A Champagne Christmas. Кэрол Мортимер

this wasn’t personal. It was business.

      Wasn’t it?

      If he’d told Grace the truth, it would have ended everything. And he was getting so close. He could feel her weakening by the moment.

      Seducing her away from Barrington was the best thing that could happen to her, he told himself. The man was obviously using her own feelings against her, working her like a slave without pay.

      And it wasn’t as if she were an innocent. No, her kisses were too perfect for that. She’d kissed Maksim slowly, sensually, holding herself back with such restraint. As if she’d been born to enflame a man’s senses and make him crazed out of his mind with longing until he would do or say anything to possess her.

      Even lie against his honor.

      He took Grace’s hand in his own. “I gave my driver the night off,” he said. “I thought we’d walk.”

      “All right,” she whispered, never taking her eyes from him.

      Snow whitened the sidewalk, covering patches of slippery ice beneath. He held her arm tightly as they walked past the pubgoers enjoying last call, making sure she didn’t slip and wasn’t accosted by some drunken lad seeking a beauty for his bed.

      Grace was all his.

      Maksim could see their breath joined in swirling white puffs of air, illuminated by the moon in the winter night. He looked at her as they walked down the snowy street toward the southern edge of Trafalgar Square.

      She looked so beautiful, he thought, lit up like an angel in front of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Her light blond hair tumbled down her shoulders, looking like spun silver and gold in the frosted moonlight. The diamond tiara sparkled in her hair, making her a spun-sugar princess. No. There was a layer of grief, of steel, beneath the sweetness. She was no helpless pink princess. No. She was a Valkyrie, from a Gothic northern land.

      Her shoulders were set squarely, her hands pushed into the pockets of her long black coat that whipped behind her like a regal cape; and yet there was a softer side to her as she leaned up against him, her tender pink lips pressed together, as if she were trying to hold herself back. As if she were trying not to think.

      “Thank you for bringing me to your sister’s party,” she said softly. “I’d forgotten what it was like to be around friends.”

      He felt another pang of an unpleasant emotion perilously close to guilt. It had been ruthless of him to take her to the party. But he’d wanted to see Dariya on her birthday. And, he admitted quietly to himself, he’d known it would lower Grace’s defenses to meet his family. She would think she could trust him. Another lie.

      The only thing that wasn’t a lie: he wanted her.

      “Are you, Maksim?”

      He focused on her. “Am I what?”

      She looked up at him as he led her by Charing Cross station. “Are you my friend?”

      He brought her hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. He felt her shiver beneath the brush of his lips against her skin. “No,” he said in a low voice. “I’m not your friend, Grace.”

      They passed down a slender street full of restaurants and pubs, crowds of young people and a few Chelsea football fans in blue-and-white scarves celebrating loudly over a pint. He took her hand and led her down to the embankment by the river. As they walked, they passed a dark garden.

      “I don’t want your friendship,” he said. “I want you in my bed.”

      The intimacy of his words, as they passed the quiet darkness of the park drenched in crystalline moonlight, was perfect. She looked up at him, her mouth a round O. A mouth made for kissing. A mouth he wanted to feel under his.

      Right now.

      But as he stopped, leaning down to kiss her, she suddenly turned away, her pale cheeks the color of roses in the moonlight.

      “Did you learn to flirt like that in Russia?” she whispered. She gave a sharp, awkward laugh and started walking again. “You have some skills.”

      So his beauty wished to wait? He would be patient. “I grew up here.”

      Her eyes went wide. “London?”

      “And other places.” He shrugged. “We moved around. My father couldn’t keep a job. We were poor. Then he died.”

      “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “My father died five years ago, too. Cancer.” She swallowed, looked away. “My mother has yet to recover. She almost never leaves the house. That’s why…” She looked away.

      “Why what?”

      She turned back, blinking hard.

      “I’m sorry I misjudged you,” she said. “Thinking you’d never known what it was like to struggle or suffer just because you’re a prince.”

      “Yes, a prince,” he said acidly. “Distantly in line to a throne that, if you haven’t noticed, stopped ruling Russia nearly a hundred years ago.”

      “But still…”

      “Prince of nothing and nowhere,” he said harshly. “Money is all that matters. Only money.”

      “Oh, Maksim.” Tears filled her eyes as Grace shook her head. “Money isn’t the only thing that matters. It’s the way you love people. The way you take care of them.”

      “And you take care of them with money.”

      “No. Like your sister said, she didn’t need more expensive things, she wanted you. Your time and—”

      “A lovely sentiment,” he said sardonically. “But my sister is too young to remember how we nearly starved and froze to death the winter we lived in Philadelphia. After that, I made sure I could support us. I made sure no one and nothing could ever threaten my mother and sister again.”

      “You protected your family.” Her eyes suddenly glittered, and her hands clenched into fists before she stuck them in the pockets of her designer coat. “I should have stayed in California,” she said softly. “I never should have left my mother alone.”

      A hard lump rose in Maksim’s throat. “Being with the people you love doesn’t always save them. I made my first million when I was twenty, but it couldn’t save my mother from dying.”

      “Oh, no,” she said softly. “What happened?”

      “Brain aneurysm. She died without warning. I…I couldn’t save her.”

      He stopped, choking on the words. He had never spoken about his mother’s death to anyone—not even Dariya, who’d been barely nine when it had happened.

      Maksim waited for Grace to expose the weakness in his argument. To point out that, by his own admission, money was indeed not everything in life.

      Instead she reached up to stroke his cheek. The first time she’d deliberately touched him.

      “It wasn’t your fault,” she said softly. “You took care of your family. You protected them. You tried to save your mother. You did everything you could.”

      A tremble went through him, and he involuntarily turned his face into her caress. He closed his eyes briefly, taking a deep breath.

      “You’re a special woman, Grace Cannon,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve never met your equal.”

      She gave a short laugh and looked away. The street-lights shone a plaintive blurry light on the dark, swift river beneath the bare trees of the embankment. “I’m not special. I’m completely ordinary.”

      “You’re special.”

      “It’s the clothes.”

      “It’s the woman inside them.” He looked down at her. “Grace. You are just like your name. Grace.” His eyes narrowed.