by Maisey Yates
“You have a tendency to land yourself on the wrong side of men. Are you sure I won’t have another scandal to clean up in the next few months?”
Shame, anger, sadness, threatened to choke her. “Well, I don’t plan on it.”
“Then what are you planning? What are your goals concerning London Diva?”
Her throat constricted, drying. This was her moment. Much earlier than she had expected to have it. She hadn’t intended to say anything until she was able to present him with a document stating legal ownership. But of course he would know that Dmitri was the one who now held ownership, and of course he would be suspicious of the link. She simply wasn’t capable of playing stupid.
“My plans are to return London Diva to its rightful place.”
There was a brief pause. “We’ll see.” No vote of confidence. No request she rethink an engagement purely for the sake of the family business. Nothing more. He simply rang off.
His response wasn’t surprising. She should expect his indifference and lack of confidence at this point. But it still hurt. Every time.
“I’m going to fix it,” she said, the silence of her bedroom only slightly less responsive than her father.
The phone rang again while still in her hand, and she pressed the green icon. “Hello?”
“Hello, darling.”
It was Dmitri, the way his accent curled around the endearment making it sound exotic, catching her off guard. Well, obviously she was caught off guard, or she would never apply a word like exotic to a silly endearment. Particularly not one designed to make her angry.
“Did you need something?”
“I was wondering how the plans were coming along.”
“Just fine. I was getting ready to book tickets. I’m assuming that you’re springing for first class,” she said, just to needle him. Because her interaction with her father had made her feel low and for some reason pushing against Dmitri brought her a rush of adrenaline that made her feel invigorated.
He chuckled and she held the phone away from her ear. A perk of not being near him in person. She did not have to listen to that unsettling sound. “I was thinking I might do you one better. We’re going on my private jet.”
“Fantastic. Then I don’t have to limit how many pairs of shoes I bring.”
“Ah, milaya moya, I promise to buy you shoes once we get there.”
“Yes, but will you let me choose them? You don’t seem to think I should be allowed to choose my own things.”
“That depends. I have always been a fan of the kinds of shoes that make a woman look like she’s begging to be bent over a piece of furniture and pleasured until she can’t speak.”
Victoria couldn’t speak now. But it had nothing to do with pleasure. Her cheeks were on fire. Her heart pounding so hard she felt dizzy. She swallowed, somehow finding words again. “And what kinds of shoes are those?”
“Stilettos, of course.”
She sighed. “Yes, predictable.”
“Possibly a little bit. But I guarantee you what happens after the shoes are on is less predictable.”
She found herself searching for words again. “I’m packing. Shoes. But what kinds of shoes are irrelevant.”
“Glad to hear it. I will see you in a couple of days.”
He hung up, and it did nothing to dissipate heat in her face or her body. His unpredictability was something of a liability. And the fact that he had the power to affect her was irritating.
No matter, she was packing now. She was good at packing. And then they were going to New Orleans, and she was going to be in her element orchestrating the event. And she would be in control then. Because this was what she did.
Sure, she had some failures in her life, but not in this arena.
And now that her father knew about the agreement, she would be extra certain that she made it work.
She had to. There was no other option.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS A shock to go from the carefully cultivated comfort of Dmitri’s private plane out into the thick afternoon air of New Orleans.
Victoria breathed a sigh of relief as they transferred from the tarmac to the black car that was waiting for them.
The flight over had been uneventful. Victoria had spent the majority of it in the private bedroom trying to get herself on the proper time schedule, even though she knew it would be somewhat futile. Jet lag was very often wicked no matter what tricks she tried to employ en route. But whether or not it helped with her sleep pattern it had helped her avoid Dmitri. That made it worth it.
Yes, she knew that she had to find some more companionable feelings for him, but she wasn’t about to do it when she was trapped thirty thousand feet above the ground in a small metal tube with the man. No, thank you. Much better to deal with him when her feet were on solid ground and she was feeling more in control of the situation.
And she would, once they managed to get to their Royal Street accommodations in the French Quarter. It was amazing what money could accomplish, and in this case it meant exclusive use of the boutique hotel for both their event and for the guests making a commute to the event. Dmitri had a lot of money, and that meant there was no end to what she could accomplish. At least seemingly. She also had plans coming together for an event in New York next week with a venue that was nearly impossible to get an entire year in advance, forget less than a month. Following that would be the final launch party in London, which would see the opening of Dmitri’s charity as a rousing success, and the closing of their engagement as a rousing one, too. All in closer to a month and a half, rather than three months as she’d originally quoted.
All she had to do was manage the slight tension she felt whenever she was in close proximity with him. And that should be simple.
A little bit of insanity when he ran his hands through her hair in his office was understandable. She had not been inoculated to his magnetism yet. And really, now she thought about it, assuming that you were the one exception to a specific danger was foolishness. And she had to confess, even if only to herself, that she had been foolish going into her dealings with Dmitri.
