by Penny Jordan
She had taught in Russia for a while, just as she had in China, whilst studying the languages of both countries, and she knew exactly how that wind could burn into one’s flesh and senses, destroying those who weren’t strong enough to withstand its onslaught.
That wind and the whip of desert sand and its burning heat had surely carved the bone structure of this male face that was stripped of all softness. The tanned flesh might look velvet-warm, and human enough to tempt any woman’s yearning touch, but the flint-grey eyes warned of the fate that would destroy anyone reckless enough to attempt the forbidden intimacy of doing so. That this was a man who prided himself on not having any human vulnerabilities within his make-up, Laura already knew from her research, but seeing the reality of all that delineated so clearly and harshly in his features was still a heart-jolting shock. His tall, broad-shouldered frame might be clothed in what looked like the best that Savile Row could produce, but it was abundantly clear to Laura that beneath those twenty-first-century clothes lay not vulnerable flesh but instead a hardened steel armour.
This man had the heritage of both his mother’s people’s blood and his father’s business success soldered into him and onto him. His already critical scrutiny told Laura that. He might by his blood be of the desert, but there was a coldness about him—an air of distance, almost a total rejection of his own humanity allied to a contempt for the vulnerability of others. The sheer onslaught of the information being relayed to her by her own senses was almost too intense for her to manage.
Every warning system her body and her mind possessed was telling her to turn and leave, to run if necessary. And yet … that frisson of sensation, that unwanted but determined sensual awareness of him as a man that trembled through every nerve ending and tingled every pore of her skin meant—Meant nothing. And if it did exist, and wasn’t merely something ridiculous left over from her teens, a product of her imagination, it should be ignored, Laura told herself firmly.
The photograph of her on her CV hadn’t revealed the female delicacy and the perfection of her heart-shaped face and its features anything like as clearly as the reality of Laura in the flesh, Vasilii was forced to acknowledge as he studied the young woman standing in front of him. Intriguingly—or suspiciously, depending on your mindset, and his always veered towards the suspicious—she had no internet presence. No unseemly photographs of university antics, no gossipy posts to reveal any real aspects of her personality. But of course he didn’t need them. He already had a direct insight into exactly what kind of person she was. The kind he most despised.
She might be physically attractive, and she might have dressed her elegantly slender five feet nine inches in a smart, businesslike, summer weight off-white dress, over which she was wearing an equally smart mid-grey jacket, accessorised with mid-height grey leather pumps and a workmanlike black leather bag, but he knew the reality of her. Just as he knew that beneath the clothes that discreetly skimmed her body she had the kind of curves that most appealed to the heterosexual male’s desires, and that they were entirely natural.
Inside his head Vasilii discovered that he was making an illogical and totally unnecessary calculation as to the number of months it had been since he had last cupped the full softness of a woman’s breasts in his hands whilst he slowly kissed his way from her throat down towards them. Her skin would be creamy pale, a sensual incitement all of its own to the man who wanted her. But he of course was not that man. He controlled his own male reactions. They did not control him. The powerful lightning strike of sexual awareness jolting through him meant nothing. It was merely an instinctive physical reaction. Nothing more. He had far more important things to think about than the brief, inconvenient surge of male desire, both inexplicable and un-desired, that had surged through him.
Turning away from her, Vasilii reached for some papers on his desk, demanding curtly as he turned back, ‘I see you speak Russian as well as Chinese? Why Russian, when most Russians who need to speak and understand English already do so?’
His question caught Laura completely off guard, and made her feel self-conscious. She could easily remember how her desire to learn Russian had been fired, and by whom, but she could hardly tell him that it had been the thought of speaking to him in his own language that had motivated her all those years ago.
‘My parents were linguists. They both spoke Russian, and I started speaking it myself, picking it up from them. I thought … I felt … It seemed natural to follow in their footsteps.’ It was in part the truth, after all—even if she was not telling him the whole of that truth.
‘You decided to follow in their footsteps rather than strike out and make your own path through life? Is that what you mean? Wouldn’t you say that that shows a lack of self-determination and ambition?’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Laura defended herself firmly. He was deliberately trying to make her feel uncomfortable, she was sure, but she wasn’t going to let him. ‘Certain abilities do pass down through the generations, after all. In your own case you followed your father into the same line of business, and your success has proved that you have an aptitude for it. I had an aptitude for languages. After I lost my parents, developing that aptitude and those skills and following in their footsteps helped me to feel that they continued to be a part of my life. I loved languages, and I wanted something I could hold on to that felt as though it was part of them.’
Something to hold on to. An image of his mother the last time he had seen her alive flashed briefly and harrowingly through Vasilii’s head before he could deny it. The fact that it had been there at all only increased the dislike and rejection he felt towards Laura. She was stirring up within him memories she should not have the ability to stir up, raising issues that no one was ever allowed to raise with him, crossing lines that no one was permitted to cross with her conversation about her parents and her foolish sentimentality. Why? And, even more importantly, how? It was absurd that a woman like her, whom he already knew he could not trust, should somehow have managed to breach the defences that not even the gentle, loving touch of his late stepmother had been allowed to breach. Absurd and dangerous. The day that a woman like Laura Westcotte could represent any kind of danger whatsoever to him would never come, Vasilii assured himself.
