Not Just The Boss's Plaything. Caitlin Crews

through. It was why he was so good at what he did.

      And it was safer, Nikolai thought now, his eyes on the heedless, hedonistic crowd. There was too much to lose should he relinquish that deep freeze, give up that iron control. What he remembered of his drinking years appalled him—the blurred nights, the scraps and pieces of too much frustrated emotion turned too quickly into violence, making him far too much like the brutal uncle he’d so despised.

      Never again.

      It was better by far to stay empty. Cold. Frozen straight through.

      He had never been anything but alone. Nikolai understood that now. The truth was, he preferred it that way. And once he dealt with Veronika, once he confirmed the truth about Stefan’s paternity, he would never have to be anything else.

      Alicia Teller ran out of patience with a sudden jolt, a wave of exhaustion and irritation nearly taking her from her feet in the midst of the jostling crowd. Or possibly that was the laddish group to her left, all of them obviously deep into the night’s drinking and therefore flailing around the dance floor.

      I’m much too old for this, she told herself as she moved out of their way for the tenth time, feeling ancient and decrepit at her extraordinarily advanced age of twenty-nine.

      She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a Saturday night anywhere more exciting than a quiet restaurant with friends, much less in a slick, pretentious club that had recently been dubbed the place to be seen in London. But then again, she also didn’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth—said gift horse, in this case, being her ever-exuberant best friend and flatmate Rosie, who’d presented the guest passes to this velvet-roped circus with a grand flourish over dinner.

      “It’s the coolest place in London right now,” she’d confidently assured Alicia over plates of saag paneer in their favorite Indian restaurant not far from Brick Lane. “Dripping with celebrities and therefore every attractive man in London.”

      “I am not cool, Rosie,” Alicia had reminded her gently. “You’ve said so yourself for years. Every single time you try to drag me to yet another club you claim will change my life, if memory serves. It might be time for you to accept the possibility that this is who I am.”

      “Never!” Rosie had cried at once, feigning shock and outrage. “I remember when you were fun, Alicia. I’ve made a solemn vow to corrupt you, no matter how long it takes!”

      “I’m incorruptible,” Alicia had assured her. Because she also remembered when she’d been fun, and she had no desire to repeat those terrible mistakes, thank you, much less that descent into shame and heartache. “I’m also very likely to embarrass you. Can you handle the shame?”

      Rosie had rolled her extravagantly mascaraed and shimmery-purple shadowed eyes while tossing the last of the poppadoms into her mouth.

      “I can handle it,” she’d said. “Anything to remind you that you’re in your twenties, not your sixties. I consider it a public service.”

      “You say that,” Alicia had teased her, “but you should be prepared for me to request ‘Dancing Queen’ as if we’re at a wedding disco. From the no doubt world-renowned and tragically hip DJ who will faint dead away at the insult.”

      “Trust me, Alicia,” Rosie had said then, very seriously. “This is going to be the best night of our lives.”

      Now Alicia watched her best friend shake her hips in a sultry come-on to the investment banker she’d been flirting with all night, and blamed the jet lag. Nothing else could have made her forget for even a moment that sparkly, dramatic still Rosie viewed it as her sacred obligation to pull on a weekend night, the way they both had when they were younger and infinitely wilder, and that meant the exorbitant taxi fare back home from the wilds of this part of East London to the flat they shared on the outskirts of Hammersmith would be Alicia’s to cough up. Alone.

      “You know what you need?” Rosie had asked on the chilly trek over from the Tube, right on cue. “Desperately, I might add?”

      “I know what you think I need, yes,” Alicia had replied dryly. “But for some reason, the fantasy of sloppy and unsatisfying sex with some stranger from a club pales in comparison to the idea of getting a good night’s sleep all alone in my own bed. Call me crazy. Or, barring that, a grown-up.”

      “You’re never going to find anyone, you know,” Rosie had told her then, frowning. “Not if you keep this up. What’s next, a nunnery?”

      But Alicia knew exactly what kind of people it was possible to meet in the clubs Rosie preferred. She’d met too many of them. She’d been one of them throughout her university years. And she’d vowed that she would never, ever let herself get so out of control again. It wasn’t worth the price—and sooner or later, there was always a price. In her case, all the years it had taken her to get her father to look at her again.

      Alicia had been every inch a Daddy’s girl until that terrible night the summer she’d been twenty-one. She’d been indulged and spoiled and adored beyond measure, the light of his life, and she’d lost that forever on a single night she still couldn’t piece together in her head. But she knew the details almost as if she could remember it herself, because she’d had to sit and listen to her own father tell them to her the next morning while her head had pounded and her stomach had heaved: she’d been so drunk she’d been practically paralytic when she’d come home that night, but at some point she’d apparently wandered out into the back garden—which was where her father had found her, having sex with Mr. Reddick from next door.

      Married Mr. Reddick, with three kids Alicia had babysat over the years, who’d been good mates with her dad until that night. The shame of it was still scarlet in her, bright and horrid, all these years later. How could she have done such a vile, despicable thing? She still didn’t know.

      Afterward, she’d decided that she’d had more than enough fun for one lifetime.

      “Sorry,” Alicia had said to Rosie then, smiling the painful memories away. “Are you talking about love? I was certain we were talking about the particular desperation of a Saturday night shag....”

      “I have a radical idea, Saint Alicia,” Rosie had said then with another roll of her eyes toward the dark sky above. “Why don’t you put the halo aside for the night? It won’t kill you, I promise. You might even find you like a little debauchery on a Saturday night the way you used to do.”

      Because Rosie didn’t know, of course. Nobody knew. Alicia had been too embarrassed, too ashamed, too disgusted with herself to tell her friend—to tell anyone—why she’d abruptly stopped going out at the weekend, why she’d thrown herself into the job she hadn’t taken seriously until then and turned it into a career she took a great deal of pride in now. Even her mother and sisters didn’t know why there had been that sudden deep chill between Alicia and her dad, that had now, years later, only marginally improved into a polite distance.

      “I’m not wearing my halo tonight, actually,” Alicia had replied primly, patting at her riot of curls as if feeling for one anyway. “It clashed with these shoes you made me wear.”

      “Idiot,” Rosie had said fondly, and then she’d brandished those guest passes and swept them past the crowd outside on the pavement, straight into the clutches of London’s hottest club of the moment.

      And Alicia had enjoyed herself—more than she’d expected she would, in fact. She’d missed dancing. She’d missed the excitement in the air, the buzz of such a big crowd. The particular, sensual seduction of a good beat. But Rosie’s version of fun went on long into the night, the way it always had, and Alicia grew tired too easily. Especially when she’d only flown back into the country the day before, and her body still believed it was in another time zone altogether.

      And more, when she wasn’t sure she could trust herself. She didn’t know what had made her do what she’d done that terrible night