“Nor you from yours?” She studied a scowling patron in a nearby box who appeared to be watching her through his raised opera glasses. “In fact, I’m rather surprised your people are willing to tolerate this venue. We could be sitting here discussing high treason. With the noise of the crowd and the performance when it resumes, it’s doubtful any listening devices—ours or yours—would even pick it up.”
“You might be surprised,” he muttered, one corner of his mouth quirking down.
Reminding herself of her meeting objectives, she snapped open her briefcase. “May I ask you, Captain Kostenko—?”
His blond head swiveled toward her, sharp as a barracuda knifing toward its prey. This close to him, she could see the smile lines raying out around his eyes, creasing his suntanned skin. So he did smile, apparently, from time to time. Yet the sharp furrow between his brows suggested a martinet’s severity. Faint grooves etched his forehead from years of squinting through his periscope—targeting her own navy, and she’d better not forget it.
Not a young man, certainly, but one in his prime. Mature and man-of-the-world enough to attract her attention under other circumstances—maybe—simply because she’d always been drawn to older men. That was one aspect of her sex drive that her philandering ex-husband hadn’t quite managed to screw up.
Unfortunately, she still couldn’t quell her edgy awareness of the man. If anything, she felt warier and more exposed than before, since tonight the captain was inexplicably exerting himself to be halfway civil. Even if he hadn’t shed that armor of cool aloofness that probably came with the epaulets. A high-ranking Russian officer, a guy who’d made himself infamous in the unforgiving post-Soviet system for his penchant to break the rules.
A guy who—as she knew perfectly well, despite her dismissive words to Geoff—might indeed be an agent under orders to compromise her. He could hardly be more verboten.
“Captain Kostenko,” she repeated, hands clenching around her briefcase. “I’m obliged to pose this question. Why did you choose this particular venue for our appointment? We could have met at your ministry with perfect decorum and without risk.”
“Don’t get excited, Ms. Castle,” he mocked softly, his electric-blue eyes snapping with amusement. “I am not about to inform you of my intention to defect.”
“What a relief,” she said dryly. “With affairs between our countries at their current ebb, I’m not certain U.S.-Russian relations could survive it if you did.”
“Indeed.” He inclined his head. “The dynamic between our two nations is growing more…complex. All MFA staff have been instructed from the top not to accept any official meetings with your government on the Ukraine issue—as a signal of Russia’s insistence that we have committed no offense.”
Startled, Alexis dug in her briefcase for her notepad and pen. “We’ve heard nothing of this, captain. Are you certain?”
He raised a chilly brow. “I am the Director of the Security Affairs and Disarmament Department, Ms. Castle. Perhaps you will concede that I’m in a position to know.”
“Of course,” she murmured, face heating as she bent to scribble a note. “But this is new and important information. My capital must be notified immediately.”
“Of course.” He was still giving her the raised eyebrow, but now irony shaded his voice. “What use to send a signal if no one on the receiving end notices?”
“What else can you tell me?” Now Alexis was all business.
“I can tell you that the government of the Russian Federation wishes to maintain unofficial and informal channels of communication with yours on this issue—at my level.” His voice altered, deepened. “So as you see, Ms. Castle, I have now an unimpeachable excuse to entertain you from the most elegant to the most risqué locales in Moscow, on a weekly or even nightly basis…if one were to wish for that.”
Her breath snared in her throat, heart stuttering like a novice Third Secretary fielding orders from the President. Outbluffed and outgunned—damn it, she was better than this. Kostenko had to be mocking her, trying to disconcert her. Or maybe he simply viewed her as another chance to flaunt the rules by implying that some sort of inappropriate attraction sizzled between them.
“Would one wish for such a thing, captain?” She raised a skeptical brow to show him she wouldn’t rise to his bait, but found herself retreating before he could pounce. “Naturally, I can do nothing and commit to nothing without instructions from my capital.”
