Kiryl shrugged and gave a small laugh, as though at the un-familiarity of his own feelings. And it was true—he was reluctant to let her go. But because she was so important to his plans, and not because there was an ache in his groin that said his body had plans of its own for her. A flash of inner irritation rebuked his flesh for its inconvenient and unwanted awareness of her.
‘There is so much I want to share with you and show you.’
He made his voice deeper and slightly ragged. And then he discovered that his words were reinforcing—uncomfortably—the surge of desire that had caught him off-guard earlier. His body’s rank disloyalty irked him, but he had more important things to deal with right now. After all no man in his thirties worthy of calling himself a man did not know how to control his own sexual arousal.
‘So much I want to belong exclusively to us,’ he continued softly, ‘and to what we’re beginning to feel for one another. It’s making me selfish. I don’t want to share it or you with anyone else. Not yet—not until I know that you …’ Deliberately he let his words trail away meaningfully.
And of course Alena knew exactly what he meant. The attraction between them might be compelling and urgent to them, but she couldn’t see Vasilii, for instance, seeing it that way. The minute she mentioned meeting Kiryl her half-brother would launch into an avalanche of questions that she didn’t want to face. The newness and delicacy of the discovery of their shared feelings needed the privacy of being shared only by the two of them to be nurtured—not exposure to her brother’s well-intentioned but potentially over-analytical and forensically intense questioning.
‘I feel the same way,’ she assured Kiryl. His admission was giving her a new confidence. She was not alone in her desire. They were connected by a mutual need. That was something they shared.
‘Then it will to be our secret—for now.’
Alena’s keycard had opened the door, which she was holding in one hand. She turned to look at Kiryl, her gaze brimming with the heady joy she was feeling. Still holding the door, she reached out and placed her hand on Kiryl’s arm, looking up at him as she did so.
‘Thank you,’ she told him softly. ‘Thank you for the donation to my mother’s charity, and thank you most of all for this,’ she whispered huskily as she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.
Taken off-guard by the sheeting feral male need her kiss drove through him, the only thought Kiryl could formulate was illogically angry—didn’t she realise that she shouldn’t be so open and trusting with him? How vulnerable she was making herself? How open to being used and hurt? But what concern was it of his that she might be hurt? When had he ever cared about anyone being hurt? Never—and he never intended to care either. That way lay the road to vulnerability and self-destruction. He needed to remain single-minded because it was only by being single-minded that he would reach his goal. And it was only once he had reached that goal that he would finally be able to stand free of the dark shadow of his father’s contempt for him and walk away from it.
Pushing her firmly away from himself, he told her truthfully, ‘If you don’t go inside now you won’t be going in alone. And your brother’s apartment is not the place I want to …’
Alena shook her head, not wanting him to spell out what she knew he meant. Because if he did the effect on her of knowing he wanted to make love to her so badly would make it as impossible for her to leave him as he was hinting it would be for him to leave her.
‘Tomorrow,’ Kiryl told her. ‘Tomorrow I shall come for you, and when I do …’
‘When you do I shall be ready,’ Alena assured him, bravely and truthfully.
SHE was so happy. If she had ever thought before that she had known happiness she had been wrong. That happiness had only been a pale shadow of what filled her now. Filled her and spilled out of her, to surround her with the blissful shining excitement of Kiryl.
She had barely slept, and she’d been up early this morning—adrenalin-filled, and with a surplus of energy that had had her pacing the floor whilst clutching her mobile phone, waiting impatiently for the contact Kiryl had promised her. And that contact would come. She knew that. Yesterday had not been some fantasy-fuelled creation of her own imagination. No, it had been real, shared—a commitment made and given to the journey they would make together. A journey to a shared future?
The knifing, twisting, yielding hot sweetness of her emotional and sensual response to that question told her what she wanted, but she was not going to let her hopes run away with her. Instead she was going to live for the moment, for every heartbeat, every touch, every kiss and every intimacy they would share.
The bell to the apartment’s security system rang, followed within a second by the ring of her mobile phone.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s me.’
She heard Kiryl’s voice in response to her own tremulous answer to the phone’s summons.
‘I’m outside. Let me in.’
Her hands were all fingers and thumbs as she struggled with the door’s lock system, and the small handful of seconds it took her to open the door was a lifetime of impatient longing.
Kiryl swept her up into his embrace the moment the door was open, closing it with a kick of his foot and then leaning back against it whilst he kissed her with all the passion and hunger her own heart felt.
For several minutes the hallway was filled with the soft sounds of Alena’s pleasure, the sweetly shocked gasps of her breath and the aching cry of her female delight when Kiryl’s hand found her breast beneath the pale grey cashmere of her jumper.
‘I want you. I ache so much for you that I have no self-control. All last night I lay awake, thinking what a fool I’d been for not snatching you up there and then and taking you with me. But you—us—what we will have together—deserves far more than the anonymity of a hotel bedroom for its culmination and our shared commitment to it. When we sacrifice our individual selves to become united as one I want it to be somewhere very special.’
Each word Kiryl whispered into her ear, between small erotic kisses bitten delicately into the soft skin of her throat, whilst he caressed her nipple into a tight excited peak of eager surrender, sent a fresh surge of sensual longing and urgency through her. Low down in her body the ache that had merely been tamped down overnight burned hotly into new and impatient life. What he was saying to her, promising her, was lovely—but Alena knew that if he had said he was so impatient that he was going to take her here and now, against the wall in the hallway of the apartment, she would have given herself to him without a second’s hesitation.
It made her feel unbearably tender towards him that he should seek to contain their mutual desire in order to give it the right setting, and that feeling increased when he told her, ‘I want to make it special for you.’
‘You are what makes it special,’ Alena replied shakily, her voice betraying her emotions. ‘You are special, Kiryl. Special, and wonderful, and … and I am so lucky to have met you.’
Instinctively Kiryl tensed—against both her words and her emotion—wanting to reject them, wanting to tell her that the last thing he wanted from anyone was an emotional connection. Emotional connections had no place in his life. They never had and they never would. He had learned young that it was safer to shut himself away from his emotions. Except, of course, those that drove him to obliterate the memory of his father’s rejection by achieving for himself what his father had not been able to achieve.
Alena’s open vulnerability irritated him like a piece of grit in his shoe, demanding his attention even though he didn’t want to give it. It had been her parents’ responsibility to prepare her for the harsh realities of life. Now it was her brother’s. If they hadn’t