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Not Just the Boss's Plaything
CAITLIN CREWS
From the moment Alicia Teller tripped and fell into Nikolai Korovin’s arms in a trendy London nightclub, her iron-clad control started to slip. Their night of pure, unadulterated passion was strictly a one off, so Alicia’s horrified to walk into the boardroom on Monday morning to find a very familiar pair of eyes staring back at her…Nikolai’s sleek composure is ruffled to see Alicia. She injects a burst of colour into his cold, shadowed world, and her tantalizing curves are driving him to distraction.But business and pleasure are not two things this legendary tycoon ever mixes… until now!


At first Alicia thought she was imagining it, given where her head had been all day.
And then it hit her. Hard.
She wasn’t hearing things.
She knew that voice.
She’d know it anywhere. Her body certainly did.
Rough velvet. Russian. That scratch of whiskey, dark and powerful, commanding and sure.
Nikolai.
Her whole body went numb, nerveless. The door handle slipped from her hand and she jerked her head up to confirm what couldn’t possibly be true, couldn’t possibly be happening.
The heavy door slammed shut behind her with a terrific crash.
Every single head in the room swivelled toward her, as if she’d made her entrance in the glare of a bright, hot spotlight and to the tune of a boisterous marching band, complete with clashing cymbals.
But she only saw him.
Him. Nikolai. Here.
CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.
Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.
She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.
Recent titles by the same author:
A ROYAL WITHOUT RULES
(Royal & Ruthless) NO MORE SWEET SURRENDER (Scandal in the Spotlight) A DEVIL IN DISGUISE THE MAN BEHIND THE SCARS (The Santina Crown)
Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
Not Just the Boss’s Plaything
Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the fabulous Sharon Kendrick, who sorted out what was wrong with an early draft of this book on a long, rainy, Irish drive to and from Sligo town and an atmospheric tour of Yeats country—both of which amounted to a Master Class in writing.
And to Abby Green, Heidi Rice, Fiona Harper and Chantelle Shaw, for our inspiring days in Delphi.
And to all the readers who wrote me to ask for Nikolai’s story. This is for you most of all!
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#u999bc907-a7e8-5c7f-8d00-552774c2cb4c)
CHAPTER TWO (#uded7e0fc-4c76-5c8d-bacb-573f68432fec)
CHAPTER THREE (#u59213051-a5d0-5ca9-8434-c602d4f7a97b)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
TORTURE WOULD BE preferable to this.
Nikolai Korovin moved through the crowd ruthlessly, with a deep distaste for his surroundings he made no effort to hide. The club was one of London’s sleekest and hottest, according to his assistants, and was therefore teeming with the famous, the trendy and the stylish.
All of whom appeared to have turned up tonight. In their slick, hectic glory, such as it was. It meant Veronika, with all her aspirations to grandeur, couldn’t be far behind.
“Fancy a drink?” a blank-eyed creature with masses of shiny black hair and plumped-up lips lisped at him, slumping against him in a manner he imagined was designed to entice him. It failed. “Or anything else? Anything at all?”
Nikolai waited impatiently for her to stop that insipid giggling, to look away from his chest and find her way to his face—and when she did, as expected, she paled. As if she’d grabbed hold of the devil himself.
She had.
He didn’t have to say a word. She dropped her hold on him immediately, and he forgot her the moment she slunk from his sight.
After a circuit or two around the loud and heaving club, his eyes moving from one person to the next as they propped up the shiny bar or clustered around the leather seating areas, cataloging each and dismissing them, Nikolai stood with his back to one of the giant speakers and simply waited. The music, if it could be called that, blasted out a bass line he could feel reverberate low in his spine as if he was under sustained attack by a series of concussion grenades. He almost wished he was.
He muttered something baleful in his native Russian, but it was swept away in the deep, hard thump and roll of that terrible bass. Torture.
Nikolai hated this place, and all the places like it he’d visited since he’d started this tiresome little quest of his. He hated the spectacle. He hated the waste. Veronika, of course, would love it—that she’d be seen in such a place, in such company.
Veronika. His ex-wife’s name slithered in his head like the snake she’d always been, reminding him why he was subjecting himself to this.
Nikolai wanted the truth, finally. She was the one loose end he had left, and he wanted nothing more than to cut it off, once and for all. Then she could fall from the face of the planet for all he cared.
“I never loved you,” Veronika had said, a long cigarette in her hand, her lips painted red like blood and all of her bags already packed. “I’ve never been faithful to you except by accident.” Then she’d smiled, to remind him that she’d always been the same as him, one way or another: a weapon hidden in plain sight. “Needless to say, Stefan isn’t yours. What sane woman would have your child?”
Nikolai had eventually sobered up and understood that whatever pain he’d felt had come from the surprise of Veronika’s departure, not the content of her farewell speech. Because he knew who he was. He knew what he was.
And he knew her.
These days, his avaricious ex-wife’s tastes ran to lavish Eurotrash parties wherever they were thrown, from Berlin to Mauritius, and the well-manicured, smooth-handed rich men who attended such events in droves—but Nikolai knew she was in London now. His time in the Russian Special Forces had taught him many things, much of which remained etched deep into that cold, hard stone where his heart had never been, and finding a woman with high ambitions and very low standards like Veronika? Child’s play.
It had taken very little effort to discover that she was shacking up with her usual type in what amounted to a fortress in Mayfair: some dissipated son of a too-wealthy sheikh with an extensive and deeply bored security force, the dismantling of which would no doubt be as easy for Nikolai as it was entertaining—but would also, regrettably, cause an international incident.
Because Nikolai wasn’t a soldier any longer. He was no longer the Spetsnaz operative who could do whatever it took to achieve his goals—with a deadly accuracy that had won him a healthy respect that bordered on fear from peers and enemies alike. He’d shed those skins, if not what lay beneath them like sinew fused to steel, seven years ago now.
And yet because his life was nothing but an exercise in irony, he’d since become a philanthropist, an internationally renowned wolf in the ill-fitting clothes of a very soft, very fluffy sheep. He ran the Korovin Foundation, the charity he and his brother, Ivan, had begun after Ivan’s retirement from Hollywood action films. Nikolai tended to Ivan’s fortune and had amassed one of his own thanks to his innate facility with investment strategies. And he was lauded far and near as a man of great compassion and caring, despite the obvious ruthlessness he did nothing to hide.
People believed what they wanted to believe. Nikolai knew that better than most.
He’d grown up hard in post-Soviet Russia, where brutal oligarchs were thick on the ground and warlords fought over territory like starving dogs—making him particularly good at targeting excessively wealthy men and the corporations they loved more than their own families, then talking them out of their money. He knew them. He understood them. They called it a kind of magic, his ability to wrest huge donations from the most reluctant and wealthiest of donors, but Nikolai saw it as simply one more form of warfare.
And he had always been so very good at war. It was his one true art.
But his regrettably high profile these days meant he was no longer the kind of man who could break into a sheikh’s son’s London stronghold and expect that to fly beneath the radar. Billionaire philanthropists with celebrity brothers, it turned out, had to follow rules that elite, highly trained soldiers did not. They were expected to use diplomacy and charm.
And if such things were too much of a reach when it concerned an ex-wife rather than a large donation, they were forced to subject themselves to London’s gauntlet of “hot spots” and wait.
