The Most Coveted Prize

by Penny Jordan

  In the square hallway at their foot, Kiryl opened one of the doors, telling her, ‘This is the master bedroom suite.’

  Unwillingly Alena stepped past him and into the room. Large and rectangular, it was decorated in the same off-white colour scheme, broken up by the rich colour of the dark grey silk curtains and the wallpaper behind the bed. Like the room upstairs she had just left, it too looked down onto the square’s garden.

  The buggies and the women were still there. The pain in her heart felt like a volcano about to erupt, but Alena knew that she had to force her emotions back down inside herself—at least for the duration of this hated, unwanted and humiliating marriage.

  She didn’t realise that Kiryl had come to stand at her side until she heard him ask, ‘What are you looking at?’

  Moving away from him, she told him in a brittle voice, ‘The children. At least I’m to be spared the horror of having your child, Kiryl. I couldn’t bear to think I’d brought a child into the world who might grow up like you. Do you know that when you first told me about your father I was actually stupid enough to think that what you’d experienced at his hands would make you a wonderful father? I thought you’d want to be so different to him. Because you’d never want to be considered anything like him, I thought you’d want to be the kind of father—the kind of man—who understood his children’s need for his love. But I was wrong—just as I was wrong to tell myself that your father’s treatment of your mother must have given you compassion and understanding for someone who loved you.

  ‘When I thought about the boy you had been I wanted to hold that child and protect him. I wanted to tell him that it was his father who was despicable and unworthy, not him. I wanted to tell him to be proud of his mother and of himself. And when I thought of the man I believed you were I wanted to give him everything I had to give—all my love, all my loyalty, all my happiness. Everything.

  ‘But of course you weren’t that man, were you, Kiryl? You never wanted to turn your back on everything your father had been and become a man as different from him as it was possible to be. You never wanted to reject everything he represented. I assumed that was what you wanted—but it wasn’t, was it? You’re just like him. There are other ways you could have chosen to prove yourself better than him—many other ways—but you chose to mirror him, to be him—only more so.

  ‘You were never the man I thought you were, and I was a fool to imagine that you could ever be. You decided to deny yourself the opportunity to be that man a long time ago, when you lay in the gutter watching your father walk away. I should hate you, but instead I pity you—because no matter what you do, or how much you succeed, you will never know what it means to love someone, or to be truly loved by them. Because you don’t have it in you to allow that to happen. Is this what your mother would have wanted for you? Is this the way she would want you to represent the love she had for you?’

  Abruptly Alena stopped speaking. She had never intended to say all she had, and now she felt slightly light-headed and dizzy.

  She looked round the master bedroom and then said to Kiryl emotionlessly, ‘I don’t know why you’ve insisted on me seeing this house. Wherever I have to live for the duration of this wretched marriage will feel like a prison to me. But there’s one thing for certain: I might have to marry you, Kiryl, but it will be a marriage without love and without intimacy. Whichever room I sleep in I shall be sleeping in it alone. There is nothing you could do now that would ever make me desire you again.’

  ‘Be careful when you challenge me, Alena,’ Kiryl warned her angrily. Her words had pierced the armour of his self-control even though he was not going to allow her to see that. What she had said about him had ripped and opened up scar tissue he had thought hardened to withstand anything life could throw at it, but he had now discovered it was still unbearably raw.

  ‘It isn’t a challenge. It’s a statement of fact,’ Alena told him fiercely.

  ‘That I can no longer make you want me? That’s a fact, is it? Are you sure about that?’

  Of course she was. So why was she looking anxiously to the door as Kiryl came towards her? He penned her in between the window and his body, a male gleam in his eyes that warned Alena that she had gone too far. But what she had said to him was true, wasn’t it? There wasn’t anything he could do now that would arouse her desire. After all that desire had been for the man she had believed him to be—not the man she had discovered he was.

  ‘Hunger for another person’s touch isn’t something you can turn on and off. It isn’t something you can control or subjugate to your own will.’ As he had already discovered, Kiryl acknowledged, remembering night upon night during which he had lain awake, his body aching for the intimacy they had shared as lovers.

  Oh, yes, he might have pretended to himself that that wasn’t the case. He might have denied to himself that he wanted her. But deep inside that part of himself that she had somehow managed to touch had refused to bow to his commands to accept the lie he had been telling it. It wanted her. It wanted her beyond logic or reason. It ached and hungered for her just as it was doing now.

  He could see the way in which his deliberately spoken words caused Alena’s eyes to darken, and his heart thudded violently into his chest wall. He had known the minute he had walked into this room and seen the dark grey curtains and the silk throw on the bed that so closely matched the colour of Alena’s eyes when she was aroused that this was the house he would rent, Kiryl admitted to himself now. This was the first time he had been alone with her since the announcement of their engagement, and the scent of her as they walked from room to room together had already been maddening his senses well before she had challenged him.

  ‘Alena …’

  The familiar warmth of Kiryl’s breath against her skin made Alena shudder. With rejection, not desire, she told herself. But it was a strange rejection that had her allowing him to take her in his arms and mould her body to his, and an even stranger one that had her head tilting so that he could brush her hair back from her face and then cup it whilst he looked down into her eyes before brushing her lips with his.

