by Penny Jordan
Vasilii looked at Laura. He had no doubt at all in his own mind that if he hadn’t been stopped Gang Li would have raped her. Raped her. And he would have been partly to blame because he had not protected her properly. The feelings that thought set twisting savagely through him felt like the bite of a thousand lashes. If she had suffered because of him, because he had failed her …
Unfamiliar thoughts and feelings were struggling for life inside him. But it wasn’t because of Laura herself that he was feeling like this. It was the principle of the matter, Vasilii insisted to himself.
She had started to tremble both inside and out, Laura recognised, her body held fast in the grip of reaction to the shock she had had. In fact she now felt worse in one way than she had done before Vasilii had rescued her—because now she had time to think about what could so easily have happened if Vasilii hadn’t saved her.
Gratitude filled her, and her emotions spilled out into her voice. ‘Thank you, for … for stopping him.’
She had said too much—been too personal, Laura knew, and she watched Vasilii step back from her as though he wanted to reject her words and her with them. When had that tiny ache of pain she had felt the first time she had suffered his rejection developed the searing strength it had now? Laura didn’t know. She felt drained and defenceless. The desire to beg Vasilii to hold her wasn’t very far away, and it had to be resisted at all costs—because it wasn’t real. It was simply a reaction—an overreaction—to what she had been through. Better by far to put some distance between them than to stay here with him and that vulnerability.
‘If you don’t mind I think I’d like to go … to call it a night. We’ve got an early start in the morning,’ she said as she struggled to regain some kind of normality.
Vasilii nodded his head as he stepped back from her, knowing that if he didn’t—if he let himself stand too close to her—then he might … He might what?
Nothing. He swore inwardly to himself. Nothing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
UNABLE to sleep, her head pounding and her eyes gritty because she couldn’t quite bring herself to close them, Laura looked at her watch. Half past two. She was perfectly safe. There was no need and no reason for her to lie here awake, she knew that, and yet at the same time …
She was longing for a glass of water, but she’d forgotten to remove a bottle from the minibar before coming to bed. Stop thinking about it and go to sleep, she told herself, but she couldn’t. She was wide awake now, and so very thirsty. Thirsty—but afraid to get out of bed and go into the sitting room to get herself some water. Why? Gang Li wasn’t going to be there, was he? She couldn’t spend the rest of her life jumping at non-existent shadows because of one man. A man who had planned to rape her. A man whose unwanted touch against her skin had resulted in her standing beneath the pounding pulse of the shower before she had come to bed, wanting to scrub painfully at her skin.
The longer she lay there the more wide awake she felt and the drier her throat. Her longing for a drink of water was growing with every second, until in the end Laura could bear it no longer. She’d gone straight to bed after having her shower, pulling on the strappy top and shorts she wore to bed in the bathroom, and her longing for a drink of water took her straight to the sitting room instead of diverting first to her en suite bathroom to put on the robe hanging behind the door there.
With her hand on the sitting room door, Laura hesitated. It had been in the room beyond this door that she had experienced what might have been rape if Vasilii hadn’t arrived to rescue her. And yet she knew as she hesitated that it wasn’t just the fear that that experience had engendered that was keeping her here on this side on the door. She had another fear to face as well—a fear of the vulnerability that had made her want the intimacy of Vasilii’s proximity. And not just because of the protection it had offered her. Why was she being subjected to, tormented by this growing, deep-rooted and demanding ache of female need for Vasilii’s touch? And not just his touch. Earlier, when she’d been comforted and protected by his physical closeness, wasn’t it true that she had also recklessly craved an impossible emotional bond with him as well?
Angry at her inability to control her thoughts, Laura turned the handle of the door and stepped into the room beyond it. Intent on reaching the minibar and returning to her bedroom as speedily as she could, her mind turbulently preoccupied with her own too revealing thoughts, and in spite of the light provided by the almost full moon that was coming in through the uncurtained window, Laura still managed to stumble against the glass coffee table, sending the metal display piece resting on it sliding to the marble floor with a loud clatter. Quickly restoring the artefact to the table, thankful that no damage had been caused by her carelessness, Laura continued on her way to the minibar.
