I wanted to be involved with as a donor.’
That was certainly true. He had known immediately he had read about the charity and Alena’s desire to become more involved in it just what a useful tool it would be in winning her trust.
‘I know how much work the charity does to help girls have the opportunity to gain an education. I admire you for wanting to take on that responsibility. Many young women in your situation would have handed that responsibility over to someone else.’ He flattered Alena warmly.
‘I could never do that. The charity was so close to my mother’s heart.’ She paused, and then said emotionally, ‘It must have been so hard for you, growing up without your mother and—’
‘According to my father I was lucky that she died, and that I was fostered by a family without the taint of Romany blood.’
Alena felt her throat clog with emotional tears. Within her head she could see that poor baby, and felt a female ache to have been able to hold and protect it. Poor, poor baby to be so cruelly treated by life.
‘I was very lucky in having the parents I did,’ was all she could manage to say.
‘But unlucky, perhaps, in having a brother who is so determined to control your life?’
‘Vasilii only wants what’s best for me.’ She defended her half-sibling quickly.
‘For you and for himself, I dare say,’ Kiryl responded, adding before Alena could question his words, ‘We’d better have our main course before it gets cold. I hope you like Dover sole.’
‘Yes, it’s another of my favourites,’ Alena began as Kiryl reached over to remove her starter, and then guessed, ‘You knew that, didn’t you? And that’s why you’ve chosen the meal you have?’
So she wasn’t entirely without either intelligence or the ability to reason analytically, Kiryl acknowledged. He gave her a small smile and told her, ‘Very well—I confess that I did ask the restaurant what your favourite dishes are. I wanted to make a good impression on you.’
Alena couldn’t look directly at him. Her heart was singing with delight and disbelief at the thought of Kiryl actually wanting to impress her, and yet at the same time his words had brought her a certain amount of self-consciousness that was making it impossible for her to look at him.
‘I’m the one who should be trying to impress you,’ she managed to tell him, albeit slightly breathlessly, her voice soft and husky with all that she was feeling. ‘After all, I’m the one who has the most to gain from our lunch.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Kiryl told her softly as he placed her main meal in front of her and removed the cover. ‘There is a great deal that I am hoping to gain from our relationship, Alena.’
As he spoke he was looking at her mouth, and as though his look was communicating an unspoken command Alena could feel her lips softening and parting as deliciously sensual ribbons of desire unrolled to flutter inside her with the movement of her breathing.
‘Tell me more about your mother,’ he invited her, abruptly bringing her back to reality, and the fact that this meeting was about her mother’s charity and not about the effect he was having on her.
‘She was a very special person,’ she answered, her voice soft with love for the mother she had loved so much. ‘Everyone thought so.’
‘Including your half-brother? After all, she was his stepmother.’
‘Vasilii loved her very much. He was fourteen when my parents met in St Petersburg, where my mother was working as an English Language teacher at a school there. Vasilii’s own mother died when he was seven. He wanted them to marry before they knew that they wanted to marry themselves, so he always says, although my mother used to say that she knew the first moment she met him that she loved my father.
‘My mother loved St Petersburg. She and my father used to take me there every winter. It’s such a romantic city. A fairytale city with the Neva frozen and the lights of the older quarters twinkling on the snow. It’s almost possible to think you’re back in the days of dashing young men in the uniform of the Imperial Guard driving their troikas, pulled by a team of three matching horses along Nevsky Prospect, ready to race one another in the morning after spending all night dancing. And then in the summer, when the sun never sets, people flock to party on the islands of the delta. I had dreamed …’
‘That you might find love there yourself?’ Kiryl suggested.
Alena shook her head.
‘I am not such a dreamer that I expect to find love there just because my mother did, but I do think that it would be a very special place to go with … with someone special to me.’ That was as close as she was able to get to saying what she meant. Somehow just to speak the word ‘lover’ in Kiryl’s presence was to run the risk of betraying her vulnerability to him, or having him guess that when she said ‘lover’ she meant Kiryl himself.
Kiryl knew the St Petersburg to which Alena referred—the St Petersburg of the rich and privileged. After all, he was one of them. But he also knew another St Petersburg. The St Petersburg of his own childhood poverty and his rejection by his father. He had turned his back on Russia just as his father had turned his back on him. Kiryl considered himself to be a citizen of the world, not of one part of it.
Not that he was going to say that to Alena. He wanted her to believe that he understood and empathised with her.
IT WAS gone three in the afternoon—over an hour since they had finished their lunch and Kiryl had invited her to sit down on the sofa opposite him. Now, as she stood up ready to leave, Alena was feeling dizzy from a combination of the excitement generated inside her at the sheer amount of the donation Kiryl had told her he was going to make to the charity, and the glass of champagne he had insisted they drank to cement that gift.
‘You’ve been so generous,’ she told him, wobbling slightly on her heels—no doubt because of the speed with which she had stood up, she assured herself, and not the fact that Kiryl was now standing right next to her, his hand resting supportively beneath her elbow as he walked with her towards the door.
Kiryl had insisted on telephoning the CEO of the charity himself to tell her of his wonderfully generous donation, before instructing his bank to make the necessary transfer, and since that had somehow or other necessitated the drinking of a second glass of champagne it was perhaps no wonder that she felt a little unsteady and very, very euphoric. But what about those other feelings, clear and sharp, definitely not due in the slightest to her intake of champagne but most unmistakably caused by Kiryl’s proximity?
They must be ignored, Alena told herself sternly. They belonged to the rather reckless young woman who had seen him in the foyer and let her hormones dictate her reactions, not the far more sensible businesswoman she had now decided she wanted to be.
Alena started to make a move to the door to the hallway, but Kiryl’s hold on her elbow tightened just enough to stop her.
When she turned to him to ask him why he forestalled her, bending his head towards her. Time seemed to stand still, whilst the earth surely rocked beneath her feet. His breath was a warm, sensual touch that
