by Penny Jordan
It wasn’t that the concept of an employer requiring a certain standard of dress was something new to her, or something to which she objected. She’d had a clothes allowance with her previous job. The thought of someone else actually choosing those clothes, though—especially when that someone else was Vasilii—sent prickles of a sensation she did not like trembling down her spine. Even worse than that—humiliatingly so, in fact—were the sudden unexpected and unwanted images which had produced themselves inside her head of delicate and very sensual silk and satin wisps of underwear.
Such images were highly inappropriate. The clothes that Vasilii had selected for her would be work clothes. It could only be because she had walked past a couple of exclusive lingerie shops on her way here this morning that those images had somehow lodged inside her head. No other reason. Vasilii Demidov might be the kind of man who had the style and the good taste to buy his lovers the kind of underwear that women loved, but she was most certainly not the kind of woman he would ever want as one of those lovers. Nor did she want to be.
‘Here is the information you will need, and here is your contract.’
Vasilii had turned round, and now her face started to burn. Get a grip, Laura warned herself as she took the papers he had put down on the coffee table within her reach but without touching her. Another unwanted stab of emotion pricked at her heart.
She knew his opinion of her. She knew he didn’t like her or trust her. Everything about his manner towards her now that she had actually met him revealed him as a man who was corrosively antagonistic and nothing like the white knight she had fantasised about as a girl. So, given that, why should she feel hurt and rejected because he was making it plain that he didn’t want any kind of physical contact with her?
It was safer to lose herself in speed-reading the contract than to allow herself to dwell on finding a truthful answer to that question, Laura acknowledged with relief as she read and then reread the contract.
As she had already known, the remuneration package was very generous, and with the added benefit of the bonus Vasilii had mentioned thrown in this six-month contract would give her the kind of financial security she needed. There would be a high price to pay for that financial security, though, Laura suspected. Not so much in the two hundred per cent dedication to her work which she knew Vasilii would demand, but in the cost to her pride and her self-respect in knowing that she was working for someone who disliked and despised her. Beggars could not be choosers, Laura reminded herself firmly. For her, right now, pride and self-respect were luxuries she could not afford. She needed this job.
Reaching into her bag, she removed the expensive pen that John had given her on the anniversary of her first year of working for him. He had had her name inscribed on it, and she treasured it as the gift of faith in her professional skills that she knew it to be. Dear John. Despite everything, he was a good man. He had been dreadfully upset about what had happened, though Laura suspected that a part of him had also been secretly rather flattered that his fiancée felt so possessive about him.
The contract signed, Laura replaced it on the coffee table and then gathered up all the other papers.
‘You said you wanted me here for eleven-thirty tomorrow morning?’ she double-checked.
‘Yes. We’ll be flying out by private jet. I’ll discuss your grasp on the negotiations so far with you during the flight.’
There was nothing else to be said. Putting the papers into her bag, Laura headed for the door.
She had a lot of very intense work ahead of her now, if she was to be able to answer any question Vasilii chose to throw at her tomorrow, but irrationally, as she walked back down Sloane Street towards the tube station, it wasn’t concern about the work that filled her mind. Instead what was preoccupying her thoughts and her emotions was her own ridiculous and dangerous reaction to that heart-stopping moment back in the apartment when, unbelievably, it had seemed as though Vasilii was going to touch her.
The thrill of horrified revulsion she had felt then echoed through her again now. She went hot and then cold at the knowledge of just how foolishly and instinctively she had been on the point of going to him, reaching out to him herself, as though … as though she’d wanted him to hold her. Which of course she most certainly had not. She wasn’t fourteen any more, and he certainly wasn’t the white knight in shining armour she had imagined him to be in her girlish fantasies. He was autocratic, disdainful, sardonic and utterly without a single aspect of shining knighthood to his personality. But somehow her body had thrilled recklessly at the prospect of his touch. No wonder she had felt so horrified and revolted by her self-betrayal.
As she started down the steps to the tube station Laura couldn’t help wishing that she hadn’t had to accept his job offer. The reality was, though, that she hadn’t had any other choice.
Once Laura had gone Vasilii gathered up the signed contract—her signature, he noted, was well formed and elegant, rather like Laura herself. That acknowledgement brought a swift cold frown to his eyes as he filed the contract. He had no wish to have any kind of personal thoughts about Laura Westcotte intruding into his private mental and emotional space.
As he straightened up from locking away the contract in his desk the group of silver-framed family photographs on the sideboard opposite caught his eye. The photographs had originally been placed there by his half-sister, when she had shared the apartment with him prior to her marriage.
He walked over to the sideboard and looked at them, reaching for the photograph that was almost tucked away behind the others—a photograph of his parents on their wedding day. His stepmother had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday, having gone to what he knew must have been an enormous amount of trouble to find it. After his mother’s death Vasilii himself had burned all the photographs he could find of his mother, because he hadn’t been able to endure seeing her image when he couldn’t see her any more in the flesh. He had only been a child then, and of course—although he could never have admitted it to anyone—later he had regretted his emotional reaction.
