“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.
“Your sins are pretty,” she’d whispered.
He’d muttered something ferocious in Russian as he’d hauled her mouth to his, then he’d pulled her astride him and surged into her with a dark fury and a deep hunger that had thrilled her all the way through, and she’d been lost in him all over again.
She was still lost.
“For God’s sake, Alicia,” she bit out, tired of the endless cycle of her own thoughts, and her own appalling weakness. Her voice sounded loud in her small office. “You have work to do.”
She had to snap out of this. Her desk was piled high after her two weeks abroad, her in-box was overflowing and she had a towering stack of messages indicating calls she needed to return now that she was back in the country. To say nothing of the report on the Latin American offices she’d visited while away that she had yet to put together, that Charlotte, her supervisor, expected her to present to the team later this week.
But she couldn’t sink into her work the way she wanted, the way she usually could. There was that deep current of shame that flared inside of her, bright like some kind of cramp, reminding her of the last night she’d abandoned herself so completely....
At least this time, she remembered every last second of what she’d done. What they’d done. Surely that counted for something.
Her body still prickled now, here, as if electrified, every time she thought of him—and she couldn’t seem to stop. Her nipples went hard and between her legs, she ran so hot it almost hurt, and it was such a deep betrayal of who she’d thought she’d become that it made her feel shaky.
Her thighs were still tender from the scrape of his hard jaw. There was a mark on the underside of one breast that he’d left deliberately, reminding her in that harsh, beautiful voice that wolves bite, solnyshka, making her laugh and squirm in reckless delight beneath him on that wide, masculine bed where she’d obviously lost her mind. Even her hips held memories of what she’d done, reminding her of her overwhelming response to him every now and again with a low, almost-pleasant ache that made her hate herself more every time she felt it.
She’d been hung over before. Ashamed of herself come the dawn. Sometimes that feeling had lingered for days as she’d promised herself that she’d stop partying so hard, knowing deep down that she wouldn’t, and hadn’t, until that last night in the back garden. But this wasn’t that. This was worse.
She felt out of control. Knocked flat. Changed, utterly.
A stranger to herself.
Alicia had been so sure the new identity she’d built over these past eight years was a fortress, completely impenetrable, impervious to attack. Hadn’t she held Rosie at bay for ages? But one night with Nikolai had showed her that she was nothing but a glass house, precarious and fragile, and a single stone could bring it all crashing down. A single touch.
Not to mention, she hadn’t even thought about protection that first time. He’d had to put it in her hand. Of all her many betrayals of herself that night, she thought that one was by far the most appalling. It made the shame that lived in her that much worse.
The only bright spot in all of this recrimination and regret was that her text to Rosie hadn’t gone through. There’d been a big X next to it when she’d looked at her mobile that next morning. And when she’d arrived back at their flat on Sunday morning, Rosie had still been out.
Which meant that no one had any idea what Alicia had done.
“I wish I’d gone home when you did,” Rosie had said with a sigh while they sat in their usual Sunday-afternoon café, paging lazily through the Sunday paper and poking at their plates of a traditional full English breakfast. “That place turned absolutely mental after hours, and I have to stop getting off with bankers who talk about the flipping property ladder like it’s the most thrilling thing on the planet.” Then she’d grinned that big grin of hers that meant she didn’t regret a single thing, no matter what she said. “Maybe someday I’ll actually follow your example.”
“What fun would that be?” Alicia had asked lightly, any guilt she’d felt at lying by giant, glaring omission to her best friend drowned out by the sheer relief pouring through her.
Because if Rosie didn’t know what she’d done, Alicia could pretend it had never happened.
There would be no discussing Nikolai, that SUV of his or what had happened in it, or that astonishing penthouse that she’d been entirely too gauche not to gape at, openly, when he’d brought her home. There would be no play-by-play description of those things he could do with such ease, that Alicia hadn’t known could feel like that. There would certainly be no conversations about all of these confusing and pointless things she felt sloshing around inside of her when she thought about those moments he’d showed her his vulnerable side, as if a man whose last name she didn’t know and hadn’t asked was something more than a one-night stand.
And if there was no one to talk about it with, all of this urgency, this driving sense of loss, would disappear. It had to. Alicia would remain, outwardly, as solid and reliable and predictably boring as she’d become in these past years. An example. The same old Saint Alicia, polishing her halo.
