Not Just the Boss's Plaything

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* * *

Nikolai came back to himself with a vicious, jarring thud.

He couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure he breathed. Alicia quivered sweetly beneath him, his mouth was pressed against the tender junction of her neck and shoulder, and he was still deep inside her lovely body.

What the hell was that?

He shifted her carefully into the seat beside him, ignoring the way her long, inky-black lashes looked against the creamy brown of her skin, the way her perfect, lush mouth was so soft now. He ignored the tiny noise she made in the back of her throat, as if distressed to lose contact with him, which made him grit his teeth. But she didn’t open her eyes.

He dealt with the condom swiftly, then he found his trousers in the tangle of clothes on the floor of the car and jerked them on. He had no idea what had happened to his T-shirt, and decided it didn’t matter. And then he simply sat there as if he was winded.

He, Nikolai Korovin, winded. By a woman.

By this woman.

What moved in him then was like a rush of too many colors, brilliant and wild, when he knew the only safety lay in gray. It surged in his veins, it pounded in his temples, it scraped along his sex. He told himself it was temper, but he knew better. It was everything he’d locked away for all these years, and he didn’t want it. He wouldn’t allow it. It made him feel like an animal again, wrong and violent and insane and drunk....

That was it.

It rang like a bell in him, low and urgent, swelling into everything. Echoing everywhere. No wonder he felt so off-kilter, so dangerously unbalanced. This woman made him feel drunk.

Nikolai forced a breath, then another.

Everything that had happened since she’d tripped in front of him flashed through his head, in the same random snatches of color and sound and scent he remembered from a thousand morning-afters. Her laughter, that sounded the way he thought joy must, though he’d no basis for comparison. The way she’d tripped and then fallen, straight into him, and hadn’t had the sense to roll herself as he would have done, to break her fall. Her brilliant smile that cracked over her face so easily. Too easily.

No one had ever smiled at him like that. As if he was a real man. Even a good one.

But he knew what he was. He’d always known. His uncle’s fists, worse after Ivan had left to fight their way to freedom one championship at a time. The things he’d done in the army. Veronika’s calculated deception, even Ivan’s more recent betrayal—these had only confirmed what Nikolai had always understood to be true about himself down deep into his core.

To think differently now, when he’d lost everything he had to lose and wanted nothing more than to shut himself off for good, was the worst kind of lie. Damaging. Dangerous. And he knew what happened when he allowed himself to become intoxicated. How many times would he have to prove that to himself? How many people would he hurt?

He was better off blank. Ice cold and gray, all the way through.

The day after Veronika left him, Nikolai had woken bruised and battered from another fight—or fights—he couldn’t recall. He’d been shaky. Sick from the alcohol and sicker still with himself. Disgusted with the holes in his memory and worse, with all the things he did remember. The things that slid without context through his head, oily and barbed.

His fists against flesh. His bellow of rage. The crunch of wood beneath his foot, the shattering of pottery against the stone floor. Faces of strangers on the street, wary. Worried. Then angry. Alarmed.

Blood on a fist—and only some of it his. Fear in those eyes—never his. Nikolai was what grown men feared, what they crossed streets to avoid, but he hadn’t felt fear himself in years. Not since he’d been a child.

Fear meant there was something left to lose.

That was the last time Nikolai had drunk a drop of alcohol and it was the last time he’d let himself lose control.

Until now.

He didn’t understand this. He was not an impulsive man. He didn’t pick up women, he picked them, carefully—and only when he was certain that whatever else they were, they were obedient and disposable.

When they posed no threat to him at all. Nikolai breathed in, out.

He’d survived wars. This was only a woman.

Nikolai looked at her then, memorizing her, like she was a code he needed to crack, instead of the bomb itself, poised to detonate.

She wore her dark black hair in a cloud of tight curls around her head, a tempting halo around her lovely, clever face, and he didn’t want any part of this near-overpowering desire that surged in him, to bury his hands in the heavy thickness of it, to start the wild rush all over again. Her body was lithe and ripe with warm, mouthwatering curves that he’d already touched and tasted, so why did he feel as if it had all been rushed, as if it wasn’t nearly enough?

He shouldn’t have this longing to take his time, to really explore her. He shouldn’t hunger for that lush, full mouth of hers again, or want to taste his way along that elegant neck for the simple pleasure of making her shiver. He shouldn’t find it so impossible to look at her without imagining himself tracing lazy patterns across every square inch of the sweet brown perfection of her skin. With his mouth and then his hands, again and again until he knew her.

He’d asked her name, as if he’d needed it. He’d wanted her that much, and Nikolai knew better than to want. It could only bring him pain.

