Loe raamatut: «The Most Coveted Prize»

Alena’s brother turned back to him. ‘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.’

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.

‘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.’

From somewhere she managed to drag up out of her pain a lifeline of anger for her to cling on to.

‘You might think now that you have succeeded in your plan to use me to blackmail Vasilii into letting you win the contract, but you haven’t,’ she told him fiercely. ‘And as for marrying you—I’d rather stay single all my life.’

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty-five years and has an outstanding record: over 185 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She says she hopes to go on writing until she has passed the 200 mark—and maybe even the 250 mark.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager, and has continued to live there. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her Crighton books. She lives with her Birman cat, Posh, who tries to assist with her writing by sitting on the newspapers and magazines Penny reads to provide her with ideas she can adapt for her fictional books.

Penny is a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors.

Don’t miss the sequel to this novel, THE POWER OF VASILII, available next month!

Recent titles by the same author:

PASSION AND THE PRINCE

A STORMY SPANISH MARRIAGE

The Most

Coveted Prize

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

ALENA had known she wanted him—quite desperately—the minute she’d seen him. That had been in the foyer of this London hotel earlier in the week. The fierce surge of previously unknown and unexpected sheer physical desire that had struck had been so powerful that it had almost literally knocked her off her feet—and left her in no doubt as to its meaning or its urgency, shaking tremulously from head to foot and on fire with the force of her own desire.

He was, she suspected, everything that her elder half-brother Vasilii had so often warned her against in his own sex. He was dangerous; she knew that—any woman would know it, even if Vasilii tried to treat her as though she was still merely a girl and not a woman.

Alena sighed. She did genuinely and really love Vasilii, even if he was the most aggravatingly old-fashioned, moralistic and over-protective brother anyone could have. However, there was something about him which drew and compelled her beyond reason, beyond duty, beyond anything and everything she had ever known or expected to know. Had she been struck by love? Had she been struck by its darker sibling lust? Or perhaps a combination of both? Was it her passionate deep-running Russian blood that was responsible? Or was it a vulnerability to wickedly dangerous Russian men she had inherited from her English mother, who had fallen so swiftly in love with her own Russian father?

It didn’t matter. What was happening to her was beyond the skills of analysis drilled in to her to fit its pupils for the modern age by the teachers at her all female and very strict school. Nothing mattered other than the gathering, growing rushing need that now owned her. His air of openly raw sexuality and her need to offer herself up to it, to be consumed by it, filled her senses, leaving no room for anything else. Just the thought of even breathing the same air as him was enough to send her dizzy with delight and to make her body react as erotically as though he was already touching it, caressing it, taking it and touching it, teaching it and her everything that it meant to be a woman.

Alena shuddered in mute acknowledgement of his mastery of her responses. Any minute now he would turn and see her, and recognise the effect he was having on her. Her heart gave a fierce bound of mingled anticipation and apprehension. Oh, yes, he was dangerous—and she ached for it, hungered for it, craved it.

She might ‘only’ be nineteen, as Vasilii was so fond of reminding her, but she was more than old enough to know from the one tremulous, daring glance she had risked earlier in the week into those malachite-green eyes—so matching in colour the awesome columns of malachite in St Petersburg’s Winter Palace—exactly what the man now standing engaged in conversation with another Russian on the other side of the exclusive hotel’s even more exclusive lounge lobby was. He was living, breathing, walking sexual danger—especially to a woman like her. He lived outside convention and its rules.

Her pulse beating increasingly speedily, she studied him covertly and eagerly. He was tall—as tall as Vasilii, who was six feet three to her own five feet nine. He was also slightly younger than Vasilii, she suspected. Perhaps in his early thirties, whereas Vasilii was now thirty-five. His thick hair was a rich tawny brown, reminding her of the colour of one of Vasilii’s hunting jackets, although this man’s hair was in need of a cut to bring it to the kind of order Vasilii favoured.

