Never again.
It was better by far to stay empty. Cold. Frozen straight through.
He had never been anything but alone. Nikolai understood that now. The truth was, he preferred it that way. And once he dealt with Veronika, once he confirmed the truth about Stefan’s paternity, he would never have to be anything else.
* * *
Alicia Teller ran out of patience with a sudden jolt, a wave of exhaustion and irritation nearly taking her from her feet in the midst of the jostling crowd. Or possibly that was the laddish group to her left, all of them obviously deep into the night’s drinking and therefore flailing around the dance floor.
I’m much too old for this, she told herself as she moved out of their way for the tenth time, feeling ancient and decrepit at her extraordinarily advanced age of twenty-nine.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a Saturday night anywhere more exciting than a quiet restaurant with friends, much less in a slick, pretentious club that had recently been dubbed the place to be seen in London. But then again, she also didn’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth—said gift horse, in this case, being her ever-exuberant best friend and flatmate Rosie, who’d presented the guest passes to this velvet-roped circus with a grand flourish over dinner.
“It’s the coolest place in London right now,” she’d confidently assured Alicia over plates of saag paneer in their favorite Indian restaurant not far from Brick Lane. “Dripping with celebrities and therefore every attractive man in London.”
“I am not cool, Rosie,” Alicia had reminded her gently. “You’ve said so yourself for years. Every single time you try to drag me to yet another club you claim will change my life, if memory serves. It might be time for you to accept the possibility that this is who I am.”
“Never!” Rosie had cried at once, feigning shock and outrage. “I remember when you were fun, Alicia. I’ve made a solemn vow to corrupt you, no matter how long it takes!”
“I’m incorruptible,” Alicia had assured her. Because she also remembered when she’d been fun, and she had no desire to repeat those terrible mistakes, thank you, much less that descent into shame and heartache. “I’m also very likely to embarrass you. Can you handle the shame?”
Rosie had rolled her extravagantly mascaraed and shimmery-purple shadowed eyes while tossing the last of the poppadoms into her mouth.
“I can handle it,” she’d said. “Anything to remind you that you’re in your twenties, not your sixties. I consider it a public service.”
“You say that,” Alicia had teased her, “but you should be prepared for me to request ‘Dancing Queen’ as if we’re at a wedding disco. From the no doubt world-renowned and tragically hip DJ who will faint dead away at the insult.”
“Trust me, Alicia,” Rosie had said then, very seriously. “This is going to be the best night of our lives.”
Now Alicia watched her best friend shake her hips in a sultry come-on to the investment banker she’d been flirting with all night, and blamed the jet lag. Nothing else could have made her forget for even a moment that sparkly, dramatic still Rosie viewed it as her sacred obligation to pull on a weekend night, the way they both had when they were younger and infinitely wilder, and that meant the exorbitant taxi fare back home from the wilds of this part of East London to the flat they shared on the outskirts of Hammersmith would be Alicia’s to cough up. Alone.
“You know what you need?” Rosie had asked on the chilly trek over from the Tube, right on cue. “Desperately, I might add?”
“I know what you think I need, yes,” Alicia had replied dryly. “But for some reason, the fantasy of sloppy and unsatisfying sex with some stranger from a club pales in comparison to the idea of getting a good night’s sleep all alone in my own bed. Call me crazy. Or, barring that, a grown-up.”
“You’re never going to find anyone, you know,” Rosie had told her then, frowning. “Not if you keep this up. What’s next, a nunnery?”
But Alicia knew exactly what kind of people it was possible to meet in the clubs Rosie preferred. She’d met too many of them. She’d been one of them throughout her university years. And she’d vowed that she would never, ever let herself get so out of control again. It wasn’t worth the price—and sooner or later, there was always a price. In her case, all the years it had taken her to get her father to look at her again.
Alicia had been every inch a Daddy’s girl until that terrible night the summer she’d been twenty-one. She’d been indulged and spoiled and adored beyond measure, the light of his life, and she’d lost that forever on a single night she still couldn’t piece together in her head. But she knew the details almost as if she could remember it herself, because she’d had to sit and listen to her own father tell them to her the next morning while her head had pounded and her stomach had heaved: she’d been so drunk she’d been practically paralytic when she’d come home that night, but at some point she’d apparently wandered out into the back garden—which was where her father had found her, having sex with Mr. Reddick from next door.
Married Mr. Reddick, with three kids Alicia had babysat over the years, who’d been good mates with her dad until that night. The shame of it was still scarlet in her, bright and horrid, all these years later. How could she have done such a vile, despicable thing? She still didn’t know.
Afterward, she’d decided that she’d had more than enough fun for one lifetime.
“Sorry,” Alicia had said to Rosie then, smiling the painful memories away. “Are you talking about love? I was certain we were talking about the particular desperation of a Saturday night shag....”
“I have a radical idea, Saint Alicia,” Rosie had said then with another roll of her eyes toward the dark sky above. “Why don’t you put the halo aside for the night? It won’t kill you, I promise. You might even find you like a little debauchery on a Saturday night the way you used to do.”
