by Dani Collins
Sucking in a breath, he asked a question that shocked her. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“A man? No!”
Aleksy’s chuckle rasped her nerves. “Why do you say it like that?”
“Because—” Clair’s heart clenched. She felt her eyebrows pull together in a pained frown and turned to the windowsill to hide it, tracing some long ago child’s initials carved into the wood. She couldn’t find her voice to continue.
“You told me that’s what you wanted.” He sounded confused.
“I did. I do! I’m just not ready yet.” She wasn’t over him yet.
He didn’t say anything. She found the courage to glance back at him and found him eating her alive with his eyes, a tortured expression on his face.
He still desired her. It made her insides quiver with yearning. She felt the same way. Pulled.
“Aleksy, don’t,” she pleaded softly, increasing his agitation.
“I know, I know. Not with me.” He grimaced.
The bottom dropped out of Clair’s world. She wasn’t sure if she understood. “Aleksy,” she said haltingly, his name like honey on her tongue, “I thought you understood… Oh, I wish I could make you believe that you’re as entitled to happiness as anyone. Why do you have to say that? ‘Not with me.’”
“You said that,” he countered harshly.
“When?” But even as she said it, she remembered and closed her eyes.
“That last day in the kitchen,” he growled. “You went off about how I should subscribe to the Happy Ever After channel, but not with me.”
“Why on earth would I say with me when I’d just gotten off the phone with Lazlo and knew you were already sending me away?” she cried, aghast at how her voice cracked, revealing the stunning pain that still reverberated through her when she recalled it. “You didn’t even want me as a mistress anymore.”
She clenched her teeth, throat scraped raw as she thought of how she’d laid it on the table as plain as she’d been able. He’d stared at her with that same impenetrable stoniness he turned on her now.
“You spoke to Lazlo that morning?”
She jerked her shoulder. “He called me. To tell me that you were downplaying our relationship in the press,” she added in a charge. “Not even wanting to acknowledge we ever had anything between us—” She kneaded the place between her eyebrows, making her eyes sting.
“Clair, I was doing everything I could think of to protect you. Giving you an easy way out. You know what my life was like then.”
“No, actually, I don’t,” she railed, lifting her glossy eyes to him, vision too blurred to see the way his expression contracted with pain. “You barely told me anything. Never looked to me for comfort or… You hardly looked at me at all!” She snatched up a tissue with a shaking hand, mortified she was falling apart like this. “Not that we had that sort of relationship,” she reminded herself. “But I would have listened. I was trying to be there—”
“You were.” He was suddenly close, far too close, big warm hands covering hers as she tried to dab at her eyes. “You have no idea what it meant to me that you were there. The only bright spot I had. Don’t cry. Don’t let me make you cry. I can’t bear it.”
She was shaking even worse, swimming in the scent of his aftershave. His heat and strength reached out to her, making her want to sway into him and hold on tight.
She swallowed, trying to brush away the solicitous hands wiping the tears off her cheeks. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” He cradled her damp cheeks in his firm palms, making her entire body tremble. “Don’t try to protect you from every possible thing that could hurt you, including myself?”
“Is that why you sent me back to London?” she asked, stretching to understand what had seemed impossibly cruel and was far beyond what she could accept as reality.
“You wanted to go, Clair. I’d already forced you into an affair you didn’t want. I couldn’t keep you when you said you wanted to go.”
“You didn’t force me.”
“Don’t say that.” He dropped his hands and took a step back. “I showed all the finesse of a Neanderthal, conking you in your tender heart for this place, threatening your reputation, practically throwing you over my shoulder to carry you to my cave.”
“You really are your own worst critic. I know how to dial the police if I need them. I wouldn’t have gone with you if I didn’t want to.”
“You really are naive,” he countered with a feral glint in his eyes that made her pulse skip. The way he sobered and watched her so closely made her heart beat even faster. “Did you want to go when you left Russia?”
The question backed her into a corner. Her feet tingled with a need to retreat while hot-cold shivers raced over her. She crushed the damp tissue she still held, knuckles going white.
“Please don’t ask me to be your mistress again,” she managed to say.
“I won’t.”
