Not Just the Boss's Plaything

by Caitlin Crews

  “I don’t want to do this.” Her voice was small, but still firm, and she thought she’d be proud, later, that she kept her head high. Even in defeat. “Any of it.”

  “I know you don’t,” Nikolai said, whole winters in his voice, in his beautiful eyes, so blue she wanted to cry. And there was a flash of something there, bright for a moment and then gone, as if this was more of a struggle for him than it seemed. It scared her, how much she wanted to believe that. “But you will.”

  * * *

  Alicia sat where Nikolai had put her, at the corner of the dark wood table that stretched across a significant length of the great two-story room that was the center of his apartment, all low-slung modern couches and soaring windows. Nikolai could read her stiff tension in the way she sat, the way she held her lips too tight, the precise, angry movements of her hands.

  His staff had served a five-star dinner that she’d barely touched. Nikolai hadn’t spoken a word, and she hadn’t broken the silence. Now she was pushing her dessert around on her plate, and he was well aware that her agitation level had skyrocketed even higher than before.

  Bastard that he was, that amused him. He lounged in his seat, at the head of the table with her at his right, and studied her. He would figure her out. He would solve the mystery of this woman and when he did, lose interest in her. It was inevitable.

  But he hadn’t anticipated he would enjoy the process quite this much.

  “You’re a terrible date,” he told her, and her dark eyes flashed when they met his. Then, after a moment, she rolled them. At him.

  No one else would dare.

  “Thank you,” she said in that dry way that made him want her beneath him, right there on the table. He had to yank himself back under control, and it was significantly harder than it should have been. Focus, he ordered himself. “I can see why you’re considered such a catch.”

  “This is an excellent opportunity to discuss my expectations,” Nikolai said, as if her fearless defiance didn’t make him want to lick his way into the heat of her, to make her writhe and sob in his hands. And he would, he promised himself, as soon as they came to an understanding. “Dating me comes with a number of requirements, Alicia. Making appropriate dinner conversation is only one of them.”

  “You’re perfectly capable of making conversation,” she pointed out in the same dry tone. “In fact, you’re doing it right now, though I don’t know if it qualifies as ‘appropriate.’” She considered him for a moment, a small smile that he didn’t like, yet found he wanted to taste, flirting with her full lips. “I suspected there must be some kind of application process and I’m delighted I’m right, but I’m not dating you. This isn’t real.” Her gaze turned hard on his. “This is blackmail.”

  “Call it whatever you like,” he said, with a careless shrug. “The result is the same.”

  “Blackmail,” she repeated, very distinctly. “I think you’ll find that’s what it’s called when you force someone into doing something they don’t want to do by holding something else over their head.”

  Nikolai could see all of that temper in her dark gaze, the flash of it when she couldn’t hide her feelings. She wore a sleeveless wool top tonight in a deep aubergine shade, with a neck that drooped down low and left her smooth, toned arms on display, looking soft and sweet in the candlelight. But most important, he could see every time she tensed, every time she forced herself to relax, written up and down the lean, elegant shape of those arms and all across her slender frame. Like now, when she forced her shoulders back and down, then smiled at him as if she wasn’t agitated at all.

  She didn’t know, yet, that he could read her body the way others read words on a page. But she would learn, and he would greatly enjoy teaching her. First, though, they had business to take care of. If it alarmed him that he had to remind himself of business before pleasure for the first time in living memory, he ignored it.

  “There is a confidentiality agreement that you’ll need to sign,” he told her, dismissing her talk of blackmail, which he could see she didn’t like. “Beyond that, I have only standard expectations. Don’t venture out into public unless you’re prepared to be photographed, as terrible pictures of you could lead to negative coverage of me, which is unacceptable. I’ll let you know what pleases me—”

  “If you mention a single thing about altering my appearance to suit your tastes, whatever those might be,” she said almost conversationally, though there was murder in her eyes, “I will stab you with this fork. I’m not dating you, Nikolai. I’m acquiescing to your bizarre demands because I want to keep my job, but we’re not reenacting some sick little version My Fair Lady. I don’t care about pleasing you.”

  Nikolai was definitely enjoying himself. Especially when he saw that little shiver move through her, and knew they were both thinking about all the ways she could please him. All the ways she had. He smiled slightly.

  “Is that a passive-aggressive demand that I compliment your looks?” he asked silkily. “I had no idea you were so insecure, Alicia. I’d have thought the fact that I had my mouth on every inch of that gorgeous body of yours would have told you my feelings on that topic in no uncertain terms. Though I’m happy to repeat myself.”

  “I may stab you with this fork anyway.” She met his gaze then and smiled. But he could see that her breathing had quickened. He knew arousal when he saw it. When he’d already tasted it. All of that heat and need, sweet against her dark skin. “Fair warning.”

  “You can always try.”

  She considered that for a moment, then sat back against her chair, inclining her head slightly as if she held the power here and was granting him permission to carry on.

  “Don’t ever keep me waiting,” Nikolai said, continuing as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Anywhere. For any reason. My time is more valuable than yours.”