His stepmother had guessed how he felt, though, although she had never said so. Her choice of that special gift to him had told him that. She had somehow known of the pain of his loss, and she had tried to offer him some comfort. Vasilii could still remember how torn his feelings had been when he had opened his gift—the sharpness of his sense of humiliation that his guard had been pierced by a woman’s knowledge of what he believed to be a weakness he had successfully concealed from everyone but himself battling against the deep well of emotion looking at his mother’s youthful features had brought him. Allowing oneself to need another person in one’s life was dangerous. He had needed his mother but she had been taken from him. He’d had to learn to go on alone without her. That experience had taught him never to take the risk of loving anyone in a dependent way ever again.
Vasilii had never resented his father remarrying. He had grown up knowing that his parents’ marriage had been in part a business marriage. That was the way things had been for the women of his mother’s people. She had often told him that she had been proud to be chosen by his father. His father in turn had respected her and valued her. They had been happy together, and they had both loved him and shown him that love. That his mother’s kidnapping and death had left his father devastated had been more than plain. If there had been other women in those years between her death and him falling in love with Alena’s mother he had made sure that Vasilii had never known about them. He had been a man of strong principles and honour.
Vasilii had been pleased for him when he had met and married Alena’s mother. Again, though, he had been caught off guard by the depth of brotherly love he had felt at the birth of their child, his half-sister. Of course he had tried to keep that emotion hidden—especially from Alena as she grew up. She had been so adept at winding their father round her little finger that Vasilii had been determined not to let her see that he was also putty in her small hands.
He had grieved for her and worried over her when his father and stepmother had lost their lives in an accident, and yet at the same time he had, he knew, built up a wall between them. For Alena’s sake. It would have done her no good at all if she had seen him devastated, lost and made helpless, unable to protect her from her own loss. He had had to be strong for her. He had after all known the savage pain of that kind of loss. If he had been stern with her at times then it had been for her own sake, and now that she was happily married to the man she loved that wall had been justified.
Because she had her own life now, with her husband and the children they would have together, and he was once again alone.
He had known from his own experience just how intense was the longing to cling to anything or anyone connected with the memory and the lost love of the one who had gone, so it had been for her own sake that he had encouraged Alena not to become emotionally dependent on him, whilst at the same time doing everything he could to protect her from further hurt.
It was because of the pain the loss of his mother had caused him that he had vowed never to allow himself to be so vulnerable again—not to a woman, not to any children that woman might give him, not to anyone. Some people might be driven to pursue love after such an experience, desperate to replace what they had lost, but he was not like that. The pain had been too intense, too much of an affront to his youthful male dignity. He had decided that he would rather not have love at all.
Unwillingly Vasilii was obliged to acknowledge that he and Laura Westcotte had something in common, in that she had lost her parents, too—and at a similar age to the age he had been when he had lost his mother. He at least had had his father. She, on the other hand, had had only an elderly aunt. If there was one saving grace within her make-up it was her financial support of her aunt. What? Did he actually want to find some good in her?
Vasilii put down his mother’s photograph and turned back towards his desk. No, he did not. He thoroughly disapproved of and wanted to reject the way in which Laura Westcotte was managing to invade his private thoughts. Because whilst he knew that he had every logical reason to disapprove of and to reject Laura herself as well, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to do so.
If that was true—and he was by no means prepared to admit that it was—then he must make sure that he found a way, Vasilii warned himself.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS time for her to leave for Vasilii’s apartment. Quickly Laura checked her appearance in her bedroom mirror. After doing a brief check on Montenegro and its climate via the internet, she had decided to dress for the flight and their arrival there in a softly structured cap-sleeved tan silk jersey wrap dress that wouldn’t crease, looked smart, but was not too businesslike, given that their destination was, from what Vasilii had told her, an upmarket exclusive resort. Pulling on a three-quarter-sleeved cream cotton jacket, Laura checked that she had put all the documentation Vasilii had given her to study in her laptop bag.
Just as she was about to reach for her trolley case, she stopped and turned round, going back to her wardrobe. The jewellery box was tucked away, right at the back of the wardrobe on the floor. It had been a gift to her mother from her father. He’d brought it back from Hong Kong for her. Traditionally decorated and lacquered, the box was in its own right a valuable antique, but its real value to Laura was and always had been the fact that not only had it belonged to her mother, but it had been given to her by her father. Their hands had touched it; they had exchanged loving smiles over the giving and the receiving of it.
The miniature cabinet was beautifully designed, with double doors that opened to reveal individual shelves, each designed to hold a different type of jewellery. The heavy, stylish, twisted gold earstuds that had been her mother’s and which she had decided to wear in order to bolster her courage were on one of those shelves, but it wasn’t that shelf she turned to first. Instead, her fingers trembling slightly, Laura searched for the special hidden catch that locked a small secret chamber in the base of the box. It was years since she had last unlocked it. She’d been a teenager who had hidden away inside it the photograph she had stolen of the darkly handsome man she had seen arriving at the school, behaving so protectively towards his young half-sister. That photograph wouldn’t—couldn’t—still be there.
