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
