Dealing Her Final Card(21)

“Your lunch,” he said coldly.

Her belly rumbled in response. She’d had nothing to eat since a cheerless Christmas dinner yesterday, a bologna sandwich eaten alone at the end of her housekeeping shift. Sitting back on her haunches, Bree wiped her sweaty forehead and looked up at him.

Unlike her, Vladimir had taken a shower, and looked sleek, urbane and civilized in a freshly pressed black button-down shirt and black trousers. His tanned skin glowed with health, smelling faintly of soap and sandalwood.

While she...

She wasn’t feeling so pretty. She’d peeled off her boots to work barefoot on the wet floor. Her long blond hair was twisted into a messy knot at the back of her head, to lift it off her hot neck. Her T-shirt was sweaty all the way through, and in the humidity of Hawaii, even with air-conditioning she knew she looked like a swamp creature from a 1950s horror movie.

She narrowed her eyes. If he thought she was going to lick his boots with gratitude for the simple courtesy of lunch, he had another think coming. His serf!

She looked at the tray. He waited.

“I don’t like tomatoes,” she said pleasantly.

Vladimir dropped the tray with a noisy clatter on the floor beside her. “Tough. I have no desire to cater to you, and Mrs. Kalani decided to take the rest of the day off.”

Bree looked up at him, and a slow grin lifted her cheeks. “She gave you a hard time about me, didn’t she?”

“Enjoy your lunch.” He pointed to an immaculate section of the floor. “You missed a spot.”

Vladimir had thrown the tray down as if she were the family golden retriever. Rising to her feet after he left, she washed her hands, then took the tray to the dining table like a civilized person, ready for a fight if he came back to give her one. Somewhat to her disappointment, he didn’t.

Once she’d removed the tomatoes, the freshly baked bread made the rest of the sandwich delicious. Honey mustard was a nice touch, too. And the cold, sparkling water was just what she’d wanted. She wiped her mouth.

He was still a brute. Her eyes narrowed as she remembered his cold words.

For the rest of your life, you will work for me, Bree. For free. You will never be paid, or allowed to leave. Your only goal, until you die, is to serve me and give me pleasure.

He didn’t know who he was dealing with. She finished off the cold water and tidied up the tray. He thought a little housecleaning would kill her? She’d been training for this for the past ten years.

She was going to escape this captivity. As soon as she could formulate a plan.

As the afternoon wore on, Bree scrubbed her way fiercely up the stairs and then cleaned five guest bedrooms, which had already been as sparkling clean as the rest of the house. But as she reached the master bedroom, the sun was starting to lower in the western sky, and her whole body ached. She couldn’t stop yawning. Looking at the four-poster bed, she was tempted to take a short power nap. Vladimir would never know, she told herself. Climbing onto the large, soft bed, she closed her eyes—just for a few minutes.

With a gasp, Bree sat up suddenly in bed. The room was now dark. She looked over at the clock. It was almost seven o’clock. Dinnertime.

She’d slept for hours.

Feeling sweaty and gross, her body aching, Bree rose stiffly from the still-made bed, stretching her arms over her head. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. So where was her slave driver? Why hadn’t he discovered her napping? Tsar Vladimir the Terrible must be hard at work, she decided, planning a new way to humiliate her, or dreaming up some nefarious new attack on his brother. When she’d been cleaning his home office, he’d been talking rather intensely in Russian on the phone. But even then, his smoldering gaze had slowly wandered over her backside as she scrubbed the floors on all fours.

Fine. Let him look.

With a deep breath, Bree closed her eyes. As long as he didn’t touch. As long as she didn’t have to feel his lips, hot and hard against her own, as he held her so tightly against his body...

“You’re awake.”

At the sound of Vladimir’s husky voice from the doorway, she jumped, whirling around. “You—you knew I was sleeping?” she stammered.

His gaze was intense as he came toward her. “Yes.”

She felt suddenly very small as his tall body loomed over hers. She licked her lips. “So why didn’t you wake me up and start bossing me around?”

Reaching out, he brushed a tendril of hair out of her eyes. “Because you looked like an angel.”

His voice was low. Sensual. Bree’s eyes widened as she looked up—no, not at his lips! His eyes! Trembling with awareness at how they were once again alone in his bedroom, she tightened her hands at her sides. “Um. Thanks. For letting me borrow your bed.” She edged away from it. “I should probably be getting back to work....”