Because Rosie didn’t know, of course. Nobody knew. Alicia had been too embarrassed, too ashamed, too disgusted with herself to tell her friend—to tell anyone—why she’d abruptly stopped going out at the weekend, why she’d thrown herself into the job she hadn’t taken seriously until then and turned it into a career she took a great deal of pride in now. Even her mother and sisters didn’t know why there had been that sudden deep chill between Alicia and her dad, that had now, years later, only marginally improved into a polite distance.
“I’m not wearing my halo tonight, actually,” Alicia had replied primly, patting at her riot of curls as if feeling for one anyway. “It clashed with these shoes you made me wear.”
“Idiot,” Rosie had said fondly, and then she’d brandished those guest passes and swept them past the crowd outside on the pavement, straight into the clutches of London’s hottest club of the moment.
And Alicia had enjoyed herself—more than she’d expected she would, in fact. She’d missed dancing. She’d missed the excitement in the air, the buzz of such a big crowd. The particular, sensual seduction of a good beat. But Rosie’s version of fun went on long into the night, the way it always had, and Alicia grew tired too easily. Especially when she’d only flown back into the country the day before, and her body still believed it was in another time zone altogether.
And more, when she wasn’t sure she could trust herself. She didn’t know what had made her do what she’d done that terrible night eight years ago; she couldn’t remember much of it. So she’d opted to avoid anything and everything that might lead down that road—which was easier to do when she wasn’t standing in the midst of so much cheerful abandon. Because she didn’t have a halo—God knows, she’d proved that with her whorish behavior—she only wished she did.
You knew what this would be like, she thought briskly now, not bothering to fight the banker for Rosie’s attention when a text from the backseat of a taxi headed home would do, and would furthermore n
ot cause any interruption to Rosie’s obvious plans for the evening. You could have gone straight home after the curry and sorted out your laundry—
And then she couldn’t help but laugh at herself: Miss Misery Guts acting exactly like the bitter old maid Rosie often darkly intimated she was well on her way to becoming. Rosie was right, clearly. Had she really started thinking about her laundry? After midnight on a dance floor in a trendy London club while music even she could tell was fantastic swelled all around her?
Still laughing as she imagined the appalled look Rosie would give her when she told her about this, Alicia turned and began fighting her way out of the wild crowd and off the heaving dance floor. She laughed even harder as she was forced to leap out of the way of a particularly energetic couple flinging themselves here and there.
Alicia overbalanced because she was laughing too hard to pay attention to where she was going, and then, moving too fast to stop herself, she slipped in a puddle of spilled drink on the edge of the dance floor—
And crashed into the dark column of a man that she’d thought, before she hurtled into him, was nothing more than an extension of the speaker behind him. A still, watchful shadow.
He wasn’t.
He was hard and male, impossibly muscled, sleek and hot. Alicia’s first thought, with her face a scant breath from the most stunning male chest she’d ever beheld in real life and her palms actually touching it, was that he smelled like winter—fresh and clean and something deliciously smoky beneath.
She was aware of his hands on her upper arms, holding her fast, and only as she absorbed the fact that he was holding her did she also fully comprehend the fact that somehow, despite the press of the crowd and the flashing lights and how quickly she’d been on her way toward taking an undignified header into the floor, he’d managed to catch her at all.
She tilted her head back to thank him for his quick reflexes, still smiling—
And everything stopped.
It simply—disappeared.
Alicia felt her heart thud, hard enough to bruise. She felt her mouth drop open.
But she saw nothing at all but his eyes.
Blue like no blue she’d ever seen in another pair of eyes before. Blue like the sky on a crystal cold winter day, so bright it almost hurt to look at him. Blue so intense it seemed to fill her up, expanding inside of her, making her feel swollen with it. As if the slightest thing might make her burst wide-open, and some mad part of her wanted that, desperately.
A touch. A smile. Anything at all.
He was beautiful. Dark and forbidding and still, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Something electric sizzled in the air between them as they gazed at each other, charging through her, making her skin prickle. Making her feel heavy and restless, all at once, as if she was a snow globe he’d picked up and shaken hard, and everything inside of her was still floating drowsily in the air, looking for a place to land.
It scared her, down deep inside in a place she hadn’t known was there until this moment—and yet she didn’t pull away.
He blinked, as if he felt it too, this terrible, impossible, beautiful thing that crackled between them. She was sure that if she could tear her eyes from his she’d be able to see it there in the air, connecting their bodies, arcing between them and around them and through them, the voltage turned high. The faintest hint of a frown etched between his dark brows, and he moved as if to set her away from him, but then he stopped and all he’d done was shift them both even farther back into the shadows.
And still they stood there, caught. Snared. As if the world around them, the raucous club, the pounding music, the wild and crazy dancing, had simply evaporated the moment they’d touched.
At last, Alicia thought, in a rush of chaotic sensation and dizzy emotion she didn’t understand at all, all of it falling through her with a certain inevitability, like a heavy stone into a terrifyingly deep well.
“My God,” she said, gazing up at him. “You look like a wolf.”