The backs of her eyes filled with a hot sting. What a stupid thing to ask, she berated herself.
“Don’t,” he groaned, and suddenly she was yanked against his chest, off balance and caged by hard arms that held her in a gentle grip when she reacted and began to struggle. “Listen, Clair. Please listen for just one minute,” he whispered against her hair.
The movement of his lips on her skin stilled her more than the words, plucking at her heartstrings as she recalled all the tender ways he’d touched her. Need stirred in her, liquid heat settling low, preparing her for the pleasure they gave each other.
“You came into my life when I thought I had only one thing to offer a woman. I made you my mistress because that’s all I was capable of. I couldn’t offer myself. I was a shell. A robot programmed for revenge. And you were the last woman I should have had anything to do with. I didn’t even understand why I had to have you, I just did.”
“It was a temporary need for human closeness. I understand. I felt the same.” She pressed for escape.
“No! That’s not what it was. You were like the sun coming back after the longest Arctic winter. I was bitter and frozen and suddenly I was thawing. Feeling. Do you know how much it hurts when feeling starts to come back into a numb limb?” His fingers wove into her hair and stroked the nape of her neck.
“Oh, Aleksy,” she murmured, hating to hear of his suffering. Drawing back, she reached to cup her hand against his scarred cheek, feeling the muscles tense beneath her touch. She almost pulled away, but he covered her hand and closed his eyes. Turning his mouth into her palm, he pressed a kiss into her hand before letting her touch settle against the jagged line again.
“Are you really able to accept all that this scar means?” he asked with a mixture of anguish and hope.
“It means you’re a man who would fight to protect the people he loves. That’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“I am. That’s what I came here to tell you. I would die protecting you.”
His image blurred as her eyes filled with tears, afraid to believe what she was hearing.
He moved his hands over her with fervent possession. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath, especially when he looked at her with uncertainty edging the blaze in his eyes.
“Can you imagine for a minute how difficult it has been for me to know that you deserve every type of happiness and be completely convinced I’m the last man who can give it to you?”
“About the same as it feels for me?” she suggested, feeling something crazy and optimistic battering at the thinning shell she’d always held tightly around her heart.
He shook his head. “All you had to do was stay and I would have been the happiest man alive.”
The feeling inside her became massive, too big to be contained. “How could I stay when you didn’t seem to w—” Her chin crumpled and she bit her bottom lip, vi
sion blurring again.
When she would have drawn back, he hugged her close, his thickly accented words breaking her open. “I want you, Clair. Of course I want you. I love you with all my heart.”
She shuddered at the cataclysm of hearing him say that, at feeling love all around her as he held her tightly and pressed hot kisses to her wet face. Her hands sought to grasp all of him, sliding up his chest, over his flexing shoulders, following the line of his tense neck, smoothing over his hair…. Their mouths met in damp, sweet, poignant ecstasy. Clair’s heart was so full it was going to explode.
In a move of agile, male strength, he hitched her to sit on her desk, sending files skating to the floor. Bracing his hands next to her hips and his forehead sternly against hers, he said, “Tell me you’re not just reacting to the first man to tell you that. I don’t have it in me to be noble and give you up again, Clair. A man like me loves for life, and this is it.”
Life. She smoothed his bottom lip with the pad of her trembling fingertip. “Just because I’d never had sex before doesn’t mean I didn’t know what it was or ache deep down to experience it. It’s the same with love. I don’t need a hundred men to compare to in order to be sure what I feel for you is the real thing.”
“Good, because you’re not getting a hundred. You’re not even getting one other man,” he muttered with a self-deprecating curl of his lip. He tilted her chin up, his gaze so tender it warmed her to her soul. “Are you too shy to say it properly?”
She smiled, stunned by how easily the words formed on her tongue. “I love you.”
The expansive emotion seemed to fill the room. The adoring smile he gave her as he stroked her cheek made fresh tears spring to her eyes, happy ones. His kiss was reverent and full of longing.
“Aleksy,” she said, reluctantly breaking a kiss that so easily could have spun into something very compromising. “This is my work. There are children here. We have to take this off-site if we’re going to keep this up.”
