Not Just the Boss's Plaything(24)

"Rosie calls me Saint Alicia and I like it," she'd whispered fiercely to    him, shoving him into the narrow hall outside her flat. She'd been    scolding him, he'd realized. He wasn't sure he'd ever experienced it    before. His uncle had preferred to use his belt. "It's better than some    other things I've been called. But you looming around the flat will be    the end of that."

"Why?" he'd asked lazily, those broken, jagged things moving around    inside of him, making him want things he couldn't name. Making him want    to hurt anyone who'd dared hurt her, like she was his. "I like saints.    I'm Russian."

"Please," she'd scoffed. "You have 'corruptor of innocents' written all over you."

"Then we are both lucky, are we not, that neither one of us is    innocent," he'd said, and had enjoyed the heat that had flashed through    her eyes, chasing out the dark.

But by the next morning, she'd built her walls back up, and higher than    before. He hadn't liked that at all, though he'd told himself it  didn't   matter. It shouldn't matter. He told himself that again, now.

It was the end result he needed to focus on: Veronika. The truth about    Stefan at long last, and the loose thread she represented snipped off    for good. Whatever he suffered on the way to that goal would be worth    it, and in any case, Alicia would soon be nothing but a memory. One  more   instrument he'd use as he needed, then set aside.

He needed to remember that. There was only a week left before the ball.    Nikolai could handle anything for one last week, surely. He'd  certainly   handled worse.

But she was under his skin, he knew, no matter how many times he told    himself otherwise. No matter how fervently he pretended she wasn't.

And she kept clawing her way deeper, like a wound that wouldn't scar over and become one more thing he'd survived.

He'd picked her up to take her to the Tate Modern on the opening night    of some desperately chic exhibit, which he'd known would be teeming  with   London's snooty art world devotees and their assorted parasites  and   photographers. It wasn't the kind of place a man took a woman he  kept   around only for sex. Taking a woman to a highly intellectual and    conceptual art exhibit suggested he might actually have an interest in    her thoughts.

It was a perfect place for them to be "accidentally spotted," in other    words. Nikolai hadn't wanted to dig too deeply into his actual level of    interest in what went on inside her head. He hadn't wanted to  confront   himself.                       
       
           



       

Alicia had swung open the door to her flat and taken his breath that    easily. She'd worn a skimpy red dress that showed off her perfect    breasts and clung to her curves in mouthwatering ways he would have    enjoyed on any woman, and deeply appreciated on her-and yet he'd had the    foreign urge to demand she hide all of her lush beauty away from the    undeserving public. That she keep it for him alone. He'd been so    startled-and appalled-at his line of thought that he'd merely stood    there, silent and grim, and stared at her as if she'd gone for his    jugular with one of her wickedly high shoes.

Alicia had taken in the black sweater with the high collar he wore over    dark trousers that, he'd been aware, made him look more like a  commando   than an appropriately urbane date to a highly anticipated  London art   exhibit.

Not that commandos wore cashmere, in his experience.

"Have you become some kind of spy?" she'd asked him, in that dry way    that might as well have been her hands on his sex. His body hadn't been    at all conflicted about how he should figure her out. It had known    exactly what it wanted.

When it came to Alicia, he'd realized, it always did.

"You must be confusing me for the character my brother plays in movies,"    he'd told her dismissively, and had fought to keep himself from  simply   leaning forward and pressing his mouth to that tempting hollow  between   her breasts, then licking his way over each creamy brown swell  until   he'd made them both delirious and hot. He'd almost been able to  taste   her from where he stood in the doorway.

Alicia had pulled on her coat from the nearby chair and swept her bag    into her hand. She hadn't even been looking at him as she stepped out    into the hall and turned to lock her door behind her.

"Your brother plays you in his Jonas Dark films," she'd replied in that    crisp way of hers that made his skin feel tight against his bones. "A    disaffected kind of James Bond character, stretched too thin on the  edge   of what's left of his humanity, yet called to act the hero  despite   himself."

Nikolai had stared at her when she'd turned to face him, and she'd    stared back, that awareness and a wary need moving across her expressive    face, no doubt reflecting his own. Making him wish-

But he'd known he had to stop. He'd known better from the first with    her, hadn't he? He should have let her fall to the floor in that club.    He'd known it even as he'd caught her.

"I'm no hero, Alicia," he'd said, sounding like sandpaper and furious    that she'd pushed him off balance again. Hadn't he warned her what would    happen? Was that what she wanted? She didn't know what she was    asking-but he did. "Surely you know this better than anyone."

She'd looked at him for a long moment, her dark gaze shrewd, seeing things he'd always wanted nothing more than to hide.

"Maybe not," she'd said. "But what do you think would happen if you found out you were wrong?"

And then she'd turned and started down the stairs toward the street, as    if she hadn't left the shell of him behind her, hollow and unsettled.

Again.

Nikolai saw his own reflection in his office windows now, and it was    like he was someone else. He was losing control and he couldn't seem to    stop it. He was as edgy and paranoid and dark as he'd been in those    brutal days after he'd quit drinking. Worse, perhaps.

Because these things that raged in him, massive and uncontrollable and    hot like acid, were symptoms of a great thaw he knew he couldn't allow.  A   thaw she was making hotter by the day, risking everything. Oceans  rose   when glaciers melted; mountains fell.

He'd destroy her, he knew. It was only a matter of time.

If he was the man she seemed to think he was, the man he sometimes    wished he was when she looked at him with all of those things he    couldn't name in her lovely dark eyes, he'd leave her alone. Play the    hero she'd suggested he could be and put her out of harm's way.

But Nikolai knew he'd never been any kind of hero. Not even by mistake.                       
       
           



       





 CHAPTER SEVEN

NIKOLAI HADN'T HEARD his family nickname in such a long time that when he did, he assumed he'd imagined it.

He frowned at the sleek and oversize computer display in front of him,    realizing that he'd barely paid attention to the video conference,  which   was unlike him. Stranger still, no one remained on his screen  but his   brother.

Nikolai wasn't sure which was more troubling, his inattention during a    business meeting or the fact he'd imagined he'd heard Ivan speak his-

"Kolya?"

That time there was no mistaking it. Ivan was the only person alive who    had ever used that name, very rarely at that, and Nikolai was looking    right at him as he said it from the comfort of his Malibu house a  world   away.

It was the first time he'd spoken directly to Nikolai in more than two years.

Nikolai stared. Ivan was still Ivan. Dark eyes narrowed beneath the dark    hair they shared, the battered face he'd earned in all of those mixed    martial arts rings, clothes that quietly proclaimed him Hollywood    royalty, every inch of him the action hero at his ease.

Nikolai would have preferred it if Ivan had fallen into obvious    disrepair after turning his back on his only brother so cavalierly.    Instead, it appeared that betrayal and delusion suited him.

That, Nikolai reflected darkly, and the woman who'd caused this rift between them in the first place, no doubt.