Was that a smile? His mouth was lush and grim at once, impossibly fascinating to her, and it tugged in one hard corner. Nothing more, and yet she smiled back at him as if he’d beamed at her.
“Is that why you’ve dressed in red, like a Shoreditch fairy tale?” he asked, his words touched with the faint, velvet caress of an accent she didn’t recognize immediately. “I should warn you, it will end with teeth.”
“I think you mean tears.” She searched his hard face, looking for more evidence of that smile. “It will end in tears, surely.”
“That, too.” Another small tug in the corner of that mouth. “But the teeth usually come first, and hurt more.”
“I’ll be very disappointed now if you don’t have fangs,” she told him, and his hands changed their steely grip on her arms, or perhaps she only then became aware of the heat of his palms and how the way he was holding her was so much like a caress.
Another tug on that austere mouth, and an answering one low in her belly, which should have terrified her, given what she knew about herself and sex. On some level, it did.
But she still didn’t move away from him.
“It is, of course, my goal in life to keep strange British women who crash into me in crowded clubs from the jaws of disappointment,” he said, a new light in his lovely eyes, and a different, more aware tilt to the way he held his head, the way he angled his big body toward her.
As if he might lean in close and swallow her whole.
Staring back at him then, his strong hands hard and hot on her arms and her palms still pressed flat against his taut chest, Alicia wanted nothing more than for him to do exactly that.
She should have turned away then and bolted for the door. Tried to locate whatever was left of her sanity, wherever she’d misplaced it. But she’d never felt this kind of raw, shimmering excitement before, this blistering heat weighing down her limbs so deliciously, this man so primal and powerful she found it hard to breathe.
“Even if the jaws in question are yours?” she asked, and she didn’t recognize that teasing lilt in her voice, the way she tilted her head to look up at him, the liquid sort of feeling that moved in her then.
“Especially if they’re mine,” he replied, his bright winter gaze on her mouth, though there was a darkness there too, a shadow across his intriguing blade of a face that she nearly got lost in. Jaws, she reminded herself. Fangs. He’s telling me what a wolf he is, big and bad. Surely she should feel more alarmed than she did—surely she shouldn’t have the strangest urge to soothe him, instead? “You should know there are none sharper or more dangerous.”
“In all of London?” She couldn’t seem to keep herself from smiling again, or that sparkling cascade of something like light from rushing in her, making her stomach tighten and her breasts pull tight. Alive. At last. “Have you measured them, then? Is there some kind of competition you can enter to prove yours are the longest? The sharpest in all the land?”
Alicia felt completely outside herself. Some part of her wanted to lie down in it, in this mad feeling, in him—and exult in it. Bask in it as if it was sunshine. As if he was, despite the air of casual menace he wore so easily, like an extra layer of skin. Was that visible to everyone, or only to her? She didn’t care. She wanted to roll around in this moment, in him, like it was the first snow of the season and she could make it all into angels.
Her breath caught at the image, and somehow, he heard it. She felt his reaction in the sudden tension of his powerful frame above her and around her, in the flex of his fingers high on her arms, in the tightening of that connection that wound between them, bright and electric, and made her feel like a stranger in her own body.
His blue eyes lifted to meet hers and gleamed bright. “I don’t need to measure them, solnyshka.” He shifted closer, and his attention returned to her mouth. “I know.”
&nbs
p; He was an arctic wolf turned man, every inch of him a predator—lean and hard as he stood over her despite the heels Rosie had coerced her into wearing. He wore all black, a tight black T-shirt beneath a perfectly tailored black jacket, dark trousers and boots, and his wide, hard shoulders made her skin feel tight. His dark hair was short and inky black. It made his blue eyes seem like smoke over his sculpted jaw and cheekbones, and yet all of it, all of him, was hard and male and so dangerous she could feel it hum beneath her skin, some part of her desperate to fight, to flee. He looked intriguingly uncivilized. Something like feral.
And yet Alicia wasn’t afraid, as that still-alarmed, still-vigilant part of her knew she should have been. Not when he was looking at her like that. Not when she followed a half-formed instinct and moved closer to him, pressing her hands flatter against the magnificently formed planes of his chest while his arms went around her to hold her like a lover might. She tilted her head back even farther and watched his eyes turn to arctic fire.
She didn’t understand it, but she burned.
This isn’t right, a small voice cautioned her in the back of her mind. This isn’t you.
But he was so beautiful she couldn’t seem to keep track of who she was supposed to be, and her heart hurt her where it thundered in her chest. She felt something bright and demanding knot into an insistent ache deep in her belly, and she found she couldn’t think of a good reason to step away from him.
In a minute, she promised herself. I’ll walk away in a minute.
“You should run,” he told her then, his voice dark and low, and she could see he was serious. That he meant it. But one of his hands moved to trace a lazy pattern on her cheek as he said it, his palm a rough velvet against her skin, and she shivered. His blue gaze seemed to sharpen. “As far away from me as you can get.”
He looked so grim then, so sure, and it hurt her, somehow. She wanted to see him smile with that hard, dangerous mouth. She wanted that with every single part of her and she didn’t even know his name.
Rumors on the Red Carpet Page 33