Everywhere in his face—its bone structure, its contours, its expression—there were subtle traces of a heritage that said that this man came from a long line of men born to battle against other members of his own sex and to stand over their prone bodies when he had defeated them. He was pure alpha male, and a man determined to challenge anyone who questioned his right to that heritage.

His name was Kiryl Androvonov. She savoured it inside her head, unrolling it like a glittering magnificent carpet of delights for her senses. She had felt so adult, so strong and in control of her own fate, when she had asked the doorman so studiedly, mock-casually, if he knew who he was, pretending that she had recognised him as an acquaintance of her brother. The name Kiryl meant ‘noble’, but the doorman had told her only that he was a businessman and that this was his second visit to the hotel.

Kiryl hadn’t intended to look for her—the slender, gazelle-like young woman with her silky fall of dark blonde hair and her silver-grey eyes that reminded him of sunlight on the frozen Neva river in winter, or the Russian fables of the rusilki, the fatal enchantresses who rose from their watery graves to lure men to join them. For one thing she wasn’t his type, and for another he had far more important things on his mind than accepting the unspoken but implicit invitation she was giving him.

But he had looked, and she was there, in the same chair, at the same table, pouring tea from the steaming traditional samovar that the hotel indulged its Russian guests by providing.

She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring—not that that meant anything these days. A high-priced hooker, then, dangling her bait? Maybe, but Kiryl doubted it. A hooker would have moved in on him before now—time was, after all, money in any business.

She wanted him, though. He knew that. But he did not want her. Nor did he intend to allow himself to want her, even if that no doubt astronomically expensive soft silk top she was wearing was outlining the undeniably natural and highly desirable shape of her breasts with all the sensual mastery of a skilled artistic hand. The top, which covered her from her throat right down to her wrists, shouldn’t have been sexy. Those impossibly small-for-male-fingers shimmering pearl buttons that closed the neckline all the way from her throat to her breastbone should not have filled him with a desire to wrest them from their closures and lay bare to his gaze and his touch the flesh that lay beneath them—but they did. The diamond stud earrings she was wearing—if real, and he suspected that they were—would have cost whoever had given them to her many thousands of pounds. He knew that because his last mistress had tried to inveigle him into buying her a similar pair, just before he had decided that she no longer interested him.

As he assessed them—and that was all he was assessing—she looked up and right at him, the colour coming and going in her face, dark lashes sweeping down over the silver-grey eyes which had gone from shining like the frozen Neva to burning with the glow of heated mercury … or the desire of a very aroused woman. Unexpectedly his own body responded to that swift change from the winter ice of St Petersburg to the fierce summer heat of the Russian steppes, with all the passion that the land of his fathers always inspired in him, as fiercely as though she held within her the essence of all that heritage meant to him. He could feel within him the surge of his own desire to take and possess that heritage; to claim it and to refuse to yield it to anyone.

Caught off-guard by the surge of electric male arousal gripping him, Kiryl recognised that the woman, whoever she was, was causing his attention to wander from something far more important than some left-over youth fantasy about possessing a woman who would somehow be a magical link between himself and his Russian heritage, earthing him in his right to it.

‘And, as I was saying, Vasilii Demidov will be your main stumbling block to winning the contract.’

Kiryl stiffened and focused his attention on the agent he had hired to help him win the contract he was determined to have for his business. The knowledge that one of Russia’s richest men was also a contender for the contract had not put him off. Far from it. It had merely sharpened his desire to win it.

‘Demidov has not previously shown any interest in the shipping or container industry. His business interests lie mainly in owning and controlling the port side of the business,’ Kiryl pointed out. ‘Therefore he has no reason to have any interest in the contract.’

‘He hadn’t, but he is currently in China, finalising another contract, and as part of the bargain the Chinese want a controlling interest in a container shipping line. He is in a position to undercut any price you may offer, even if that means acquiring the contract at an initial loss. I have it on the very best authority that the selection process for the contract is now down to the two of you, with the dice loaded very heavily in his favour. I’m afraid that I must warn you that with Demidov as your competition you cannot win.’