Nikolai checked an impatient sigh, ignoring the squealing trio of underdressed teenagers who leaped up and down in front of him, their eyes dulled with drink, drugs and their own craven self-importance. Lights flashed frenetically, the awful music howled and he monitored the crowd from his strategic position in the shadows of the dance floor.
He simply had to wait for Veronika to show herself, as he knew she would.
Then he would find out how much of what she’d said seven years ago had been spite, designed to hurt him as much as possible, and how much had been truth. Nikolai knew that on some level, he’d never wanted to know. If he never pressed the issue, then it was always possible that Stefan really was his, as Veronika had made him believe for the first five years of the boy’s life. That somewhere out there, he had a son. That he had done something right, even if it was by accident.
But such fantasies made him weak, he knew, and he could no longer tolerate it. He wanted a DNA test to prove that Stefan wasn’t his. Then he would be done with his weaknesses, once and for all.
“You need to go and fix your life,” his brother, Ivan, the only person alive that Nikolai still cared about, the only one who knew what they’d suffered at their uncle’s hands in those grim years after their parents had died in a factory fire, had told him just over two years ago. Then he’d stared at Nikolai as if he was a stranger and walked away from him as if he was even less than that.
It was the last time they’d spoken in person, or about anything other than the Korovin Foundation.
Nikolai didn’t blame his older brother for this betrayal. He’d watched Ivan’s slide into his inevitable madness as it happened. He knew that Ivan was sadly deluded—blinded by sex and emotion, desperate to believe in things that didn’t exist because it was far better than the grim alternative of reality. How could he blame Ivan for preferring the delusion? Most people did.
Nikolai didn’t have that luxury.
Emotions were liabilities. Lies. Nikolai believed in sex and money. No ties, no temptations. No relationships now his brother had turned his back on him. No possibility that any of the women he took to his bed—always nameless, faceless and only permitted near him if they agreed to adhere to a very strict set of requirements—would ever reach him.
In order to be betrayed, one first had to trust.
And the only person Nikolai had trusted in his life was Ivan and even then, only in a very qualified way once that woman had sunk her claws in him.
But ultimately, this was a gift. It freed him, finally, from his last remaining emotional prison. It made everything simple. Because he had never known how to tell Ivan—who had built a life out of playing the hero in the fighting ring and on the screen, who was able to embody those fights he’d won and the roles he’d played with all the self-righteous fury of the untainted, the unbroken, the good—that there were some things that couldn’t be fixed.
Nikolai wished he was something so simple as broken.
He acted like a man, but was never at risk of becoming one. He’d need flesh and blood, heat and heart for that, and those were the things he’d sold off years ago to make himself into the perfect monster. A killing machine.
Nikolai knew exactly what he was: a bright and shining piece of ice with no hope of warmth, frozen too solid for any sun to penetrate the chill. A hard and deadly weapon, honed to lethal perfection beneath his uncle’s fists, then sharpened anew in the bloody Spetsnaz brotherhood. To say nothing of the dark war games he’d learned he could make into his own kind of terrible poetry, despite what it took from him in return.
He was empty where it counted, down to his bones. Empty all the way through. It was why he was so good at what he did.
And it was safer, Nikolai thought now, his eyes on the heedless, hedonistic crowd. There was too much to lose should he relinquish that deep freeze, give up that iron control. What he remembered of his drinking years appalled him—the blurred nights, the scraps and pieces of too much frustrated emotion turned too quickly into violence, making him far too much like the brutal uncle he’d so despised.
Never again.
It was better by far to stay empty. Cold. Frozen straight through.
He had never been anything but alone. Nikolai understood that now. The truth was, he preferred it that way. And once he dealt with Veronika, once he confirmed the truth about Stefan’s paternity, he would never have to be anything else.
* * *
Alicia Teller ran out of patience with a sudden jolt, a wave of exhaustion and irritation nearly taking her from her feet in the midst of the jostling crowd. Or possibly that was the laddish group to her left, all of them obviously deep into the night’s drinking and therefore flailing around the dance floor.
I’m much too old for this, she told herself as she moved out of their way for the tenth time, feeling ancient and decrepit at her extraordinarily advanced age of twenty-nine.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a Saturday night anywhere more exciting than a quiet restaurant with friends, much less in a slick, pretentious club that had recently been dubbed the place to be seen in London. But then again, she also didn’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth—said gift horse, in this case, being her ever-exuberant best friend and flatmate Rosie, who’d presented the guest passes to this velvet-roped circus with a grand flourish over dinner.
“It’s the coolest place in London right now,” she’d confidently assured Alicia over plates of saag paneer in their favorite Indian restaurant not far from Brick Lane. “Dripping with celebrities and therefore every attractive man in London.”
“I am not cool, Rosie,” Alicia had reminded her gently. “You’ve said so yourself for years. Every single time you try to drag me to yet another club you claim will change my life, if memory serves. It might be time for you to accept the possibility that this is who I am.”
“Never!” Rosie had cried at once, feigning shock and outrage. “I remember when you were fun, Alicia. I’ve made a solemn vow to corrupt you, no matter how long it takes!”
“I’m incorruptible,” Alicia had assured her. Because she also remembered when she’d been fun, and she had no desire to repeat those terrible mistakes, thank you, much less that descent into shame and heartache. “I’m also very likely to embarrass you. Can you handle the shame?”
Rosie had rolled her extravagantly mascaraed and shimmery-purple shadowed eyes while tossing the last of the poppadoms into her mouth.
“I can handle it,” she’d said. “Anything to remind you that you’re in your twenties, not your sixties. I consider it a public service.”
“You say that,” Alicia had teased her, “but you should be prepared for me to request ‘Dancing Queen’ as if we’re at a wedding disco. From the no doubt world-renowned and tragically hip DJ who will faint dead away at the insult.”
“Trust me, Alicia,” Rosie had said then, very seriously. “This is going to be the best night of our lives.”
Now Alicia watched her best friend shake her hips in a sultry come-on to the investment banker she’d been flirting with all night, and blamed the jet lag. Nothing else could have made her forget for even a moment that sparkly, dramatic still Rosie viewed it as her sacred obligation to pull on a weekend night, the way they both had when they were younger and infinitely wilder, and that meant the exorbitant taxi fare back home from the wilds of this part of East London to the flat they shared on the outskirts of Hammersmith would be Alicia’s to cough up. Alone.
“You know what you need?” Rosie had asked on the chilly trek over from the Tube, right on cue. “Desperately, I might add?”
“I know what you think I need, yes,” Alicia had replied dryly. “But for some reason, the fantasy of sloppy and unsatisfying sex with some stranger from a club pales in comparison to the idea of getting a good night’s sleep all alone in my own bed. Call me crazy. Or, barring that, a grown-up.”
“You’re never going to find anyone, you know,” Rosie had told her then, frowning. “Not if you keep this up. What’s next, a nunnery?”
But Alicia knew exactly what kind of people it was possible to meet in the clubs Rosie preferred. She’d met too many of them. She’d been one of them throughout her university years. And she’d vowed that she would never, ever let herself get so out of control again. It wasn’t worth the price—and sooner or later, there was always a price. In her case, all the years it had taken her to get her father to look at her again.
Alicia had been every inch a Daddy’s girl until that terrible night the summer she’d been twenty-one. She’d been indulged and spoiled and adored beyond measure, the light of his life, and she’d lost that forever on a single night she still couldn’t piece together in her head. But she knew the details almost as if she could remember it herself, because she’d had to sit and listen to her own father tell them to her the next morning while her head had pounded and her stomach had heaved: she’d been so drunk she’d been practically paralytic when she’d come home that night, but at some point she’d apparently wandered out into the back garden—which was where her father had found her, having sex with Mr. Reddick from next door.