Because she had spent so many years inured to male charms, she’d assumed it would transfer to him.
Problematically, it had not.
But she wouldn’t waste time beating herself up about it. Better women than her had fallen to the likes of him, so there was nothing for it but to simply accept that she found him attractive and move on from it. Finding someone attractive did not mean you had to act on it.
Of course, Stavros had come with a reputation of his own. While not a playboy per se, he was a prince, and a nice-looking one at that, meaning he was custom designed to be irresistible. He’d had his share of lovers, and the other women who had been vying for his affections at the time had been positively giddy over him, while Victoria had remained mainly immune.
She could still remember feeling the most intense sense of relief the first time he’d nearly kissed her. Not because he’d been about to kiss her, but because in the end, for whatever reason, he had decided not to.
She’d been baiting him, trying to get him to make that all-important lip-to-lip contact, but he hadn’t. Later, it had become clear that it was because he had fallen for their matchmaker, Jessica Carter, but at the time she hadn’t understood why. Only that she had been extremely happy not to have to deal with a physical relationship just yet.
She simply hadn’t been in a space to be dealing with it. She had subsumed all of her sexual feelings after that unfortunate incident with Nathan. Because it had been easier. Because it made things much simpler. It was much easier to keep her eyes on the prize, to keep moving toward the goal of redemption when she wasn’t distracted by nonessentials.
Unfortunately, Dmitri was part and parcel of essentials. And whatever had
insulated her against Stavros’s charms was not working here. She took a deep breath. Oh well, she had acknowledged it. Acknowledging it was the first step to ignoring it, or something like that.
Victoria reached around behind her head and coiled her hair around her wrist, lifting it up off her neck. Her skin was already sticky. “Is there some way we can turn the air-conditioning up?” she asked, keeping her eyes on this view outside. So far the expressway was typical—modern buildings and palm trees whizzing past. There was a creek running alongside the road, and children with small nets trying to catch something in the murky waters.
“I believe it’s up as high as it goes.”
“It’s like a very wet oven,” she said, knowing she sounded a bit whiny and a lot snobby. But this was a heat quite unlike anything she’d ever felt before. It wasn’t simply the temperature, but the air quality.
“It is that. I take it you’ve never been here before?”
“No, I haven’t been. Have you?”
“I was here once before with Colvin.” He kept his eyes fixed on the view outside the window. “This was back when I was still fighting. We came to help hurricane relief. Things were very different then.”
“I imagine so.”
“I always admired the lengths he went to in order to help others. The lengths he went to in order to help me, and anyone else he felt needed it. Certainly his interest in me wasn’t entirely altruistic, as I did end up making him quite a lot of money. But he had no way of knowing that for sure. He had an instinct, he had his gut, but there were no guarantees that sinking hours of free training into an angry street urchin were going to amount to anything.”
“How did he end up in London? How did you end up in London?”
“I ended up in London by way of Colvin. He went for the usual reason. A woman. Though it didn’t work out, because by the time I was on the scene she was not.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Russia.”
“Where in Russia?” He simply stared at her, his dark eyes impassive, his chiseled jaw set. He was far too handsome for his own good. For her own good. Really, it was gratuitous. “You realize Russia’s a very big country.”
“I do.” He smiled, somewhat ruefully. “Moscow. I was fighting in bars at the time. Cage matches. Very unsophisticated, very few rules. Lots of blood.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. I spoke little English, beyond a few foul swearwords. And Colvin spoke no Russian. But he knew potential when he saw it, and he offered me some very good vodka when I desperately needed some, so we sat down to try to have a chat. He was there talent scouting, looking for actual trained fighters. And he wandered into a bar the night that I fought a particularly crushing victory. He told me I had potential, which seemed laughable when I had just left a man stone-cold unconscious in the middle of the cage. In my mind, I was unstoppable. But he told me he would bring me back to London and teach me how to fight for real so that we could both make a whole lot more money.”
“And you just went with him? Just like that?”
He lifted his shoulder. “What did I have to fear?”
“I don’t know. Going off with a stranger seems rather dangerous.”
“Perhaps to you. But I had just demonstrated to the man that I could effectively disable someone with one well-placed hit. I was angry, I didn’t fear pain and I had nothing to lose. I was very close to being an animal. I saw no reason not to jump at the chance to escape from Russia, to escape from the hell that I was living in. A chance to fight for more than pocket change and a bed for the night? It was another choice. After years of feeling as though I had none. I was intrigued.”
“I can imagine.” Although it was very difficult.
Victoria’s life had always been very shiny. Very ornate. She lived with the weight of expectation, yes, and it had been far from perfect. Just as she had been. But it was nothing like what Dmitri described. Cage fighting in bars. There was something about the way he said it that was very bleak. Well, she imagined that it was a reality that could sound nothing but bleak. Especially by comparison to her own well-appointed upbringing.