He sobered. “Can you leave? In the long term, I mean. Can you—will you—work from Russia or must you stay here? We can come back whenever you’re needed,” he promised.
She melted, thrilled but at the same time incredibly touched by his understanding. “Thank you for seeing how important the foundation is to me.”
His ironic expression made her chuckle.
“I didn’t sleep with you just for the foundation,” she insisted.
“I’ll choose to believe that,” he said with disgruntlement. “But you’ll marry me for no other reason than that you want to.”
Not a question. A demand. Wounded he might be, but never weak. Her grin widened. “Of course I will. But I’m given to understand I have to anyway. A woman’s virginity belongs to her husband, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t betray one iota of compunction, only smiled with wolfish satisfaction. “True. But I don’t just miss you in my bed,” he added with deep sincerity. “I miss you in my life.” With utmost tenderness, he asked, “I mean it, Clair—will you come home with me? Be my wife and make a family with me?”
All the details flitting through her mind scattered, completely eclipsed by the momentous wish that had just come true for her. She couldn’t even speak she was so overcome.
Aleksy tensed as a shadow passed across Clair’s face, but when he tilted up her chin, her blue eyes gleamed. Her joy was so tangible he could taste it like spun sugar on his tongue.
“I always wanted someone to come here and say that to me,” she managed to husk. “It was worth the wait.”
Aleksy’s heart expanded beyond what he could contain. Pressing his mouth to her crooked, trembling smile, he drew her into his arms.
“No more waiting. I’m here now.”
* * * * *
Keep reading for a special excerpt from HEIRESS'S DEFIANCE by Lynn Raye Harris.
Ten years ago one devastating night changed everything for Austin, Hunter and Alex. Now they must each play their part in the revenge against the one man who ruined it all.
Austin Treffen has the plan… Hunter has the money… Alex has the power!
Read each of their stories in the captivating Fifth Avenue trilogy,
only from Harlequin Presents:
Avenge Me by Maisey Yates (June 2014)
Scandalize Me by Caitlin Crews (July 2014)
Expose Me by Kate Hewitt (August 2014)
And don’t miss the Fifth Avenue prequel that started it all, Take Me, by Maisey Yates!
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SPECIAL EXCERPT FROM
Harlequin® Presents® welcomes you to the world of THE CHATSFIELD
Synonymous with style, spectacle…and scandal!
Read on for an exclusive extract from Lynn Raye Harris’s stunning conclusion
to this exciting eight-book series:
HEIRESS’S DEFIANCE
* * *
“YOU HAVE NO CONTROL over me, Christos, no matter what you think. Yes, you control The Chatsfield empire, and you control access to my trust fund. But you won’t intimidate me the way you’ve intimidated my family.” She walked over and put her palms on his desk, leaned over until her eyes were at the same level as his. She was all in now, her emotions whipped to a furious froth that had been bubbling for weeks, ever since this man showed up and started giving orders like a despot.
Christos’s eyes glittered. He stood very slowly, and Lucilla straightened. Even in her heels, she wasn’t as tall as he was. He looked down on her as if she were a bug beneath his custom shoe.
“You’ve been wanting to say that for a while, have you not?” His voice was mild, amused, and yet it also managed to be hard and unflinching.
Her heart raced, her skin heating from the inside out. Yes, she’d been holding it in and, yes, it felt good to finally say what she’d been thinking. But she also felt as if she’d committed an error. She’d admitted to the enemy that she cared very much about his elevation over her when what she really needed to do was be quiet and take him down from the inside.
“I have, indeed. You might be congratulating yourself on dispersing my siblings on your errands, but don’t think you’ll handle me quite so easily.”
His eyes slid over her then, and her stomach tightened. “I wouldn’t dream of handling you, Lucilla. But if I did, rest assured, you would do as I wished. And you would enjoy every moment of it.”
* * *
Step into the gilded world of THE CHATSFIELD!
Where secrets and scandal lurk behind every door…
Reserve your room!
December 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Harlequin Books, S.A.
ISBN-13: 9781460341810
The Russian’s Acquisition
Copyright © 2014 by Dani Collins
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