The Most Coveted Prize

by Penny Jordan

  Alena.

  Kiryl was caught off-guard by the sudden jolt to his heart caused by the thought of her. That should not have happened. It had only happened because he had let it happen—because somehow he had let Alena slip into his thoughts, just as he had done last night, lying alone in bed without her, his body aching treacherously for her, dangerously aware of how empty his bed had felt without her lying within the curve of his arm, her soft breath warming his skin.

  Alena—with her open and total giving of herself to him without holding back. Alena—who loved him. Love? What was that? Nothing. And if his bed felt empty without her—well, he would soon replace her, Kiryl told himself. She meant nothing to him as a person, after all. She was simply a pawn to be used and then discarded.

  He had no emotional feelings. How could he? Emotional feelings were a weakness. From his past he heard his father’s jeering laughter as he looked down at him, lying in the gutter, trying to conceal his misery.

  ‘You are your Romany mother’s child, all right. You have her foolish emotional weakness. No true son of mine would ever show such weakness.’

  His mother’s child with his mother’s weaknesses. Weaknesses that had to be crushed into oblivion. Only by sharing his father’s lack of emotion could he stand taller than him. And only by doing that could he fulfil the vow he had made to himself lying in that gutter.

  So why was he hesitating? Why was everything he had worked for single-mindedly and for so long being threatened by his weakness now? Why was he allowing himself to even acknowledge, never mind listen to, whatever it was inside him that gripped him with the need to simply turn and walk away. Why was this unwanted voice inside him urging him to change his mind? Why was this weakness—his mother’s weakness—interfering with his plans now? Was it because he was being tested to see if he would be tempted to weaken? If so then that temptation was a test he must endure and survive. He must reach his goal—if he failed then he would never be able to call himself the man the young Kiryl had promised himself he would be. The man who would succeed where the father who had despised him had failed.

  And yet still he could not rid himself completely of the image inside his head of Alena looking at him, her silver-grey eyes luminous with love. He could even hear her voice breaking with the agonised joy of their sexual pleasure. If he closed his eyes he knew that he would be able to recall the feel of her touch on his skin.

  Alena …

  No! The denial roared silently from the damaged heart of the child he had once been. It was a sound that he could not ignore. If he did not give that child what he needed then who would? No one. There was no one—only him. Alena had her brother, and all the men who would love her and comfort her—and they would love her. A sharp, savage, slicing pain bit into him.

  Ignoring it, he faced Alena’s half-brother as they stood either side of the fireplace.

  Vasilii Demidov was as tall as he was himself, although a few years older. His dark hair was cut short and his skin was warmer toned than Alena’s, even though he had the same silver-grey eyes. A hand seemed to tighten around Kiryl’s heart. Because after today he would never look into Alena’s eyes again and see there her love for him. But that did not matter. Nothing mattered other than getting this contract—and he would sacrifice everything that had to be sacrificed in order to get it. Everything.

  Deliberately he held Vasilii’s gaze.

  ‘I altered the time of our appointment because I wanted to speak with you without Alena being here,’ Kiryl began.

  Behind the door, on the point of entering the room, Alena hesitated.

  Vasilii frowned slightly. ‘You know my sister?’ he queried.

  The question seemed to hang on the air, as though it wanted to give Kiryl the time to reject it—a final chance to step back.

  Ruthlessly Kiryl crushed into silence the voice inside him that was trying to make him waver from his cause.

  ‘Yes.’ Meeting Vasilii’s questioning look head-on, Kiryl told him unemotionally, ‘She believes herself to be in love with me.’ He paused, and then added equally unemotionally, ‘In fact she believes that she and I are destined to be together, and that nothing and no one can part us.’

  A burst of fire briefly darkened the silver-grey eyes. Anger? If so it was controlled quickly. The look he was now being given was one of clinical assessment.

  ‘I see. And you, I take it, have encouraged her in this belief for reasons of your own which I imagine, from the tone of your voice, have nothing to do with you returning her feelings?’

  ‘That is correct,’ Kiryl agreed. It was good news for him that Alena’s half-brother was so quick on the uptake, but knowing Vasilii’s reputation in business he had not expected anything less.

  Disbelief, like a single drop of icy cold water, touched Alena’s senses as she stood outside the room listening to Kiryl speaking—so analytically and without a trace of emotion in his voice, as though she was a stranger to him, as though the love she had given him so freely and so passionately meant nothing to him at all. But that couldn’t be possible—not after the way he had held her and touched her. It just couldn’t.

  ‘When you e-mailed me to bring the time of our appointment forward, you said that it was a business matter you wished to discuss with me,’ she heard her half-brother saying.

  ‘It is,’ Kiryl agreed. ‘A business matter of great importance to me.’

  ‘A business matter that is more important than Alena’s love for you?’

  Vasilii’s question echoed Alena’s own unspoken confusion. She held her breath whilst she waited for Kiryl’s answer, praying that he would say something to explain the bewildering and frightening confusion of what she had already heard him say.

  ‘It is my good luck that Alena loves me as much as she does.’

