Prince of Secrets

by Lucy Monroe

  Sex was a powerful force. “Body chemistry is so much more potent than I ever believed.” She sounded every bit as bewildered as she felt.

  “Because you have never felt it so strongly with someone else.” There was no question mark at the end of that sentence.

  Chanel would take umbrage at the certainty in his tone if Demyan didn’t speak the absolute truth.

  “I’m sure you have.”

  Something strange moved across his features. Surprise? Maybe confusion. “No.”

  “You stopped earlier, not me.”

  “It was not easy.”

  Was that supposed to make her feel better about the fact he’d been more determined to go to the lecture than she’d been? Sarcasm infused her voice as she said, “I’m glad to hear that.”

  His eyes narrowed, a spark of irritation showing before it disappeared. She wasn’t surprised. Demyan might not be the corporate shark her stepfather was, but he was not a man who liked to lose control, either.

  Not that he had. Now, or earlier.

  He had stopped after all, and right now, as much as she could read desire in his dark gaze, he wasn’t acting on it.

  She, on the other hand, was seconds away from kissing him silly. She, who had never initiated a kiss in her life.

  “Do you want to stay?” she asked baldly.

  Subtlety was all well and good for a woman who found the role of flirt comfortable, but that woman wasn’t Chanel.

  He smiled down at her. “Do you want me to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shock held his face immobile for the count of three seconds. “You don’t know?”

  She shook her head.

  “You didn’t seem unsure about what you wanted earlier tonight.” Disbelief laced his voice.

  She nodded, making no attempt to deny it. Subterfuge was not her thing. “I barely know you.”

  “Is that how it feels to you?”

  She experienced that strange sense of disparity she’d had with him before. The words were right, the expression concurrent and yet, she felt the lack of sincerity.

  Only, unlike at the dinner, there was a vein of honesty in his words that confused her.

  “You already know you could take me to bed with very little effort.”

  “I assure you, the effort will not be minimal.” Sensual promise vibrated in every word.

  Chanel felt his promise to her very core and her thighs squeezed together in involuntary response, not because she feared what he wanted but because it made her ache with a need she’d never known.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Her voice cracked on the last word, but she pretended not to notice.

  The slight flaring of his nostrils and the way his eyes went just that much darker said he had, though. “What did you mean then, little one?”

  “I’m hardly little.” At five foot seven, she was above average in height for a woman.

  “Do not avoid the question.”

  “I wasn’t trying to.” She’d just been trying to clarify, because that was familiar territory.

  The rest of this? Was not.

  Only he knew how tall she was, so if he wanted to call her little one, maybe that was okay. “I suppose I do seem kind of short to you. You’re not exactly average height for a man in North America, though maybe I should be comparing you to Ukrainians, as that’s your country’s formative gene pool.”

  In fact, he was well above average height, certainly taller than most of the men in her life, and that gave her a peculiar kind of pleasure. Which, like many things she’d discovered since meeting him, surprised her about herself.

  She’d never thought she would enjoy feeling protected when she was with a man, or that the difference in their height would even succeed in making her feel that way. Maybe it wasn’t just that difference but something else about Demyan entirely.

  Something intangible that didn’t quite match his casual designer sweaters and dark-rimmed glasses.

  “You do not seem short.” He tugged at one of her red curls, a soft smile playing about his lips as if he could read her thoughts and was amused by them. “You are just right.”

  This time there was no conflict between the words and sincerity in his manner.

  But it put the times there was in stark relief in her mind. “I can’t make you out.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked surprised again and she got the definite impression that didn’t happen a lot with him.

  “Sometimes I think you mean everything you say, but then there are times, like at dinner tonight, when it seems like you’re saying what you think I want to hear.”

  “I have not lied to you.” Affront echoed through his tone.

  “Haven’t you?”

  “No.” Dead certainty, and then almost as if it was drawn from him without his permission, “I have not told you everything about myself.”

  “I didn’t expect you to bring along an information dossier on our first date.” Of course she didn’t know everything about him; that was part of the dating process, wasn’t it? “You don’t know everything about me, either.”

  His gaze turned cold, almost ruthless. Then he adjusted his glasses and the look disappeared. “I know what I need to.”

  Sometimes there was a glimmer of another man there—a man that even a shark like Perry would swim from in a frantic effort to escape. Then Demyan would smile and the impression of that other man would dissipate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DEMYAN DIDN’T SMILE now, but she knew the man in front of her wasn’t a shark.

  Not like the overcritical Perry, and definitely not like someone even more ruthless than her stepfather. There was too much kindness in Demyan, even if he was wholly unaware of it, as Chanel suspected he was.

  “What did you mean earlier?” he asked, pulling her back to the original question.

  Oh, yes…right.

  “It’s just…you must realize I’m a sure thing. Even if I’m not sure I want to be.”

  “Why aren’t you sure?” he asked, deflecting himself this time.