“Naturally.” A diabolical gleam flickered in those diamond-hard eyes as he shrugged, probably for the benefit of their viewing audience. “Do what you must, Ms. Castle.”
Behind the concealment of the low barrier before them, he leaned in and captured her hand. Alexis lost any semblance of professional detachment when she fumbled and dropped her pen.
Taking advantage of that flicker of hesitation, he tightened his warm calloused grip. The rugged hand of a laborer or an extreme sports enthusiast, exactly the type of rough-edged adventurer that always turned her on. But he was escalating their encounter to the physical for purely strategic reasons, so why the hell was she thinking about guys who’d turned her on?
“Captain.” She firmed her voice and her wobbly defenses. “Would you mind, ah, retrieving my pen?”
Ignoring her request, he turned her hand upward, traced the lines of her palm, feather light. An unexpected shiver of pleasure zinged up her arm, making her entire body tingle.
Escalation or not, this was highly inappropriate. And wasn’t that the understatement of the century? You’re a third-degree black belt, Alexis. Whatever he’s up to here, trying to intimidate you or whatever—just pull away.
“Tell them in Washington whatever you wish,” he murmured in a liquid torrent of Russian that arrested her, head bowed over her hand. The hot brush of his breath on her palm made her shudder as his cobalt eyes seared into her. “Tell them, why don’t you, that the first time I saw you at the German Ambassador’s residence, I burned to discover how you would look and feel and taste in my bed.”
Whoa. The raw physical shock of those words surged through her. Surely he’d said it to disconcert her, throw her off-stride. Did he guess it’d been years since any man pursued her sexually—all too intimidated, she supposed, by her crisp diplomatic persona and her famous last name?
But Kostenko’s underhanded tactics appeared to be working, because she couldn’t seem to get enough breath into her lungs to challenge him. Consequently, that current of low-voiced Russian kept rolling right over her.
“Tell them in Washington that I’ve thought of nothing else.” His eyes riveted hers like lasers, tracking her every reaction. “Tell them your knees go weak and you get goosebumps when I touch you. Tell them everything—if you require instructions from your capital to know how to respond.”
She sucked in oxygen to roast him for his arrogance—and to rebuff him, that went without saying. She needed to regain control with an unequivocal rejection, for the sake of her career, and for so many other reasons she couldn’t even count them.
“I hardly require instructions from Washington, captain, to know how to deal with a man like you. A woman in my position gets hit on all the time, unfortunately, so your antics barely stir my interest.”
“But you’ll report the conquest to your capital nonetheless, won’t you?” He froze her with an icy smile, shocking after his heated words. “I’m fairly certain they’ll tell you ‘well done hooking him,’ and to reel me in. As that seems to be your government’s current modus operandi for its dealings with mine.”
The hell of it was that she couldn’t deny it. Oliver Grey had done exactly that, though her predecessor still claimed he’d fallen in love with his counterpart, and the Russians were furious about it. Still, that hardly gave them the right to pull the same stunt on her.
“Or should I consider it mere coincidence,” the captain murmured, “that the government of the United States has appointed you to become my counterpart—the woman they calculated I’
d be least able to resist?”
OK, he was definitely playing her, plucking her strings like a maestro with a violin. Kostenko had to know her own husband had proven eminently capable of resisting her, that it was all those models and aspiring film stars Geoff hadn’t been able to resist—his coterie of trophy girlfriends. So the captain was trying to manipulate her insecurities, and she’d better not let him think his underhanded ploy was working.
“Sorry, but I’m still unmoved by your charms,” she said blandly. “If you want to disconcert me, I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that.”
“Is that a request or an instruction?” His mouth nuzzled her palm, shredding every pretense of indifference she’d projected. A deep throb of response rolled through her, shocking her.
Low in her throat, a sound shivered out before she could swallow it. And despite the murmur of half-a-dozen languages rising from the parterre, she prayed he hadn’t detected it—he, whose life had hung on listening and reacting in the ocean’s dark depths.
