The Most Coveted Prize. PENNY JORDAN

       Alena’s brother turned back to him. ‘I am prepared to withdraw from the contest between us for the contract,’ he told Kiryl, ‘but only if instead of giving up Alena, you marry her.’

      Alena made a small, agonised sound of protest and denial. This could not be happening. To listen whilst Kiryl revealed the truth about their relationship and his plans for her had been bad enough, but now to hear her beloved brother offering her to him in marriage was more than she could cope with. Vasilii couldn’t mean what she had just heard him say. He couldn’t.

      ‘I heard everything, Vasilii.’ She was deliberately keeping her back to Kiryl, unable to endure the thought of looking at him. ‘All of it—every single word.’

      From somewhere she managed to drag up out of her pain a lifeline of anger for her to cling on to.

      ‘You might think now that you have succeeded in your plan to use me to blackmail Vasilii into letting you win the contract, but you haven’t,’ she told him fiercely. ‘And as for marrying you—I’d rather stay single all my life.’

      About the Author

      PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty-five years and has an outstanding record: over 185 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She says she hopes to go on writing until she has passed the 200 mark—and maybe even the 250 mark.

      Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager, and has continued to live there. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her Crighton books. She lives with her Birman cat, Posh, who tries to assist with her writing by sitting on the newspapers and magazines Penny reads to provide her with ideas she can adapt for her fictional books.

      Penny is a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors.

       Don’t miss the sequel to this novel, THE POWER OF VASILII, available next month!

       Recent titles by the same author:

      PASSION AND THE PRINCE

       A STORMY SPANISH MARRIAGE

      The Most

       Coveted Prize

      Penny Jordan

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      ALENA had known she wanted him—quite desperately—the minute she’d seen him. That had been in the foyer of this London hotel earlier in the week. The fierce surge of previously unknown and unexpected sheer physical desire that had struck had been so powerful that it had almost literally knocked her off her feet—and left her in no doubt as to its meaning or its urgency, shaking tremulously from head to foot and on fire with the force of her own desire.

      He was, she suspected, everything that her elder half-brother Vasilii had so often warned her against in his own sex. He was dangerous; she knew that—any woman would know it, even if Vasilii tried to treat her as though she was still merely a girl and not a woman.

      Alena sighed. She did genuinely and really love Vasilii, even if he was the most aggravatingly old-fashioned, moralistic and over-protective brother anyone could have. However, there was something about him which drew and compelled her beyond reason, beyond duty, beyond anything and everything she had ever known or expected to know. Had she been struck by love? Had she been struck by its darker sibling lust? Or perhaps a combination of both? Was it her passionate deep-running Russian blood that was responsible? Or was it a vulnerability to wickedly dangerous Russian men she had inherited from her English mother, who had fallen so swiftly in love with her own Russian father?

      It didn’t matter. What was happening to her was beyond the skills of analysis drilled in to her to fit its pupils for the modern age by the teachers at her all female and very strict school. Nothing mattered other than the gathering, growing rushing need that now owned her. His air of openly raw sexuality and her need to offer herself up to it, to be consumed by it, filled her senses, leaving no room for anything else. Just the thought of even breathing the same air as him was enough to send her dizzy with delight and to make her body react as erotically as though he was already touching it, caressing it, taking it and touching it, teaching it and her everything that it meant to be a woman.

      Alena shuddered in mute acknowledgement of his mastery of her responses. Any minute now he would turn and see her, and recognise the effect he was having on her. Her heart gave a fierce bound of mingled anticipation and apprehension. Oh, yes, he was dangerous—and she ached for it, hungered for it, craved it.

      She might ‘only’ be nineteen, as Vasilii was so fond of reminding her, but she was more than old enough to know from the one tremulous, daring glance she had risked earlier in the week into those malachite-green eyes—so matching in colour the awesome columns of malachite in St Petersburg’s Winter Palace—exactly what the man now standing engaged in conversation with another Russian on the other side of the exclusive hotel’s even more exclusive lounge lobby was. He was living, breathing, walking sexual danger—especially to a woman like her. He lived outside convention and its rules.

      Her pulse beating increasingly speedily, she studied him covertly and eagerly. He was tall—as tall as Vasilii, who was six feet three to her own five feet nine. He was also slightly younger than Vasilii, she suspected. Perhaps in his early thirties, whereas Vasilii was now thirty-five. His thick hair was a rich tawny brown, reminding her of the colour of one of Vasilii’s hunting jackets, although this man’s hair was in need of a cut to bring it to the kind of order Vasilii favoured.

      Everywhere in his face—its bone structure, its contours, its expression—there were subtle traces of a heritage that said that this man came from a long line of men born to battle against other members of his own sex and to stand over their prone bodies when he had defeated them. He was pure alpha male, and a man determined to challenge anyone who questioned his right to that heritage.

      His name was Kiryl Androvonov. She savoured it inside her head, unrolling it like a glittering magnificent carpet of delights for her senses. She had felt so adult, so strong and in control of her own fate, when she had asked the doorman so studiedly, mock-casually, if he knew who he was, pretending that she had recognised him as an acquaintance of her brother. The name Kiryl meant ‘noble’, but the doorman had told her only that he was a businessman and that this was his second visit to the hotel.

      Kiryl hadn’t intended to look for her—the slender, gazelle-like young woman with her silky fall of dark blonde hair and her silver-grey eyes that reminded him of sunlight on the frozen Neva river in winter, or the Russian fables of the rusilki, the fatal enchantresses who rose from their watery graves to lure men to join them. For one thing she wasn’t his type, and for another he had far more important things on his mind than accepting the unspoken but implicit invitation she was giving him.

      But he had looked, and she was there, in the same chair, at the same table, pouring tea from the steaming traditional samovar that the hotel indulged its Russian guests by providing.

      She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring—not that that meant anything these days. A high-priced hooker, then, dangling her bait? Maybe, but Kiryl doubted it. A hooker would have moved in on him before now—time was, after all, money in any business.

      She wanted him, though. He knew that. But he did not want her. Nor did he intend to allow himself to want her, even if that no doubt astronomically expensive soft