Kiryl gave his agent a hard look.

‘I refuse to accept that.’

He could not and would not lose this contract. It was the final building block, the final piece in the chess game of his business life, that would establish his supremacy in his chosen field—not just in his own eyes but in the eyes of Russia itself. No one could be allowed to stop him from achieving that goal. No one. He had worked too hard and too long to let that happen.

Inside his head an image formed: a man’s profile, his eyes hard and denying, rejecting the child he had been. His father. The father who had denied him not just the right to his name but also the right to his Russian blood. Just as Vasilii Demidov would if he now denied him the right to complete the end game he had striven for so long.

‘Then you must hope for a miracle—because that is what it will take for you to beat Demidov and win this contract.’

Typically Kiryl did not allow any of what he was feeling to show in his demeanour or his voice, simply saying, in a voice as relentlessly cold as winter, ‘There must be something that would make him back off—some way of undermining him. A man does not make the money he has made without having secrets in his past he would not want exposed.’

The agent inclined his greying head in acknowledgement of Kiryl’s statement before warning him, ‘You are not the first man to look for some weakness in Demidov that can be exploited, but there isn’t one. He is armour plated. He has no vulnerability, no known past sins to catch up with him, and no present vices to use against him. He is impregnable.’

Kiryl’s mouth hardened.

‘He is impressive, I agree. But no man is impregnable. There will be a way, a vulnerability—and I promise you this: I will find it, and I will use and exploit it.’

The agent remained silent. He knew better than to argue with the man facing him. Kiryl had grown to his wealth and his present position of authority and power through the hardest and most challenging of circumstances—and it showed.

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to remind him as they parted, ‘As I have already said, what you require if you are to win out against Demidov is a miracle. Take my advice and back out now—let him have the contract. That way at least you will save face and not have to endure the humiliation of publicly losing to him.’

Back out? When he was so close to fulfilling the vow he had made to himself so many years ago? Never.

Could she risk picking up her teacup now, without her hands trembling so much that she risked spilling the hot liquid? Alena wasn’t sure. Her heart was still jumping around inside her chest cavity, and her face was still burning from the effect that one piercing brilliant green gaze had had on her. He had looked right at her. She put her hands on her still hot cheeks in an attempt to cool them down. She must not look at him again. She simply didn’t have the strength to withstand the raw maleness of such a gaze. It had melted her insides, turning them into a soft liquid pulse of longing that quivered within her still. And yet she had to look—she had to let her senses and her body drink in their fill of the dangerous excitement of all that fierce sexual masculinity.

Her pulse had started to race, and her throat was so dry that she had to swallow hard as she allowed her head to turn again in his direction, the longing and excitement beating even more fiercely than ever inside her with anticipation—only to crash down to wretched disappointment when she realised that he wasn’t there. He had gone, and thanks to her silly, immature stupidity she had missed her chance to … to what? To prolong the intensity of that mesmerising gaze until her bones melted and her heart burst with the unbearable excitement of it? He might have come over, introduced himself. He might have …

There was something on the floor—a gold pen. It must be his. He must have dropped it. Quickly Alena rose from her seat and went to pick it up. It felt cool and hard against her fingertips. She was shaking so much that she couldn’t stand up again without her head swimming. She could see him standing close to the hotel exit. The man he had been with was leaving the hotel. Was he going to follow him? Without allowing herself the chance to think about what she was doing, Alena crossed the hotel foyer.

The click of her heels alerted Kiryl to her presence. When she walked she swayed as delicately as the silver birches in Russia’s northern forests.

‘You dropped this.’

Her voice was as soft as the sigh of a spring breeze, cooling the stuffy, overheated hotel air as it brushed his skin.

