It was hardly the warmest of welcomes, Laura recognised as she stepped towards the doors and then through them, into the smartly modern room beyond. Her attention, though, wasn’t focused on the expensive designer furniture and decor of the room. Instead it had flown like a homing pigeon to the man standing in front of one of the room’s two tall balconied windows, with his back to her.
Like her, he was wearing formal business clothes—a dark suit. His equally dark hair just touched the white collar of his shirt. His hands, which were at his sides, were tanned and ring-free. His head was angled slightly to one side, so that the light from the window caught the sharp bone structure.
The flutters she had felt in her tummy when she’d got out of the lift had turned into a distinct and discomforting curl of sensation—not, of course, awareness of him as a man, and certainly not helpless female appreciation of that maleness. That could not be allowed to be possible. Not with the very personal knowledge she had of herself and the way other people might translate it were they to know. It wasn’t as though she had actually chosen to be that way. And it certainly didn’t have anything to do with Vasilii Demidov and those teenage feelings she had had for him.
What she was feeling was simply a very natural anxiety, Laura insisted to herself. Professional anxiety because she needed this job so desperately. That was all.
And then he turned round.
The man her fourteen-year-old self had adored must have been stored in her memory in soft focus, and that focus had been gentled by idealism, Laura acknowledged, torn between wishing that there was a chair for her to steady herself on and being glad that there wasn’t as she withstood the searing, biting hostility of a gaze that felt like the coldest wind that had ever blown off the winter steppes.
She had taught in Russia for a while, just as she had in China, whilst studying the languages of both countries, and she knew exactly how that wind could burn into one’s flesh and senses, destroying those who weren’t strong enough to withstand its onslaught.
That wind and the whip of desert sand and its burning heat had surely carved the bone structure of this male face that was stripped of all softness. The tanned flesh might look velvet-warm, and human enough to tempt any woman’s yearning touch, but the flint-grey eyes warned of the fate that would destroy anyone reckless enough to attempt the forbidden intimacy of doing so. That this was a man who prided himself on not having any human vulnerabilities within his make-up, Laura already knew from her research, but seeing the reality of all that delineated so clearly and harshly in his features was still a heart-jolting shock. His tall, broad-shouldered frame might be clothed in what looked like the best that Savile Row could produce, but it was abundantly clear to Laura that beneath those twenty-first-century clothes lay not vulnerable flesh but instead a hardened steel armour.
This man had the heritage of both his mother’s people’s blood and his father’s business success soldered into him and onto him. His already critical scrutiny told Laura that. He might by his blood be of the desert, but there was a coldness about him—an air of distance, almost a total rejection of his own humanity allied to a contempt for the vulnerability of others. The sheer onslaught of the information being relayed to her by her own senses was almost too intense for her to manage.
Every warning system her body and her mind possessed was telling her to turn and leave, to run if necessary. And yet … that frisson of sensation, that unwanted but determined sensual awareness of him as a man that trembled through every nerve ending and tingled every pore of her skin meant—Meant nothing. And if it did exist, and wasn’t merely something ridiculous left over from her teens, a product of her imagination, it should be ignored, Laura told herself firmly.
The photograph of her on her CV hadn’t revealed the female delicacy and the perfection of her heart-shaped face and its features anything like as clearly as the reality of Laura in the flesh, Vasilii was forced to acknowledge as he studied the young woman standing in front of him. Intriguingly—or suspiciously, depending on your mindset, and his always veered towards the suspicious—she had no internet presence. No unseemly photographs of university antics, no gossipy posts to reveal any real aspects of her personality. But of course he didn’t need them. He already had a direct insight into exactly what kind of person she was. The kind he most despised.
She might be physically attractive, and she might have dressed her elegantly slender five feet nine inches in a smart, businesslike, summer weight off-white dress, over which she was wearing an equally smart mid-grey jacket, accessorised with mid-height grey leather pumps and a workmanlike black leather bag, but he knew the reality of her. Just as he knew that beneath the clothes that discreetly skimmed her body she had the kind of curves that most appealed to the heterosexual male’s desires, and that they were entirely natural.
Inside his head Vasilii discovered that he was making an illogical and totally unnecessary calculation as to the number of months it had been since he had last cupped the full softness of a woman’s breasts in his hands whilst he slowly kissed his way from her throat down towards them. Her skin would be creamy pale, a sensual incitement all of its own to the man who wanted her. But he of course was not that man. He controlled his own male reactions. They did not control him. The powerful lightning strike of sexual awareness jolting through him meant nothing. It was merely an instinctive physical reaction. Nothing more. He had far more important things to think about than the brief, inconvenient surge of male desire, both inexplicable and un-desired, that had surged through him.
Turning away from her, Vasilii reached for some papers on his desk, demanding curtly as he turned back, ‘I see you speak Russian as well as Chinese? Why Russian, when most Russians who need to speak and understand English already do so?’
His question caught Laura completely off guard, and made her feel self-conscious. She could easily remember how her desire to learn Russian had been fired, and by whom, but she could hardly tell him that it had been the thought of speaking to him in his own language that had motivated her all those years ago.
‘My parents were linguists. They both spoke Russian, and I started speaking it myself, picking it up from them. I thought … I felt … It seemed natural to follow in their footsteps.’ It was in part the truth, after all—even if she was not telling him the whole of that truth.
‘You decided to follow in their footsteps rather than strike out and make your own path through life? Is that what you mean? Wouldn’t you say that that shows a lack of self-determination and ambition?’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Laura defended herself firmly. He was deliberately trying to make her feel uncomfortable, she was sure, but she wasn’t going to let him. ‘Certain abilities do pass down through the generations, after all. In your own case you followed your father into the same line of business, and your success has proved that you have an aptitude for it. I had an aptitude for languages. After I lost my parents, developing that aptitude and those skills and following in their footsteps helped me to feel that they continued to be a part of my life. I loved languages, and I wanted something I could hold on to that felt as though it was part of them.’
Something to hold on to. An image of his mother the last time he had seen her alive flashed briefly and harrowingly through Vasilii’s head before he could deny it. The fact that it had been there at all only increased the dislike and rejection he felt towards Laura. She was stirring up within him memories she should not have the ability to stir up, raising issues that no one was ever allowed to raise with him, crossing lines that no one was permitted to cross with her conversation about her parents and her foolish sentimentality. Why? And, even more importantly, how? It was absurd that a woman like her, whom he already knew he could not trust, should somehow have managed to breach the defences that not even the gentle, loving touch of his late stepmother had been allowed to breach. Absurd and dangerous. The day that a woman like Laura Westcotte could represent any kind of danger whatsoever to him would never come, Vasilii assured himself.
‘I asked you for an explanation of why you chose to learn Russian. I expected a business reason, not a self-indulgent description of your childhood emotions.’
The harshness