The Most Coveted Prize

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Were you? Or were you perhaps hoping that I had chosen it because of you? Because I wanted to … please you?’

  ‘No!’

  The lift had come to a halt and the doors were opening. Hot-faced, Alena was glad of the fact that several other people were waiting to get in. Blindly she stepped out of the lift, her head down, feeling both embarrassed and exposed, stripped bare of her defences. She felt somehow as though he could see right through into the vulnerable heart of her. His penetrating green gaze was far too keen and astute. But then it had probably looked upon many women who had been as sensually aware of him as she was now. Many, many women. For her, though, all this was very new—taking her up to the heights and then plunging her down into the depths until she was so shaken up that she felt in danger of losing the power to reason.

  Instinctively heading for the main doors to the building, she was brought to a halt when Kiryl reached for her arm, holding it in a firm grip and half turning her towards him. He was standing so close to her that she could feel the power of his male sensuality engulfing her. Like a force-field it surged round her, locked round her effortlessly, holding her captive.

  ‘I am considering your charity because of my own mother.’

  His words were so unexpected that it took Alena several seconds to grasp their meaning. Her lungs greedily sucked in the air she had briefly denied them before she was able to question, ‘Your own mother?’

  Good—he had her hooked now. But then, given what he knew about the close relationship she had had with her own parents—especially her mother—it had been a foregone conclusion as far as Kiryl was concerned that to bring his own mother into any conversation he had with her was bound to elicit both her interest and ultimately her sympathy. Right now, though, having piqued her interest, it was best to keep her guessing a little, so Kiryl shook his head.

  ‘This is not the time for such a discussion,’ he told her. ‘It is something better discussed over lunch. Do you mind riding back in a taxi? Only when I’m in London I prefer to use taxis rather than to have a car and driver following me around. I like the freedom it gives me.’

  ‘No,’ Alena assured him, forced into a small self-conscious half-laugh as she admitted, ‘I love London taxis. And I’d much rather use them than have a car and driver too.’ She pulled a small face. ‘Vasilii doesn’t understand that, and doesn’t really approve.’

  It was a small thing to know that he too loved the freedom that being in London gave her. A small thing, and yet immediately it made her feel more relaxed in his company—as though they shared something.

  Watching her, Kiryl smiled secretly to himself. He knew perfectly well, from the information garnered by his agent, every single like and dislike Alena possessed. His goal now was to disarm her to such an extent that she ended up trusting him.

  Once they were inside a taxi he told her, ‘I thought we’d have lunch back at your hotel.’

  Alena nodded her head. The hotel did have an excellent restaurant, she knew. The kind of restaurant where important business was conducted on a regular basis. A man’s restaurant, Alena often felt, with a menu that was heavy on traditional gourmet meat and fish dishes and portions which she found far too generous. It was silly of her to feel disappointed. This was, after all, a business lunch and not a date. Kiryl was obviously a busy man, just like her brother, and she knew that in similar circumstances Vasilii would have done exactly the same thing.

  The reminder to herself that their lunch was a business lunch had her sitting up straight on her own side of the shiny leather taxi seat as she automatically adopted what she hoped was the right pose for a businesswoman.

  From his own side of the seat Kiryl, who had relaxed into the darker shadows of the corner of the seat refused to allow himself the mistake of looking at her. Not yet. That would come later. As a boy, running wild with other boys like himself—poor, ragged, half-starved boys, living hand to mouth under the aegis of their elderly foster grandmother, some of them lucky enough to have mothers who worked—he had learned to fish. Sometimes the fish he’d caught had been the only meal there was, so he had had to learn how to take his time and to wait for the right moment to catch his prey unawares.

  He knew his silence now was bound to add to the tension he could see Alena was already feeling, and that suited him. Fate had handed the very best wild card he was ever likely to get when it had brought Alena Demidova into his life—without her brother.