  Her eyes narrowed at that, but she didn’t speak. Perhaps she was learning, he thought—but he hoped not. He really hoped not. He wanted her conquered, not coerced. He wanted to do it himself, step by delectable step.

  “Don’t challenge my authority. In your case, I’ll allow some leeway because I find that smart mouth of yours amusing, but only a little leeway, Alicia, and never in public. Your role is as an ornament. I won’t tolerate disrespect or disobedience. And I will tell you what you are to me, explicitly—never imagine yourself anything else. I can’t stress that enough.”

  The silence between them then felt tighter. Hotter. Breathless, as if the great room had shrunk down until there was nothing but the two of them and the gently flickering candles. And her eyes were big and dark and he realized he could no longer read the way she looked at him.

  “You’re aware that this is a conversation about dating you for show, not working for you as one of your many interchangeable subordinates at the Korovin Foundation,” she said after a moment. “Aren’t you?”

  “The roles aren’t dissimilar.”

  He stretched his legs out in front of him and lounged even lower in the chair.

  “Is this your usual first date checklist, then?”

  Her gaze swept over him, and he had no idea what she saw. It surprised him how much he wanted to know.

  He nodded, never taking his gaze from hers. “More or less.”

  “You actually ask a woman to dinner and then present her with this list.” She sounded dubious, and something else he wasn’t sure he recognized. “Before or after you order starters? And what if she says no? Do you stand up and walk out? Leave her with the bill for her temerity?”

  “No one has ever said no.” He felt that fire between them reach higher, pull tighter. He could see it on her face. “And I don’t take women to dinner without a signed confidentiality agreement. Or anywhere else.”

  Alicia tapped a finger against her lips for a moment, and he wanted to suck that finger into his own mouth almo
st more than he wanted his next breath. Need raked through him, raw and hungry.

  “You brought me here that night,” she pointed out, her tone light, as if there was no tension between them at all. “I certainly didn’t sign anything.”

  Nikolai almost smiled. “You are an anomaly.”

  “Lucky me,” she murmured, faint and dry, and there was no reason that should have worked through him like a match against flint. He didn’t like anomalies. He shouldn’t have to keep telling himself that.

  “If you’ve absorbed the initial requirements,” he said, watching her intently now, “we can move on.”

  “There are more? The mind boggles.”

  She was mocking him, he was sure of it. He could see the light of it bright in her eyes and in that wicked twist of her lips, and for some reason, he didn’t mind it.

  “Sex,” he said, and liked the way she froze, for the slightest instant, before concealing her reaction. He had to shift in his seat to hide his.

  “You don’t really have rules for sex with your girlfriends, Nikolai,” she said softly. Imploring him. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “I think of this as setting clear boundaries,” he told her, leaning forward and smiling when she shivered and sat back. “It prevents undue confusion down the line.”

  “Undue confusion is what relationships are all about,” Alicia said, shaking her head. Her dark eyes searched his, then dropped to her lap. “I rather think that might be the whole point.”

  “I don’t have relationships.” He waited until her eyes were on him again, until that tension between them pulled taut and that electric charge was on high, humming through them both. “I have sex. A lot of it. I’ll make you come so many times your head will spin, which you already know is no idle boast, but in return, I require two things.”

  Nikolai watched her swallow almost convulsively, but she didn’t look away. She didn’t even blink. And he didn’t quite know why he felt that like a victory.

  “Access and obedience,” he said, very distinctly, and was rewarded with the faintest tremor across those lips, down that slender frame. “When I want you, I want you—I don’t want a negotiation. Just do what I tell you to do.”

  He could hear every shift in her breathing. The catch, the slow release. It took every bit of self-control he possessed to wait. To keep his distance. To let her look away for a moment and collect herself, then turn that dark gaze back on him.

  “I want to be very clear.” She leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table and keeping her eyes trained on him. “What you’re telling me, Nikolai, is that every woman pictured on your arm in every single photograph of you online has agreed to all of these requirements. All of them.”

  He wanted to taste her, a violent cut of need, but he didn’t. He waited.

  “Of course,” he said.

  And Alicia laughed.

  Silvery and musical, just as he remembered. It poured out of her and deep into him, and for a moment he was stunned by it. As if everything disappeared into the sound of it, the way she tipped back her head and let it light up the room. As if she’d hit him from behind and taken him down to the ground without his feeling a single blow.

  That laughter rolled into places frozen so solid he’d forgotten they existed at all. It pierced him straight through to a core he hadn’t known he had. And it was worse now than it had been that first night. It cut deeper. He was terribly afraid it had made him bleed.

  “Laugh as much as you like,” he said stiffly when she subsided, and was sitting back in her chair, wiping at her too-bright eyes. “But none of this is negotiable.”

  “Nikolai,” she said, and that clutched at him too, because he’d never heard anyone speak his name like that. So warm, with all of that laughter still moving through her voice. It was almost as if she spoke to someone else entirely, as if it wasn’t his name at all—but she looked directly at him, those dark eyes dancing, and he felt as if she’d shot him. He wished she had. He knew how to handle a bullet wound. “I’ll play this game of yours. But I’m not going to do any of that.”

