The Man She Shouldn't Crave

by Lucy Ellis

  He pulled out his phone. Cold invaded every cell of his body as he read the security report in growing disbelief. Who had delayed sending this to him?

  He’d put a guy on Rose to ensure her safety, and apparently he’d been right to. She had stayed approximately half an hour at the apartment before appearing in the street and taking off on foot. She’d walked a few blocks before rounding back and entering the gallery down the road, where she had been for the past few hours.

  Alone.

  He swore and gestured to the car.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WITHOUT her really noticing it the restaurant had gone very quiet. There was a lull in the general conversation, and even the quiet clink of cutlery, porcelain and glass had evaporated. Rose looked up.

  Plato had changed clothes since she’d seen him earlier. He was wearing some kind of suit that made him look older, harder…incredibly sexy…and he was coming towards her across that restaurant as if nobody else existed.

  Rose sat up a little straighter, her heart slamming against her ribs.

  He didn’t look very happy. Which was fine with her. She didn’t feel very happy with him either.

  He bore down on her. His hands hit her table and rattled the cups. He leaned in and icy grey eyes clashed with her own startled blue.

  ‘You do not leave the apartment without letting me know where you are going.’

  She jumped in her seat and she saw him register her reaction, because for a moment his expression softened a little as he searched her face.

  ‘Rose, do you understand me?’

  He was looming over her the same way he had the other night in her house, when he’d come storming in all suspicion and sex appeal. Except right now what she felt was a rising tide of anger—because this wasn’t her problem, it was his.

  Plato pulled out the chair opposite and dropped into it, moody and tense, framing the table with his big arms as he rested his hands on opposite ends.

  She glared back at him, blocking out all the wonderful things she knew about him and making herself concentrate on the rekindled suspicion that he just wanted to control her.

  ‘You cannot wander this city on your own.’

  He was looking at her as if trying to work her out. She could have told him she was having the same problem.

  Yet even as he was being completely unreasonable she was viscerally responding to the deep, masculine note in his voice, to the way he looked at her, all of her, as if she was the one being unreasonably provocative, as if she’d invented her mouth and her breasts and her hips to distract him from what was necessary right now. Pulling her into line, putting the hard word on her about who she was in his life.

  Most shockingly, the woman in her was glad of it—was in her imagination unbuttoning her little jacket, one button at a time, never taking her eyes off him just so she could see him suffer a little longer, and then climbing over the table and making it all better.

  Sweet bejesus, she was out of control with this man.

  ‘It’s not safe,’ he said.

  There’s something wild in you, Rose. Bill’s words came back to her. No man wants a wife who can’t control herself.

  She swallowed hard.

  Damn it, I’m allowed to be passionate and sexual and happy…

  ‘What? This restaurant?’ Her voice was low and husky and…taunting. She actually saw him respond, the way his eyes went down, settled on her mouth, his features growing taut with sexual intent. Rose began to tremble inside. ‘Has there been an outbreak of salmonella I don’t know about?’ Her joke fell flat.

  Plato dragged his attention away from her to pull out his phone. He thumbed through it and laid it down in front of her on the table. Rose looked down at the screen. It was an internet image of herself and Plato at the airport. Her face wasn’t completely covered by her bag and she was entirely recognisable.

  Her blood ran cold.

  ‘The company we settled on for security in the clubs announced the deal yesterday, before we gave the all-clear,’ Plato said flatly. ‘It’s the reason the media were at the airport. I would have protected you from it had I known. But your face, Rose, is now public property.’

  Every muscle in her body pulled tight. ‘Will—will people see this in the States?’

  How on earth did she explain Plato to her family? She couldn’t even explain him to herself.

  ‘I doubt it.’ He picked up his phone, long fingers closing tensely around it.

  The adrenalin surge over, she felt a little faint. A fork slipped and clattered on the plate.

  ‘This isn’t Toronto, Rose, it’s Moscow, and there’s a certain level of security I require—especially at the moment.’

  Rose was a little thrown. Not by the security stuff—everyone knew rich Russians were super-sensitive about those things—but the fact there might be a reason why he hadn’t wanted her to leave the apartment.

  Relief flooded her.

  ‘You’re now included in that security until you fly out at the beginning of next week,’ he continued.

  He was already talking about a date for her departure.

  She knew she would be going—she’d worked too long and hard building up her business to be away any longer—but right now, with everything so uncertain between them, it felt pretty lousy to be reminded of it. He’d said it himself. He was here and she was—there.

  What she had been hoping up until this instant was that he would say, Da, baby, I can do this. I’ve got a jet. I can fly in weekends.

  But somehow she knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  ‘I meet beautiful women all the time. Many of them give me their contact details. You just did it in an unusual way.’

  ‘Rose, do you understand? When you’re not with me you need to be where I can keep an eye on you.’

  She’d only been half listening, but those familiar words, combined with the certain knowledge that this had never been anything but a hook-up on his part, brought her up short.

  ‘An eye on me?’

  He seemed to be grappling to express himself. ‘You’re from Texas, yes? The history of your country, your Wild West, this is very much the feel of my city at the moment.’

