effort, Ria controlled the shiver of reaction that threatened her composure.
She hadn’t seen Alexei for ten years, but she had had close contact with his distant cousin Ivan in that time. And hadn’t enjoyed a moment of it. She’d watched Ivan grow from the sort of small boy who pulled wings off butterflies and kicked cats into a man whose volatile, mean-minded temper was usually only barely under control. He was aggressive, greedy, dangerous for the country—and now, she had learned to her horror, a danger to her personally as a result of her father’s machinations. And the only man between them and that possibility was Alexei.
But she knew how much she was asking of him. Especially now, when she knew how he still felt about Mecjoria.
‘Please listen!’
But his face was armoured against her, his eyes hooded, and she felt that every look she turned on him, every word she spoke, simply bounced off his thick skin like a pebble off an elephant’s hide.
‘Please?’ he echoed sardonically, his mouth twisting on the word as he turned it into a cruelly derisory echoing of her tone. ‘I didn’t even realise that you knew that word. Please what, Sweetheart?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
Bleak honesty made her admit it. She could read it in his face, in the cruel opacity of those coal-black eyes. There wasn’t the faintest sign of softening in his expression or any of the lines around his nose and mouth. How could he take a gentle word like ‘sweetheart’ and turn it into something hateful and vile with just his tone?
‘Oh, but I do,’ Alexei drawled, folding his arms across his broad chest and lounging back against the wall, one foot hooked round the base of the door so as to keep it open and so making it plain that he was still waiting—expecting her to leave. ‘I’d love to know just what you’ve come looking for.’
‘Really?’
Unexpected hope kicked hard in her heart. Had she got this all wrong, read him completely the wrong way round?
‘Really,’ he echoed sardonically. ‘It’s fascinating to see the tables turned. Remember how I once asked you for just one thing?’
He’d asked her to help him, and his mother. Asked her to talk to her father, plead with him to at least let them have something to live on, some part of his father’s vast fortune that the state had confiscated, leaving Alexei and his mother penniless as well as homeless. And not knowing the truth, not understanding the machinations of the plotters, or how sick his mother actually was, she had seen him as a threat and sided with her father.
‘I made a mistake …’ she managed. She’d known that her father was ruthless, ambitious, but she had never really believed that he would lie through his teeth, that he would manipulate an innocent woman and her son.
For the good of the country, Honoria, he had said. And, seeing the outrage Alexei’s wayward behaviour had created, she had believed him. Because she had trusted her father. Trusted him and believed in the values of upright behaviour, of loyalty to the crown that he’d insisted on. So she’d believed him when he’d told her how the scandal of Alexei’s mother’s ‘affair’ with one of the younger royal sons was creating problems of state. It was only now, years later, that she’d discovered how much further his deception had gone, and how it had involved her.
‘What is it, darling?’ Alexei taunted. ‘Not enjoying this?’
She saw the gleam of cruel amusement in his eyes, the fiendish smile curling the corners of the beautiful mouth. Each of them spoke of cold contempt, but together they spelled a callous triumph at the thought of getting her exactly where he wanted her. She knew now that this man would delight in rejecting anything she said, if only to have his revenge on the family that he saw as the ringleaders of his downfall. And who could blame him?
But would he do the same for his country?
‘It’s no fun having to beg, is it? No fun having to crawl to someone you’d much rather die than even talk to.’
Once more that searing gaze raked over her from the top of her uncharacteristically controlled hair down to the neat, highly polished black shoes. It was a look that took her back ten years, forced her to remember how coldly he had regarded her before he had walked away and out of her life. For good, she had thought then.
‘And I should know, angel—I’ve been there, remember? I’ve been exactly where you are now—begged, pleaded—and walked away with nothing.’
He might look indolently relaxed and at his ease as he lounged back against the wall, still with those strong arms crossed over the width of his chest, but in reality his position was the taut, expectant posture of a wily, knowing hunter, a predator that was poised, watching and waiting. He only needed his prey—her—to make one move and then he would pounce, hard and fast.
But still she had to try.
‘You are wanted back in Mecjoria,’ she blurted out in an uneven rush.
She could tell his response even before he opened his mouth. The way that long straight spine stiffened, the tightening of the beautiful lips, the way a muscle in his jaw jerked just once.
‘You couldn’t have said anything less likely to make me want to know more,’ he drawled, dark and slow. ‘But you could try to persuade me …’
She could try, but it would have no effect, his tone, his stony expression told her. And she didn’t like the thought of just what sort of ‘persuasion’ could be in his mind. She wasn’t prepared to give him that satisfaction.
Calling on every ounce of strength she possessed, stiffening her back, straightening her shoulders, she managed to lift her head high, force her green eyes to meet those icy black ones head-on.
‘No thank you,’ she managed, her tone pure ice.
Her father would have been proud of her for this at least. She was the Grand Duchess Honoria Maria at her very best. The only daughter of the Chancellor, faced by a troublesome member of the public. The trouble was that after all she had learned about her father’s schemes, the way that he had seen her as a way to further his own power, she didn’t want to be that woman any more. She had actually hoped that by coming here today she could free herself from the toxic inheritance that came with that title.
‘You might get off on that sort of thing, but it certainly does nothing for me.’
If she had hoped that he would look at least a little crestfallen, a touch deflated, then she was doomed to disappointment. There might have been a tiny acknowledgement of her response in his eyes, a gleam that could have been a touch of admiration—or a hint of dark satisfaction from a man who had known all along just how she would respond.
She’d dug herself a hole without him needing to push her into it. But, for now, was discretion the better part of valour? She could let Alexei think that he had won this round at least but it was only one battle, not the whole war. There was too much at stake for that.
‘Thank you for your time.’
She couldn’t so much as turn a glance in his direction, even though she caught another wave of that citrus scent as he came closer, with the undertones of clean male skin that almost destroyed her hard-won courage. But even as she fought with her reactions he fired another comment at her. One that tightened a slackening
