lace panties and nothing else. As his hot hands slid down her body, the breath snared in her throat.
“I have to warn you,” he muttered, pinning her with his smoldering gaze. “You’re not going to need your electron microscope to appreciate what I have to show you.”
It was such a typically male statement she couldn’t help laughing. She was still giggling when his mouth closed over hers in a kiss that gave her scientific mind all the information she needed.
The Russian Temptation (Book Two) (Foreign Affairs 2) Page 30