‘I asked you for an explanation of why you chose to learn Russian. I expected a business reason, not a self-indulgent description of your childhood emotions.’
The harshness in his voice made Laura want to recoil from it—and from him. She’d felt so sorry for him when she’d learned how he’d lost his mother. She’d even felt as a girl that it gave them a shared bond. Was that why she had mentioned her own parents? Did she still want to create a shared bond with him? No! There wouldn’t be any point, because no woman would ever be allowed to share any kind of bond with the man he actually was, Laura suspected.
His criticism had stung, and under normal circumstances—if she hadn’t needed this job so badly—it would have had her questioning whether he was the kind of person she wanted to work with. She might need this job, but she certainly wasn’t going to allow his comment to go undefended.
Straightening her shoulders, she told him spiritedly, ‘I may have chosen Russian for personal reasons, but my decision to learn Mandarin—which was not one of my parents’ languages—demonstrates that I was looking towards the future of business. My parents passed down to me an ability to learn languages, but I made the decision to study Mandarin based on my awareness of the growing importance of China in the world market.’
She was daring to challenge him? That wasn’t something Vasilii was used to at all. Not from anyone and especially not from women, who were normally all too eager to court and flatter him.
‘You attended the same school as my half-sister. As far as I am aware Mandarin was not on the syllabus there.’
He knew she had been at school with Alena? A mental image of herself trying to find out from her aunt when Vasilii was likely to come to the school to collect his sist
er and then positioning herself at the window that would give her the best view of his ar rival flooded her body’s defence system with guilty self-consciousness. He couldn’t possibly know about that—just as he couldn’t know how often she had mentally rehearsed walking oh, so casually past his stationary car as he waited for Alena, only to have always lacked the courage actually to do so. She was being ridiculous, Laura warned herself. Of course he would know that she had been at school with Alena, just as he would know that her aunt had been the matron there, because—naturally, as her prospective employer—he would have checked up on her.
‘No. Mandarin wasn’t on the syllabus,’ she agreed.
One dark eyebrow lifted in a manner that Laura felt was coldly censorious.
‘Private lessons must have been an added expense for your aunt.’
He really did not like her. Laura could tell.
‘I paid for them myself,’ she informed him, her voice every bit as cold as his had been. ‘Some of the private pupils stabled their horses locally, and I worked at the stables mucking out. They got an extra hour in bed every morning and I earned the money to pay for my Mandarin lessons. Oh, and before you ask me, I saved up and bought an old bicycle so that I could cycle to the stables.’
Against his will Vasilii had a mental image of a much younger version of Laura Westcotte—ponytailed, fresh-faced and determined—setting off on her bicycle every morning, no matter what the weather, in order to do the chores that girls from better off families were too indulged by their parents to want to do, before returning to the school to begin a day’s education. His own father had always insisted that he work for his spending money as a boy, and even Alena, protected though she had been, had had her own special chores to do.
Vasilii pulled himself up. He wasn’t used to thinking about other people with his emotions, never mind mentally linking their situation to his own. Quite how and why it had happened he had no idea, but he did know that it must and would not happen again.
‘I would like you to read these notes aloud to me, translating them into Mandarin as you do so,’ he told Laura, firmly dismissing the unwanted image of her as a teenager from inside his head.
Very quickly Laura scanned the first paragraph of the technical data she had been handed. As an employee of a business specialising in handling translations of and negotiations for highly complex business operations she had become very much at home with the kind of thing Vasilii had asked her to do, so there was no reason whatsoever for her hand and then her whole body to tremble slightly, or for the colour to come and go in her face—apart, that was, from the fact that Vasilii’s hand had brushed her own as he handed her the piece of paper. That was ridiculous. Vasilii’s touch couldn’t possibly have made her feel like that.
She took a deep breath and started to translate the information on the printed page.
She was good, Vasilii was forced to accept as he followed Laura’s translation. His own PA would have taken longer, despite his experience.
‘And now if you would translate it into Russian?’
Laura nodded her head.
Again she was word-perfect. Not that Vasilii would have expected or accepted anything else.
‘So, we have established that your translation skills are … adequate, but if you know anything about China you will know that there is far more to successful business negotiations with the Chinese than merely having a good grasp of Mandarin.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Laura agreed. ‘Even if they speak another language the heads of Chinese industries and high-ranking Chinese officials often use a retinue of interpreters and PAs because that adds to their status. It is part and parcel of the Chinese way of doing business. Since I know that you speak both Russian and Mandarin yourself, I assumed that it was in part because of the issue of respect that you have decided to negotiate through someone else yourself.’
‘That is correct,’ Vasilii replied, and then looked at her, his eyes slightly hooded and his grey gaze unreadable.
Instinctively Laura knew that his silent assessment of her was both critical and meant to unnerve her.