  Such a tender, gentle kiss—and one that she could have avoided or denied instead of making that small keening sound deep in her throat. But she had made it, and Kiryl’s response was to crush her even closer, kiss her deeply and intimately. Now she tried to resist him, realising the danger she was in—not from Kiryl, but from herself, in the response within her that was rising up inside her like a rip tide.

  No matter how hard she tried to force her body to deny that it wanted him, the need he aroused refused to be controlled. Just the merest touch of his breath against her skin was enough to make her shudder with need, and right now Kiryl was doing far more than merely breathing against her skin. Right now Kiryl was kissing her, touching her with something that if she hadn’t known better she would have believed was a savagely hungry need of his own.

  His hand had found and cupped her breast, his thumb and finger caressing her nipple through her clothes. Fierce longing exploded inside her, depriving her of the ability to think or assess. When Kiryl pulled aside her clothes to lift her breast from her bra and suckle sensuously on her nipple Alena was lost. She was vaguely aware of raking his back with her nails through the fabric of his shirt, and then sobbing with a mixture of release and impatience when he pressed her lower body into his, his hand on her bottom encouraging her to move her hips rhythmically against him in response to the hard presence of his erection.

  He was lost—helpless—possessed by the intensity of his need for Alena, Kiryl recognised even as he tried to hold back the ferocity of need claiming him. She was all he wanted, all he would ever want. He wanted to lose himself in her and let everything else fall away. All he wanted was Alena.

  All he wanted? That couldn’t be possible. It must not be possible. Abruptly he released her.

  Shocked out of the her own desire back into reality, Alena pulled away with a small shocked cry of denial, darting past K
iryl and pausing only to pick up her handbag before running down the stairs and out into the square. Her heart was pounding. She felt physically sick with self-disgust, unable to believe what she had done and how she had felt. The sight of a cruising taxi had her flagging it down and climbing into it. And then, even with all that had happened, she was unable to stop herself from looking up towards the bedroom she had just left.

  Kiryl was standing there in the window, looking down into the street. Her heart rocked to a standstill inside her chest. What had happened was all her own fault. She should never have challenged him like that. She might have guessed, knowing now the kind of man he was, that he would think nothing of adding to her humiliation by making her want him again.

  And she had wanted him. Oh, how that knowledge scorched her pride. How could she still want him? How could she?

  From the window Kiryl watched as the taxi bore Alena away. Thank heavens she had gone. Another handful of seconds and he would not have been able to stop himself from begging her to let him love her. Love her? Possess her was what he meant. That was all. She’d got him so that he couldn’t think straight now. Why …? Why did she affect him the way she did? How was it possible, after all he had taught himself, for her to get under his skin and into his senses into his heart and—

  His heart? Kiryl could hear the sound of his own blood drumming in his ears.

  Alena.

  Why was it that just thinking her name filled him with such intense longing that it felt like a form of torture?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IN HER bedroom in the luxurious St Petersburg apartment Vasilii was renting, Alena felt the morning sunshine warming her skin through the windows from which the maid had pulled back the curtains when she had come in earlier. Warming her skin … but not as Kiryl’s touch had warmed it. Nothing and no one would ever touch her in that way again. Just as nothing could or would ever take away the ache inside her for him.

  Why had this had to happen to her? Why was she condemned to love him even though she knew he was not worthy of that love? Because she did still love him. Nothing she could say to herself seemed to stop her from doing that. A small gasp of despair escaped her. How on earth was she going to get through the mockery of their marriage without betraying her feelings? How was she going to be able to endure living under the same roof as Kiryl, knowing that he was so close to her, knowing how much she wanted him, and yet at the same time knowing that she must never allow him to see how she felt about him?

  For her, Kiryl was as dangerous as any drug craved by an addict. Those moments in his arms at the house he was renting for them in London had ripped the comforting protection of her self-delusion from her eyes and revealed the truth to her, and now there was no going back from that truth. Despite everything she knew about Kiryl that should have killed her love for him; that love was still alive inside her. How that knowledge shamed and humiliated her, scorching and scalding her pride and withering her self-respect. She had thought she had touched the nadir of self-contempt in knowing that she had been so easily deceived by him, but that had been nothing compared with the way she felt about herself now for still loving him.

  Her wedding dress had been delivered to the London apartment the day before they had left for St Petersburg. Alena had refused to unpack it, never mind look at it or try it on, but the maid who had come with the apartment Vasilii was renting had taken it upon herself to unpack the gown, along with the rest of Alena’s things, and had been in the process of hanging it up when Alena had walked into her dressing room.

  The shock of recognising that the dress the saleswoman had chosen for her was the one she herself would have loved to wear as a real bride—a bride who was loved and who loved in return—had held Alena rigidly still as she’d stared at it. Then she had started to tremble, and she suspected that had the maid not been there she would have grabbed the dress and bundled it up into as small a ball as she could before putting it somewhere she no longer needed to see it. But the maid had been there, and the dress had been carefully hung up in the wardrobe, the vision it represented of all that her own wedding day would not be ready to torment Alena every time she opened the wardrobe doors.

