PENNY JORDAN - The Russian Rivals - The Most Coveted Prize / The Power of Vasilii

‘That you might find love there yourself?’ Kiryl suggested.

Alena shook her head.

‘I am not such a dreamer that I expect to find love there just because my mother did, but I do think that it would be a very special place to go with … with someone special to me.’ That was as close as she was able to get to saying what she meant. Somehow just to speak the word ‘lover’ in Kiryl’s presence was to run the risk of betraying her vulnerability to him, or having him guess that when she said ‘lover’ she meant Kiryl himself.

Kiryl knew the St Petersburg to which Alena referred—the St Petersburg of the rich and privileged. After all, he was one of them. But he also knew another St Petersburg. The St Petersburg of his own childhood poverty and his rejection by his father. He had turned his back on Russia just as his father had turned his back on him. Kiryl considered himself to be a citizen of the world, not of one part of it.

Not that he was going to say that to Alena. He wanted her to believe that he understood and empathised with her.

IT WAS gone three in the afternoon—over an hour since they had finished their lunch and Kiryl had invited her to sit down on the sofa opposite him. Now, as she stood up ready to leave, Alena was feeling dizzy from a combination of the excitement generated inside her at the sheer amount of the donation Kiryl had told her he was going to make to the charity, and the glass of champagne he had insisted they drank to cement that gift.

‘You’ve been so generous,’ she told him, wobbling slightly on her heels—no doubt because of the speed with which she had stood up, she assured herself, and not the fact that Kiryl was now standing right next to her, his hand resting supportively beneath her elbow as he walked with her towards the door.

Kiryl had insisted on telephoning the CEO of the charity himself to tell her of his wonderfully generous donation, before instructing his bank to make the necessary transfer, and since that had somehow or other necessitated the drinking of a second glass of champagne it was perhaps no wonder that she felt a little unsteady and very, very euphoric. But what about those other feelings, clear and sharp, definitely not due in the slightest to her intake of champagne but most unmistakably caused by Kiryl’s proximity?

They must be ignored, Alena told herself sternly. They belonged to the rather reckless young woman who had seen him in the foyer and let her hormones dictate her reactions, not the far more sensible businesswoman she had now decided she wanted to be.

Alena started to make a move to the door to the hallway, but Kiryl’s hold on her elbow tightened just enough to stop her.

When she turned to him to ask him why he forestalled her, bending his head towards her. Time seemed to stand still, whilst the earth surely rocked beneath her feet. His breath was a warm, sensual touch that caressed her vulnerable flesh. Rivers of sensation flowed from that caress, like the many streams that came with the thawing of Russia’s winter, to bring the frozen earth to life once more, freeing it from the icy spell it had been under, melting away its resistance.

‘Do you remember saying when we arrived here that you weren’t afraid to be alone with me?’ Kiryl was asking her.

‘Yes …’ Her voice turned her confirmation into a small soft moan of self-betrayal. She was standing on the edge of something so very dangerous, and yet so very tempting.

Helplessly her gaze—the gaze she had so determinedly kept removed from his, knowing what she could betray to him if she looked at him—searched for and clung to his. The green eyes were dark with the knowledge of a thousand sensual mysteries that were unknown to her.

‘Perhaps you should have been a wise virgin and been afraid after all.’

The sound of his voice—deeper, rougher, strained with something elementally male, his words containing an intimate knowledge of her that she had not thought anyone else shared—made her whole body jerk visibly in response.

He knew she was a virgin? How could he?

Kiryl watched the shadow-play of light and dark dapple Alena’s silver eyes, their lucidity as illuminating as St Petersburg’s famous ‘white nights’, when the daylight never truly disappeared. Her lips had parted; the softest pink colour was warming her skin. She was trembling in his hold, held captive by his sexuality and her own response to it.

Her virginity made her an even easier target for the success of his plans. She certainly wasn’t a virgin because she was lacking in sensuality, so her chasteness must have been imposed on her—either by circumstance or her brother, or perhaps a combination of both. Kiryl gave a small mental shrug. Why she was still a virgin was immaterial. It simply made it easier for him to overwhelm her sensually and emotionally. For his plan to succeed he needed to convince her that she loved him, and of course that he loved her back. And his plan would succeed. It had to.

He lifted his free hand to her neck, gently brushing away her hair so that he could curl his fingers round her slender nape. Her eyes were pure silver now, and brilliant with emotion. Looking into them he told her softly, ‘You do know, don’t you, that I’m going to kiss you?’

Her heart seemed to jump into her throat, her stomach hollowing with an aching excitement and desire that spilled over into the lower part of her body, making it pulse with a wild surge of longing.

She lifted her hand to his face and touched the skin that was drawn so smoothly over the high cheekbones. Danger glittered in the malachite depths of his eyes, promising a treasure greater than any priceless stone. His breath against her lips commanded them to part still further, and his fingers caressing the nape of her neck under her hair were sending frantic shivers of arousal coursing through her body. Urgency leapt from nerve-ending to nerve-ending within her, spreading like wildfire, until she was possessed by it, the whole of her body one fierce wild ache of need that would not be denied. She wanted this—and him—so badly.

With a small yearning sound she moved closer to him, offering him her mouth and closing her eyes as she did so.

‘No!’ Kiryl told her, the word exploding into the sensual tension they were creating. ‘No. Don’t close your eyes. I want to look into them when I kiss you. I want to watch the pleasure we shall create together being born. Pleasure such as previously you can only have imagined, little virgin. Tell me you want that. Tell me you want me as I want you.’

How could she resist or deny him when every word he spoke only reinforced what she was already feeling? She couldn’t—but neither could she find the words to speak her need. Instead she could only press her mouth against his with passionate intensity, feeling them burn against the hard maleness of his before they were taken and possessed, shown and taught lessons of demand and desire and sensuality that were as he had promised her: a world—no, a whole galaxy—away from anything her imagination had ever created.

This need, this desire, this hunger he was creating and feeding inside her was both new to her and yet at the same time had an age-old elemental familiarity that called to all within her that was female. She knew that—and she knew something else as well. She knew that the feelings and needs that were surrounding her and filling her now were being conjured from deep within her by the only man who would ever have the power to call them into life. The only man for her for ever. She knew that so deep within herself that she felt the knowledge must have somehow been born with her, and that he must surely be her destiny.

The stroke of Kiryl’s tongue against her own—moving rhythmically, darting, lingering, thrusting with hard demand, then coaxing and teaching her to return the hot intimacy of that caress—set fresh desire exploding inside her. A dazzling banquet of new sensations to experience of which this was only the first course; a thousand new pleasures to know.