Only when Laura finally eased out the small tray she saw at once that it was. Her hand shaking, she removed the photograph. Vasilii’s features were instantly recognisable, even if it was a decade since she had snatched the photograph. Of course the only reason her heart could be giving that slow roll of breath-stealing shock was because she was angry with herself for not disposing of it long ago, Laura assured herself. Quickly she ripped the photograph in half, and was just about to throw it away when, on some impulse she couldn’t understand, she found that instead she was tucking the two halves back into the secret space. As a warning to herself for the future, should she ever be tempted to put another man on a pedestal, Laura told herself as she replaced the drawer and then quickly removed her mother’s gold earrings, closing up the jewellery box and restoring it to its resting place in her wardrobe before putting them on.
In his apartment Vasilii was just checking his watch at eleven-twenty-five when Laura rang the intercom. He certainly couldn’t fault her timekeeping, Vasilii was forced to admit as he went towards the door and opened it.
‘My driver is waiting downstairs for us,’ he told her. ‘He’ll drive us to City Airport, and from there we’ll be taken by helicopter to Luton, where we’ll pick up a private jet. You have, I hope, familiarised yourself with the basic background to my negotiations?’
‘Yes,’ Laura confirmed as she walked alongside Vasilii heading for the lift.
Vasilii frowned as the silky fabric of the dress Laura was wearing made a soft sound as she walked. For some reason it made him think of male hands against female skin. The dress wasn’t in any way provocative. In fact it was undeniably plain and discreet, its wrap style effectively revealing only the merest hint of a V-neck and its hem neatly reaching Laura’s knees. However, the very fact that he had been obliged to study her was enough to rearm his hostility towards her. If he could remain completely untempted to give a second glance to women who, in an attempt to attract his attention, wore far more provocative and insubstantial clothes than the dress Laura was wearing, why was it that her dress managed to attract his attention not just to its fabric but also—wholly unacceptably—to what it revealed of Laura’s body? Her throat, her arms, the narrowness of her waist, her legs and even the soft roundness of her breasts. It was intolerable. And he would not tolerate it.
Sunlight shone on the burnished sheen of her hair and the warm gold of her earrings. Vasilii made himself focus on their classical design, but it seemed even they were determined to add to his irritation and discomfort by nestling the way they did on the delicate lobes of her ears, almost as though the weight of the studs might be too much for such fragile femininity.
They had only to walk across the pavement to reach his waiting car—it had taken a handful of seconds, that was all—but as his driver held open the door of the car for Laura, Vasilii was relieved to be able to walk away from the sight of her and around to the far door.
Immediately when he was inside the car he reached for his mobile phone and began to scroll through his messages, not by so much as a flicker of his gaze allowing it to stray in Laura’s direction as they were driven to London’s City Airport.
Laura didn’t mind him ignoring her. In fact she was glad that he was. This morning by rights she ought to have been prepared for the impact of Vasilii’s particularly corrosive brand of maleness on her system after the previous day, but for some reason the sight of him had brought to her far too vulnerable senses a fresh kick of unwanted sensual recognition of just how powerfully male he was. It didn’t mean anything, of course. It was just that there were certain men—and Vasilii was one of them—who simply by virtue of existing forced women to be aware of them as men
.
The transfer from luxurious limousine to equally top-of-the-market private helicopter was effected with all the speed and efficiency Laura had assumed it would be. She had travelled before with wealthy clients, and knew what to expect, so it certainly wasn’t any lack of familiarity with a world in which she felt uncomfortable that was responsible for the nervousness she was feeling. She might want to deny it to herself, but she knew that the truth was it was Vasilii and Vasilii alone who was causing her to be so on edge.
In no time at all they were landing at Luton and being whisked efficiently to the waiting private jet. Laura had travelled in such jets before—some of them overpoweringly opulent and ostentatious. The interior of Vasilii’s jet, though, was far more sternly practical and businesslike, and very much an office in the air—all black leather seating, chrome and glass furniture, and a fine dark charcoal-and-cream-striped carpet.
Vasilii himself didn’t lose any time in getting down to work, either. Whilst there was an immaculately uniformed steward on hand to see to their needs, there was no offer of a glass of champagne, nor indeed any sign of conviviality, as Vasilii took his seat and promptly removed some papers from the case he had been carrying, immediately engrossing himself in them, having told the steward to bring him a cup of strong black coffee.
With his dark head bent over the papers on which he was concentrating, and with work of her own to do, she accepted the steward’s offer of a coffee for herself. There was no reason or indeed any excuse for Laura to pause and let her gaze be drawn to Vasilii. In fact there was every reason for her not to do anything of the sort. But for some reason she just couldn’t help herself. Hadn’t it always been said that it was wise to know thine enemy? Laura attempted to defend her inability to look at something else. In a very powerful sense Vasilii was her enemy, in that she knew full well that he wouldn’t hesitate to keep a check on her and to find fault with her if he could.