Married Mr. Reddick, with three kids Alicia had babysat over the years, who’d been good mates with her dad until that night. The shame of it was still scarlet in her, bright and horrid, all these years later. How could she have done such a vile, despicable thing? She still didn’t know.
Afterward, she’d decided that she’d had more than enough fun for one lifetime.
“Sorry,” Alicia had said to Rosie then, smiling the painful memories away. “Are you talking about love? I was certain we were talking about the particular desperation of a Saturday night shag....”
“I have a radical idea, Saint Alicia,” Rosie had said then with another roll of her eyes toward the dark sky above. “Why don’t you put the halo aside for the night? It won’t kill you, I promise. You might even find you like a little debauchery on a Saturday night the way you used to do.”
Because Rosie didn’t know, of course. Nobody knew. Alicia had been too embarrassed, too ashamed, too disgusted with herself to tell her friend—to tell anyone—why she’d abruptly stopped going out at the weekend, why she’d thrown herself into the job she hadn’t taken seriously until then and turned it into a career she took a great deal of pride in now. Even her mother and sisters didn’t know why there had been that sudden deep chill between Alicia and her dad, that had now, years later, only marginally improved into a polite distance.
“I’m not wearing my halo tonight, actually,” Alicia had replied primly, patting at her riot of curls as if feeling for one anyway. “It clashed with these shoes you made me wear.”
“Idiot,” Rosie had said fondly, and then she’d brandished those guest passes and swept them past the crowd outside on the pavement, straight into the clutches of London’s hottest club of the moment.
And Alicia had enjoyed herself—more than she’d expected she would, in fact. She’d missed dancing. She’d missed the excitement in the air, the buzz of such a big crowd. The particular, sensual seduction of a good beat. But Rosie’s version of fun went on long into the night, the way it always had, and Alicia grew tired too easily. Especially when she’d only flown back into the country the day before, and her body still believed it was in another time zone altogether.
And more, when she wasn’t sure she could trust herself. She didn’t know what had made her do what she’d done that terrible night eight years ago; she couldn’t remember much of it. So she’d opted to avoid anything and everything that might lead down that road—which was easier to do when she wasn’t standing in the midst of so much cheerful abandon. Because she didn’t have a halo—God knows, she’d proved that with her whorish behavior—she only wished she did.
You knew what this would be like, she thought briskly now, not bothering to fight the banker for Rosie’s attention when a text from the backseat of a taxi headed home would do, and would furthermore not cause any interruption to Rosie’s obvious plans for the evening. You could have gone straight home after the curry and sorted out your laundry—
And then she couldn’t help but laugh at herself: Miss Misery Guts acting exactly like the bitter old maid Rosie often darkly intimated she was well on her way to becoming. Rosie was right, clearly. Had she really started thinking about her laundry? After midnight on a dance floor in a trendy London club while music even she could tell was fantastic swelled all around her?
Still laughing as she imagined the appalled look Rosie would give her when she told her about this, Alicia turned and began fighting her way out of the wild crowd and off the heaving dance floor. She laughed even harder as she was forced to leap out of the way of a particularly energetic couple flinging themselves here and there.
Alicia overbalanced because she was laughing too hard to pay attention to where she was going, and then, moving too fast to stop herself, she slipped in a puddle of spilled drink on the edge of the dance floor—
And crashed into the dark column of a man that she’d thought, before she hurtled into him, was nothing more than an extension of the speaker behind him. A still, watchful shadow.
He wasn’t.
He was hard and male, impossibly muscled, sleek and hot. Alicia’s first thought, with her face a scant breath from the most stunning male chest she’d ever beheld in real life and her palms actually touching it, was that he smelled like winter—fresh and clean and something deliciously smoky beneath.
She was aware of his hands on her upper arms, holding her fast, and only as she absorbed the fact that he was holding her did she also fully comprehend the fact that somehow, despite the press of the crowd and the flashing lights and how quickly she’d been on her way toward taking an undignified header into the floor, he’d managed to catch her at all.
She tilted her head back to thank him for his quick reflexes, still smiling—
And everything stopped.
It simply—disappeared.
Alicia felt her heart thud, hard enough to bruise. She felt her mouth drop open.
But she saw nothing at all but his eyes.
Blue like no blue she’d ever seen in another pair of eyes before. Blue like the sky on a crystal cold winter day, so bright it almost hurt to look at him. Blue so intense it seemed to fill her up, expanding inside of her, making her feel swollen with it. As if the slightest thing might make her burst wide-open, and some mad part of her wanted that, desperately.
A touch. A smile. Anything at all.
He was beautiful. Dark and forbidding and still, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Something electric sizzled in the air between them as they gazed at each other, charging through her, making her skin prickle. Making her feel heavy and restless, all at once, as if she was a snow globe he’d picked up and shaken hard, and everything inside of her was still floating drowsily in the air, looking for a place to land.
It scared her, down deep inside in a place she hadn’t known was there until this moment—and yet she didn’t pull away.
He blinked, as if he felt it too, this terrible, impossible, beautiful thing that crackled between them. She was sure that if she could tear her eyes from his she’d be able to see it there in the air, connecting their bodies, arcing between them and around them and through them, the voltage turned high. The faintest hint of a frown etched between his dark brows, and he moved as if to set her away from him, but then he stopped and all he’d done was shift them both even farther back into the shadows.
And still they stood there, caught. Snared. As if the world around them, the raucous club, the pounding music, the wild and crazy dancing, had simply evaporated the moment they’d touched.
At last, Alicia thought, in a rush of chaotic sensation and dizzy emotion she didn’t understand at all, all of it falling through her with a certain inevitability, like a heavy stone into a terrifyingly deep well.
“My God,” she said, gazing up at him. “You look like a wolf.”
Was that a smile? His mouth was lush and grim at once, impossibly fascinating to her, and it tugged in one hard corner. Nothing more, and yet she smiled back at him as if he’d beamed at her.
“Is that why you’ve dressed in red, like a Shoreditch fairy tale?” he asked, his words touched with the faint, velvet caress of an accent she didn’t recognize immediately. “I should warn you, it will end with teeth.”
“I think you mean tears.” She searched his hard face, looking for more evidence of that smile. “It will end in tears, surely.”
“That, too.” Another small tug in the corner of that mouth. “But the teeth usually come first, and hurt more.”
“I’ll be very disappointed now if you don’t have fangs,” she told him, and his hands changed their steely grip on her arms, or perhaps she only then became aware of the heat of his palms and how the way he was holding her was so much like a caress.
Another tug on that austere mouth, and an answering one low in her belly, which should have terrified her, given what she knew about herself and sex. On some level, it did.
But she still didn’t move away from him.
“It is, of course, my goal in life to keep strange British women who crash into me in crowded clubs from the jaws of disappointment,” he said, a new light in his lovely eyes, and a different, more aware tilt to the way he held his head, the way he angled his big body toward her.
As if he might lean in close and swallow her whole.
Staring back at him then, his strong hands hard and hot on her arms and her palms still pressed flat against his taut chest, Alicia wanted nothing more than for him to do exactly that.
She should have turned away then and bolted for the door. Tried to locate whatever was left of her sanity, wherever she’d misplaced it. But she’d never felt this kind of raw, shimmering excitement before, this blistering heat weighing down her limbs so deliciously, this man so primal and powerful she found it hard to breathe.