It would have been so much better, so much easier for her, if she didn’t have that silly teenage crush lodged dangerously in her emotions. Its mere presence was enough to weaken her self-confidence.
When the silence instigated by Vasilii stretched to a length that was beginning to feel uncomfortable he delivered the blow that came from a direction she had not been prepared for. ‘You resigned from your previous employment, I understand—without having secured another post first. Why? It is rather a risk in today’s financial climate.’
CHAPTER TWO
LAURA felt her heart still in fearful recognition.
He couldn’t know. It just wasn’t possible. Summoning all her courage, she told him, ‘I decided to take a sabbatical,’ keeping her tone light and her head held high.
‘Really?’
The cynical look he was giving her warned Laura that he didn’t believe her. But worse was to come when he continued.
‘I understand that you are buying your current property with a mortgage, and that in addition to that financial commitment you also help to pay the fees for your aunt’s sheltered accommodation?’
‘Yes,’ Laura was obliged to confirm. ‘My aunt brought me up after the death of my parents. She’s not been well recently, and only receives a small pension, so naturally I want to do what I can to help her.’
‘You seem very eager to draw a picture of yourself as someone who takes her duties and responsibilities seriously, yet your attitude towards job security, which I would have thought in the circumstances would be extremely important to you, suggests the opposite. In fact I’d go so far as to say that I find it hard to believe that someone with your financial commitments would even think of taking time out for a sabbatical. And I have to say that I find it even harder to believe when I know that you made that decision within a month of being offered a promotion for which you had been personally selected by your mentor—a mentor with whom you have worked for many years.’
Laura’s heart had started to beat with heavy, hammer-like blows of acute dread.
There was nothing he wanted to do more than tell Laura that he had another far more suitable, far more acceptable applicant to fill the vacancy as his PA, Vasilii acknowledged as he watched her, but he couldn’t. Her translations had been faultless and skilled, and he already knew from her CV how highly her previous employers had rated not only her negotiating skills but also her people skills. As Vasilii knew, they were going to be very, very important in securing this particular contract. However, he intended to let her know he was not a man she should cross.
Laura could see that Vasilii was waiting for an explanation, but she couldn’t tell him the truth. Instead she had to appear casual and calmly in control, even if she was sick with anxiety inside, and tell him, ‘The new position I was offered would have entailed a relocation to New York. I resigned because I preferred not to go.’
‘Because you don’t want to travel? But the position as my PA involves a great deal of travelling—and to places rather more far flung than New York.’
Laura’s earlier anxiety had become a clawing sense of impending disaster. Her dread was justified when Vasilii announced, ‘If there is one thing above all else that I demand in my employees, Ms Westcotte, it is honesty and trustworthiness.’ He paused, and then demanded, ‘Isn’t it the truth that you were offered the option of leaving your previous employment voluntarily or being dismissed, because of your affair with your immediate—and affianced—superior?’
‘No!’ Laura denied immediately.
This time it was impossible for her to control her emotions—those feelings that she had kept locked up inside herself since the shocking and humiliating moment when Harold and Nancy had burst into the bedroom of John’s hotel room. And then she’d been summoned to Harold’s office to be accused of having an affair with John—her boss and her mentor, a man she loved and admi
red. A man she looked up to as a career-related father figure. John was, after all, twenty years her senior. He had been divorced when she had first met him, with two sons he adored, and she had been delighted for him when he had become engaged to a wealthy American socialite, a divorcée of his own age whom he had met in New York, even though she had never actually been able to warm to Nancy herself.
One dark, sardonically arched eyebrow told her exactly what Vasilii thought of her hot denial.
‘Very well—yes. I was offered that choice,’ she felt forced to agree. ‘But I was not having an affair with John. He was my mentor—a father figure to me in many ways. We were not having an affair,’ she stated again fiercely.
‘Your CEO thought you were. In fact he was so convinced of it that he offered you the choice of leaving of your own accord, with the whole matter being kept private, or of being subjected to a very public dismissal, with all the damage that would do to your professional reputation. Harold Johnson has very strong views on the morals he expects from those who work under him. He is also an extremely astute CEO, so I doubt he would make such an accusation against a valued and valuable member of his team if he wasn’t convinced of their guilt. Was he convinced of your guilt, Ms Westcotte?’
Laura exhaled shakily.
‘Yes. Yes, he was,’ she admitted.
‘And he was convinced because he and John Metcalfe’s fiancée found you in Metcalfe’s bed. Isn’t that also the truth?’
‘Yes …’
As the excruciating scene came rushing back, Laura could hear in her own voice the dying of her hopes of Vasilii offering her the job. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the condemnatory look in the flint-grey gaze that right now was clinically ripping her pride to shreds.
Laura didn’t know, but something definitely gave her the determination and the strength to insist, ‘But it wasn’t how it looked. John and I had been working late on a project for a client and the client had taken us both out to dinner, and then a nightclub. There had recently been articles in the papers about young women being at risk in using cabs late at night—especially from nightclubs. We were both tired, and we knew we’d got an early start in the morning, so John suggested I stay overnight in his hotel suite. We’d done it before …’