The Russian Rivals: The Most Coveted Prize / The Power of Vasilii. PENNY JORDAN

threw me out on the street outside his grand mansion—like unwanted rubbish, to be swept away out of his sight. I swore then that one day—’

      Kiryl stopped speaking, frowning as he recognised how much he had said to Alena. He had never intended to say it, and certainly had never said to anyone else. It was because he wanted to draw her into his plan by eliciting her sympathy towards his mother and making her believe that he had a genuine reason for choosing her charity for his donation, that was why. It certainly wasn’t because something in her expression and that shocked gasp she had given had somehow unlocked a door within him he had thought safely barred against the burned-out ashes of the pain he kept caged behind that door. It was impossible for any living human being to re-ignite those ashes. They belonged to the promise he had made himself when he had lain in the gutter outside his father’s house—that he would prove his superiority by becoming more successful and more powerful than his father had ever been.

      His father was dead now, his empire squandered by the second husband of the young wife he had married to provide him with the son she had never conceived for him—the son he had told Kiryl would be the only son he would ever acknowledge.

      With the acquisition of this new contract Kiryl would finally succeed in reaching the goal he had set himself as the fifteen-year-old who had gone to Moscow to look for his father and been rejected. That goal had been to create a business empire that was both larger, more profitable and more securely stable than that of his father. Only Vasilii Demidov now stood in his way.

      He looked across the table at Alena.

      ‘When I heard about your mother’s charity I knew immediately that it was something 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.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      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