He shot her an upward look from eyes that flickered with electric heat. “How am I doing now, Ms. Castle?”
The shrill chime of a mobile phone sliced through the vibrating web of tension between them. Must be his phone, since Alexis had switched hers off in preparation for their appointment. She jumped and snatched her hand away.
Kostenko allowed this strategic retreat, thank God, because she needed a minute to reassemble her fractured poise. But at least she didn’t seem to be the only one who’d been disconcerted, since annoyance at the interruption made him scowl.
Extracting the flat silver phone from his pocket, he glanced at the display, then uttered a curt apology and flipped it open.
“Damn it, man,” he growled into the receiver. “What is it?”
While he handled the call, Alexis retrieved her pen and pulled herself together. He’d just been testing the waters, hadn’t he? Taking a sounding of her terrain, to assess how vulnerable she might be—a recent divorcee whose ex’s infidelities were public knowledge—to the same trick her team had just pulled on his. Or maybe Kostenko viewed her as a juicy bonus, a way to indulge his appetite for adventure while getting back in his government’s good graces
But she was no longer a starry-eyed kid, to be swept off her feet by a casual touch. God knew she’d done enough experimenting at Stanford during those four heady years of freedom when she’d thought—mistakenly, naively—that she’d broken free of her father’s smothering shadow.
She’d learned enough about herself in all those beds to figure out that sexual bliss for women was an urban legend. That the mechanical shock of climax was something she could induce in herself without the bother, the risk, the head-games of a seduction. She’d learned to barricade herself against the inevitable feelings of loss and abandonment that sucked at her once her casual flings were over. Above all, she’d learned not to rely on the temporary mirage of intimacy—that brief escape from the gnawing ache of solitude, when she cuddled with the guy for an hour or two afterward.
If she’d wanted a meaningful relationship, she would have had to cede control to someone else. She hadn’t cared to make herself that vulnerable.
So she understood that Victor Kostenko could offer her nothing more than a fleeting thrill, with the added fillip of danger thrown in. It was hardly worth losing her career over, no matter how strongly her sex-starved body reacted to his touch.
“I can’t come there now,” the captain growled into his phone. “For once, they’ll have to manage their crisis without me. I’ll eliminate the loose ends tomorrow.”
He snapped the phone shut, with another gruff apology for the interruption. Composed, Alexis extracted the documents from her briefcase and managed a wry smile.
“Careful, captain,” she murmured. “First an invitation to the ballet, and now suddenly you’re observing social courtesies. Much more of this, and I’ll suspect you of being human after all.”
“That would be a mistake, Ms. Castle.” He smiled, the convulsive tightening of his lips that didn’t denote humor. “I can see you’re determined to sandbag me with that damned demarche. Better do it now, before the intermission’s over.”
Though she couldn’t help feeling a bit off-balance—which had to be what he’d intended, right?—Alexis drew on her years of diplomatic experience and felt she made a credible job of it. The captain listened with narrowed eyes, accepted the U.S. documents with a flicker of scorn for the political niceties, and rapped out a few points in response.
Predictably, the Russians continued to deploy the fiction that their navy occupied Ukrainian waters while they conducted training exercises with the host nation. When in fact the Ukrainian president had declared the exercises over a week ago, and politely asked the Russians to get out.
As an aggravating factor, Ukraine’s reform-minded president was now threatening to expel the Russians from their shared Soviet-era naval base in Sevastopol if the blockade wasn’t broken. Clearly, little Ukraine was scared shitless, but Alexis privately considered the threat a mistake. Evicting the Russians from their rented base in Ukraine would eviscerate the Russian naval presence in the Black Sea—a blow Moscow would never tolerate.
Instead of dissuading the Russians with the threatened expulsion, Ukraine was forcing their hand.