  ‘You mean Moscow is like Dodge?’ she said, a little lost. ‘Except Dodge City was in Kansas?’

  ‘Da.’ He sat back, running his gaze over her as if making an inventory of her dark hair, her eyes, her mouth, the slope of her shoulders right down to her lap.

  He’s thinking about sex, Rose thought edgily, because she was no longer feeling particularly sexy right now. He’s weighing me up as if it’s worth his while.

  ‘Naturally there are laws, but there are a lot of people working outside of those laws.’

  ‘Shady types?’ she said dully.

  ‘Da, shady types.’ He ran a hand over the back of his neck, drawing attention to the strain of his bulging biceps under the close-weave fabric of his jacket.

  Rose wrenched her gaze away. He didn’t belong to her any more. He wasn’t hers to desire.

  He leaned towards her, as if sensing her withdrawal, his forearms coming down on the table. He reached for her hands. ‘You need to behave yourself whilst you’re with me, Rose. No more of these unexpected surprises, yes?’

  He had lowered his voice to an intimate level, his hands closing around hers, his thumbs rubbing her wrists. The feeling was making her breathless and sad and angry all at once.

  ‘We don’t want any more photographs of you in the papers. Can you do that for me?’

  Rose dragged her hands back, her expression one of utter dismay. She felt the same way she had in that restaurant the first night, when he had revealed so casually that his players had been warned not to contact her.

  As if she were Timebomb Rose, who might go off at any moment.

  She’d lived that persona for four years. Having her actions monitored, having to run her decisions by another person who inevitably overruled her.

  The one thing she had learned from th
e whole experience was that she wouldn’t walk that road again, not for anybody. Not even for a gorgeous Russian who made her want things she couldn’t have.

  She threw down her napkin and launched to her feet.

  ‘I’d like to go home now, please.’

  And she didn’t mean his apartment.

  He gave her a look that was angry and frustrated.

  ‘Da, we go,’ he muttered, as if making up his mind about something, pushing back his chair and pulling out a billfold. He peeled off a few notes and tossed them down on the table. Five times the cost of her meal.

  She wanted to yell at him and tell him she wasn’t a woman he could toy with. She wasn’t some game for him to play because he was bored and rich and…

  She didn’t really want to go home.

  She wanted to give this a try…

  And then it occurred to her. Plato might be a whole heap more important than Bill Hilliger and his influential family, but she hadn’t really felt it until now. All the time she had spent with Bill she’d been made to feel like an unsophisticated hick, but Plato hadn’t made her feel like that once.

  Last time she had been in a restaurant with him she’d stormed out, she hadn’t given him the benefit of the doubt, and she had been proved wrong.

  Was she wrong now too?

  Troubled, confused, she looked up at him, trying to sort out the old feelings left over from her years in Houston from the new ones he had stirred in her over the last few days and line them up with what was happening now. Was she ready to risk her tender heart? Would he prove worthy?

  ‘How about we do this?’ Plato said, far more calmly than he was feeling. He was used to dealing with women, their idiosyncrasies.

  Rose had just shifted from her singular spot as the only girl he’d ever spent time with who hadn’t bored him stupid, into the row of spoilt divas he’d handled on a regular basis for the last several years. She was just another girl who liked to get her own way and he’d mistaken that for character. He ignored the man in him who wanted to shake some sense into her and then wrap her up tight in his arms.

  ‘I am opening a new club in Monaco mid-week. We’ll fly down. I’ll get you back to Toronto from there.’

  He sounded bored. He was bored. He’d done this all before. With far too many women to number.

  ‘Monaco?’ she said a little faintly. ‘That sounds—ritzy.’

  All of a sudden she just wanted to cry.

  She’d really hoped…what? That this would be different? With a man like this? Was he really going to put in the time to fly in and out…date her?

  ‘Da, you can do a little shopping, we can go to the casino—you’ll have fun.’

  Patronising her, thought Rose, and everything she had been building up in her head about this man disintegrated into nothing. She’d been mollycoddled all her life by a father and brothers who adored her; she’d wasted four years of her life with a man who’d both controlled her and underestimated her. She wasn’t wasting five more minutes on a man she had known three days who clearly had no interest in getting to know her at all!

  Plato took her elbow almost impersonally, steered her across the restaurant. People were looking at them. Looking at him.

  He was right, she thought. He wasn’t an invisible man in this city, and now he had been transformed into that silent stranger she’d imagined back on the tarmac in Toronto who would walk away.

  Well, she could do it too. With a lot more class.

  She wasn’t going to Monaco with this man. She was going as far as his apartment and she was packing her suitcase.

  Except as he helped her into her wool coat she was invaded by a sense of longing for what she had so briefly had with him, only sharpened by the knowledge that she needed to go home. He turned her in his arms, began to button her up although she could have done it herself. She let him. His expression was closed, his eyes impassive on hers.

  He knew as well as she did that it was over. Before it had even started.

  The physical longing for him welled up inside of her.

  Wild, uncontrollable Rose.