In his bedroom Vasilii lay motionless against the bed on which he had been lying, unable to sleep, trying to think of some way in which he could get over the problems that Gang Li’s antagonism towards him was going to cause with the contract. In reality he was unable to think about anything or anyone other than Laura. The emotions that had gripped him when he had realised that Gang Li was attacking her still had the power to increase his heart-rate and fill him with a complex mixture of such intense emotions that he automatically wanted to restore his own personal default mode of denying he felt anything.
The best way to do that would be to go to sleep. But he couldn’t get to sleep because he couldn’t stop thinking about Laura. Not the contract, not any of the other things he should be thinking about, but Laura.
A sound from the sitting room broke into his thoughts and set off his own inner alarm system. Vasilii was on his feet and heading for the door the minute his brain registered the fact that there was someone in the other room.
With her back to the door as she opened the minibar, Laura sensed rather than heard the sitting room door open, her body registering the sudden movement of air caused by the opening door. Automatically and immediately her defence mechanism kicked in, fear streaming past her defences as she turned round to confront the intruder.
‘Laura.’
‘Vasilii.’
‘I heard a noise.’
‘I wanted some water.’
All Vasilii was wearing was a pair of thin cotton boxer shorts. The room might be in darkness, but thanks to the brilliance of the moon there wasn’t very much of his almost naked body that was left to her imagination. And Laura recognised, as she fought hard to unlock her own body from its awestruck paralysis, that her imagination had in no way done full justice to the physical, living and breathing male reality of the six-feet-plus of solidly muscled manhood that was now standing in front of her.
Models and new men might wax, but the Vasiliis of this world quite obviously did not see the necessity to remove from their torsos that inescapably open, heart-thuddingly sexual message of masculinity that right now was riveting her gaze on the pathway it created down Vasilii’s body, before disappearing beneath the waistband of the shorts that were riding low on the hard-angled bones of Vasilii’s hips. Her heart was beating so heavily and loudly she could hear it herself, although it was several seconds before Laura recognised that she was holding her breath and needed to breathe. Just because she had seen Vasilii’s naked torso? Not just his torso. She could see all of him, really—his torso, his arms, his legs, thighs that looked as though they had been hewn from solid muscle—apart from what was concealed by his shorts.
It was no wonder she was feeling dizzy—and that dizziness was not just caused by her inability to breathe properly, Laura knew, as she swayed light-headedly.
‘Laura?’
Had he spoken her name out loud or merely felt the echo of mentally saying it crashing inside his chest? Vasilii didn’t know. He only knew that the sight of her swaying on her feet had him crossing the floor to take hold of her, and that once he had … Once he had …
Vasilii was kissing her, and she was kissing him back, Laura recognised. She parted her lips eagerly
beneath the sure, knowing intrusion of Vasilii’s tongue-tip as it searched the sensitivity of her lips. Somehow he knew just how to use his power over her to turn her body into mindless delight and make her cling eagerly to him. His arms wrapped round her and she felt the full potency of his body impressing itself on her own. Felt it and wanted it. Wanted him, Laura admitted as her body responded to the intimacy of the feel of his flesh almost against her own, without any barriers between them.
It must be the shock of what had happened earlier—the shock of Vasilii coming into the sitting room when she hadn’t been expecting him to do so—that was unleashing this soaring, crashing, demanding sensuality that was burning her up inside, Laura decided breathlessly, and her senses submitted to the demands Vasilii was making on them.
How had this happened? How could he be so aroused by one simple kiss? By the feel of this particular woman in his arms? It was beyond logic, Vasilii decided. Just as he, too, was beyond logic—beyond his own control, beyond anything and everything other than answering the need that was now driving through him.