She was holding out a pen to him. Not his pen, but he took it from her nonetheless. Her hand was delicately boned, her fingers long and slim, her nails buffed to a natural sheen. She had a look about her that money alone could not buy: a translucent, shimmering natural beauty allied to the kind of discreet grooming that whispered privilege and protection. This woman had been feather-bedded from the moment of her birth.

Angry with himself for being so aware of her, he punished her for that awareness by telling her mockingly, ‘And of course you would seize such a golden opportunity to return it to me, wouldn’t you? Given your interest in me. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it is the male’s role to pursue his quarry and reveal his desire, not the female’s.’

Hot colour ran up under Alena’s skin like burning fire. She deserved his mockery—and his cruelty: Vasilii would have said so. But she hadn’t been prepared for it and it hurt. Inside her head—foolishly—she had built up an image of him in which his danger was tempered by a desire for her that matched her own for him. Now she was being made to pay for that fantasy.

Kiryl watched as she struggled to overcome her humiliation, pride battling against pain as her small white teeth bit so hard into that soft bottom lip that it swelled swiftly. Just as it would swell beneath the fierce demand of a man’s kiss? Against his will Kiryl felt the ache in his groin the sight of her had aroused earlier return—with interest.

‘My apologies. That was ungracious of me.’

His apology was deliberately insincere. He didn’t have either the time or the desire to deal with the fragile ego of an emotional woman—no matter how desirable. He knew himself too well, and he knew that in the mood he was in now, thanks to Vasilii Demidov, the darkness within him that he had never wholly been able to control would unleash itself and seek a victim. Over the years Kiryl had taught himself to think of that darkness as something of a mental vampire, an echo of himself that, when aroused, could only be calmed by feeding off the emotional pain of others. No doubt there were those who would say that that dark need sprang from his childhood, but Kiryl had no intention of dwelling on a time when he had been vulnerable. Instead he preferred to live in the present, and living in the present meant securing that contract. The girl was simply a spare pawn in the game, and as such he had no use for her other than as a momentary outlet for his pent-up inner frustration with regard to his bid and the competition he was up against.

For Alena, though, his caustic cruelty was unbearable. She retreated from him, feeling too upset and too humiliated to defend herself, merely shaking her head and turning away to hurry back to her table.

Once there she asked for her bill and proceeded to gather up her coat and her bag. She had shown herself up most dreadfully. She deserved the punishment he had meted out, she told herself. She was just glad that her half-brother hadn’t been there to witness it. Fresh tears blurred her vision.

Automatically Kiryl tracked her uncoordinated, anxiously urgent movements. Because he wanted to distance himself from her, that was all. And yet his gaze and his senses were somehow reluctant to let her go. Even now, when she was plainly upset, there was still a grace about her, a breathtaking natural sensuality, a pliable softness—from the top of her shining fall of dark blonde hair to the delicacy of ankles so fine Kiryl suspected he could easily close his hand around them—that said the whole of her could be bent to the will of the man who possessed her.

And did he want to be that man? It wasn’t so much a matter of wanting as of taking advantage of what he was being offered so blatantly. Kiryl shrugged aside his inner criticism of himself. He was, after all, a man—with a man’s needs. And it was obviously what she wanted. She had practically been begging for it, and it would be one way of ridding himself of the anger he felt at having his plans threatened by Vasilii Demidov. He had taken the savagery of the sharp raw edge off it via his mockery of her. He could make amends quite easily. He knew the format. She would initially pretend to refuse to allow him to do so. He would then flatter her and she would give in. It was a game as old as life itself, and an hour or so in bed with her in his suite would surely be enough to satisfy the ache in his groin.

A brief movement of his hand summoned a waitress. Giving her his instructions, he made his way over to the table.

Alena was just about to leave, her back to him as she waited for another waitress to bring her bill.

‘You didn’t drink your tea earlier, and since I am very much in need of a cup why don’t we share a samovar together? Two Russians together, sharing a tradition from our homeland?’