  Frustrated, and frightened by the intensity of those feelings and what they told her about herself, she suddenly needed to put some physical distance between them and she pulled away, heading straight for the doorman, who opened the plate glass doors at the entrance.

  Plato swore and followed her out, his temper barely restrained. He grabbed her arm as she stepped out onto the wide snow-swept pavement, saw the cold hit her like a gravity pull. His instinct was to protect her from it. She wasn’t used to it. He shoved that soft thought aside. She wasn’t going to get used to it.

  This had been a mistake—a girl like this and a man like him.

  Something pulled tight and hot in his chest. He took a sharp breath past it.

  She needed to go home. Whatever this was, it ended here and now.

  Rose tugged her arm free. ‘Let me go, Plato,’ she said stonily.

  He knew what she meant.

  He noticed the car the moment they hit the pavement. A smokescreened Mercedes S-class idling by the roadside, its engine a low rumble. Not discreet—but these things never were.

  Plato knew what he had to do, but unease shifted sinuously up and down his spine because it was going to scare the hell out of Rose. She had darted ahead, her bag shoved under her arm, and was doing her best to put some distance between them.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds. The car accelerated, braked, and three men leapt out, crowding the pavement in front of Rose.

  They were all in sharply tailored coats, fur ushankas, smiling pleasantly at her, but Rose backed up, her head whipping around, her blue eyes searching for him.

  He was on her in moments, shouldering her behind him. “What is it, boys? Got lost and looking for directions?”

  “You know me, Kuragin, always hunting for a new investment.” Ivan Gorkov looked Rose up and down. “You need to be more careful with your property. No telling what could get damaged if we don’t sort this little problem out.”

  “It’s sorted, Gorkov. Nice and legal. So you can take your girlfriends and go and file another injunction and we’ll deal with it in court.”

  He knew his security team was only moments away, but fronting up to a guy like Gorkov was often the simplest solution, and he didn’t want this to turn into something it didn’t need to be. He could feel Rose at his side, the bump of her arm as she pressed in against him. She was a tough little thing, and he didn’t quite trust her not to put her own kopek into the mix. He knew better than to make eye contact with her. As far as these guys were concerned she was just a woman who was with him—an onlooker. He wanted it to stay that way.

  Except he could hear her soft rapid breathing and it made a difficult situation fraught, because all he could think about was protecting her.

  One of Gorkov’s men shouldered up to him and Plato stepped forward, knowing he had to shove thoughts of Rose aside and keep pushing this. It was all about intimidation. Gorkov was a local mafia bit-player who wanted in on the club scene in Moscow. He had put in several bids to service the bars and nightclubs Plato had made his name with. This morning a legitimate security firm had announced winning the contract. Gorkov clearly had the misguided view that making his disappointment personal was going to change things.

  Rose couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Plato was grinning at the guy shouldering up to him, even as he kept up an almost mocking dialogue with the shorter man in the superior tailoring.

  He lifted his hands in what appeared at first glance to be a placatory gesture, but his fingers curled and Rose realised in mounting horror he was beckoning the aggressive guy towards him, keeping her behind him as he moved.

  No, Plato, she thought desperately.

  ‘You cannot wander this city on your own.’

  His words came back at her. This was actually happening.

  ‘When you’re not with me you need to be somewhere I can keep an eye on you.’
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  She had made such a terrible mistake…

  There was an animalistic quality to the way the men were circling one another now, and the smiles on their faces were sending Rose’s blood cold. Other people were giving them a wide berth. A couple of onlookers were pointing. Plato said something guttural in Russian and the short guy in the fur-lined coat blanched. He moved uneasily on his feet, looking left and right.

  Plato kept coming, eyes narrowed, features drawn tight, and Rose realised he was fully able to deal with this. She was with a man who understood this situation in ways she couldn’t begin to fathom, and whatever Plato was saying to these guys he was making his point.

  They were breaking up, shifting onto the road.

  Rose’s stomach, tight and clenched from the moment this had started, began to cramp as she realised it might be over.

  Plato beckoned to her, his eyes never leaving the men as they vanished into their car and took off. Rose didn’t shift an inch. She was wobbling on her legs as it was, and frankly she wasn’t sure what to do.

  It was pounding in her head. This could have been so much worse. I should have listened to him.

  Plato had whipped out his cell and was snarling into it as he crossed the few feet between them. The arm he used to drag her in against him was not gentle. Rose instinctively pressed her face into the lapel of his coat. He felt solid and hot and very male, still pumping out testosterone although they were safe now. Weren’t they? With other people passing them on the street, going about their business, it all felt very normal.

  ‘Plato—’

  ‘Nichivo,’ he said briefly, shoving his phone back into his coat.

  He had put in a report to the police. He could give her his full attention. He knew what she’d seen had been seedy, dangerous, confusing to a woman like Rose. She would have questions, or maybe she wouldn’t. She needed comfort and soft words and protection. He could offer her protection, but he didn’t have any soft words for her. All he had was blood hammering in his head and surging into his groin. He was going to have her, and he didn’t much care for her opinion on the matter.