“The first place we went to in London was the gym that you met me in.” The gym that had, to Victoria, seemed very low scale.
“It was a palace to me,” he said, as though he had just read her mind. “After the stench in those bars, after the mildew and dampness of the rooms in the cellars and above the places where we fought, where we would sleep with nothing more than a cot and a thin blanket, the accommodations that Colvin offered were nothing short of luxurious. I thought no matter whether or not he made us rich, whether or not he made me famous, I could do no worse than where I already was.”
“It must’ve been...” Victoria searched for the proper words and found she didn’t have any. She had no experience in such things, no experience of life under those circumstances. She couldn’t imagine viewing the hovel of the gym back in London as though it were a mansion. But Dmitri had. And the realization twisted something inside of her, made her stomach feel tight and strange. Made it feel as if she could scarcely breathe.
“In the beginning it was very frustrating. I expected to be fighting. I expected to be doing more of what I was already doing. But from the first moment I arrived in London, he kept me inactive. At least, to my view. He had me doing training exercises. Basic forms and martial arts. All this stuff that seemed very much like a waste of my time. I used to ask him if he was some kind of ninja master.” He laughed at his own memory. “I didn’t know very much English when I came to him, but I learned insults very quickly got the point across in any language.”
“He trained you in martial arts first?”
“I already had the brute strength down. Already had that cage fighting sensibility. But I lacked in form and technique. And what I lacked in most of all was control. When he introduced me to martial arts I learned that there were better ways. That anger makes an opponent weak. That a lack of form betrays your next move. That by watching those who had inferior technique to myself I could guess where they were going to go next. That’s the chess game.”
“You told me chess wasn’t enough,” she said, thinking back to the conversation they’d had in his office. Of course, thinking of that made her think of the moment when he touched her hair. More than touched her hair...caressed it. Ran his fingers deep through it.
She tried to ignore the rising tension in her body.
“It isn’t. That’s why Colvin reminded me to keep with me what I already had. My gut. Intuition. Training combined with raw talent made me an unstoppable fighter in the ring. And from there I got my sponsorships.”
“How does a boy from the streets of Moscow go from fighting in bars to owning one of the largest conglomerates of retail shops in the world?”
“From my sponsorships came modeling opportunities. Which, as you can guess, weren’t really my thing. But that gave me the opportunity to work very closely with the owner of an athletic wear company, Sport Limited. I gave him some suggestions on how to tweak some of the gear we were using. I ended up with my own line. He told me I had a good head on my shoulders, that I had a good mind for business. So, I took some of the money I had been earning in my fights and started taking classes. When Hugh was ready to sell Sport Limited, I had the money and the know-how to take it over. From there, I started buying out more places. Failing retail lines that I felt that I could revamp.”
“You ended up with London Diva,” she said, an empty statement of fact that served very little purpose. Just a reminder for her. Of why she was here. Of the real point of his story, of all of this.
“Yes. For a while I bought up everything I possibly could. And it turned out I had an eye for where to place certain stores, and for what the next high-demand items might be. I have done well. My world expanded after Colvin took me in, after he taught me and
trained me. I began to think about more than just where my next meal might come from, or where I might sleep that night. It changed everything for me. It opened up a whole new world of possibilities.
“I want to do that for these children who might come into my gym. Into these gyms that will hopefully be established by the foundation. I want to provide not only training, but the kind of emotional support that I received. It changed who I was. I was fueled by anger when I lived in Russia. The path I was on was narrow. And it had one end. But when I went to England? That was when I saw all the different directions that path could turn. And it all started with a simple bit of training that I resented so much at first.”
“It’s an amazing story.” Victoria swallowed hard. “One I feel people cannot help but be moved by. You should tell it when you give your speech at the charity gala this week.”
“You want me to speak?”
“Well, it is your charity.”
“Didn’t you get a celebrity emcee?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I did, but I think you’ll find it will be much more powerful for you to share your personal story. Celebrities are only marginally impressed by other celebrities.”
He titled his head to the side, one dark brow lifting. “You may not realize this, but some people find me off-putting.”
She raised her brows and gave him her best surprised look. “Indeed. I guessed something like that.”
“I thought you might have. Though, most women are much more fond of me than you seem to be.”
Victoria’s cheeks heated “Well, most women are after something different than I am. Which is the source of many of your issues with the press. Seeing as you are a...let me see if I can call up some of the finer terms used to describe you... A manwhore. A home wrecker. A corruptor of innocents.”
“I’ve never corrupted an innocent in my life,” he said, his tone casual. “The rest of it is probably true.” He shifted in his seat, one long leg bent at the knee, his elbow resting on it, his chin resting on his hand. He looked too large to be contained in such a small space, too feral to be enclosed in something so luxurious. Reflecting on the time since she’d met him, Victoria decided he was a man who never seemed to fit into his surroundings. Not entirely at the gym, and not entirely here, either. There was something more to him, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.