“Even if the jaws in question are yours?” she asked, and she didn’t recognize that teasing lilt in her voice, the way she tilted her head to look up at him, the liquid sort of feeling that moved in her then.
“Especially if they’re mine,” he replied, his bright winter gaze on her mouth, though there was a darkness there too, a shadow across his intriguing blade of a face that she nearly got lost in. Jaws, she reminded herself. Fangs. He’s telling me what a wolf he is, big and bad. Surely she should feel more alarmed than she did—surely she shouldn’t have the strangest urge to soothe him, instead? “You should know there are none sharper or more dangerous.”
“In all of London?” She couldn’t seem to keep herself from smiling again, or that sparkling cascade of something like light from rushing in her, making her stomach tighten and her breasts pull tight. Alive. At last. “Have you measured them, then? Is there some kind of competition you can enter to prove yours are the longest? The sharpest in all the land?”
Alicia felt completely outside herself. Some part of her wanted to lie down in it, in this mad feeling, in him—and exult in it. Bask in it as if it was sunshine. As if he was, despite the air of casual menace he wore so easily, like an extra layer of skin. Was that visible to everyone, or only to her? She didn’t care. She wanted to roll around in this moment, in him, like it was the first snow of the season and she could make it all into angels.
Her breath caught at the image, and somehow, he heard it. She felt his reaction in the sudden tension of his powerful frame above her and around her, in the flex of his fingers high on her arms, in the tightening of that connection that wound between them, bright and electric, and made her feel like a stranger in her own body.
His blue eyes lifted to meet hers and gleamed bright. “I don’t need to measure them, solnyshka.” He shifted closer, and his attention returned to her mouth. “I know.”
He was an arctic wolf turned man, every inch of him a predator—lean and hard as he stood over her despite the heels Rosie had coerced her into wearing. He wore all black, a tight black T-shirt beneath a perfectly tailored black jacket, dark trousers and boots, and his wide, hard shoulders made her skin feel tight. His dark hair was short and inky black. It made his blue eyes seem like smoke over his sculpted jaw and cheekbones, and yet all of it, all of him, was hard and male and so dangerous she could feel it hum beneath her skin, some part of her desperate to fight, to flee. He looked intriguingly uncivilized. Something like feral.
And yet Alicia wasn’t afraid, as that still-alarmed, still-vigilant part of her knew she should have been. Not when he was looking at her like that. Not when she followed a half-formed instinct and moved closer to him, pressing her hands flatter against the magnificently formed planes of his chest while his arms went around her to hold her like a lover might. She tilted her head back even farther and watched his eyes turn to arctic fire.
She didn’t understand it, but she burned.
This isn’t right, a small voice cautioned her in the back of her mind. This isn’t you.
But he was so beautiful she couldn’t seem to keep track of who she was supposed to be, and her heart hurt her where it thundered in her chest. She felt something bright and demanding knot into an insistent ache deep in her belly, and she found she couldn’t think of a good reason to step away from him.
In a minute, she promised herself. I’ll walk away in a minute.
“You should run,” he told her then, his voice dark and low, and she could see he was serious. That he meant it. But one of his hands moved to trace a lazy pattern on her cheek as he said it, his palm a rough velvet against her skin, and she shivered. His blue gaze seemed to sharpen. “As far away from me as you can get.”
He looked so grim then, so sure, and it hurt her, somehow. She wanted to see him smile with that hard, dangerous mouth. She wanted that with every single part of her and she didn’t even know his name.
None of this made any sense.
Alicia had been so good for so long. She’d paid and paid and paid for that single night eight years ago. She’d been so vigilant, so careful, ever since. She was never spontaneous. She was never reckless. And yet this beautiful shadow of a man had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, and the saddest mouth, and the way he touched her made her shake and burn and glow.
And she thought that maybe this once, for a moment or two, she could let down her guard. Just the smallest, tiniest bit. It didn’t have to mean anything she didn’t want it to mean. It didn’t have to mean anything at all.
So she ignored that voice inside of her, and she ignored his warning, too.
Alicia leaned her face into his hard palm as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and smiled when he pulled in a breath like it was a fire in him, too. Like he felt the same burn.
She stretched up against his hard, tough body and told herself this was about that grim mouth of his, not the wild, impossible things she knew she shouldn’t let herself feel or want or, God help her, do. And they were in the shadows of a crowded club where nobody could see her and no one would ever know what she did in the dark. It wasn’t as if it counted.
She could go back to her regularly scheduled quiet life in a moment.
It would only be a moment. One small moment outside all the rules she’d made for herself, the rules she’d lived by so carefully for so long, and then she would go straight back home to her neat, orderly, virtuous life.
She would. She had to. She would.
But first Alicia obeyed that surge of wild demand inside of her, leaned closer and fitted her mouth to his.
CHAPTER TWO
HE TASTED LIKE the night. Better even than she’d imagined.
He paused for the barest instant when Alicia’s lips touched his. Half a heartbeat. Less.
A scant second while the taste of him seared through her, deep and dark and wild. She thought that was enough, that small taste of his fascinating mouth. That would do, and now she could go back to her quiet—
But then he angled his head to one side, used the hand at her cheek to guide her mouth where he wanted it and took over.
Devouring her like the wolf she understood he was. He really was, and the realization swirled inside of her like heat. His mouth was impossibly carnal, opening over hers to taste her, to claim her.
Dark and deep, hot and sure.
Alicia simply...exploded. It was like a long flash of light, shuddering and bright, searing everything away in the white hot burn of it. It was perfect. It was beautiful.
It was too much.
She shivered against him, overloaded with his bold taste, the scrape of his jaw, his talented fingers moving her mouth where he wanted it in a silent, searing command she was happy to obey. Then his hands were in her hair, buried in her thick curls. Her arms went around his neck of their own volition, and then she was plastered against the tall, hard length of him. It was like pressing into the surface of the sun and still, she couldn’t seem to get close enough.
As if there was no close enough.
And he kissed her, again and again, with a ruthless intensity that made her feel weak and beautiful all at once, until she was mindless with need. Until she forgot her own name. Until she forgot she didn’t know his. Until she forgot how dangerous forgetting was for her.
Until she forgot everything but him.
When he pulled back, she didn’t understand. He put an inch, maybe two, between them, and then he muttered something harsh and incomprehensible while he stared at her as if he thought she was some kind of ghost.
It took her a long, confused moment to realize that she couldn’t understand him because he wasn’t speaking in English, not because she’d forgotten her own language, too.
Alicia blinked, the world rushing back as she did. She was still standing in that club. Music still pounded all around them, lights still flashed, well-dressed patrons still shouted over the din, and somewhere out in the middle of the dance floor, Rosie was no doubt still playing her favorite game with her latest conquest.
Everything was as it had been before she’d stumbled into this man, before he’d caught her. Before she’d kissed him.
Before he’d kissed her back.
Everything was exactly the same. Except Alicia.
He was searching her face as if he was looking for something. He shook his head slightly, then reached down and ran a lazy finger over the ridge of her collarbone, as if testing its shape. Even that made her shudder, that simple slide of skin against skin. Even so innocuous a touch seemed directly connected to that pulsing heat between her legs, the heavy ache in her breasts, the hectic spin inside of her.
She didn’t have to speak his language to know whatever he muttered then was a curse.