  Unsteadily Alena exhaled her pent-up breath. There had been no reason for her disquiet after all. But then, just as she would have flown into the room to Kiryl’s side, he continued.

  ‘It is, after all, Alena’s unquestioning love for me that is enabling me to put my business proposition to you.’

  What was happening? What was Kiryl saying? Alena couldn’t understand what was going on, and yet instinctively she felt apprehensive and fearful—as though something dark and treacherous was reaching out to hurt her love, like a dark shadow threatening to diminish the bright light of the sun. She wanted to run into the other room and demand to know what was going on, but somehow she couldn’t move or even speak, condemned to simply stand there out of sight, forced to listen to what was being said.

  ‘What kind of business proposition?’

  Kiryl could hear the ominous warning note in Vasilii’s voice but he ignored it. ‘You and I, as I am sure you already know, are now the only two contenders for the contract to build and run the new container shipping port. As your wealth is far greater than mine, and your standing is that of a man whose antecedents had an elite standing in our community, that has to stack the odds of winning the contract more heavily in your favour than it does mine.’

  ‘Because I have both the financial and social wherewithal to ensure that I secure the contract, you mean?’ Vasilii responded.

  Alena’s shock intensified. Was Kiryl really suggesting that her brother would bribe officials in order to win the contract? If so he couldn’t have been listening to what she had told him about her half-brother—how important honesty and anti-corruption in business dealings was to him, just as it had been to their father.

  ‘Exactly,’ Kiryl agreed. ‘Which is why I decided that it would be in my own interests to tilt the playing field to my benefit. Let’s not waste time. Alena believes she loves me. Nothing you can say or do will alter that. She is mine to do with as I please. She will defy any and every embargo you choose to put on whatever relationship I choose to have with her.’

  Alena. Alena who looked at him with so much love in her eyes. Alena who would give him anything he asked of her. Alena. A woman. Just a woman. Women were weak. The
ir emotions made them weak. He had only to think of his own mother to know that. He would not allow any emotions to stand in his way. So why was he having to fight against the savage, angry ache inside him, that driving furious urgency that was almost an agonised yearning, biting into him and filling his senses with images of the time he had spent in St Petersburg with Alena? It threatened to undermine his resolution. It was her fault. She had made him weak, just as his father had always said he was. The useless, weak and unwanted result of giving in to a moment’s sexual need.

  ‘Alena has said nothing to me of even knowing you, never mind loving you as you claim.’ Vasilii’s voice was tightly controlled.

  ‘I told her not to.’ Kiryl lifted his shoulders expressively. ‘You are a successful businessman who has succeeded in a very hard world. I am your competitor for this contract and you will have had me investigated, as I did you. You will know my history.’

  ‘I know that your father was a man my father said was the most callous and corrupt man he had ever come across, and that your mother was—’

  ‘A Romany gypsy, and as such despised by my father. Yes. That is true. He loathed the fact that I existed. My mother’s blood made me unacceptable to him then just as it still makes me unacceptable to many people now. Your own bloodlines, though, are far more exalted. Your father comes from a family of the ruling elite. Your mother was a princess amongst her own people. You have the reputation of being a very proud man. Some would say a very arrogant man.’

  ‘Some would say the same thing about you.’

  ‘My pride and arrogance, if I have them, come from what I have achieved for myself—not what I have inherited. But that pride does not blind me to reality. You will not want to see your sister being flaunted in front of our world as my current mistress and then discarded. She is far too valuable a pawn to you for that.’

  Kiryl looked towards the window. Now, when he should be consolidating his position by informing Alena’s brother of just how much of herself Alena had already given to him, and with what passion and intensity, he was experiencing a strange reluctance to do so. It was as though a door had locked inside him, protecting that information—and Alena—safely behind it, as though he actually wanted to protect her. He simply could not say the words that would reveal the completeness with which Alena had given herself to him already.

  But it seemed that her half-brother had worked things out for himself and didn’t need those words, because he asked curtly, ‘You and Alena are lovers?’

  ‘I have taken her to bed, yes.’

  The hard, cold, almost stilted words were meant to distance him from any voice within that might dare to remind him of just how appropriate the word ‘lovers’ was to describe the intimacy he and Alena had shared. Instead they felt like the blows of an axe, striking directly into him and causing indescribable pain. The last time he had felt like this had been when his father had rejected him. As he was now rejecting Alena. Why should that cause him pain?

  Outside in the other room, Alena was still unable to move. How could Kiryl be doing this to her? If anyone had told her what he was saying she would have refused to believe them, she knew. But, having heard him herself, she could not. The pain was all-consuming, tearing viciously at her and threatening to destroy her completely.

  Angry with himself for allowing his unwanted emotions to sidetrack him from his purpose in being here, Kiryl delivered his ultimatum.

  ‘As yet no one other than Alena and myself—and now, of course, you—knows of our relationship. You are an intelligent man. I don’t have to tell you that once she is known publicly as my mistress her value as your pawn will decrease a very great deal. However, I am prepared to renounce Alena and to walk away from her, leaving you free to arrange whatever marriage for her you ultimately decide upon, if you agree to drop out of this contract race. Furthermore, I will never speak of our relationship to anyone and no one will ever need to know that it existed.’ Kiryl gave a dismissive shrug. ‘We both know it will be either as a bribe or a reward that you will give her in marriage, and to the highest bidder. For that to happen her value must not be diminished—as it could be if I choose to do it.’