And maybe someday, if she was well-behaved and lucky, she’d believe it again herself.
“Are you ready for the big meeting?”
Her supervisor’s dry voice from the open doorway made Alicia jump guiltily in her chair, and it was much harder than it should have been to smile at Charlotte the way she usually did. She was sure what she’d done over her weekend was plastered all over her face. That Charlotte could see how filthy she really was, the way her father had. All her sins at a single glance, like that furious creature that bristled on Nikolai’s chest.
“Meeting?” she echoed weakly.
“The new celebrity partnership?” Charlotte prompted her. At Alicia’s blank look, she laughed. “We all have to show our faces in the conference hall in exactly five minutes, and Daniel delivered a new version of his official presidential lecture
on tardiness last week. I wouldn’t be late.”
“I’ll be right along,” Alicia promised, and this time, managed a bit of a better smile.
She sighed heavily when Charlotte withdrew, feeling much too fragile. Hollow and raw, as if she was still fighting off that hangover she hadn’t had. But she knew it was him. Nikolai. That much fire, that much wild heat, had to have a backlash. She shouldn’t be surprised.
This will fade, she told herself, and she should know, shouldn’t she? She’d had other things to forget. It always does, eventually.
But the current of self-loathing that wound through her then suggested otherwise.
This was not the end of the world. This was no more than a bit of backsliding into shameful behavior, and she wasn’t very happy with herself for doing it, but it wouldn’t happen again.
No one had walked in on her doing it. No one even knew. Everything was going to be fine.
Alicia blew out a shaky breath, closed down her computer, then made her way toward the big conference hall on the second floor, surprised to find the office already deserted. That could only mean that the celebrity charity in question was a particularly thrilling one. She racked her brain as she climbed the stairs, but she couldn’t remember what the last memo had said about it or even if she’d read it.
She hated these meetings, always compulsory and always about standard-waving, a little bit of morale-building, and most of all, PR. They were a waste of her time. Her duties involved the financial planning and off-site management of the charity’s regional offices scattered across Latin America. Partnering with much bigger, much more well-known celebrity charities was more of a fundraising and publicity endeavor, which always made Daniel, their president, ecstatic—but didn’t do much for Alicia.
She was glad she was a bit late, she thought as she hurried down the gleaming hallway on the second level. She could slip in, stand at the back, applaud loudly at something to catch Daniel’s eye and prove she’d attended, then slip back out again and return to all that work on her messy desk.
Alicia silently eased open the heavy door at the rear of the hall. Down at the front, a man was talking confidently to the quiet, rapt room as she slipped inside.
At first she 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, 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 swiveled 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.
Once again, everything disappeared. There was only the fearsome blue of his beautiful eyes as they nailed her to the door behind her, slamming into her so hard she didn’t know how she withstood it, how she wasn’t on her knees from the force of it.
He was even more devastating than she’d let herself remember.
Still dressed all in black, today he wore an understated, elegant suit that made his lethal frame look consummately powerful rather than raw and dangerous, a clever distinction. And one that could only be made by expert tailoring to the tune of thousands upon thousands of pounds. The brutal force of him filled the room, filled her, and her body reacted as if they were still naked, still sprawled across his bed in a tangle of sheets and limbs. She felt too hot, almost feverish. His mouth was a harsh line, but she knew how it tasted and what it could do, and there was something dark and predatory in his eyes that made her tremble deep inside.
And remember. Dear God, what she remembered. What he’d done, how she’d screamed, what he’d promised and how he’d delivered, again and again and again....
It took her much too long to recollect where she was now.
Not in a club in Shoreditch this time, filled with drunken idiots who wouldn’t recall what they did, much less what she did, but in her office. Surrounded by every single person she worked with, all of whom were staring at her.
Nikolai’s gaze was so blue. So relentlessly, impossibly, mercilessly blue.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” Alicia managed to murmur, hoping she sounded appropriately embarrassed and apologetic, the way anyone would after slamming that door—and not as utterly rocked to the core, as lit up with shock and horror, as she felt.
It took a superhuman effort to wrench her gaze away from the man who stood there glaring at her—who wasn’t a figment of her overheated imagination, who had the same terrifying power over her from across a crowded room as he’d had in his bed, whom she’d never thought she’d see again, ever—and slink to an empty seat in the back row.