If she were smart, the way she’d tried to be for years now, she would pull her hand away and run. Just as he’d told her she should. Just as she’d promised herself she would. Everything about this was too extreme, too intense, as if he wasn’t only a strange man in a club but the kind of drug that usually went with this kind of rolling, wildly out-of-control feeling. As if she was much too close to being high on him.
“Last chance,” he said then, as if he could read her mind.
He was giving her a warning. Again.
In her head, she listened. She smiled politely and extricated herself. She marched herself to the nearest exit, hailed a taxi, then headed straight home to the comfort of her bloody laundry. Because she knew she couldn’t be trusted outside the confines of the rules she’d made for herself. She’d been living the consequences of having no rules for a long, long time.
But here, now, in this loud place surrounded by so many people and all of that pounding music, she didn’t feel like the person she’d been when she’d arrived. Everything she knew about herself had twisted inside out. Turned into something else entirely in that electric blue of his challenging gaze.
As if this really was a Shoreditch fairy tale, after all.
“What big eyes you have,” she teased him.
His hard mouth curved then, and she felt it like a burst of heat, like sunlight. She couldn’t do anything but smile back at him.
“So be it,” he said, as if he despaired of them both.
Alicia laughed, then laughed again at the startled look in his eyes.
“The dourness is a lovely touch,” she told him. “You must be beating them off with a stick. A very grim stick.”
“No stick,” he said, in an odd tone. “A look at me is usually sufficient.”
“A wolf,” she said, and grinned. “Just as I suspected.”
He blinked, and again looked at her in that strange way of his, as if she was an apparition he couldn’t quite believe was standing there before him.
Then he moved with the same decisiveness he’d used when he’d taken control of that kiss, tucking her into his side as he navigated his way through the dense crowd. She tried not to think about how well she fitted there, under his heavy arm, tight against the powerful length of his torso as he cut through the crowd. She tried not to drift away in the scent of him, the heat and the power, all of it surrounding her and pouring into that ache already inside of her, making it bloom and stretch and grow.
Until it took over everything.
Maybe she was under some kind of spell, Alicia thought with the small part of her that wasn’t consumed with the feel of his tall, lean frame as he guided her so protectively through the crowd. It should have been impossible to move through the club so quickly, so confidently. Not in a place like this at the height of a Saturday night. But he did it.
And then they were outside, in the cold and the damp November night, and he was still moving in that same breathtaking way, like quicksilver. Like he knew exactly where they were headed—away from the club and the people still milling about in front of it. He led her down the dark street, deeper into the shadows, and it was then Alicia’s sense of self-preservation finally kicked itself into gear.
Better late than never, she thought, annoyed with herself, but it actually hurt her to pull away from the magnificent shelter of his body, from all of that intense heat and strength. It felt like she’d ripped her skin off when she stepped away from him, as if they’d been fused together.
He regarded her calmly, making her want to trust him when she knew she shouldn’t. She couldn’t.
“I’m sorry, but...” She wrapped her arms around her own waist in an attempt to make up for the heat she’d lost when she’d stepped away from him. “I don’t know a single thing about you.”
“You know several things, I think.”
He sounded even more delicious now that they were alone and she could hear him properly. Russian, she thought, as pleased as if she’d learned his deepest, darkest secrets.
“Yes,” she agreed, thinking of the things she knew. Most of them to do with that insistent ache in her belly, and lower. His mouth. His clever hands. “All lovely things. But none of them worth risking my personal safety for, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Something like a smile moved in his eyes, but didn’t make it to his hard mouth. Still, it echoed in her, sweet and light, making her feel far more buoyant than she should have on a dark East London street with a strange man even she could see was dangerous, no matter how much she wanted him.
Had she ever wanted anything this much? Had anyone?
“A wolf is never without risk,” he told her, that voice of his like whiskey, smooth and scratchy at once, heating her up from the inside out. “That’s the point of wolves. Or you’d simply get a dog, pat it on the head.” His eyes gleamed. “Teach it tricks.”
Alicia wasn’t sure she wanted to know the tricks this man had up his sleeve. Or, more to the point, she wasn’t sure she’d survive them. She wasn’t certain she’d survive this as it was.
“You could be very bad in bed,” she said, conversationally, as if she picked up strange men all the time. She hardly recognized her own light, easy, flirtatious tone. She hadn’t heard it since before that night in her parents’ back garden. “That’s a terrible risk to take with any stranger, and awkward besides.”
That smile in his eyes intensified, got even bluer. “I’m not.”
She believed him.
“You could be the sort who gets very, very drunk and weeps loudly about his broken heart until dawn.” She gave a mock shudder. “So tedious, especially if poetry is involved. Or worse, singing.”
“I don’t drink,” he countered at once. His dark brows arched over those eyes of his, challenging her. Daring her. “I never sing, I don’t write poems and I certainly do not weep.” He paused. “More to the point, I don’t have a heart.”
“Handy, that,” she replied easily. She eyed him. “You could be a killer, of course. That would be unfortunate.”
She smiled at that. He didn’t.
“And if I am?”
“There you go,” she said, and nodded sagely. Light, airy. Enchanted, despite herself. “I can’t possibly go off into the night with you now, can I?”
But it was terrifying how much she wanted to go off with him, wherever he’d take her, and instead of reacting to that as she should, she couldn’t stop smiling at him. As if she already knew him, this strange man dressed all in black, his blue eyes the only spot of color on the cold pavement as he stared at her as if she’d stunned him somehow.
“My name is Nikolai,” he said, and she had the oddest impression he hadn’t meant to speak at all. He shifted, then reached over and traced her lips with his thumb, his expression so fierce, so intent, it made her feel hollowed out inside, everything scraped away except that wild, wondrous heat he stirred in her. “Text someone my name and address. Have them ring every fifteen minutes if you like. Send the police. Whatever you want.”
“All those safeguards are very thoughtful,” she pointed out, but her eyes felt too wide and her voice sounded insubstantial. Wispy. “Though not exactly wolfish, it has to be said.”
His mouth moved into his understated version of a smile
“I want you.” His eyes were on fire. Every inch of him that wolf. “What will it take?”
She swayed back into him as if they were magnets and she’d simply succumbed to the pull. And then she had no choice but to put her hand to his abdomen, to feel all that blasting heat right there beneath her palm.
Even that didn’t scare her the way it should.
“What big teeth you have,” she whispered, too on edge to laugh, too filled with that pulsing ache inside of her to smile.
“The biting part comes later.” His eyes gleamed again, with the kind of sheer male confidence that made it difficult to breathe. Alicia stopped trying. “If you ask nicely.”
He picked up her hand and lifted it to his mouth, tracing a dark heat over the back of it. He didn’t look away.
“If you’re sure,” she said piously, trying desperately to pretend she wasn’t shaking, and that he couldn’t feel it. That he didn’t know exactly what he was doing to her when she could see full well that he did. “I was promised a wolf, not a dog.”
“I eat dogs for breakfast.”
She laughed then. “That’s not particularly comforting.”
“I can’t be what I’m not, solnyshka.” He turned her hand over, then kissed her palm in a way that made her hiss in a sharp breath. His eyes were smiling again, so bright and blue. “But I’m very good at what I am.”
And she’d been lost since she’d set eyes on him, hadn’t she? What use was there in pretending otherwise? She wasn’t drunk. It wasn’t like that terrible night, because she knew what she was doing. Didn’t she?