Moonlight stroked Laura’s skin in a pathway that led from her throat to her shoulder, its lure inviting his hands and then the kisses that followed them as she moved to his touch, her heartbeat making the pathway jump and tremble.
This was so much more than she had ever dared to imagine—too much more, Laura recognised as Vasilii’s hands and mouth burned a platinum heat into her skin that sent her senses spiralling out of control and into a universe of previously undreamed-of sensuality.
Beneath Vasilii’s touch, beneath his kisses, she had become another woman—a woman on fire with desire and need. Her body was not just responding to his touch but enticing and deliberately exciting it.
Looking down at Vasilii’s dark head as he kissed her shoulder, she, too, could see the moonlight path he was following, and with a provocation she had not previously known she could manifest Laura found that she was moving her body, so that the path stroked down towards her breasts, shadowing the tumultuous desire of her peaking nipples. Another movement and the touch of her own hand, removed from its exploration of the hard-packed muscles of Vasilii’s back, allowed her fingers to free her arm from the thin strap of her top, so that when she moved again it was her naked flaunting nipple that was caught by the silver pathway.
Distracted by the urgent rise and fall of Laura’s breathing, Vasilii lifted his mouth from her shoulder and saw what the moonlight was now revealing. He was a man, with all the normal male desires; he had had lovers, enjoyed sex, but never had there been anything like this feeling storming through him now. It caught him up in its ferocity, flinging him headlong into its depths, searing him with its savage lash, possessing him with the same extreme intensity with which he knew he wanted to possess Laura herself. It knew no boundaries, no restrictions, no logic or law. It simply was, and he was bound to it—unable to free himself from it, he recognised. And he cupped her naked breast with his hand and bent his lips to the silvered torment that was possessing him.
Laura felt the growing crescendo of her own driven longing, her need to clasp Vasilii’s head so that he wouldn’t stop doing what he was doing to her right now, with his lips and his tongue and his teeth, even as she could hardly bear the pleasure of it and half feared that it would destroy her. A sound—more than a gasp but thankfully not yet a scream—bubbled in her throat and spun into the shifting pattern of sound that was their mutually tormented breathing and the movement of their urgent bodies.
The moonlight showed the quicksilver of her bare flesh. It touched Vasilii’s face as he bent over her, streaking slashes of powerful illumination on the sharp angle of his cheekbone before sending a shaft of pure steel over the muscles of his shoulder and back. How different their flesh was, and how different the moonlight’s response to it—different and yet together a perfect match, a perfect whole. Laura surfaced briefly from the delirium of the pleasure Vasilii was giving her into a longing for the intimacy that would bring them together in that physical completion, only to be submerged once again in the new world to which Vasilii was taking her.
Never, ever before had he wanted a woman as intensely, as urgently, or as completely as he wanted Laura, Vasilii knew. Never, ever had the mere need to see a naked body aroused him so completely or filled him with the ferocity of desire he was feeling now. Never, ever before had the simple thought of seeing a woman naked driven him to such a place of agonised anticipatory need that the arousal that thought brought him was more intense than the full act of sex had been with anyone else.
‘Vasilii …’
The sound of Vasilii’s name, torn from her throat by her own desire as he slipped her top and shorts from her body, was as silvered with her desire for him as her body was silvered for his pleasure by the moonlight.
Vasilii’s bedroom was a mirror image of her own, its bed wonderfully firm and wide before her as he laid her down on it. Her arms opened impatiently to him and for him as he pulled off his own shorts. The light coming in from the sitting room through the half-open door only told her what she had already worked out for herself, and that was that his body was beautifully and powerfully male, and that she ached to know and caress every intimate detail of it.
Laura’s hands on his body, her breath against his skin, her lips tracing a line from his shoulder to his throat, had Vasilii sucking in his own breath and tightening his muscles, his stomach hollowing with the aching torment of his own longing. Logic, reason—everything he had told himself about never allowing himself to want like this were pale, insubstantial shadows of nothing that could not withstand the force of his need for her.
