He hung up, and it did nothing to dissipate heat in her face or her body. His unpredictability was something of a liability. And the fact that he had the power to affect her was irritating.
No matter, she was packing now. She was good at packing. And then they were going to New Orleans, and she was going to be in her element orchestrating the event. And she would be in control then. Because this was what she did.
Sure, she had some failures in her life, but not in this arena.
And now that her father knew about the agreement, she would be extra certain that she made it work.
She had to. There was no other option.
IT WAS A shock to go from the carefully cultivated comfort of Dmitri’s private plane out into the thick afternoon air of New Orleans.
Victoria breathed a sigh of relief as they transferred from the tarmac to the black car that was waiting for them.
The flight over had been uneventful. Victoria had spent the majority of it in the private bedroom trying to get herself on the proper time schedule, even though she knew it would be somewhat futile. Jet lag was very often wicked no matter what tricks she tried to employ en route. But whether or not it helped with her sleep pattern it had helped her avoid Dmitri. That made it worth it.
Yes, she knew that she had to find some more companionable feelings for him, but she wasn’t about to do it when she was trapped thirty thousand feet above the ground in a small metal tube with the man. No, thank you. Much better to deal with him when her feet were on solid ground and she was feeling more in control of the situation.
And she would, once they managed to get to their Royal Street accommodations in the French Quarter. It was amazing what money could accomplish, and in this case it meant exclusive use of the boutique hotel for both their event and for the guests making a commute to the event. Dmitri had a lot of money, and that meant there was no end to what she could accomplish. At least seemingly. She also had plans coming together for an event in New York next week with a venue that was nearly impossible to get an entire year in advance, forget less than a month. Following that would be the final launch party in London, which would see the opening of Dmitri’s charity as a rousing success, and the closing of their engagement as a rousing one, too. All in closer to a month and a half, rather than three months as she’d originally quoted.
All she had to do was manage the slight tension she felt whenever she was in close proximity with him. And that should be simple.
A little bit of insanity when he ran his hands through her hair in his office was understandable. She had not been inoculated to his magnetism yet. And really, now she thought about it, assuming that you were the one exception to a specific danger was foolishness. And she had to confess, even if only to herself, that she had been foolish going into her dealings with Dmitri.
Because she had spent so many years inured to male charms, she’d assumed it would transfer to him.
Problematically, it had not.
But she wouldn’t waste time beating herself up about it. Better women than her had fallen to the likes of him, so there was nothing for it but to simply accept that she found him attractive and move on from it. Finding someone attractive did not mean you had to act on it.
Of course, Stavros had come with a reputation of his own. While not a playboy per se, he was a prince, and a nice-looking one at that, meaning he was custom designed to be irresistible. He’d had his share of lovers, and the other women who had been vying for his affections at the time had been positively giddy over him, while Victoria had remained mainly immune.
She could still remember feeling the most intense sense of relief the first time he’d nearly kissed her. Not because he’d been about to kiss her, but because in the end, for whatever reason, he had decided not to.
She’d been baiting him, trying to get him to make that all-important lip-to-lip contact, but he hadn’t. Later, it had become clear that it was because he had fallen for their matchmaker, Jessica Carter, but at the time she hadn’t understood why. Only that she had been extremely happy not to have to deal with a physical relationship just yet.
She simply hadn’t been in a space to be dealing with it. She had subsumed all of her sexual feelings after that unfortunate incident with Nathan. Because it had been easier. Because it made things much simpler. It was much easier to keep her eyes on the prize, to keep moving toward the goal of redemption when she wasn’t distracted by nonessentials.
Unfortunately, Dmitri was part and parcel of essentials. And whatever had insulated her against Stavros’s charms was not working here. She took a deep breath. Oh well, she had acknowledged it. Acknowledging it was the first step to ignoring it, or something like that.
Victoria reached around behind her head and coiled her hair around her wrist, lifting it up off her neck. Her skin was already sticky. “Is there some way we can turn the air-conditioning up?” she asked, keeping her eyes on this view outside. So far the expressway was typical—modern buildings and palm trees whizzing past. There was a creek running alongside the road, and children with small nets trying to catch something in the murky waters.
“I believe it’s up as high as it goes.”
“It’s like a very wet oven,” she said, knowing she sounded a bit whiny and a lot snobby. But this was a heat quite unlike anything she’d ever felt before. It wasn’t simply the temperature, but the air quality.
“It is that. I take it you’ve never been here before?”
“No, I haven’t been. Have you?”
“I was here once before with Colvin.” He kept his eyes fixed on the view outside the window. “This was back when I was still fighting. We came to help hurricane relief. Things were very different then.”
“I imagine so.”
“I always admired the lengths he went to in order to help others. The lengths he went to in order to help me, and anyone else he felt needed it. Certainly his interest in me wasn’t entirely altruistic, as I did end up making him quite a lot of money. But he had no way of knowing that for sure. He had an instinct, he had his gut, but there were no guarantees that sinking hours of free training into an angry street urchin were going to amount to anything.”
“How did he end up in London? How did you end up in London?”
“I ended up in London by way of Colvin. He went for the usual reason. A woman. Though it didn’t work out, because by the time I was on the scene she was not.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Russia.”
“Where in Russia?” He simply stared at her, his dark eyes impassive, his chiseled jaw set. He was far too handsome for his own good. For her own good. Really, it was gratuitous. “You realize Russia’s a very big country.”
“I do.” He smiled, somewhat ruefully. “Moscow. I was fighting in bars at the time. Cage matches. Very unsophisticated, very few rules. Lots of blood.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. I spoke little English, beyond a few foul swearwords. And Colvin spoke no Russian. But he knew potential when he saw it, and he offered me some very good vodka when I desperately needed some, so we sat down to try to have a chat. He was there talent scouting, looking for actual trained fighters. And he wandered into a bar the night that I fought a particularly crushing victory. He told me I had potential, which seemed laughable when I had just left a man stone-cold unconscious in the middle of the cage. In my mind, I was unstoppable. But he told me he would bring me back to London and teach me how to fight for real so that we could both make a whole lot more money.”
“And you just went with him? Just like that?”
He lifted his shoulder. “What did I have to fear?”
“I