“Note to self,” Alicia managed to say, breathless and dizzy and unable to remember why she’d tried to stop this in the first place, when surrendering to it—to him—felt so much like triumph. Like fate. “Never eat breakfast with a wolf. The sausages are likely the family dog.”
He shrugged. “Not your family dog,” he said with that fierce mouth of his, though she was sure his blue eyes laughed. “If that helps.”
And this time, when she smiled at him, the negotiation was over.
The address he gave her in his clipped, direct way was in an extraordinarily posh part of town Alicia could hardly afford to visit, much less live in. She dutifully texted it to Rosie, hoping that her friend was far too busy to check it until morning. And then she tucked her phone away and forgot about Rosie altogether.
Because he still moved like magic, tucking her against him again as if there was a crowd he needed to part when there was only the late-night street and what surged between them like heat lightning. As if he liked the way she fitted there as much as she did. And her heart began to pound all over again, excitement and anticipation and a certain astonishment at her own behavior pouring through her with every hard thump.
At the corner, he lifted his free hand almost languidly toward the empty street, and for a second Alicia truly believed that he was so powerful that taxis simply materialized before him at his whim—until a nearby engine turned over and a powerful black SUV slid out of the shadows and pulled to a stop right there before them.
More magic, when she was enchanted already.
Nikolai, she whispered to herself as she climbed inside the SUV, as if the name was a song. Or a spell. His name is Nikolai.
He swung in behind her on the soft leather backseat, exchanged a few words in curt Russian with the driver and then pressed a button that raised a privacy shield, secluding them. Then he settled back against the seat, near her but not touching her, stretching out his long, lean body and making the spacious vehicle seem tight. Close.
And then he simply looked at her.
As if he was trying to puzzle her out. Or giving her one last chance to bolt.
But Alicia knew she wasn’t going to do that.
“More talk of dogs?” he asked mildly, yet all she heard was the hunger beneath. She could see it in his eyes, his face. She could feel the echo of it in her, new and huge and almost more than she could bear. “More clever little character assessments couched as potential objections?”
“I got in your car,” she pointed out, hardly recognizing her own voice. The thick heat in it. “I think I’m done.”
He smiled. She was sure of it, though his mouth didn’t move. But she could see the stamp of satisfaction on his hard face, the flare of a deep male approval.
“Not yet, solnyshka,” he murmured, his voice a low rasp. “Not quite yet.”
And she melted. It was a shivery thing, hot and desperate, like she couldn’t quite catch her breath against the heat of it.
“Come here,” he said.
They were cocooned in the darkness, light spilling here and there as the car sped through the city, and still his blue gaze was brilliant. Compelling. And so knowing—so certain of himself, of her, of what was about to happen—it made her blood run hot in her veins.
Alicia didn’t move fast enough and he made a low noise. A growl—like the wolf he so resembled. The rough sound made her shake apart and then melt down into nothing but need, alive with that crazy heat she couldn’t seem to control any longer.
He simply picked her up and pulled her into his lap, his mouth finding hers and claiming her all over again with an impatience that delighted her. She met him with the same urgency. His hands marveled down the length of her back, explored the shape of her hips, and Alicia’s mind blanked out into a red-hot burst of that consuming, impossible fire. Into pure and simple need.
It had been so long. So long, and yet her body knew exactly what to do, thrilling to the taste of him, the feel of his hard, capable hands first over and then underneath her bright red shirt. His hands on her stomach, her waist, her breasts. So perfect she wanted to die. And not nearly enough.
He leaned back to peel off his jacket and the tight black T-shirt beneath, and her eyes glazed over at the sight of all of that raw male beauty. She pressed herself against the hard planes of his perfect chest, tracing the large, colorful tattoos that stretched over his skin with trembling fingers, with her lips and her tongue, tasting art etched across art.
Intense. Hot. Intoxicating.
And that scent of his—of the darkest winter, smoke and ice—surrounded her. Licked into her. Claimed her as surely as he did.
One moment she was fully clothed, the next her shirt and the bra beneath it were swept away, while his hard mouth took hers again and again until she thought she might die if he stopped. Then he did stop, and she moaned out her distress, her desperation. That needy ache so deep in the core of her. But he only laughed softly, before he fastened his hot mouth to the tight peak of one breast and sucked on it, not quite gently, until she thought she really had died.
The noises she heard herself making were impossible. Nothing could really feel this good. This perfect. This wild or this right.
Nikolai shifted, lifting her, and Alicia helped him peel her trousers down from her hips, kicking one leg free and not caring what happened to the other. She felt outside herself and yet more fully in herself than she had been in as long as she could remember. She explored the expanse of his gorgeous shoulders, the distractingly tender spot behind his ear, the play of his stunning muscles, perfectly honed beneath her.
He twisted them both around, coming down over her on the seat and pulling her legs around his hips with an urgency that made her breath desert her. She hadn’t even been aware that he’d undressed. It was more magic—and then he was finally naked against her, the steel length of him a hot brand against her belly.
Alicia shuddered and melted, then melted again, and he moved even closer, one of his hands moving to her bottom and lifting her against him with that devastating skill, that easy mastery, that made her belly tighten.
He was muttering in Russian, that same word he’d used before like a curse or a prayer or even both at once, and the sound of it made her moan again. It was harsh like him, and tender, too. It made her feel as if she might come out of her own skin. He teased her breasts, licking his way from one proud nipple to the other as if he might lose himself there, then moved to her neck, making her shiver against him before he took her mouth again in a hard, deep kiss.
As raw as she was. As undone.
He pulled back slightly to press something into her hand, and she blinked at it, taking much longer than she should have to recognize it was the condom she hadn’t thought about for even an instant.
A trickle of unease snaked down the back of her neck, but she pushed it away, too far gone for shame. Not when his blue eyes glittered with sensual intent and his long fingers moved between them, feeling her damp heat and then stroking deep into her molten center, making her clench him hard.
“Hurry,” he told her.
“I’m hurrying. You’re distracting me.”
He played his fingers in and out of her, slick and hot, then pressed the heel of his hand into her neediest part, laughing softly when she bucked against him.
“Concentrate, solnyshka.”
She ripped open the foil packet, then took her time rolling it down his velvety length, until he cursed beneath his breath.
Alicia liked the evidence of his own pressing need. She liked that she could make his breath catch, too. And then he stopped, braced over her, his face close to hers and the hardest part of him poised at her entrance but not quite—
He groaned. He sounded as tortured as she felt. She liked that, too.
“Your name.”
She blinked at the short command, so gruff and harsh. His arms were hard around her, his big body pressed her back into the soft leather seat, and she felt delicate and powerful all at once.
“Tell me your name,” he said, nipping at her jaw, making her head fall back to give him any access he desired, anything he wanted.
Alive, she thought again. At last.
“Alicia,” she whispered.
He muttered it like a fierce prayer, and then he thrust into her—hot and hard and so perfect, so beautiful, that tears spilled from her eyes even as she shattered around him.
“Again,” he said.
It was another command, arrogant and darkly certain. Nikolai was hard and dangerous and between her legs, his eyes bright and hot and much too intense on hers. She turned her head away but he caught her mouth with his, taking her over, conquering her.
“I don’t think I can—” she tried to say against his mouth, even while the flames still licked through her, even as she still shuddered helplessly around him, aware of the steel length of him inside her, filling her.
Waiting.
That hard smile like a burst of heat inside her. “You will.”
And then he started to move.