  He was so tense he thought he might simply snap into pieces, but he couldn’t seem to move. Her laughter sneaked inside him, messing him up and making even his breathing feel impossibly changed. He hated it.

  So he couldn’t imagine why he wanted to hear it again, with an intensity that very nearly hurt.

  “That’s not one of your options,” he told her, his voice the roughest he’d ever heard it.

  But she was smiling at him, gently, and looked wholly uncowed by his tone.

  “If I were you, Nikolai,” she said, “I’d start asking myself why I’m so incapable of interacting with other people that I come up with ridiculous rules and regulations to govern things that are supposed to come naturally. That are better when they do.”

  “Because I am a monster,” he said. He didn’t plan it. It simply came out of his mouth and he did nothing to prevent it. She stopped smiling. Even the brightness in her eyes dimmed. “I’ve never been anything else. These rules and regulations aren’t ridiculous, Alicia. They’re necessary.”

  “Do they make you feel safe?” she asked with a certain quiet kindness he found deeply alarming, as if she knew things she couldn’t possibly guess at, much less know.

  But this was familiar ground even so. He’d had this same conversation with his brother, time and again. He recognized the happy, delusional world she’d come from that let her ask a question like that, and he knew the real world, cynical and bleak. He recognized himself again.

  It was a relief, cold and sharp.

  “Safety is a delusion,” he told her curtly, “and not one I’ve ever shared. Some of us live our whole lives without succumbing to that particular opiate.”

  She frowned at him. “Surely when you were a child—”

  “I was never a child.” He pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. “Not in the way you mean.”

  She only watched him, still frowning, as he crossed his arms over his chest, and she didn’t move so much as a muscle when he glared down at her. She didn’t shrink back the way she should. She looked at him as if he didn’t scare her at all, and it ate at him. It made him want to show her how bad he really was—but he couldn’t start down that road. He had no idea where it would lead.

  “Why do you think my uncle tried to keep me in line with a kitchen knife? It wasn’t an accident. He knew what I was.”

  “Your parents—”

  “Died in a fire with seventy others when I was barely five years old,” he told her coldly. “I don’t remember them. But I doubt they would have liked what I’ve become. This isn’t a bid for sympathy.” He shrugged. “It’s a truth I accepted a long time ago. Even my own brother believes it, and this after years of being the only one alive who thought I could be any different. I can’t.” He couldn’t look away from her dark eyes, that frown, from the odd and wholly novel notion that she wanted to fight for him that opened up a hollow in his chest. “I won’t.”

  “Your brother is an idiot.” Her voice was fierce, as if she was prepared to defend him against Ivan—and even against himself, and he had no idea what to do with that. “Because while families always have some kind of tension, Nikolai, monsters do not exist. No matter what an uncle who holds a knife on a child tells you. No matter what we like to tell ourselves.”

  “I’m glad you think so.” Nikolai wasn’t sure he could handle the way she looked at him then, as if she hurt for him. He wasn’t sure he knew how. “Soft, breakable creatures like you should believe there’s nothing terrible out there in the dark. But I know better.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THAT WAS PAIN on his face.

  In those searing eyes of his. In the rough scrape of his voice. It was like a dark stain that spilled out from deep inside of him, as i
f he was torn apart far beneath his strong, icy surface. Ravaged, it dawned on her, as surely as if that ferocious thing on his chest rent him to pieces where he stood.

  Alicia felt it claw at her, too.

  “I’m neither soft nor breakable, Nikolai.” She kept her voice steady and her gaze on his, because she thought he needed to see that he hadn’t rocked her with that heartbreakingly stark confession, even if he had. “Or as naive as you seem to believe.”

  “There are four or five ways I could kill you from here.” His voice was like gravel. “With my thumb.”

  Alicia believed him, the way she’d believed he’d be good in bed when he’d told her he was, with a very similar matter-of-fact certainty. It occurred to her that there were any number of ways a man could be talented with his body—with his clever hands for pleasure, with his thumb for something more violent—and Nikolai Korovin clearly knew every one of them. She thought she ought to be frightened by that.

  What was wrong with her that she wasn’t?

  “Please don’t,” she said briskly, as if she couldn’t feel the sting of those claws, as if she didn’t see that thick blackness all around him.

  Nikolai stared at her. He stood so still, as if he expected he might need to bolt in any direction, and he held himself as if he expected an attack at any moment. As if he expected she might be the attacker.

  Alicia thought of his coldness tonight, that bone-deep chill that should have hurt, so much harsher than the gruff, darkly amusing man she’d taken by surprise in that club. Who’d surprised her in return. She thought about what little he’d told her of his uncle meant for the boy he must have been—what he must have had to live through. She thought about a man who believed his own brother thought so little of him, and who accepted it as his due. She thought of his lists of rules that he obviously took very seriously indeed, designed to keep even the most intimate people in his life at bay.

  I am a monster, he’d said, and she could see that he believed it.