  Alena felt as though her heart had stopped beating—as though her whole world was standing still. And then it came. The most intense emotional pain she had ever experienced. Her heart was pierced by it and filled with it. Like winter striking swiftly and cruelly deep in St Petersburg, she could feel the unbearable pain of the destruction of her dreams.

  ‘Winning this contract is obviously very important to you,’ Vasilii told Kiryl.

  ‘It is the most important thing in my life.’ As far as Kiryl was concerned there was no need for him not to make that admission. ‘With this contract I shall finally create a business empire greater than my father’s and do something he himself could not achieve. In doing so I shall prove myself the greater man, despite my mother’s blood. I have thought of nothing else since the day he left me in the gutter outside his house.’

  Kiryl knew his father had boasted about the way he had treated him quite openly, so Vasilii was bound to have heard the story. There had been plenty of occasions during his long climb to where he was now when those he had been doing business with had enjoyed reminding him of it, only realising too late their mistake when he punished them for their amusement at his expense.

  And yet, incomprehensibly, the images forming inside his head now weren’t of his father, or even of his triumph. Instead they were of Alena. Alena lying in his arms, looking up at him with eyes silvered with love. Alena laughing as they stood watching children playing in the snow, her arm tucked through his as she leaned into him. Alena clinging to him in the back of the troika he had hired as it raced across the snow. Alena so proud and happy when she talked about her mother’s work and her own plans to build on what she had created. Alena looking from the malachite columns in the Malachite Room to his eyes, her gaze melting with love for him. Alena wanting him, and loving him, and talking of their future together.

  What was happening to him? He shouldn’t be thinking about her now—and most certainly not in such emotional terms. He forced himself to focus on Alena’s half-brother instead.

  Vasilii had walked over to the window and was standing there with his back to him. There was no doubt in Kiryl’s mind that Vasilii would accept his ultimatum, but instead of being filled with anticipatory triumph there was a feeling of flat emptiness inside him.

  Alena’s brother turned back to him and said evenly, ‘I am prepared to withdraw from the contest between us for the contract,’ he told Kiryl. ‘But only if instead of giving up Alena you marry her.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘MARRY Alena?’

  Kiryl stared at the other man, too stunned by his words to be able to conceal his shock. And yet beneath that shock his heart was leaping with such an almighty bound against his chest wall that it felt as though somehow he had suddenly and unexpectedly been thrown a rope to save him from a deep pit of darkness and loss. As though he had been offered something he had secretly ached for in the very depths of his being. As though miraculously at the last hour he had been saved from himself.

  ‘You’re saying that you want me to marry Alena?’ Had he perhaps misheard or misunderstood what the other man had said? Apparently not, because Alena’s half-brother was now speaking calmly.

  ‘Yes, that is what I am saying. In the circumstances I think it would be for the best. Your agreement to a speedy marriage in return for mine not to challenge you for the contract.’

  Marriage to Alena. Alena who loved him, who had given him herself and something so sweet and lost to him that….

  But, no. He must not think like that. The old habit of rejecting his emotions was fighting fiercely for control inside him—reminding him, warning him, of how much he had suffered before he had learned to exclude the desire to give and receive love from his life. How much stronger he had been since doing that. How much safer, how much more free to concentrate on the
really important things in life—like besting his father. It would be madness for him to weaken now and allow himself to have feelings for Alena. He could never allow himself to have that kind of emotional need for anyone. No. If his spirits had lifted at the thought of taking Alena as his wife, then it was simply because of the commercial benefits marriage to her would bring. As Vasilii Demidov’s half-sister she was—as he had already told himself—a valuable asset.

  Logically, and from a practical point of view, marriage to Vasilii Demidov’s half-sister would be advantageous to him—but recklessly, and dangerously, there was still that feeling in a deep and complex place within him that would not go away.

  It was that, Kiryl knew, that was responsible for him saying unsteadily, ‘Very well,’ and then taking the hand Vasilii extended to shake on their agreement.

  Outside in the other room, Alena made a small agonised sound of protest and denial. This could not be happening. To listen whilst Kiryl revealed the truth about their relationship and his plans for her had been bad enough, but now to hear her beloved brother offering her to him in marriage was more than she could cope with. Vasilii couldn’t mean what she had just heard him say. He couldn’t.

  Released from her frozen immobility, Alena rushed into the other room, oblivious to the shock her appearance caused both men.

  ‘Alena.’

  They both spoke at the same time, but it was Kiryl’s voice that was raw and ragged with emotion.

  ‘No. You can’t mean it, Vasilii. I won’t marry him,’ Alena burst out passionately, and all the horror she felt at what she had heard was clear in her voice as she continued, before either of them could say anything, ‘I heard everything, Vasilii.’ She was deliberately keeping her back to Kiryl, unable to endure the thought of looking at him. ‘All of it. Every single word.’