The unexpected sound of his voice had Alena spinning round, her shock intensifying when he reached out and closed long fingers around her wrist, his thumb on her unsteady, far too fast pulse.

His smile was pure megawatt charm. It softened the earlier arrogant harshness of his features and turned him into every woman’s fantasy of a bad boy grown into an adult male. It gave him the sensuality of a Cossack, the romance of a gypsy, the wild devilry of a pirate and the alpha allure of a hero. With that smile he was all of them and more. And she would be a fool to give in to him.

‘No, thank you.’ She tried to sound distant and cool, but she knew he had heard the vulnerable huskiness of her voice, the note of doubt and longing that undermined her will-power. Her throat felt dry and raw with emotion and tension. She wanted to wrench her wrist free of his hold but somehow she couldn’t.

He was smiling at her again, more intimately this time, the malachite eyes darkening and gleaming.

‘I was rude and I upset you, and now you are angry with me. You think, no doubt, that I do not deserve your company. And you are right. After all, such a beautiful woman can easily find a far more pleasant and appreciative companion. But I think you have a kind heart, and that that kind heart will whisper to you to take pity on me.’

Oh, yes, he could be very charming—as well as very cruel. And Alena didn’t need Vasilii to tell her how dangerous that made him. Every woman carried within her DNA the instinctive knowledge of just how dangerous such a man could be. And just how compellingly and demandingly irresistible.

The smile that accompanied his apology revealed strong white teeth and crinkled the skin around his eyes. Its effect on her locked the breath in her lungs and started a stampede of small butterfly movements of shocked but exhilarating excitement fizzing in her stomach. The hurt he had already caused her had left its mark, though—like a bruise against pale vulnerable skin and her brain warned her to be careful.

He was massaging her skin, stroking that place where her pulse was thudding so tempestuously, but far from soothing her his touch was only increasing her agitation and her awareness of him. She must escape from him whilst she still could. He was dangerous, and she was not equipped to deal with that danger.

‘I must go. I …’

Her English was refined and unaccented. Despite the samovar he had seen on the table she did not look or sound Russian, except for those silver-grey eyes that reminded him so intensely of the Neva and the city of his birth. And the pain he had known there …

‘I have ordered our tea. See—the waitress is bringing it now.’

Two waitresses were heading for the table—one carrying fresh tea, the other bringing her bill. The waitress with her bill smiled at her and said politely, ‘I am sorry, Miss Demidova. I thought you wanted your bill.’

She was Russian. She had to be with that surname. And not just any Russian surname either. The irony of her sharing the same surname—a relatively common one in Russia—as his rival for the contract he wanted so badly was not lost on Kiryl. Perhaps it was an omen. The voluntary foster mother or babushka, who had raised him after the death of his own mother, along with several other orphaned and unwanted children, had set great store by old superstitions and beliefs, but he did not. He was a modern man, after all.

‘You’re staying here in the hotel?’ he asked, pulling out a chair for Alena with his free hand and firmly guiding her into it, leaving her no option other than to remain at the table.

He was even more magnificent, more imposing, more heart-stoppingly male close up than he had been at a distance. In the rarefied heated air of the hotel he somehow managed to smell of the clean air of the Russian steppes, with an underlying note of their wildness that brought the tiny hairs up along her skin. Oh, yes—he was dangerous.

‘Yes.’ She answered his question. ‘My brother Vasilii has a concierge apartment here in the hotel for when he’s in London on business.’ Her half-brother was something of a nomad, and although he had similar apartments all over the world, and his most permanent address was an apartment in Zurich, there was nowhere that he really called home.