  She couldn’t bear to think of wearing such a perfect wedding dress for Kiryl, but she would have to. It was too late to regret now that she had not stayed at the designer’s showroom and deliberately chosen the worst dress she could find. An ugly dress for a wedding that represented everything that was ugly about a marriage entered into for the reasons she and Kiryl were entering into theirs.

  Staying here in bed wouldn’t do her any good, Alena told herself now. Her dreams last night had been tormented by memories of how it had felt to lie in Kiryl’s arms and believe that she was loved. Better to get up and face reality. And that reality was that this was surely the worst time there could be for her to be here in St Petersburg, feeling the way she did.

  Summer in St Petersburg, was the season for celebrations—a time when it never truly went dark, traditionally known as ‘White Nights’—the Belye Nochi, as the Russians called them. A time when all-night parties were given all over the city and especially on the islands of its delta. A time of joy in celebrating the return to warmth from the icy grip of winter. The time of St Petersburg’s marriage season.

  Everywhere she looked, or so it seemed to Alena, happy, loved-up brides and their grooms were posing for photographs against the backdrop of the city’s elegant buildings or on its many bridges over its network of canals. In the past Alena had loved visiting St Petersburg in the summer almost as much as visiting it in the winter, but not this summer. Every time she saw a bride posing in her white dress, laughing lovingly up at her groom, her own heart ached even more for all that she would never have. After only two days in the city that ache had become unbearable.

  Since their arrival in the city they had all been caught up in a whirl of social activities ahead of the wedding, which was to take place in three days’ time. Last night the three of them had attended the exclusive and prestigious Stars of the White Nights Festival at the Mariinsky Theatre—an event which was the highlight of the city’s cultural calendar, for which tickets were highly sought-after.

  Formal dress was the order of the day for the event, and Vasilii had commented, as she had stood with him and Kiryl, upon how much he regretted having forgotten to arrange for her mother’s jewellery to be removed from the London bank vault where it was kept so that she could wear it whilst they were in the city.

  ‘My mother never wanted to be judged or valued as a person by the quality of her diamonds, Vasilii,’ Alena had reminded him. ‘And neither do I.’ No amount of jewellery, however splendid, could compensate her for the emotional pain she was having to endure.

  Tonight they were all attending yet another party—this one just outside St Petersburg, at a luxurious new villa built there by one of Russia’s wealthiest men to celebrate his marriage earlier in the year—his third—to a well-known American actress. The festivities were to include the live appearance of a world famous pop singer, and would conclude with a firework display. The entire event was reputed to be costing millions.

  Alena had no appetite either for celebrating or seeing so much money spent so lavishly. Just a tithe of that money given to charity, as her mother had always insisted that her father did, would have done so much for so many people. She hadn’t even bought a new dress for the event. Instead she had brought with her from London one she already had, although she suspected that its understated elegance would probably seem dull compared with the fashions favoured by some of Russia’s wealthiest socialite wives. Not that she cared. Even though Kiryl would see her wearing it.

  Her heart gave an unwanted lurch inside her chest. Why did she feel like this about him when she knew that loving him could only hurt her?

  A few minutes later, after she had composed herself, she walked into the main salon of the apartment and was surprised to see Vasilii sitting there, reading the London papers which he had se
nt to him every morning. He’d had so many business appointments that she had hardly seen him since they had arrived.

  ‘Ah, Alena,’ he greeted her, putting down his paper to stand up and come over to kiss her briefly on the cheek.

  They had had such a good relationship before Kiryl, but now she felt so betrayed by the stance he had taken that Alena felt she had lost the brother she’d thought she knew.

  As he wasn’t a man given to open displays of affection, it surprised her when instead of releasing her he kept his arm around her, his voice unexpectedly gruff as he told her, ‘I know you don’t think so right now, but I promise you, Lena, that I am acting in your best interests. And if you will just trust me you will discover that for yourself.’

  His use of his old pet name for her brought a lump to Alena’s throat. Maybe Vasilii did think he was acting in her best interests, but he didn’t know what she knew. He didn’t know that she still loved Kiryl, and that loving someone for whom she knew she should only feel contempt was tearing her apart.

  ‘I’ve got some news for you,’ Vasilii continued. ‘Although it won’t be announced officially yet, it’s been confirmed that Kiryl has won the contract. I had a telephone call from the head of the company this morning to tell me. By now I expect Kiryl will have heard the good news himself.’

  Alena pulled away from her brother’s hold.

  ‘You might call it good news, Vasilii,’ she told him, ‘but for me it’s the worst possible news there could be.’

  She saw her brother shake his head, as though impatient with her words, but what she had said was the truth as far as she was concerned. Now, with his goal achieved, Kiryl would be fully turned into a man just like his father. She was in love with a man who simply did not exist—an image she had created inside her own head—and surely knowing that should have made it easy for her to cease loving him?