smiled secretly to himself. He knew perfectly well, from the information garnered by his agent, every single like and dislike Alena possessed. His goal now was to disarm her to such an extent that she ended up trusting him.
Once they were inside a taxi he told her, ‘I thought we’d have lunch back at your hotel.’
Alena nodded her head. The hotel did have an excellent restaurant, she knew. The kind of restaurant where important business was conducted on a regular basis. A man’s restaurant, Alena often felt, with a menu that was heavy on traditional gourmet meat and fish dishes and portions which she found far too generous. It was silly of her to feel disappointed. This was, after all, a business lunch and not a date. Kiryl was obviously a busy man, just like her brother, and she knew that in similar circumstances Vasilii would have done exactly the same thing.
The reminder to herself that their lunch was a business lunch had her sitting up straight on her own side of the shiny leather taxi seat as she automatically adopted what she hoped was the right pose for a businesswoman.
From his own side of the seat Kiryl, who had relaxed into the darker shadows of the corner of the seat refused to allow himself the mistake of looking at her. Not yet. That would come later. As a boy, running wild with other boys like himself—poor, ragged, half-starved boys, living hand to mouth under the aegis of their elderly foster grandmother, some of them lucky enough to have mothers who worked—he had learned to fish. Sometimes the fish he’d caught had been the only meal there was, so he had had to learn how to take his time and to wait for the right moment to catch his prey unawares.
He knew his silence now was bound to add to the tension he could see Alena was already feeling, and that suited him. Fate had handed the very best wild card he was ever likely to get when it had brought Alena Demidova into his life—without her brother.
The traffic was building up; one of London’s many sets of roadworks had brought their taxi to a standstill. Kiryl looked from under his lashes at Alena. His agent had done his work well, and Kiryl knew everything there was to know about her—from the fact that her brother believed her to be currently under the safe care of an elderly ex-matron of an exclusive girls’ school to the fact that she was probably still a virgin. He knew all about her parents’ marriage, and her English mother’s passion for her charity, just as he knew to the last pound how many millions of pounds there were in her trust fund, and how many shares in the businesses of her late father and her half-brother would come into her control when she reached twenty-five.
She was a valuable asset—a valuable pawn, indeed—to the man who controlled her future, and it was no wonder that her half-brother was so protective of her and of her eventual inheritance. With such an asset as his half-sister to barter Vasilii Demidov had a great deal of persuasive power at his command. Via her marriage Vasilii would be able to broker even more power for himself than he already had. There would be many, many men who would want to form an alliance with him via marriage to her. It wasn’t her virginity that would be important, either to her brother or the man who married her. It was the power of the alliance that would be created.
He most certainly did not want to marry her. He did not want to marry anyone. But he was quite prepared to let Alena think that he did to win her over.
What he really intended to do was seduce her into falling for him—which would be easy, given the susceptibility to him he had already seen in her and her innocence—and then offer to end their relationship provided her brother backed off from the contract they were competing for. Kiryl’s assessment was that he was the last person her brother would want as a brother-in-law—a man born not just on the wrong side of the tracks but brought up in the gutters of those tracks. In his judgement her brother would far rather lose one contract than a pawn as valuable as a sister who, married to the right man, would bring far more assets into the family than merely one contract.
He wouldn’t like what Kiryl was doing, of course. He wouldn’t like it one little bit. But he would have to accept it, because his sister’s vulnerability to Kiryl was his Achilles’ heel. Kiryl had no doubts about that. No man would guard his sister as Vasilii Demidov guarded his unless she was extremely important to him.
And Alena herself … She would have the sexual pleasure those longing looks she had been giving him said she wanted. And when her brother exchanged her hand in marriage for an increase in his power and wealth she would be able to remember that pleasure when she lay in the arms of a husband she might not particularly want.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, inside his head he could see an image of his mother’s face—the anguish in her eyes when she had told him about how she had trusted his father and how he had deserted her and refused to recognise Kiryl himself. He dismissed it as swiftly and ruthlessly as he always despatched any kind of emotional weakness he found within himself.
The taxi pulled off the main road and into the designated drop-off area outside the main entrance to the hotel. Whilst Kiryl paid the driver, a uniformed doorman opened Alena’s door for her and helped her out. Following her into the hotel, Kiryl tipped him generously. The man would no doubt remember seeing him with Alena—and that would add further reinforcement to his eventual challenge to her brother either to back out of the contract race or risk seeing his besotted sister marry him.
‘This way,’ he told Alena, taking a firm hold on her upper arm to turn her in towards the lifts, when she would have walked past them towards the entrance to the hotel’s restaurant.
Taking advantage of her confusion, when the lift doors opened he guided her inside it, ignoring the faint resistant stiffening of her body.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘I thought we were supposed to be having lunch together?’
‘We are,’ Kiryl agreed equably. ‘But not in the restaurant. I thought it would suit us both better if we had lunch in my suite.’
Suit them both better? What exactly did he mean by that? Alena could feel guilty, excited heat flooding swiftly through her body. Even her face felt as though it was burning with her awareness of how the thought of such intimacy with him was affecting her. And very concerned and wary of that feeling she ought to be, Alena reminded herself as the lift rose swiftly upwards.
Impulsively, her actions driven by sudden apprehension and the frantic pounding of her heart, she turned to him and told him unsteadily, ‘I’m not sure …’
‘You’re afraid to be alone with me? You think I might try to seduce you?’ he guessed. ‘Or is it more that you have been wondering what it would be like if I did try?’
‘No!’ Alena denied immediately.
The lift had stopped. The door was open. He was looking at her with an expression that was a mixture of amusement and something else that re-ignited the desire she had felt earlier.
‘Good,’ he told her as he guided her out of the lift. ‘Because I can assure you that for me this lunch will be strictly business.’
That much was true—even if he had no intention of allowing her to know what exactly that meant.
Torn between relief and embarrassment that he had guessed what was going through her mind, Alena reminded herself that for her the only purpose of this lunch must be the fact that she would be able to claim to Vasilii later that she had secured Kiryl’s donation to the charity, and that it proved she was mature enough to step into her mother’s shoes.
The thick pile of the carpet in the corridor muffled their footsteps as Kiryl guided her towards one of a mere handful of doors in its length, opening it on his suite and indicating that she should
