the sensual mastery of a skilled artistic hand. The top, which covered her from her throat right down to her wrists, shouldn’t have been sexy. Those impossibly small-for-male-fingers shimmering pearl buttons that closed the neckline all the way from her throat to her breastbone should not have filled him with a desire to wrest them from their closures and lay bare to his gaze and his touch the flesh that lay beneath them—but they did. The diamond stud earrings she was wearing—if real, and he suspected that they were—would have cost whoever had given them to her many thousands of pounds. He knew that because his last mistress had tried to inveigle him into buying her a similar pair, just before he had decided that she no longer interested him.
As he assessed them—and that was all he was assessing—she looked up and right at him, the colour coming and going in her face, dark lashes sweeping down over the silver-grey eyes which had gone from shining like the frozen Neva to burning with the glow of heated mercury … or the desire of a very aroused woman. Unexpectedly his own body responded to that swift change from the winter ice of St Petersburg to the fierce summer heat of the Russian steppes, with all the passion that the land of his fathers always inspired in him, as fiercely as though she held within her the essence of all that heritage meant to him. He could feel within him the surge of his own desire to take and possess that heritage; to claim it and to refuse to yield it to anyone.
Caught off-guard by the surge of electric male arousal gripping him, Kiryl recognised that the woman, whoever she was, was causing his attention to wander from something far more important than some left-over youth fantasy about possessing a woman who would somehow be a magical link between himself and his Russian heritage, earthing him in his right to it.
‘And, as I was saying, Vasilii Demidov will be your main stumbling block to winning the contract.’
Kiryl stiffened and focused his attention on the agent he had hired to help him win the contract he was determined to have for his business. The knowledge that one of Russia’s richest men was also a contender for the contract had not put him off. Far from it. It had merely sharpened his desire to win it.
‘Demidov has not previously shown any interest in the shipping or container industry. His business interests lie mainly in owning and controlling the port side of the business,’ Kiryl pointed out. ‘Therefore he has no reason to have any interest in the contract.’
‘He hadn’t, but he is currently in China, finalising another contract, and as part of the bargain the Chinese want a controlling interest in a container shipping line. He is in a position to undercut any price you may offer, even if that means acquiring the contract at an initial loss. I have it on the very best authority that the selection process for the contract is now down to the two of you, with the dice loaded very heavily in his favour. I’m afraid that I must warn you that with Demidov as your competition you cannot win.’
Kiryl gave his agent a hard look.
‘I refuse to accept that.’
He could not and would not lose this contract. It was the final building block, the final piece in the chess game of his business life, that would establish his supremacy in his chosen field—not just in his own eyes but in the eyes of Russia itself. No one could be allowed to stop him from achieving that goal. No one. He had worked too hard and too long to let that happen.
Inside his head an image formed: a man’s profile, his eyes hard and denying, rejecting the child he had been. His father. The father who had denied him not just the right to his name but also the right to his Russian blood. Just as Vasilii Demidov would if he now denied him the right to complete the end game he had striven for so long.
‘Then you must hope for a miracle—because that is what it will take for you to beat Demidov and win this contract.’
Typically Kiryl did not allow any of what he was feeling to show in his demeanour or his voice, simply saying, in a voice as relentlessly cold as winter, ‘There must be something that would make him back off—some way of undermining him. A man does not make the money he has made without having secrets in his past he would not want exposed.’
The agent inclined his greying head in acknowledgement of Kiryl’s statement before warning him, ‘You are not the first man to look for some weakness in Demidov that can be exploited, but there isn’t one. He is armour plated. He has no vulnerability, no known past sins to catch up with him, and no present vices to use against him. He is impregnable.’
Kiryl’s mouth hardened.
‘He is impressive, I agree. But no man is impregnable. There will be a way, a vulnerability—and I promise you this: I will find it, and I will use and exploit it.’
The agent remained silent. He knew better than to argue with the man facing him. Kiryl had grown to his wealth and his present position of authority and power through the hardest and most challenging of circumstances—and it showed.
Nevertheless, he felt obliged to remind him as they parted, ‘As I have already said, what you require if you are to win out against Demidov is a miracle. Take my advice and back out now—let him have the contract. That way at least you will save face and not have to endure the humiliation of publicly losing to him.’
Back out? When he was so close to fulfilling the vow he had made to himself so many years ago? Never.
Could she risk picking up her teacup now, without her hands trembling so much that she risked spilling the hot liquid? Alena wasn’t sure. Her heart was still jumping around inside her chest cavity, and her face was still burning from the effect that one piercing brilliant green gaze had had on her. He had looked right at her. She put her hands on her still hot cheeks in an attempt to cool them down. She must not look at him again. She simply didn’t have the strength to withstand the raw maleness of such a gaze. It had melted her insides, turning them into a soft liquid pulse of longing that quivered within her still. And yet she had to look—she had to let her senses and her body drink in their fill of the dangerous excitement of all that fierce sexual masculinity.
Her pulse had started to race, and her throat was so dry that she had to swallow hard as she allowed her head to turn again in his direction, the longing and excitement beating even more fiercely than ever inside her with anticipation—only to crash down to wretched disappointment when she realised that he wasn’t there. He had gone, and thanks to her silly, immature stupidity she had missed her chance to … to what? To prolong the intensity of that mesmerising gaze until her bones melted and her heart burst with the unbearable excitement of it? He might have come over, introduced himself. He might have …
There was something on the floor—a gold pen. It must be his. He must have dropped it. Quickly Alena rose from her seat and went to pick it up. It felt cool and hard against her fingertips. She was shaking so much that she couldn’t stand up again without her head swimming. She could see him standing close to the hotel exit. The man he had been with was leaving the hotel. Was he going to follow him? Without allowing herself the chance to think about what she was doing, Alena crossed the hotel foyer.
The click of her heels alerted Kiryl to her presence. When she walked she swayed as delicately as the silver birches in Russia’s northern forests.
‘You dropped this.’
Her voice was as soft as the sigh of a spring breeze, cooling the stuffy, overheated hotel air as it brushed his skin.
She was holding out a pen to him. Not his pen, but he took it from her nonetheless. Her hand was delicately boned, her fingers long and slim, her nails buffed to a natural sheen. She had a look about her that money alone could not buy: a translucent, shimmering natural beauty allied to the kind of discreet grooming that whispered privilege and protection. This woman had been feather-bedded from the moment of her birth.
Angry with himself for being so aware of her, he punished her for that awareness by telling her mockingly, ‘And of course you would seize such a golden opportunity to return it to me, wouldn’t you? Given your interest in me. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it is the male’s role to pursue his quarry and reveal his desire, not the female’s.’
Hot colour ran up under Alena’s skin like