It was perfect. More than perfect. It was sleek and hot, impossibly good. He simply claimed her, took her, and Alicia met him. She arched into him, lost in the slide and the heat, the glory of it. Of him.
Slick. Wild.
Perfect.
He moved in her, over her, his mouth at her neck and his hands roaming from her bottom to the center of her shuddering need as he set the wild, intense pace. She felt it rage inside her again, this mad fire she’d never felt before and worried would destroy her even as she hungered for more. And more. And more.
She met every deep thrust. She gloried in it.
“Say my name,” he said, gruff against her ear, his voice washing through her and sending her higher, making her glow. “Now, Alicia. Say it.”
When she obeyed he shuddered, then let out another low, sexy growl that moved over her like a newer, better fire. He reached between them and pressed down hard against the heart of her hunger, hurtling her right over the edge again.
And smiled, she was sure of it, with his warrior’s mouth as well as those winter-bright eyes, right before he followed her into bliss.
* * *
Nikolai came back to himself with a vicious, jarring thud.
He couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure he breathed. Alicia quivered sweetly beneath him, his mouth was pressed against the tender junction of her neck and shoulder, and he was still deep inside her lovely body.
What the hell was that?
He shifted her carefully into the seat beside him, ignoring the way her long, inky-black lashes looked against the creamy brown of her skin, the way her perfect, lush mouth was so soft now. He ignored the tiny noise she made in the back of her throat, as if distressed to lose contact with him, which made him grit his teeth. But she didn’t open her eyes.
He dealt with the condom swiftly, then he found his trousers in the tangle of clothes on the floor of the car and jerked them on. He had no idea what had happened to his T-shirt, and decided it didn’t matter. And then he simply sat there as if he was winded.
He, Nikolai Korovin, winded. By a woman.
By this woman.
What moved in him then was like a rush of too many colors, brilliant and wild, when he knew the only safety lay in gray. It surged in his veins, it pounded in his temples, it scraped along his sex. He told himself it was temper, but he knew better. It was everything he’d locked away for all these years, and he didn’t want it. He wouldn’t allow it. It made him feel like an animal again, wrong and violent and insane and drunk....
That was it.
It rang like a bell in him, low and urgent, swelling into everything. Echoing everywhere. No wonder he felt so off-kilter, so dangerously unbalanced. This woman made him feel drunk.
Nikolai forced a breath, then another.
Everything that had happened since she’d tripped in front of him flashed through his head, in the same random snatches of color and sound and scent he remembered from a thousand morning-afters. Her laughter, that sounded the way he thought joy must, though he’d no basis for comparison. The way she’d tripped and then fallen, straight into him, and hadn’t had the sense to roll herself as he would have done, to break her fall. Her brilliant smile that cracked over her face so easily. Too easily.
No one had ever smiled at him like that. As if he was a real man. Even a good one.
But he knew what he was. He’d always known. His uncle’s fists, worse after Ivan had left to fight their way to freedom one championship at a time. The things he’d done in the army. Veronika’s calculated deception, even Ivan’s more recent betrayal—these had only confirmed what Nikolai had always understood to be true about himself down deep into his core.
To think differently now, when he’d lost everything he had to lose and wanted nothing more than to shut himself off for good, was the worst kind of lie. Damaging. Dangerous. And he knew what happened when he allowed himself to become intoxicated. How many times would he have to prove that to himself? How many people would he hurt?
He was better off blank. Ice cold and gray, all the way through.
The day after Veronika left him, Nikolai had woken bruised and battered from another fight—or fights—he couldn’t recall. He’d been shaky. Sick from the alcohol and sicker still with himself. Disgusted with the holes in his memory and worse, with all the things he did remember. The things that slid without context through his head, oily and barbed.
His fists against flesh. His bellow of rage. The crunch of wood beneath his foot, the shattering of pottery against the stone floor. Faces of strangers on the street, wary. Worried. Then angry. Alarmed.
Blood on a fist—and only some of it his. Fear in those eyes—never his. Nikolai was what grown men feared, what they crossed streets to avoid, but he hadn’t felt fear himself in years. Not since he’d been a child.
Fear meant there was something left to lose.
That was the last time Nikolai had drunk a drop of alcohol and it was the last time he’d let himself lose control.
Until now.
He didn’t understand this. He was not an impulsive man. He didn’t pick up women, he picked them, carefully—and only when he was certain that whatever else they were, they were obedient and disposable.
When they posed no threat to him at all. Nikolai breathed in, out.
He’d survived wars. This was only a woman.
Nikolai looked at her then, memorizing her, like she was a code he needed to crack, instead of the bomb itself, poised to detonate.
She wore her dark black hair in a cloud of tight curls around her head, a tempting halo around her lovely, clever face, and he didn’t want any part of this near-overpowering desire that surged in him, to bury his hands in the heavy thickness of it, to start the wild rush all over again. Her body was lithe and ripe with warm, mouthwatering curves that he’d already touched and tasted, so why did he feel as if it had all been rushed, as if it wasn’t nearly enough?
He shouldn’t have this longing to take his time, to really explore her. He shouldn’t hunger for that lush, full mouth of hers again, or want to taste his way along that elegant neck for the simple pleasure of making her shiver. He shouldn’t find it so impossible to look at her without imagining himself tracing lazy patterns across every square inch of the sweet brown perfection of her skin. With his mouth and then his hands, again and again until he knew her.
He’d asked her name, as if he’d needed it. He’d wanted her that much, and Nikolai knew better than to want. It could only bring him pain.
Vodka had been his one true love, and it had ruined him. It had let loose that monster in him, let it run amok. It had taken everything that his childhood and the army hadn’t already divided between them and picked down to the bone. He’d known it in his sober moments, but he hadn’t cared. Because vodka had warmed him, lent color and volume to the dark, silent prison of his life, made him imagine he could be something other than a six-foot-two column of glacial ice.
But he knew better than that now. He knew better than this.
Alicia’s eyes fluttered open then, dark brown shot through with amber, almost too pretty to bear. He hated that he noticed, that he couldn’t look away. She glanced around as if she’d forgotten where they were. Then she looked at him.
She didn’t smile that outrageously beautiful smile of hers, and it made something hitch inside him, like a stitch in his side. As if he’d lost that, too.
She lifted one foot, shaking her head at the trousers that were still attached to her ankle, and the shoe she’d never removed. She reached down, picked up the tangle of her bright red shirt and lacy pink bra from the pile on the floor of the car, and sighed.
And Nikolai relaxed, because he was back on familiar ground.
Now came the demands, the negotiations, he thought cynically. The endless manipulations, which were the reason he’d started making any woman who wanted him agree to his rules before he touched her. Sign the appropriate documents, understand exactly how this would go before it started. Nikolai knew this particular dance well. It was why he normally didn’t pick up women, let them into the sleek, muscular SUV that told them too much about his net worth, much less give them his address....
But instead of pouting prettily and pointedly, almost always the first transparent step in these situations, Alicia looked at him, let her head fall back and laughed.
CHAPTER THREE
THAT DAMNED LAUGH.
Nikolai would rather be shot again, he decided in that electric moment as her laughter filled the car. He would rather take another knife or two to the gut. He didn’t know what on earth he was supposed to do with laughter like that, when it sparkled in the air all around him and fell indiscriminately here and there, like a thousand unwelcome caresses all over his skin and something worse—much worse—deep beneath it.
He scowled.
“Never let it be said this wasn’t classy,” Alicia said, her lovely voice wry. “I suppose we’ll always have that going for us.”
