The answering surge of his own flesh in its need to feel the soft warmth of her sheathing and holding it had Kiryl for the first time in his life fumbling slightly with urgency as he reached towards his discarded clothes to retrieve the condom he had brought with him. There was, after all, nothing he did not know about the way Alena lived her life-and that included the knowledge that she did not use any form of birth control. It was not, though, the urgency of his body to complete the journey that it had begun that had him tensing in the act of opening the foil packet so much as his unwanted but unignorable ache of need to be with Alena without any barriers between them-to feel her flesh around his with every intimacy there was.
This was a feeling so alien to him that it locked his breath in his throat. He never, ever had unprotected sex. The thought of doing so was wholly repugnant to him. It simply wasn't a risk he had ever wanted to take-and yet right here, right now, there was something … a need, a compulsion, a longing … something within him that wanted his flesh to be at one with hers, and it ripped into what he believed he knew about himself.
It was as though he had looked deep into a mirror and seen reflected there an image of all those things he had buried so deep inside himself that he had convinced himself they no longer existed.
Whatever was responsible for those feelings it had to be ignored. Kiryl knew that, but his fingers still hesitated over a task so familiar to him that it should have taken a mere breath to accomplish-instead of so long that Alena was sobbing her own need against his ear, her body shuddering with the need for the satisfaction he was denying it.
Finishing his self-appointed task, he turned towards her.
Alena was cast adrift in a new world-a world of sensation and delight and longing and love. Surely the most complete love she would ever know? Certainly the only love she would ever want to know. Kiryl was kissing her breasts, and then he tongued her nipples, the gentle caress a form of torture and torment when all she wanted was the immediate satisfaction of the savage clawing need he had unleashed inside her. But then his teeth again raked her nipple, causing her back to arch, and her cry of molten agonised pleasure was taken by Kiryl's kiss as he took her mouth in a deeply passionate kiss.
The slow, penetrative thrust of his tongue against hers was mirrored by the thrust of his body within her own. And how she welcomed that intimacy. How her body opened and quivered with delight and longing-how her flesh clung lovingly to his, holding it and tightening around it, her muscles moving rhythmically against each movement of his until Alena felt as though she was weightless, soaring higher and higher on the wings of her pleasure, dazzled by the brilliance and the wonder of it. Like a journey to the stars, the feeling was so magical, so perfect and so filled with pleasure, that with each increased surge of that pleasure she felt there could be no more-only to discover that there was.
She opened the eyes she had closed tightly when Kiryl had first entered her and looked up at him, her heart turning over inside her chest when she saw that he was looking back at her. How could there be any greater intimacy than this, their flesh united into one perfect whole?
Everything that was in her heart was open and revealed in her gaze. She reached up to Kiryl and touched his face.
"I love you.' Her eyes widened, her body arching as the shock of the final pleasure seized her and took her, making her hold on to Kiryl for safety and sanity.
It wasn't Alena's sobbed cry of wonderment and completion that stilled Kiryl's body in the aftershock of his release. It was his mental reaction to the intensity of the harsh cry of discovery and loss he himself had given. With its echoes still shuddering through his head he knew that it had touched something so unbearably painful inside him that it had stripped him of all his defences. It was something he could never and must never revisit. And it was Alena's fault. She had caused him to feel what he had no wish to feel. Something he had promised himself a long time ago he would never feel.
The plan. He must focus on that, and on his goal, and not think about that handful of seconds when-ridiculously-he had felt as though he was holding in his arms everything he had ever wanted or would ever want.
* * *
She was safe, held in Kiryl's arms, having survived the storm of desire and pleasure he had aroused within her.
Wonderingly, Alena traced the shape of Kiryl's lips with a slightly shaky fingertip. "I'm so lucky to have met you,' she whispered. "So very, very lucky. I love you, Kiryl. You mean everything to me.'
Something-a softening, a tenderness, a leap of hope like the flicker of light in the darkness-something as vague as the finest tendrils of early-morning mist-was happening inside him. Something so dangerous that he automatically jerked against its unwanted presence and steeled himself against it. Such feelings could only make him vulnerable-as he had been as a boy-and he had promised himself he would never be vulnerable again. Let Alena be as foolishly emotional as she wished. Those emotions could not and must not touch him, never mind evoke emotions of his own.
The very thought brought an inner anger against that vulnerability she had come close to causing. His voice slightly clipped, he told her the truth. "As you do to me.'
The tone of Kiryl's voice filled Alena with renewed tenderness towards him. He was clearly embarrassed about talking about his emotions-
no doubt as a result of his unhappy childhood. With her love for him she would try to find a way to ease the pain of that childhood for him, and to soften the painful memories of his father's cruel rejection of him. Love for him flooded through her.
They had three days together in St Petersburg. The most wonderful three days Alena could have imagined having, if her imagination had ever been capable of creating such happiness-which it had not. The joy and love that being with Kiryl gave her went way beyond anything that could be imagined. She woke in the morning to his touch and his kisses, and they left her floating on a cloud of sensuality.
They spent their days enjoying the city that she knew so well together, and to her delight she was able to show Kiryl treasures in it that he had not visited before. Only once was a shadow cast over the happiness of their time together, and that was one afternoon when they were walking arm in arm together in the old quarter, with its elegant architecture of a bygone age. When Kiryl paused outside one of the magnificently grand buildings to look towards it, initially Alena thought that he had simply paused to admire it. However, when she had said admiringly, "It's a very handsome building, isn't it?' Kiryl's face clouded.
"This was where my father lived-where I came to see him after I discovered that he was my father.'
The bitterness in Kiryl's voice made Alena's heart ache for him. How lucky she had been in her own parents, who had given her so much love. She couldn't bear to think of how hurt Kiryl must have been by his father's rejection, and how he must have suffered emotionally, yearning for his father's love and being denied.
"I'm so sorry that you had to suffer like that.' she told him softly. "But what a terrible loss your father inflicted on himself by his behaviour in rejecting you. He could have had your love-he could have had you growing up at his side-but instead, he was too blind to see what he was denying himself.'
"That was his choice,' was all Kiryl said dismissively in response.
Alena had come to recognise that, except for those brief occasions when something touched the still open wound deep within him caused by his father, he preferred not to talk about his father or his childhood.
"I've been too busy working.'
That was his response to her mock scandalised disbelief when she obligingly changed the subject and discovered that he had never visited the fabled Winter Palace or the Hermitage Museum, with its fabled art collection.
"Well, you shal visit it now,' she had told him. "Because there is something that you need to see.'
That "something' was the Malachite Room which, as Alena explained to Kiryl proudly when they visited it the following day, had been designed in the late 1830s by the architect Alexander Briul ov for use as a formal reception room for the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, wife of Nicholas I.
"It replaced the original Jasper Room, which was destroyed in the fire of 1837,' Alena told Kiryl knowledgably when they stood together inside it, having joined one of the official tours allowed to view the famous building. "The minute I saw you I thought how at home you would be in here,' she added with a smile.