CHAPTER SEVEN

      Russia.

      AS A child, Bree had traveled down the rocky, forest-covered Alaskan coast with her father, seeking gullible tourists off cruise ships for poker games. Her favorite village had been Sitka, once the capital of Russian America. At twelve, she’d looked across the gray, frozen Bering Sea and dreamed of the distant, ancient, mysterious land of the tsars.

      When wooden Orthodox churches were being hacked out of the wilderness in Alaska, St. Petersburg was already a century old, built on the orders of a tsar. She’d dreamed of someday seeing the palatial Russian city, the onion domes of its cathedrals shining with silver and gold.

      But Bree never dreamed she’d come here as the cosseted mistress of a prince. For two days now, she’d been living in his three-story palace outside the city, built like a fortress on a hill, overlooking the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. She’d spent her days shopping in the most exclusive boutiques of the city, accompanied by his bodyguards and his chauffeur.

      She spent her nights in Vladimir’s bed. He came to her in the middle of the night, waking her, making love to her in darkness, setting her body ablaze from the inside out. He burned her with the fire of their mutual need. Each night, she fell asleep in his arms, satiated with pleasure.

      But each day, she woke up in the cold gray winter dawn, bereft and alone.

      Vladimir was extremely busy, working on the Arctic Oil merger. Even if he was using her only for sex, she shouldn’t take it personally. Right? That was what she’d expected. Wasn’t it? She should be grateful for this life he’d given her, one of luxury, pleasure and comfort. Most women would envy her. She should make the best of things.

      So she tried.

      Left alone all day, she went shopping, as Vladimir had ordered. Four bodyguards took her out in a black limousine with bulletproof glass. Expensive designer shops closed their doors to all other customers so Bree could shop alone, quite alone, with only sycophantic store clerks for company.

      Maybe it would have been fun if Vladimir had been with her. Or Josie. Bree missed her sister like a physical ache in her heart. She’d tried multiple times over the past few days to call her, but Josie never answered. Bree tried to squelch her worries. Surely Josie was fine. It was just her own loneliness, playing tricks on her mood, that made Bree anxious.

      But after two exhausting days of shopping, shocked at the outrageous prices, she was desperate to find something, anything, else to do. “Buy a wardrobe of winter clothes,” Vladimir had said, shoving his credit card into her hand. “And lingerie.” Wanting to be done, she’d randomly grabbed two items the clerks were pushing on her—a long, puffy black coat and an expensive lingerie set with a white lace bustier, G-string and garter belt—and practically ran from the store. The bodyguards formed a tunnel to her waiting black limo, and she fled past the annoyed faces of Russian women waiting outside.

      But now, on her third day in St. Petersburg, as she sat alone at a very long table in the empty palace, eating an elegant lunch prepared by the Russian-speaking housekeeper, Bree felt a rush of pure relief when her cell phone rang. She snatched it up. “Hello?”

      “What are you wearing?”

      At the sound of Vladimir’s low, sensual voice, her shoulders relaxed. “I thought you might be Josie.”

      “Sorry to disappoint you.”

      “I’m glad to hear your voice.” Her hand tightened on her phone. “I’m, um, wearing my old flannel pajamas and big bootie slippers from home.”

      “Sounds sexy. Want to come over?”

      “Come where?”

      “To my office.”

      She blinked. “Why?”

      “I have a fifteen-minute break coming up. I thought I’d have you for lunch.”

      A shiver of sensual delight went through her at his words. Straightening in her antique chair, she retorted, “Forget it. I’m not going to rush over to your office like some kind of booty-call delivery service. I might be your sex slave, but I do have some standards.”

      “I think you’ll change your mind when you hear what I want to do to you….”

      She listened to his low growl of a voice describing his intentions in graphic detail, and her hand went limp until the phone fell from her grasp and clattered to the floor. She snatched it up.

      “I’ll be right there,” she said breathlessly. Clicking off, she pulled her new lingerie from the designer bag and tugged it on. Covering herself with the black puffy coat, that trailed to her ankles, she replaced her slippers with black stiletto boots and went outside, where a bodyguard held open her limousine door.

      Bree’s heart pounded as the chauffeur drove into the heart of St. Petersburg. She barely saw the elegant buildings lining the snowy streets and icy Neva River. All she could think about was what waited for her. Who waited for her.

      The limo arrived at a sprawling eighteenth-century building. A bodyguard opened her door and said in heavily accented English, “This is office, miss.”

      She looked up and down the block. The structure seemed to stretch endlessly along the avenue. “Which one?”

      The bodyguard looked at her. “All. Is Xendzov building.”

      “All of it?” Bree looked at the classically columned building in shock. It was one thing to theoretically know that Vladimir was rich. It was another to see this enormous building, an entire city block, and know it represented a mere fragment of his worldwide empire.

      Swallowing nervously, she went into the foyer and took an elevator to the top floor. Down the hall, through a wall of glass, she saw men in suits packed around a conference table, some of them pounding the tabletop as they argued, while secretaries refilled their coffee cups and took notes.

      Vladimir looked devastatingly powerful