  The traffic was building up; one of London’s many sets of roadworks had brought their taxi to a standstill. Kiryl looked from under his lashes at Alena. His agent had done his work well, and Kiryl knew everything there was to know about her—from the fact that her brother believed her to be currently under the safe care of an elderly ex-matron of an exclusive girls’ school to the fact that she was probably still a virgin. He knew all about her parents’ marriage, and her English mother’s passion for her charity, just as he knew to the last pound how many millions of pounds there were in her trust fund, and how many shares in the businesses of her late father and her half-brother would come into her control when she reached twenty-five.

  She was a valuable asset—a valuable pawn, indeed—to the man who controlled her future, and it was no wonder that her half-brother was so protective of her and of her eventual inheritance. With such an asset as his half-sister to barter Vasilii Demidov had a great deal of persuasive power at his command. Via her marriage Vasilii would be able to broker even more power for himself than he already had. There would be many, many men who would want to form an alliance with him via marriage to her. It wasn’t her virginity that would be important, either to her brother or the man who married her. It was the power of the alliance that would be created.

  He most certainly did not want to marry her. He did not want to marry anyone. But he was quite prepared to let Alena think that he did to win her over.

  What he really intended to do was seduce her into falling for him—which would be easy, given the susceptibility to him he had already seen in her and her innocence—and then offer to end their relationship provided her brother backed off from the contract they were competing for. Kiryl’s assessment was that he was the last person her brother would want as a brother-in-law—a man born not just on the wrong side of the tracks but brought up in the gutters of those tracks. In his judgement her brother would far rather lose one contract than a pawn as valuable as a sister who, married to the right man, would bring far more assets into the family than merely one contract.

  He wouldn’t like what Kiryl was doing, of course. He wouldn’t like it one little bit. But he would have to accept it, because his sister’s vulnerability to Kiryl was his Achilles’ heel. Kiryl had no doubts about that. No man would guard his sister as Vasilii Demidov guarded his unless she was extremely important to him.

  And Alena herself … She would have the sexual pleasure those longing looks she had been giving him said she wanted. And when her brother exchanged her hand in marriage for an increase in his power and wealth she would be able to remember that pleasure when she lay in the arms of a husband she might not particularly want.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, inside his head he could see an image of his mother’s face—the anguish in her eyes when she had told him about how she had trusted his father and how he had deserted her and refused to recognise Kiryl himself. He dismissed it as swiftly and ruthlessly as he always despatched any kind of emotional weakness he found within himself.

  The taxi pulled off the main road and into the designated drop-off area outside the main entrance to the hotel. Whilst Kiryl paid the driver, a uniformed doorman opened Alena’s door for her and helped her out. Following her into the hotel, Kiryl tipped him generously. The man would no doubt remember seeing him with Alena—and that would add further reinforcement to his eventual challenge to her brother either to back out of the contract race or risk seeing his besotted sister marry him.

  ‘This way,’ he told Alena, taking a firm hold on her upper arm
to turn her in towards the lifts, when she would have walked past them towards the entrance to the hotel’s restaurant.

  Taking advantage of her confusion, when the lift doors opened he guided her inside it, ignoring the faint resistant stiffening of her body.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘I thought we were supposed to be having lunch together?’

  ‘We are,’ Kiryl agreed equably. ‘But not in the restaurant. I thought it would suit us both better if we had lunch in my suite.’

  Suit them both better? What exactly did he mean by that? Alena could feel guilty, excited heat flooding swiftly through her body. Even her face felt as though it was burning with her awareness of how the thought of such intimacy with him was affecting her. And very concerned and wary of that feeling she ought to be, Alena reminded herself as the lift rose swiftly upwards.

  Impulsively, her actions driven by sudden apprehension and the frantic pounding of her heart, she turned to him and told him unsteadily, ‘I’m not sure …’

  ‘You’re afraid to be alone with me? You think I might try to seduce you?’ he guessed. ‘Or is it more that you have been wondering what it would be like if I did try?’