He kissed the soft curve of her belly and felt the anguished desire she was trying to control. He slid his hand beneath her knee and lifted her leg, so that he could kiss the smooth flesh on the inside of her thigh. She smelled and tasted of her own special warmth, her scent and taste inciting his desire to burn ever higher, even though he had thought that was not possible.
She wanted him. Oh, but she wanted him. And now even the hot sensuality of enclosing his sex within her touch was not enough to satisfy the ache of need raging inside her body. The intimacy of his touch and his kisses against her own flesh were driving her to a place where only sensation and need existed.
When Vasilii parted her thighs and leaned over her, his body cloaking her own in its hard male shadow, Laura welcomed the intimacy as eagerly as she wanted to welcome the intimacy of his possession. Her body, like her heart, was so ready for this, and for him. She could feel its waiting, pulsing softness. She could feel its tremor of knowing that a pleasure was to come that went beyond any uncertainty of the unknown.
One thrust—slow and purposeful. That of a man staking his claim on that which he knew to be his and which he couldn’t live without claiming for himself. It carried him surely into the warm female embrace of Laura’s body, and her muscles softened for him, then tightened around him to hold him.
One of them was trembling—shuddering with tiny involuntary movements of impatient longing—or was it both of them?
Vasilii started to thrust deeper and then stopped, his body and mind shocked by the awareness of a barrier that ripped a chasm between what had gone before that discovery and what he now knew. She was a virgin. How could she still be a virgin? The fact that she was stirred something deep within him that belonged centuries ago, to men who had prized and protected the sexual fidelity of their women—men who had known that the giving and the taking of virginity forged a bond that tied a couple together for life. Men who believed that the acceptance of such a gift committed them to the woman who gave it.
He could not make that commitment. He could not take such a gift from Laura. She had no right to offer it to him without first being sure that it would be valued as it deserved to be. A surge of anger and revulsion flooded him. Anger against Laura, for being what she was and in so being causing him such inner conflict. Revulsion against himself, for what had so nearly happened. What had
happened to his earlier desire to protect her? Wasn’t his behaviour every bit as bad in its way as Gang Li’s had been? Wasn’t he allowing his desire to dominate her and the situation just as Gang Li had planned to do? Wasn’t he man enough, strong enough, resolute enough, to stop himself before it was too late?
For a handful of seconds Vasilii fought to control the urgency of his desire, and then he was withdrawing from her, moving back from her, reaching for his discarded shorts.
Laura couldn’t believe what was happening. Just when she had thought that finally she would know Vasilii’s possession he had withdrawn from her—and not just physically, she recognised as she watched him turn away from her to pull on his shorts. The outline of his body showed her quite plainly that, whatever the cause of his rejection of her, it wasn’t anything to do with a lack of desire for her on his body’s part.
Laura didn’t know what to do or think. Her body was aching for what Vasilii had denied her with an intensity and a hunger that made her weak with need. She felt as though she was in the grip of a fever, half-delirious and fully distraught with the physical and emotional pain the shock of his abrupt withdrawal from her had caused, and she was unable to stop herself from adding to her own humiliation by begging him shakily, ‘What is it? Why …?’
Still half turned away from her, Vasilii answered, his voice grimly uncompromising. ‘You’re a virgin, that’s why.’
He couldn’t explain any more than that. He certainly couldn’t tell her that somehow her vulnerability had undermined his defences, or about his own unwanted need to protect her. Because if he did … If he did then she would know that he was vulnerable, too, and he could never allow that. Instead he had to find another way, another reason.
Why was she still a virgin anyway? Vasilii had lost count of the number of women who had hoped to use his bed as a means of acquiring a wedding ring from him, and with it access to his wealth. Those women had hoped to use their sexual skills to persuade him. Laura had chosen the opposite route—that of offering him purity. It wouldn’t work, though. He had no intention of making a commitment to any woman, and Laura, he told himself coldly, was no different.