Vodka had been his one true love, and it had ruined him. It had let loose that monster in him, let it run amok. It had taken everything that his childhood and the army hadn’t already divided between them and picked down to the bone. He’d known it in his sober moments, but he hadn’t cared. Because vodka had warmed him, lent color and volume to the dark, silent prison of his life, made him imagine he could be something other than a six-foot-two column of glacial ice.

But he knew better than that now. He knew better than this.

Alicia’s eyes fluttered open then, dark brown shot through with amber, almost too pretty to bear. He hated that he noticed, that he couldn’t look away. She glanced around as if she’d forgotten where they were. Then she looked at him.

She didn’t smile that outrageously beautiful smile of hers, and it made something hitch inside him, like a stitch in his side. As if he’d lost that, too.

She lifted one foot, shaking her head at the trousers that were still attached to her ankle, and the shoe she’d never removed. She reached down, picked up the tangle of her bright red shirt and lacy pink bra from the pile on the floor of the car, and sighed.

And Nikolai relaxed, because he was back on familiar ground.

Now came the demands, the negotiations, he thought cynically. The endless manipulations, which were the reason he’d started making any woman who wanted him agree to his rules before he touched her. Sign the appropriate documents, understand exactly how this would go before it started. Nikolai knew this particular dance well. It was why he normally didn’t pick up women, let them into the sleek, muscular SUV that told them too much about his net worth, much less give them his address....

But instead of pouting prettily and pointedly, almost always the first transparent step in these situations, Alicia looked at him, let her head fall back and laughed.

CHAPTER THREE

THAT DAMNED LAUGH.

Nikolai would rather be shot again, he decided in that electric moment as her laughter filled the car. He would rather take another knife or two to the gut. He didn’t know what on earth he was supposed to do with laughter like that, when it sparkled in the air all around him and fell indiscriminately here and there, like a thousand unwelcome caresses all over his skin and something worse—much worse—deep beneath it.

He scowled.

“Never let it be said this wasn’t classy,” Alicia said, her lovely voice wry. “I suppose we’ll always have that going for us.”

There was no we. There was no us. Neither of those words were disposable. Alarms shrieked like air raid sirens inside of him, mixing with the aftereffects of that laugh.

“I thought you understood,” he said abruptly, at his coldest and most cutting. “I don’t—”

“Relax, Tin Man.” Laughter still lurked in her voice. She tugged her trousers back up over her hips, then pulled her bra free of her shirt, shooting him a breezy smile that felt not unlike a blade to the stomach as she clipped it back into place. “I heard you the first time. No heart.”

And then she ignored him, as if he wasn’t vibrating beside her with all of that darkness and icy intent. As if he wasn’t Nikolai Korovin, feared and respected in equal measure all across the planet, in a thousand corporate boardrooms as well as the grim theaters of too many violent conflicts. As if he was the kind of man someone could simply pick up in a London club and then dismiss...

Except, of course, he was. Because she had. She’d done exactly that.

He’d let her.

Alicia fussed with her shirt before pulling it over her head, her black curls springing out of the opening in a joyful froth that made him actually ache to touch them. Her. He glared down at his hands as if they’d betrayed him.

When she looked at him again, her dark eyes were soft, undoing him as surely as if she really had eviscerated him with a hunting knife. He would have preferred the latter. She made it incalculably worse by reaching over and smoothing her warm hand over his cheek, offering him...comfort?

“You look like you’ve swallowed broken glass,” she said.

Kindly.

Very much as if she cared.

Nikolai didn’t want what he couldn’t have. It had been beaten out of him long ago. It was a simple, unassailable fact, like gravity. Like air.

Like light.

But he couldn’t seem to stop himself from lifting his hand, tracing that tempting mouth of hers once more, watching the heat bloom again in her eyes.

Just one night, he told himself then. He couldn’t help it. That smile of hers made him realize he was so tired of the cold, the dark. That he felt haunted by the things he’d lost, the wars he’d won, the battles he’d been fighting all his life. Just once, he wanted.

One night to explore this light of hers she shone so indiscriminately, he thought. Just one night to pretend he was something more than ice. A wise man didn’t step onto a land mine when he could see it lying there in front of him, waiting to blow. But Nikolai had been through more hells than he could count. He could handle anything for a night. Even this. Even her.

Just one night.

“You should hold on,” he heard himself say. He slid his hand around to cup the nape of her neck, and exulted in the shiver that moved over her at even so small a touch. As if she was his. That could never happen, he knew. But he’d allowed himself the night. He had every intention of making it a long one. “I’m only getting started.”

* * *

If only he really had been a wolf.

Alicia scowled down at the desk in her office on Monday and tried valiantly to think of something—anything—other than Nikolai. And failed, as she’d been doing with alarming regularity since she’d sneaked away from his palatial penthouse in South Kensington early on Sunday morning.