Alena wasn’t quite sure if she was so pointedly introducing her brother into the conversation to warn Kiryl that she was not unprotected and alone, or to remind herself how Vasilii would judge her own behaviour were he to learn of it. Vasilii, who thought she was safely in the care of the now retired matron of the girls’ school Alena had attended, whom he had hired to stay with her whilst she was away. Poor Miss Carlisle, though, had been rushed into hospital with appendicitis, and was now recovering from an operation in the comfortable nursing home where Alena had insisted she go to to recuperate.

Her absence was giving Alena a brief period of unexpected freedom, but Alena did feel guilty about the way she had deceived Miss Carlisle by letting her think that the niece she had begged Alena to contact on her behalf was now standing in for her. It wasn’t her fault that Miss Carlisle’s niece had left for New York the day before Miss Carlisle had fallen ill. She should have told Vasilii what had happened, of course, but she hadn’t. Her brother was still under the illusion that Miss Carlisle, who flatly refused to have anything to do with modern technology and thus would not use a computer or a mobile telephone, was staying in the apartment with Alena to look after her.

Kiryl’s heart had jerked to a standstill, almost cutting off his breath and leaving him feeling almost as though he was at a hangman’s mercy. Surely it was beyond coincidence that there could be two Vasilii Demidovs—both of whom were wealthy enough to maintain a suite in one of London’s most expensive hotels? Perhaps there had after all been some grain of truth in his old babushka’s superstitious beliefs about the workings of fate?

Kiryl, though, had not built up his business and his own status as a billionaire by making assumptions that were not based on properly sourced fact.

After waiting for the waitress to pour their tea and then withdraw, he asked casually, ‘Your brother is Vasilii Demidov? Head of Venturanova International?’

‘Yes,’ Alena confirmed, a small frown puckering her forehead as she asked anxiously, ‘Do you know Vasilii?’

Was she concerned—anxious—about the possibility of him knowing her brother? Like all hunters Kiryl had a good nose for vulnerability in his prey.

‘Not personally. Although naturally I do know of him and his reputation as a successful businessman. Is he here in London?’ Kiryl knew that he wasn’t, but he wanted to know how much the girl would tell him.

‘No. He’s in China. On business.’

‘Leaving you, his sister, to amuse herself here in London, enjoying its nightlife?’ he suggested with another smile.

Immediately Alena shook her head. ‘Oh, no. Vasilii would never allow me to do that. He doesn’t approve of that kind of thing—especially for me,’ she admitted, immediately flushing guiltily. She was saying far too much. Certainly saying and doing things that Vasilii would most definitely not have approved of, because she felt so nervous and so excited.

‘He sounds a very protective brother,’ Kiryl told her. A very protective brother who believed in guarding something—someone—who was very important to him. He needed to find out more about her and her relationship with her brother.

‘Yes he is.’ Alena answered Kiryl’s question, caught off guard. ‘And sometime …’

‘You find that irksome and inhibiting?’ he guessed. ‘You are young. It’s only natural that you want to enjoy the same kind of life as other people. It must be lonely for you—left here on your own here in an anonymous hotel whilst your brother goes about his business.’

‘Vasilii is very protective. He doesn’t leave me on my own. At least not normally. This time, though … This time he had to.’ Again Alena felt that pang of guilt she had every time she thought about how she was deceiving her brother. But, much as she liked Miss Carlisle, she was very old and very old-fashioned. Everything had been so different when their parents had been alive. Their father had been so energetic, so filled with an enjoyment of life, and her mother had been so loving, and so understanding. Alena missed them both dreadfully, but especially her mother.

* * *

Something was going on here. Kiryl’s sharply keen senses told him that. Some undercurrent the meaning of which with regard to his own plans he had yet to divine and define.

He lifted one eyebrow and joked, ‘He sounds more like a gaoler than a brother.’

Alena immediately felt guilty again. She was being horribly disloyal to Vasilii, but at the same time there was a sense of relief and release for her in talking about how she felt. Something about this intense stranger had her opening up about things she’d never confided to anyone before. Even so, her love for her brother insisted that she defend him and correct Kiryl’s misconceptions.