after finished and get out of here. “Why? Do you not know how to boil your own egg? You need me to do it?”
His eyebrows elevated a fraction at her pert challenge. His golden eyes looked deeply set into hollows darkened by a sleepless night. She was so startled by the thought that this powerful man might have lost sleep over her, she let it go as if it were hot.
The impression dissipated as he said with casual arrogance, “I pay the housekeeper to cook—or in this case deliver pastries.”
“Oh. I would have liked to walk to the patisserie.”
A flicker of surprise crossed his expression, followed by a purse of his mouth that made her bite her lip. He didn’t want to stroll hand in hand down the Champs-Elysées and she hadn’t meant to sound as if she was longing for romance either.
“I’ve never been to Paris. I’d like to visit a patisserie for fresh croissants at least once in my life,” she defended, embarrassment stinging her cheeks. “But that’s fine. I’ll be out in a moment.” She shifted her feet to the edge of the bed, signaling she needed privacy to rise and dress.
He didn’t move.
Because there were no secrets from him behind this sheet. Perhaps he had sent his housekeeper out and come to wake her for a different reason. Her heart tripped and her fragile poise slipped. She swallowed, mind casting with indecision. She knew she shouldn’t want to sleep with him again, but she did. Weak longing stole over her even as she searched his expression for his intention.
He gave nothing away as the silence grew loaded. Finally he entered the room, coming around the bed. She tensed, but he passed her by, stepping into the bathroom long enough to reach for something off the back of the door. When he returned, he draped a pewter-colored robe over the foot of the bed. “Take your time.”
He left and she let her breath out in a whoosh, staring at the closed door, wondering why she felt so forlorn. In the space of twenty-four hours the man had completely taken over her world, which was intolerable. She didn’t need to be completed. She was already whole. Aleksy might have tapped through her inner walls last night, but she had an infinite capacity for shoring herself up against the world. He’d simply caught her in a moment of weakness. Showered and dressed, she’d be completely unaffected.
She had to be.
* * *
Aleksy was not used to sexual denial. If he wanted a woman, he found one. When he had one, he had one. Waiting for Clair in the lounge, knowing she was running a soapy cloth over her nectarine-scented skin, was excruciating.
The proximity of her lissome body had burned in him all night as he paced the dark lounge. Taking her should have iced his vindictive cake, allowing him to discard her and move on, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how exquisite she’d been. He’d thought he only wanted to mark his victory over his enemy, but she wasn’t Van Eych’s. She belonged to him, only him.
It was one more twist that caught him unexpectedly. He’d planned to be in London indefinitely as he drew the noose ever tighter around Van Eych’s neck, putting him in a cell while stripping him of his stolen riches, but going to London had turned into nothing more than a formality because Victor had died. Aleksy’s appetite for steering the takeover was gone. He could leave it to his team and go back to Russia where his own interests had been neglected far too long.
Given Clair’s inexperience, he should sever their association. The deepest part of him knew that, but the rest of him rejected the idea. What would be the point in acting gallant now? Her virginity was gone. She’d given it up as a survival tactic in the face of losing her job and home. If she was going to sell herself, it might as well be to him.
It was a rationalization he grasped with surprising desperation, which disturbed him. For two decades his entire life had revolved around one thing: retribution. Taking Clair was supposed to be a facet of that, but instead she’d been an escape from it.
The stark realization unsettled him, agitating him further when he realized he wanted that escape again and again. He told himself it was timing and circumstance, that he would have found extra significance in any woman he’d bedded right now, but he didn’t want any woman. He wanted Clair.
So he would keep her as long as it took to satiate this inexplicable want, he decided.
His resolve took a hit, however, when she appeared in a filmy white sundress a few minutes later. Her disturbing sense of purity made his heart lurch. It was not unlike the modesty she’d shown in not being able to reveal herself by leaving the bed this morning. She withheld her thoughts behind a mask, but her blond hair was a golden veil and her minimal makeup revealed her natural beauty, fresh-faced and ingenuous.
If this was going to work, she had to fit the mold.
“I’ll book you into a salon today,” he pronounced with the swift call to action that had made his meteoric success possible. It would also fill her day so her nearness wouldn’t tempt him beyond bearing. Women always expected a new wardrobe anyway.
Clair touched her hair, her composed expression denting with confusion. “I had a trim a few weeks ago.”
Aleksy resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “A fashion salon,” he clarified, then added with irony, “So you can wear what I like.” He held a chair at the table for her.
“Why? Taking possession of Victor’s trophy wasn’t enough? You need to stamp your own engraved plate on it?” A betraying unsteadiness undermined her cool challenge.
He didn’t let her remark ignite his temper. “I intend to remove any traces of him from you, yes.”
“For whose benefit?”
She seemed genuinely baffled, which was yet another reminder of her unfamiliarity with the way these arrangements worked.
His housekeeper brought their meals at that moment and he watched Clair withdraw even further behind her frustrating shields as she was offered tea and asked if she’d found everything she’d needed.
After Yvette left, Clair muttered, “As if this isn’t harrowing enough.” Her hand tremored as she helped herself to a croissant, the only betrayal of tension behind an otherwise cool demeanor.
“Harrowing.” Aleksy repeated the unfamiliar word so he’d remember to look it up.
“I’m sure mornings after one-night stands are old hat to you, but this is my first. I’m not exactly comfortable with a stranger witnessing it.”
He tensed. Was that what she thought? “I don’t do one-night stands,” he informed her quietly.
“Or virgins, if I recall. Must have been a two-for-one special.”
“But you’re not a virgin anymore, are you?”
She stilled. Smoldering memories darkened the blue of her eyes, igniting a lovely blush under her skin. She swallowed and looked away.
He didn’t like that she would try to withhold any part of herself from him, especially that intriguing response. Forget experience. She had to know that once wasn’t enough for either of them. He reached out and drew her chin around to face him.
The look in her eyes was shockingly defenseless, full of anxiety and fear coupled with deep longing. Things that stirred a deep, protective desire to comfort her with tenderness…
She jerked back, blinking away the peek into her soul, turning serious. “I need to return to London.”
Her words jolted him with a startlingly strong kick of possessiveness. “Why?”
Clair’s heart jammed under his intense regard. She wanted to be as dispassionate as he was, but it was impossible. Her normal ability to hold people at a distance wasn’t bearing up against Aleksy’s penetrating looks. She didn’t even know why she was having a problem with this. She had known she was a conquest, nothing more, but she still felt vulnerable, out of her element and unaccountably lonely. Everything in her wanted