You called me Breanna.
Irritated, he exhaled, setting his jaw. He glanced up toward the house. It had been almost an hour. What was taking her so long?
He grabbed a plate and served her a portion of the soufflé, then took a crystal goblet from the cupboard on the lanai. He carried them both over to the tray on the granite table, beside the open bottle of merlot. He looked out at the shimmering pool, at the crashing waves of the dark ocean below the cliff. He tried to relax his shoulders, to take a deep breath.
After he’d nearly died in the car crash on the raceway, his doctor had arrived from St. Petersburg and told him he needed to find a less risky way to relax. “You’re thirty-five years old, Your Highness,” the doctor had said gravely. “But you have the blood pressure of a much older man. You’re a heart attack waiting to happen.” So Vladimir, wrapped up in bandages over his broken bones, had grimly promised to give up car racing forever, along with boxing and skydiving. He’d bought this house and started physical rehabilitation. He’d done yoga and tai chi.
Or at least he’d tried.
He hadn’t made it through a single yoga class. The more he tried to calm down, the more he felt the vein in his neck throb until his forehead was covered with sweat. The pain of doing nothing, of just sitting alone with his thoughts, left him half-mad, like a tiger trapped in a cage.
He’d done extreme sports because they made him feel something. The adrenaline stirred up by thinking he might die was a reminder that he was still alive. The never ending sameness of his work, of one meaningless love affair after another, sometimes made him forget.
And yoga was supposed to relax him? Vladimir grumbled beneath his breath. Stupid doctors. What did they know?
He’d already had twelve weeks of twiddling his thumbs, “healing” as ordered, while knowing his brother was in Morocco, tying up various gold and diamond sources in underhanded ways. When his leg had healed enough for him to drive, Vladimir had bought the new Lamborghini to go to the weekly private poker game at the Hale Ka’nani Resort. Then he’d found Bree, who drove him absolutely insane. Even more than yoga.
But what the hell was taking her so long? The dinner he’d made was growing cold. Scowling, he looked up at the second-floor bedroom balcony. How long could it take for a woman to shower?
“Bree,” he yelled. “Come down.”
“No,” he heard her yell back from the open French doors of the balcony.
He set his jaw. “Right now!”
“Forget it! I’m not wearing this thing!”
“Then you won’t eat!”
“Fine by me!”
This dinner wasn’t going at all as he’d envisioned. Growling to himself, Vladimir left the dinner tray on the table and raced inside. Taking the stairs two at a time, he went down the hall and shoved open the double doors to the master bedroom, knocking them back against the walls.
Bree whirled around with a gasp.
Vladimir took one look and his mouth went slack. His heart nearly stopped in his chest.
She stood half-naked, wearing the expensive lingerie, a pale pink teddy and silk robe he’d had a servant buy for her in Kailua. “Make it tacky,” Vladimir had instructed. “The sort of thing a stripper might wear.”
He’d meant to humiliate her. In spite of Bree’s corrupt, hollow soul, she’d always dressed modestly. She never showed any skin—ever. Even when she’d done her best to entice the men at the poker game, she’d lured them with her words, with her electrifying voice, with her angelic face and slender body. But she’d been completely covered from head to toe, with jeans and a leather jacket.
Vladimir had never seen this much of her bare skin. Not even the night ten years ago when he’d proposed, when they would have made love if they hadn’t been interrupted. The lingerie should have looked slutty. It didn’t.
The pale pink color reflected the blush on her cheeks. She looked innocent and young. Like a bride on her wedding night.
Anger and frustration rushed through him. Each time he tried to humiliate Bree or teach her a lesson, she stymied him.
Furious, he crossed the bedroom. Reaching out his hand, he heard her intake of breath as he ripped off the short silken robe, dropping it to the floor. His eyes raked over the creamy skin of her bare shoulders. The slip of silk beneath barely reached the tops of her thighs, and the flimsy bodice revealed most of the curves of her breasts. He saw the thrust of her nipples through the silk, and was instantly hard.
Bree’s cheeks burned red as she glared at him. “Are you happy?”
“No,” he growled. He roughly pulled her into his arms. “But I will be.”
Her eyes glittered. “So you won me in a poker game. Is this what you wanted, Vladimir? To make me look like your whore?”
He saw the shimmer in her eyes, the vulnerability on her beautiful face, heard the heart-stopping tremble of her voice, and felt that same strange twist in his chest. It’s nothing more than an act to manipulate me, he told himself fiercely. Damn her!
“You sold yourself to me of your own free will,” he growled. “What other word would you use to describe a woman who does such a thing?”
He heard the furious intake of her breath, saw the rapid rise and fall of her chest. But as she drew her hand back to slap him, he caught her wrist.
“Typical feminine reaction,” he observed coldly. “I expected more of you.”
“How about this,” she hissed, ripping her arm away. Her damp blond hair slid against the bare skin of her shoulders. “I hate you.”
His lips curled. “Good.”
“I wish to God we’d never met. That any man but you had won me.” Her eyes flashed fire. “I’d rather be right now in the bed of any man at the table—”
Her voice ended with a choke as he yanked her against his body. “So you admit, then, that you are exactly as I’ve said. A liar, a cheat and a whore.”
Her beautiful hazel eyes widened beneath the dark fringe of lashes. Then she swallowed and looked down. “I was a liar, yes, and a cheat, too, but never—never the other,” she said in a small voice. She shook her head. “I haven’t tried to con anyone for ten years. You changed me.” Her dark lashes rose. “You made me a better person,” she whispered. The pain and bewilderment in her eyes made her seem suddenly young and fragile and sad. “And you left.”
And he felt it again—the tight twist in the place where his heart should have been. As if he were an ogre standing over a poor peasant girl with a whip.
No! Damn it! He wouldn’t feel sorry for her!
He’d show her that her overt display of a wobbly lower lip and big hazel eyes had no effect on him whatsoever!
Bree Dalton didn’t have feelings, he told himself fiercely. Just masks. He glared at her. “Stop it.”
“What?”
“Your ridiculous attempt to gain my sympathy. It—”
It won’t work, he meant to say, but his throat closed as he was distracted by the rise and fall of her breasts in the tiny slip of blush-colored silk when she breathed. He could see the shape of her nipples and the way they trembled with every hard breath.
And he was rock hard. Their mutual dislike somehow only made him desire her more, to almost unsustainable need. What magnetic control did she have over his body? Why did he want her like this? She was a confessed liar, a con artist. She wished she’d lost her body to any man but him. How could he want her still?