  Or maybe he just really wanted to know. Being the center of someone else’s undivided attention when she wasn’t discussing her work wasn’t something Chanel was used to.

  When she was with Demyan, he focused solely on her, though, as if nothing was more important to him. He wanted to know things others reacted to with impatience, not interest. It was a heady feeling.

  Even so, peeling away the layers to reveal her full self to him wasn’t easy. “You’ll laugh.”

  “Is it funny?”

  “Not to me.” Not even a little.

  “Then I will not laugh.”

  “How can you be so perfect?”

  “So long as I am perfect for you, that is all that matters.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Yes.” There could be no doubting the conviction in his tone or handsome features.

  “Why?”

  “Are you saying you feel differently?” he asked in a tone that implied he knew the answer.

  “Love at first sight doesn’t happen.”

  “Maybe for some people it does.”

  All the breath seemed to leave the room at his words. “Are you saying…” She had to clear her throat, suck in air and try again. “Are you saying you feel the same?”

  “I want to be your perfect man.”

  “You mean that.” And maybe it was past time she stopped doubting his sincerity.

  How much of her feeling he was saying what she wanted to hear stemmed from her own insecurities? Why was it so hard for her to accept that this man didn’t need her to be something or someone different to want to be with her?

  The answer was the years spent in a family she simply didn’t fit, the daughter of a mother and stepfather who found constant fault with a child too much like her own father for their comfort.

  “I do.”

  She nodded, accepting. Believing. “I’ve never had sex.”

  Once again she
’d managed to shock him. And this time she didn’t have to look for subtle signs.

  His whisker-shadowed jaw dropped and dark eyes widened comically. “You are twenty-nine.”

  “I’m not staring retirement in the face, or something.” She had eleven more years of relatively safe childbearing, even.

  Not that she thought she was going to marry and have children. She’d given up on that idea when she realized that even in the academic world, Chanel was a social misfit.

  “No, I didn’t mean that.” But his voice was still laced with surprise and his superior brain was clearly not firing on all cylinders. “You’re educated. American.”

  “So?” What in the world did her PhD in chemistry have to do with her virginity?

  “Are you completely innocent?”

  Man, did he even realize how that sounded?

  And people thought she was old-fashioned. “Even if I’d had sex, I would still be innocent. Sex isn’t a crime.”

  “You know that is not what I was referring to.”

  “No, I know, but innocent? Come on.”

  The look he was giving her was way too familiar.

  “I’m awkward,” she excused with a barely stifled sigh. “I told you.” Had he forgotten?

  “You are refreshingly direct.” That wasn’t disappointment in his tone and the look she thought she recognized.

  Well, it wasn’t. He almost looked admiring. If she believed it, and hadn’t she diced to do just that? “Mother calls it ridiculously blunt.”

  “Your mother does not see you as I do.”

  “I should hope not.”

  They both smiled at her small joke that did nothing to dissipate the emotional tension between them.

  He put his big hands on her shoulders, his thumbs brushing along her collarbone, the hold possessive like before. And just like earlier, she found a new unexpected part of her that liked that. A lot.

  “Demyan.” His name just sighed out of her.

  She didn’t know what she meant by it. What she wanted from him.

  He didn’t appear similarly lost, his gaze direct and commanding. “You say you’ve never had sex. I want to know what that means.”

  It took two tries to get words past her suddenly constricted throat. “Why does it matter?”

  “You can ask that?”

  “Um, yes.” Hadn’t she just done?

  “You are mine.”

  “Three dates,” she reminded him.

  “Love at first sight,” he countered.

  “You… I…”

  “We are going to make love. What I want to know is what you have done to this point.” His thumbs continued the sensual caress along her collarbone. “You are going to tell me.”

  “Bossy much?”

  “Only in bed.”

  She wasn’t sure she believed him, was even less sure if it mattered. She wasn’t worried about standing up for herself. She’d never conformed when it counted, no matter how much easier it would have made her life—especially with her family.

  Right now she found she wanted to answer his question, needed to. Still, she kept it general. “Heavy petting, I guess you’d say.”

  “Be more specific.”

  “No.” Heat crawled up her neck.

  He shouldn’t care, should he? Virginity wasn’t an issue for modern men. Or modern women, her inner voice mocked her, and yet you are a virgin.

  He bent so close their lips almost touched. “Oh, yes.”

  Thoughts came and went, no words making it past her lips until she made a sound she’d never heard from her own vocal cords before. It was something like surrender, but more.

  It was sexual.

  The air between them grew heavy with the most primal kind of desire, pushing against her, demanding her acquiescence.

  In a last-ditch desperate bid for space, she shut her eyes, but it did no good. She could feel his stare. Could feel his determination to get an answer.

  She was super sensitive to his nearness, too, her body aching to press against his, her lips going soft in preparation for his kiss.

  The kiss didn’t come.

  “Tell me,” puffed across her lips.