  ‘No!’ Alena denied immediately.

  The lift had stopped. The door was open. He was looking at her with an expression that was a mixture of amusement and something else that re-ignited the desire she had felt earlier.

  ‘Good,’ he told her as he guided her out of the lift. ‘Because I can assure you that for me this lunch will be strictly business.’

  That much was true—even if he had no intention of allowing her to know what exactly that meant.

  Torn between relief and embarrassment that he had guessed what was going through her mind, Alena reminded herself that for her the only purpose of this lunch must be the fact that she would be able to claim to Vasilii later that she had secured Kiryl’s donation to the charity, and that it proved she was mature enough to step into her mother’s shoes.

  The thick pile of the carpet in the corridor muffled their footsteps as Kiryl guided her towards one of a mere handful of doors in its length, opening it on his suite and indicating that she should precede him into it.

  Opposite the entry door to the small rectangular lobby in which she was now standing was a pair of double doors, which Kiryl went to open for her. The sight of natural daylight coming in through the tall windows of the suite’s sitting room brought a welcome easing of the tight constriction of her throat, which she was trying to insist to herself had come from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the small windowless space of the lobby.

  The decor of the suite’s sitting room was familiar to her from staying in exclusive hotels all over the world. Luxuriously comfortable, the room contained everything a demanding guest might need—from a faux fireplace with two small sofas either side of it, through to a desk and the large cupboard which she suspected contained a concealed TV set and a mini-bar, and dining chairs placed neatly against one of the walls. The col our scheme of creams and greys was very ‘boutique hotel’, the fabrics and carpet obviously expensive.

  ‘I’ll ring down for our lunch. I hope you’ll like what I’ve ordered. Oh, and there’s a guest bathroom through the door off the lobby,’ Kiryl informed her.

  Alena nodded her head. She was glad about that, of course. She wouldn’t have wanted to have to walk through his bedroom to find its en suite bathroom. Of course not. She wouldn’t have wanted to do that at all. Because if she had she might have looked at the bed—Kiryl’s bed—and once she had done that she might have started imagining him lying on it … naked … the magnificent body her senses insisted on repeatedly telling her lay beneath his clothes exposed to her hungry gaze.

  By the time she reached the relative sanctuary of the guest bathroom Alena was breathing so heard, her heart pumping so frantically, that she had to lean on the door once she was inside and slowly count to ten inside her head in an effort to calm herself down.

  Pulling away from the door, she ran cold water over her wrists to cool her overheated skin, reminding herself of just why she was there. The charity and Kiryl’s donation to it. That was the only pairing she should be thinking about, she warned herself, quickly reaching for one of the immaculate white linen towels to dry her wrists and hands when she heard the buzzer to the suite and guessed that it was announcing the arrival of their lunch.

  And what a lunch!

  Alena’s eyes widened when one of the two waiters who had wheeled in a hot trolley, along with a table already dressed with a starched white cloth and all the accoutrements one would expect from the most prestigious of restaurants, pulled out her chair for her. The other did the same for Kiryl, and then placed her first course in front of her. Her favourite, she realised as she looked down at the serving of warm pear and goat’s cheese salad.

  ‘Thank you—we shall serve ourselves from here.’ Kiryl dismissed the waiters with a discreetly given tip, before getting up once they had gone to say, ‘A drink first, I think—our national drink to start with.’ He removed a bottle of chilled vodka from the ice bucket and poured it into two waiting shots glasses.

  ‘Vodka?’

  He was holding one of the glasses out to her across the intimacy of the small table, which was also set with wine glasses, giving her no real option other than to take it. Her fingers had to curl around his as she did so. Why had she never known before this intense difference between her own flesh and that of another? The sensation of his cool, firm skin against hers seared her senses, flooding them with the most acute awareness of him. She could smell the subtle expensive scent of his cologne, fresh and yet somehow at the same time powerfully erotic. He was so close to her that she was sure she could see the dark shadow of the body hair on his chest beneath the fine cotton of his white shirt.