If he’d really been a wolf, she’d likely be in hospital right now, recovering from being bitten in a lovely quiet coma or restful medicated haze, which would mean she’d be enjoying a much-needed holiday from the self-recriminating clamor inside her head.

At least I wasn’t drunk....

Though if she was honest, some part of her almost wished she had been. Almost. As if that would be some kind of excuse when she knew from bitter experience that it wasn’t.

The real problem was, she’d been perfectly aware of what she was doing on Saturday. She’d gone ahead and done it precisely because she hadn’t been drunk. For no other reason than that she’d wanted him.

From her parents’ back garden to a stranger in a car. She hadn’t learned much of anything in all these years, had she? Given the chance, she’d gleefully act the promiscuous whore—drunk or sober.

That turned inside of her like bile, acidic and thick at the back of her throat.

“I think you must be a witch,” he’d said at some point in those long, sleepless hours of too much pleasure, too hot and too addicting. He’d been sprawled out next to her, his rough voice no more than a growl in the dark of his cavernous bedroom.

A girl could get lost in a room like that, she’d thought. In a bed so wide. In a man like Nikolai, who had taken her over and over with a skill and a thoroughness and a sheer masculine prowess that made her wonder how she’d ever recover from it. If she would. But she hadn’t wanted to think those things, not then. Not while it was still dark outside and they were cocooned on those soft sheets together, the world held at bay. There’d be time enough to work on forgetting, she’d thought. When it was over.

When it was morning.

She’d propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at him, his bold, hard face in shadows but those eyes of his as intense as ever.

“I’m not the driving force in this fairy tale,” she’d said quietly. Then she’d dropped her gaze lower, past that hard mouth of his she now knew was a terrible, electric torment when he chose, and down to that astonishing torso of his laid out before her like a feast. “Red Riding Hood is a hapless little fool, isn’t she? Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Alicia had meant that to come out light and breezy, but it hadn’t. It had felt intimate instead, somehow. Darker and deeper, and a different kind of ache inside. Not at all what she’d intended.

She’d felt the blue of his gaze like a touch.

Instead of losing herself there, she’d traced a lazy finger over the steel plates of his harshly honed chest. Devastatingly perfect. She moved from this scar to that tattoo, tracing each pucker of flesh, each white strip of long-ago agony, then smoothing her fingertip over the bright colors and Cyrillic letters that flowed everywhere else. Two kinds of marks, stamped permanently into his flesh. She’d been uncertain if she was fascinated or something else, something that made her mourn for all his body had suffered.

But it wasn’t her place to ask.

“Bullet,” he’d said quietly, when her fingers moved over a slightly raised and shiny patch of skin below his shoulder, as if she had asked after all. “I was in the army.”

“For how long?”

“Too long.”

She’d flicked a look at him, but had kept going, finding a long, narrow white scar that slashed across his taut abdomen and following the length of it, back and forth. So much violence boiled down to a thin white line etched into his hard, smooth flesh. It had made her hurt for him, but she still hadn’t asked.

“Kitchen knife. My uncle.” His voice had been little more than a rasp against the dark. She’d gone still, her fingers splayed across the scar in question. “He took his role as our guardian seriously,” Nikolai had said, and his gruff voice had sounded almost amused, as if what he’d said was something other than awful. Alicia had chanced a glance at him, and saw a different truth in that wintry gaze, more vulnerable in the clasp of the dark than she’d imagined he knew. “He didn’t like how I’d washed the dishes.”

“Nikolai—” she’d begun, not knowing what she could possibly say, but spurred on by that torn look in his eyes.

He’d blinked, then frowned. “It was nothing.”

But she’d known he was lying. And the fact that she’d had no choice but to let it pass, that this man wasn’t hers to care for no matter how it felt as if he should have been, had rippled through her like actual, physical pain.

Alicia had moved on then to the tattoo of a wild beast rendered in a shocking sweep of bold color and dark black lines that wrapped around the left side of his body, from his shoulder all the way down to an inch or so above his sex. It was fierce and furious, all ferocious teeth and wicked claws, poised there as if ready to devour him.

As if, she’d thought, it already had.

“All of my sins,” he’d said then, his voice far darker and rougher than before.

There’d been an almost-guarded look in his winter gaze when she’d glanced up at him, but she’d thought that was that same vulnerability again. And then he’d sucked in a harsh breath when she’d leaned over and pressed a kiss to the fearsome head of this creature that claimed him, as if she could wash away the things that had hurt him—uncles who wielded kitchen knives, whatever battles he’d fought in the army that had got him shot, all those shadows that lay heavy on his hard face. One kiss, then another, and she’d felt the coiling tension in him, the heat.