  The sound of his voice whispered through her, increasing the sensual fire burning through her veins.

  “It wasn’t anything.”

  “Were you naked?”

  “Once.”

  “Good.” He kissed her, his lips barely there and gone before she could lose herself in the caress she wanted more than air or research funding. “When?”

  “In college.”

  He just waited.

  “He told me he loved me.” She’d wanted to be loved so badly, she realized later.

  “You didn’t let him into your body.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “It didn’t feel right.” Old pain twisted through her heart.

  She turned her head away, stepping back when a few seconds before she would have said she wasn’t capable of moving at all, much less away from him.

  “He hurt you.” The growl in Demyan’s voice made Chanel’s eyes snap open, her gaze searching for him, for visual proof of what had been in his tone.

  The anger in his eyes wasn’t directed at her, but it still made Chanel shiver. “He broke up with me.”

  Her ex had called her a dried-up relic, a throwback woman who belonged in a medieval nunnery, not a modern university. Chanel had a lot of experience with disappointing her family, so her ex-boyfriend’s words should not have had the power to wound.

  She should have been inured.

  But they’d cut her deeply, traumatically so.

  She’d never shared with another person the experience that had left her convinced her mother and stepfather were right, had never admitted her ultimate failure.

  “I’m hopeless with men.” What was she doing here, wanting to give her body to a man destined to eviscerate her heart?

  He wasn’t ever going to stay with her. He said they were going to make love, but they couldn’t. He didn’t love her, no matter what his words had implied. He couldn’t.

  She wasn’t that woman.

  Chanel wasn’t a bubbly blonde beauty like her sister, Laura. She wasn’t a cool sophisticate like her mother. Chanel was the awkward one who could make perfect marks in chemistry courses but utterly fail at the human kind.

  She shook her head, her hands cold and shaking. “You should leave.”

  Another primal sound of anger came out of him before he crossed the small distance between them and yanked her body into his with tender ruthlessness. “I’m not going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever.”

  “You can’t make promises like that.” His breaking them was going to destroy something inside her that her parents and ex had been unable to touch.

  The belief that she was worth something.

  “I can.”

  “What? You’re going to marry me?” she demanded with pain-filled sarcasm.

  “Yes.”

  She couldn’t breathe, her vision going black around the edges. Words were torn from her, but they came out in barely a whisper. “You don’t mean that.”

  He cupped the back of her head, forcing her gaze to meet his. “I do.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I am a man of my word.”

  “Always?” she mocked, not believing.

  No one kept all their promises. Especially not to her. Hadn’t her father told her he’d always be there for her? But then he’d died. Her mother had promised, in the aftermath of Jacob Tanner’s death, that she and Chanel would always be a team, that she wouldn’t leave her daughter, wouldn’t die like her husband.

  Beatrice hadn’t died, but she’d abandoned Chanel emotionally within a year of her marriage to Perry, making it clear from that point on that the only team was the Saltzmans’. Chanel Tanner had no place on it.

  “Try me,” Demyan demanded, no insecurity about the future in his words.

  “You’ll destroy me.
”

  “No.”

  “Men like you…” Her words ran out as her heart twisted at the thought of never seeing him again.

  “Know our own minds.” There was that look in his eyes again.

  As if he was a man who always got what he set out to, no matter what he had to do to get it. As if she might as well give in because he never would.

  “I wanted to wait until I got married. I didn’t want to trap someone into a lifetime they would only resent.”

  “There are such things as birth control.”

  “My mom was on the Pill when she got pregnant with me. I was not part of her future plans. Neither was my father.”

  “She didn’t have to marry him.”

  “She loved him. At first.” Chanel didn’t know when that had changed.

  She’d been only eight when her dad died, but she’d believed her parents loved each other deeply and forever. It was her mother’s constant criticism and unfavorable comparisons later that made Chanel realize Beatrice had not approved of her husband any more than she did their daughter.

  “They were not compatible.” Demyan said it like he really knew—not that he could.

  “I thought they were, when I was little. I was wrong,” she admitted.

  “We aren’t them. We are compatible.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know more than you think I do. We belong together.” There was a message in his words she couldn’t quite decipher, but his dark gaze wasn’t giving any hints.

  “I told you I was a sure thing.” Though she wasn’t sure that was true. Part of her was still fighting the idea of total intimacy, especially at the cost of opening herself up like this. “You don’t have to say these things.”

  “I am not a man who makes a habit of saying things I do not mean.”

  “You never lie.” He’d as good as said so earlier.

  Something passed across his handsome features. “I have not lied to you.”

  His implication was unbelievable. “You really plan to marry me. After three dates?”

  “Yes.” There was so much certainty, such deep conviction in that single word.

  She could not doubt him, but it didn’t make sense. Her scientific brain could not identify the components of the formula of their interaction that had led to this reaction.

  In her lab she knew mixing one substance with another and adding heat, or cold, or simply agitation resulted in identifiable and documented results.