CHAPTER THREE

      THAT DAMNED LAUGH.

      Nikolai would rather be shot again, he decided in that electric moment as her laughter filled the car. He would rather take another knife or two to the gut. He didn’t know what on earth he was supposed to do with laughter like that, when it sparkled in the air all around him and fell indiscriminately here and there, like a thousand unwelcome caresses all over his skin and something worse—much worse—deep beneath it.

      He scowled.

      “Never let it be said this wasn’t classy,” Alicia said, her lovely voice wry. “I suppose we’ll always have that going for us.”

      There was no we. There was no us. Neither of those words were disposable. Alarms shrieked like air raid sirens inside of him, mixing with the aftereffects of that laugh.

      “I thought you understood,” he said abruptly, at his coldest and most cutting. “I don’t—”

      “Relax, Tin Man.” Laughter still lurked in her voice. She tugged her trousers back up over her hips, then pulled her bra free of her shirt, shooting him a breezy smile that felt not unlike a blade to the stomach as she clipped it back into place. “I heard you the first time. No heart.”

      And then she ignored him, as if he wasn’t vibrating beside her with all of that darkness and icy intent. As if he wasn’t Nikolai Korovin, feared and respected in equal measure all across the planet, in a thousand corporate boardrooms as well as the grim theaters of too many violent conflicts. As if he was the kind of man someone could simply pick up in a London club and then dismiss...

      Except, of course, he was. Because she had. She’d done exactly that.

      He’d let her.

      Alicia fussed with her shirt before pulling it over her head, her black curls springing out of the opening in a joyful froth that made him actually ache to touch them. Her. He glared down at his hands as if they’d betrayed him.

      When she looked at him again, her dark eyes were soft, undoing him as surely as if she really had eviscerated him with a hunting knife. He would have preferred the latter. She made it incalculably worse by reaching over and smoothing her warm hand over his cheek, offering him...comfort?

      “You look like you’ve swallowed broken glass,” she said.

      Kindly.

      Very much as if she cared.

      Nikolai didn’t want what he couldn’t have. It had been beaten out of him long ago. It was a simple, unassailable fact, like gravity. Like air.

      Like light.

      But he couldn’t seem to stop himself from lifting his hand, tracing that tempting mouth of hers once more, watching the heat bloom again in her eyes.

      Just one night, he told himself then. He couldn’t help it. That smile of hers made him realize he was so tired of the cold, the dark. That he felt haunted by the things he’d lost, the wars he’d won, the battles he’d been fighting all his life. Just once, he wanted.

      One night to explore this light of hers she shone so indiscriminately, he thought. Just one night to pretend he was something more than ice. A wise man didn’t step onto a land mine when he could see it lying there in front of him, waiting to blow. But Nikolai had been through more hells than he could count. He could handle anything for a night. Even this. Even her.

      Just one night.

      “You should hold on,” he heard himself say. He slid his hand around to cup the nape of her neck, and exulted in the shiver that moved over her at even so small a touch. As if she was his. That could never happen, he knew. But he’d allowed himself the night. He had every intention of making it a long one. “I’m only getting started.”

      * * *

      If only he really had been a wolf.

      Alicia scowled down at the desk in her office on Monday and tried valiantly to think of something—anything—other than Nikolai. And failed, as she’d been doing with alarming regularity since she’d sneaked away from his palatial penthouse in South Kensington early on Sunday morning.

      If he’d really been a wolf, she’d likely be in hospital right now, recovering from being bitten in a lovely quiet coma or restful medicated haze, which would mean she’d be enjoying a much-needed holiday from the self-recriminating clamor inside her head.

      At least I wasn’t drunk....

      Though if she was honest, some part of her almost wished she had been. Almost. As if that would be some kind of excuse when she knew from bitter experience that it wasn’t.

      The real problem was, she’d been perfectly aware of what she was doing on Saturday. She’d gone ahead and done it precisely because she hadn’t been drunk. For no other reason than that she’d wanted him.

      From her parents’ back garden to a stranger in a car. She hadn’t learned much of anything in all these years, had she? Given the chance, she’d gleefully act the promiscuous whore—drunk or sober.

      That turned inside of her like bile, acidic and thick at the back of her throat.

      “I think you must be a witch,” he’d said at some point in those long, sleepless hours of too much pleasure, too hot and too addicting. He’d been sprawled out next to her, his rough voice no more than a growl in the dark of his cavernous bedroom.

      A girl could get lost in a room like that, she’d thought. In a bed so wide. In a man like Nikolai, who had taken her over and over with a skill and a thoroughness and a sheer masculine prowess that made her wonder how she’d ever recover from it. If she would. But she hadn’t wanted to think those things, not then. Not while it was still dark outside and they were cocooned on those soft sheets together, the world held at bay. There’d be time enough to work on forgetting, she’d thought. When it was over.

      When it was morning.

      She’d propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at him, his bold, hard face in shadows but those eyes of his as intense as ever.

      “I’m not the driving force in this fairy tale,” she’d said quietly. Then she’d dropped her gaze lower, past that hard mouth of his she now knew was a terrible, electric torment when he chose, and down to that astonishing torso of his laid out before her like a feast. “Red Riding Hood is a hapless little fool, isn’t she? Always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

      Alicia had meant that to come out light and breezy, but it hadn’t. It had felt intimate instead, somehow. Darker and deeper, and a different kind of ache inside. Not at all what she’d intended.

      She’d felt the blue of his gaze like a touch.

      Instead of losing herself there, she’d traced a lazy finger over the steel plates of his harshly honed chest. Devastatingly perfect. She moved from this scar to that tattoo, tracing each pucker of flesh, each white strip of long-ago agony, then smoothing her fingertip over the bright colors and Cyrillic letters that flowed everywhere else. Two kinds of marks, stamped permanently into his flesh. She’d been uncertain if she was fascinated or something else, something that made her mourn for all his body had suffered.

      But it wasn’t her place to ask.

      “Bullet,” he’d said quietly, when her fingers moved over a slightly raised and shiny patch of skin below his shoulder, as if she had asked after all. “I was in the army.”

      “For how long?”

      “Too long.”

      She’d flicked a look at him, but had kept going, finding a long, narrow