The Most Coveted Prize(18)

       
           



       

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.