There was no we. There was no us. Neither of those words were disposable. Alarms shrieked like air raid sirens inside of him, mixing with the aftereffects of that laugh.
“I thought you understood,” he said abruptly, at his coldest and most cutting. “I don’t—”
“Relax, Tin Man.” Laughter still lurked in her voice. She tugged her trousers back up over her hips, then pulled her bra free of her shirt, shooting him a breezy smile that felt not unlike a blade to the stomach as she clipped it back into place. “I heard you the first time. No heart.”
And then she ignored him, as if he wasn’t vibrating beside her with all of that darkness and icy intent. As if he wasn’t Nikolai Korovin, feared and respected in equal measure all across the planet, in a thousand corporate boardrooms as well as the grim theaters of too many violent conflicts. As if he was the kind of man someone could simply pick up in a London club and then dismiss...
Except, of course, he was. Because she had. She’d done exactly that.
He’d let her.
Alicia fussed with her shirt before pulling it over her head, her black curls springing out of the opening in a joyful froth that made him actually ache to touch them. Her. He glared down at his hands as if they’d betrayed him.
When she looked at him again, her dark eyes were soft, undoing him as surely as if she really had eviscerated him with a hunting knife. He would have preferred the latter. She made it incalculably worse by reaching over and smoothing her warm hand over his cheek, offering him...comfort?
“You look like you’ve swallowed broken glass,” she said.
Kindly.
Very much as if she cared.
Nikolai didn’t want what he couldn’t have. It had been beaten out of him long ago. It was a simple, unassailable fact, like gravity. Like air.
Like light.
But he couldn’t seem to stop himself from lifting his hand, tracing that tempting mouth of hers once more, watching the heat bloom again in her eyes.
Just one night, he told himself then. He couldn’t help it. That smile of hers made him realize he was so tired of the cold, the dark. That he felt haunted by the things he’d lost, the wars he’d won, the battles he’d been fighting all his life. Just once, he wanted.
One night to explore this light of hers she shone so indiscriminately, he thought. Just one night to pretend he was something more than ice. A wise man didn’t step onto a land mine when he could see it lying there in front of him, waiting to blow. But Nikolai had been through more hells than he could count. He could handle anything for a night. Even this. Even her.
Just one night.
“You should hold on,” he heard himself say. He slid his hand around to cup the nape of her neck, and exulted in the shiver that moved over her at even so small a touch. As if she was his. That could never happen, he knew. But he’d allowed himself the night. He had every intention of making it a long one. “I’m only getting started.”
* * *
If only he really had been a wolf.
Alicia scowled down at the desk in her office on Monday and tried valiantly to think of something—anything—other than Nikolai. And failed, as she’d been doing with alarming regularity since she’d sneaked away from his palatial penthouse in South Kensington early on Sunday morning.
If he’d really been a wolf, she’d likely be in hospital right now, recovering from being bitten in a lovely quiet coma or restful medicated haze, which would mean she’d be enjoying a much-needed holiday from the self-recriminating clamor inside her head.
At least I wasn’t drunk....
Though if she was honest, some part of her almost wished she had been. Almost. As if that would be some kind of excuse when she knew from bitter experience that it wasn’t.
The real problem was, she’d been perfectly aware of what she was doing on Saturday. She’d gone ahead and done it precisely because she hadn’t been drunk. For no other reason than that she’d wanted him.
From her parents’ back garden to a stranger in a car. She hadn’t learned much of anything in all these years, had she? Given the chance, she’d gleefully act the promiscuous whore—drunk or sober.
That turned inside of her like bile, acidic and thick at the back of her throat.
“I think you must be a witch,” he’d said at some point in those long, sleepless hours of too much pleasure, too hot and too addicting. He’d been sprawled out next to her, his rough voice no more than a growl in the dark of his cavernous bedroom.
A girl could get lost in a room like that, she’d thought. In a bed so wide. In a man like Nikolai, who had taken her over and over with a skill and a thoroughness and a sheer masculine prowess that made her wonder how she’d ever recover from it. If she would. But she hadn’t wanted to think those things, not then. Not while it was still dark outside and they were cocooned on those soft sheets together, the world held at bay. There’d be time enough to work on forgetting, she’d thought. When it was over.
When it was morning.
She’d propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at him, his bold, hard face in shadows but those eyes of his as intense as ever.
“I’m not the driving force in this fairy tale,” she’d said quietly. Then she’d dropped her gaze lower, past that hard mouth of his she now knew was a terrible, electric torment when he chose, and down to that astonishing torso of his laid out before her like a feast. “Red Riding Hood is a hapless little fool, isn’t she? Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Alicia had meant that to come out light and breezy, but it hadn’t. It had felt intimate instead, somehow. Darker and deeper, and a different kind of ache inside. Not at all what she’d intended.
She’d felt the blue of his gaze like a touch.
Instead of losing herself there, she’d traced a lazy finger over the steel plates of his harshly honed chest. Devastatingly perfect. She moved from this scar to that tattoo, tracing each pucker of flesh, each white strip of long-ago agony, then smoothing her fingertip over the bright colors and Cyrillic letters that flowed everywhere else. Two kinds of marks, stamped permanently into his flesh. She’d been uncertain if she was fascinated or something else, something that made her mourn for all his body had suffered.
But it wasn’t her place to ask.
“Bullet,” he’d said quietly, when her fingers moved over a slightly raised and shiny patch of skin below his shoulder, as if she had asked after all. “I was in the army.”
“For how long?”
“Too long.”
She’d flicked a look at him, but had kept going, finding a long, narrow white scar that slashed across his taut abdomen and following the length of it, back and forth. So much violence boiled down to a thin white line etched into his hard, smooth flesh. It had made her hurt for him, but she still hadn’t asked.
“Kitchen knife. My uncle.” His voice had been little more than a rasp against the dark. She’d gone still, her fingers splayed across the scar in question. “He took his role as our guardian seriously,” Nikolai had said, and his gruff voice had sounded almost amused, as if what he’d said was something other than awful. Alicia had chanced a glance at him, and saw a different truth in that wintry gaze, more vulnerable in the clasp of the dark than she’d imagined he knew. “He didn’t like how I’d washed the dishes.”
“Nikolai—” she’d begun, not knowing what she could possibly say, but spurred on by that torn look in his eyes.
He’d blinked, then frowned. “It was nothing.”
But she’d known he was lying. And the fact that she’d had no choice but to let it pass, that this man wasn’t hers to care for no matter how it felt as if he should have been, had rippled through her like actual, physical pain.
Alicia had moved on then to the tattoo of a wild beast rendered in a shocking sweep of bold color and dark black lines that wrapped around the left side of his body, from his shoulder all the way down to an inch or so above his sex. It was fierce and furious, all ferocious teeth and wicked claws, poised there as if ready to devour him.
As if, she’d thought, it already had.
“All of my sins,” he’d said then, his voice far darker and rougher than before.
There’d been an almost-guarded look in his winter gaze when she’d glanced up at him, but she’d thought that was that same vulnerability again. And then he’d sucked in a harsh breath when she’d leaned over and pressed a kiss to the fearsome head of this creature that claimed him, as if she could wash away the things that had hurt him—uncles who wielded kitchen knives, whatever battles he’d fought in the army that had got him shot, all those shadows that lay heavy on his hard face. One kiss, then another, and she’d felt the coiling tension in him, the heat.

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