She would never know how she did it.
Down in the front of the room, a phalanx of assistants behind him and the screen above him announcing who he was in no uncertain terms, NIKOLAI KOROVIN OF THE KOROVIN FOUNDATION, she saw Nikolai blink. Once.
And then he kept talking as if Alicia hadn’t interrupted him. As if he hadn’t recognized her—as if Saturday night was no more than the product of her feverish imagination.
As if she didn’t exist.
She’d never wished so fervently that she didn’t. That she could simply disappear into the ether as if she’d never been, or sink into the hole in the ground she was sure his icy glare had dug beneath her.
What had she been thinking, to touch this man? To give herself to him so completely? Had she been drunk after all? Because today, here and now, he looked like nothing so much as a sharpened blade. Gorgeous and mesmerizing, but terrifying. That dark, ruthless power came off him in waves the way it had in the club, even stronger without the commotion of the music and the crowd, and this time, Alicia understood it.
This was who he was.
She knew who he was.
He was Nikolai Korovin. His brother was one of the most famous actors on the planet, which made Nikolai famous by virtue of his surname alone. Alicia knew his name like every other person in her field, thanks to his brilliant, inspired management of the Korovin Foundation since its creation two years ago. People whispered he was a harsh and demanding boss, but always fair, and the amount of money he’d already raised for the good causes the Korovin Foundation supported was staggering.
He was Nikolai Korovin, and he’d explored every part of her body with that hard, fascinating mouth. He’d held her in his arms and made her feel impossibly beautiful, and then he’d driven into her so hard, so deep, filling her so perfectly and driving her so out of her mind with pleasure, she had to bear down now to keep from reacting to the memory. He’d made her feel so wild with lust, so deliciously addicted to him, that she’d sobbed the last time she’d shattered into pieces all around him. She knew how he tasted. His mouth, his neck, the length of his proud sex. That angry, tattooed monster crouched on his chest. She knew what made him groan, fist his hands into her hair.
More than all of that, she knew how those bright eyes looked when he told her things she had the sense he didn’t normally speak of to anyone. She knew too much.
He was Nikolai Korovin, and she didn’t have to look over at Daniel’s beaming face to understand what it meant that he was here. For Daniel as president, for making this happen. For the charity itself. A partnership with the Korovin Foundation was more than a publicity opportunity—it was a coup. It would take their relatively small charity with global ambitions an
d slam it straight into the big time, once and for all. And it went without saying that Nikolai Korovin, the legendary CEO of the Korovin Foundation and the person responsible for all its business decisions, needed to be kept happy for that to happen.
That look on his face when he’d seen her had been anything but happy.
Alicia had to force herself to sit still as the implications of this washed through her. She had betrayed herself completely and had a tawdry one-night stand. That was bad enough. But it turned out she’d done it with a man who could end her career.
Eight years ago she’d lost her father’s respect and her own self-respect in the blur of a long night she couldn’t even recall. Now she could lose her job.
Today. At the end of this meeting. Whenever Nikolai liked.
When you decide to mess up your life, you really go for it, she told herself, fighting back the panic, the prick of tears. No simple messes for Alicia Teller! Better to go with total devastation!
Alicia sat through the meeting in agony, expecting something to happen the moment it ended—lightning to strike, the world to come crashing to a halt, Nikolai to summon her to the front of the room and demand her termination at once—but nothing did. Nikolai didn’t glance in her direction again. He and his many assistants merely swept from the hall like a sleek black cloud, followed by the still-beaming Daniel and all the rest of the upper level directors and managers.
Alicia told herself she was relieved. This had to be relief, this sharp thing in the pit of her stomach that made it hard to breathe, because nothing else made sense. She’d known he was dangerous the moment she’d met him, not that it had stopped her.
Now she knew exactly how dangerous.
She was an idiot. A soon-to-be-sacked idiot.
Her colleagues all grimaced in sympathy as they trooped back downstairs. They thought the fact she’d slammed that door was embarrassing enough. Little did they know.
“Can’t imagine having a man like that look at me the way he did you,” one said in an undertone. “I think I’d have nightmares!”
Not Just the Boss's Plaything Page 5