  She hadn’t taken so much as a sip of her vodka yet, and already she was beginning to feel dizzy and lightheaded. Because she knew how important this meeting was—for the charity and for her. Her hand started to shake, and then her body, but to her relief he didn’t appear to notice, releasing the glass into her shaky hold before reaching for his own, and toasting her.

  ‘Za vashe zdorovye—your good health,’ he said, before emptying the glass in one swallow.

  Alena knew that she was expected to do the same. It was the tradition to do so. But even though she managed to return the toast, she could only manage to sip at the fiery ice-cold liquid.

  ‘They say it is less intoxicating if you drink it down in one, but I can see that you are a woman who likes to draw out and enjoy her sensual pleasures. And drinking vodka slowly is a very particular sensual pleasure for those who can bear it. One has to withstand its icy cold and then endure its burning heart. Not a task for the faint-hearted—but then I already know that you have a very brave and reckless heart indeed. You have already proved that to me.’

  He was smiling at her, his gaze trapping hers and holding it easily with the same strength with which she suspected he would hold her body between his hands if he chose to do so. And surely worse than being trapped was the feeling that in his compelling dark green gaze was a knowing glint that suggested …

  Alena didn’t want to risk thinking about what it was telling her.

  She couldn’t help wondering feverishly if his words could really mean that he wanted to remind her of his earlier suggestion that she was afraid to be alone with him, when she had denied that suggestion.

  ‘I am referring, of course, to your bravery in meeting the challenge inheriting responsibility for your late mother’s charity must place on you.’

  Of course he was. Why must she keep on putting a personal slant on everything he said to her? And, even worse, dragging it into the far too overheated sensual awareness of him she should be resolutely ignoring rather than encouraging. He himself was making it plain that his interest in her was not personally biased at all. Was it because she wanted him to have a personal interest in her? Because she wanted him to desire her and, des
iring her, show her that desire? No. No—a thousand times no.

  ‘I am proud to take on that responsibility,’ Alena assured him, finishing her vodka so that she could break the eye contact he was maintaining with her, hoping she sounded suitably businesslike.

  Gesturing towards her starter, Kiryl said, ‘I hope the food I have chosen will be to your liking?’

  ‘This is my favourite starter,’ she admitted.

  Of course it was, Kiryl thought inwardly with cynical satisfaction. He had left nothing to chance about this lunch. He knew exactly what her favourite dishes from the restaurant’s menu were.

  ‘You mentioned your own mother when I asked you what had drawn you to my mother’s charity,’ Alena reminded him, having told herself yet again that this was a business lunch—no matter how intimate it might seem. Talking about the charity would help her to focus on that reality. So she wasn’t asking him about his mother because she desperately wanted to know more about him. She wasn’t.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Kiryl agreed, reaching into the second ice bucket and removing a bottle of white wine, telling her, ‘Try this. I discovered it the last time I stayed here and I rather like it.’

  Wine on top of the vodka she had already had to drink; was that really a good idea? For a moment Alena hesitated. It was very flattering to be asked her opinion on a bottle of wine. She wasn’t a big drinker—her mother hadn’t been, and Vasilii deplored the growing modern trend for young women to drink heavily.

  Quickly she placed her hand over her empty wine glass and shook her head, telling him, ‘No, thank you. I’m not much of a drinker, I’m afraid. Especially at lunchtime.’

  Kiryl put down the bottle and gave her another of those searching looks that seemed to probe the depths of her being.

  ‘Was that decision your own or your brother’s?’ Kiryl asked.

  He was smiling at her again. His smile said that she could feel safe with him, but his words had sliced to the heart of her own growing awareness that a byproduct of Vasilii’s protection of her was a certain immaturity when it came to experiencing the things that other girls her age had experienced. Was that how he saw her? As someone immature and inexperienced? A girl rather than the fully sensual and adult woman a man like him was bound to prefer?