Alexis jotted down Kostenko’s arguments, paying careful attention to the diplomatic hedge-words he pronounced with such disdain. Of course, the Russians were taking advantage of the fact that Ukraine wasn’t yet a NATO ally, despite strong U.S. support. Unfortunately for Ukraine, the European allies were reluctant to risk their troops on behalf of a struggling democracy with profound economic challenges. Not to mention an environmental disaster like Chernobyl still oozing radionuclides over broad swaths of its terrain.
By the time the lights dimmed for the second act, Alexis was satisfied that she’d carried out her instructions. Better yet, she’d made such a performance of passing the documents that no one watching could possibly construe this cozy tete-a-tete as anything but an official meeting.
Now she was itching to make her excuses and get out of there. She had a reporting cable to write, and she needed it on Geoff’s desk by start-of-business tomorrow to head off any more unsubtle hints about her precarious position. But Kostenko was just wrapping up, as if he’d timed it that way, when the curtain rose on the second act. Not Swan Lake as she’d thought, but rather Giselle, another classic ballet, the tragic tale of two lovers parted by death.
Her diplomat’s sense of dignity wouldn’t permit her to cause a disruption by rushing out like a frightened virgin just because he’d hit on her—especially when she distrusted his motives so thoroughly. Before leaving, she would send a strong message to Victor Kostenko: it would take far more than an inappropriate sexual come-on to disconcert or divert her.
Maybe she needed to prove something to herself as well. She’d never run away from a professional challenge. She’d certainly never needed to run from a man whose sex appeal held any danger of overwhelming her perennial self-control. And she damn well wasn’t going to start running now.
Even if she knew she was playing with fire. She’d been a woman playing in a man’s world her entire career. She’d always been able to handle the heat without getting scorched.
Though she’d seen the ballet before, Alexis had to admire the exceptional dancing, the breathtaking scenery, and the classic traditional choreography. As she tucked away her notebook, she paused to savor the unobstructed view—a novelty in the Bolshoi from any seat. Certainly her unruffled calm must be sending the right message, because Kostenko seemed to be keeping his distance.
I’ve proven my point. So I’ll leave in five minutes, she decided, leaning forward to appreciate the live orchestra that gave voice to Adolphe Adam’s graceful melodies.
In her peripheral vision, the captain too seemed absorbed, his harsh features intent, the fingers of one hand idly tapping out the rhythms on his thigh. She’d read in his dossier tha
t he was into classical music—God help her, extreme sports and classical music, a real Renaissance man. And of course he’d married a ballerina, though his ex danced in a different ballet company, and thus wouldn’t be performing tonight.
The ballet swept toward its sorrowful climax. In torment, the unfaithful mortal hero beheld the ghostly lover who’d killed herself over his betrayal, while she danced with other pale spirits among the moonlit tombstones. Alexis turned fully toward the stage, away from her companion, determined to prove her utter indifference to him—despite the edgy awareness she still couldn’t seem to shake.
Her senses snapped to full alert when he leaned in close behind her, measured breath teasing her neck.
“How would you describe the theme,” he whispered, “to one who hasn’t seen it?”
So much for her vaunted indifference. Tremors of unease rippled through her at his nearness: an aggressive global power that was her country’s greatest rival, and he was breathing down her neck. A sleepless eye that watched in the deep, a cunning predator with infinite patience—and now he’d fixed his sights on her.
“The theme of this ballet?” She held herself apart, and strove for a casual tone. “Lost love, I suppose, or something equally melodramatic. What else would it be?”
“Are you so indifferent to passion?” He uttered a soft laugh. “As for myself, I think the theme is longing…for the physical consummation of love.”
Whisper-light, his lips brushed her nape and lingered there, caressing. Even as the shock of his touch jolted through her, a shudder of raw pleasure rippled along her nerves, turning her bones to water, dancing like tongues of fire over the fine hairs along her body. As the intimate darkness embraced them and the violins moaned, the deep throb of oboes and bassoons vibrated through her blood.
The Russian Seduction Page 4
