The Power of Vasilii. PENNY JORDAN
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what a business. Vasilii had taken charge of the business portfolio originally begun by his late father and had turned it into a multinational empire. The head office of this empire might technically be located in Zurich, but from what Laura had been able to learn the reality was that the head of the empire still adhered to the traditions of the Nomad desert warriors of his maternal family. He travelled almost continuously between all the places in which he had business and financial interests.
Unlike so many other Russian oligarchs, Vasilii did not own lavish homes all over the world. Instead he stayed in hotel suites or concierge apartments, as though at heart his spirit needed to move as ceaselessly as the sands had once moved beneath the feet of the camels in the camel trains of his mother’s people.
How intrigued and awed she had been at fourteen to learn that Vasilii, whilst being half Russian through his Russian father, could trace his roots back through his mother’s family to one of the most noble and ancient races to travel the deserts and the rugged terrain of the southernmost part of Russia’s old territories. There was a legend she had read saying that this tribe of light-skinned and light-eyed desert warriors had once mixed their blood with that of a lost Roman legion, and that their centuries-old pride in their warrior skills came from that time. There had been other stories on the internet about the tribe, and its fierce pride and equally fierce adherence to its own code of honour.
Like so many of the old desert tribes its numbers had been reduced by war and disease long before Vasilii’s mother had been born. She had fallen in love with Vasilii’s father, and then been lost to both her husband and her son in the most tragic of circumstances. She had felt such a surge of idealistic love when she had learned from her aunt the story of the kidnap and subsequent death of Vasilii’s mother.
But that had been then, and this was now—and everything she knew about Vasilii Demidov now suggested that he was a man immune to the kind of vulnerabilities experienced by the rest of the human race. A powerful, hard-headed man, who was completely focused on the success of his business. Not the kind of man who was likely to welcome the knowledge that a fourteen-year-old had had such a huge crush on him that she …
That was enough!
Laura checked her watch and then quickened her walking pace. She must not be late for this all-important appointment—and she definitely must not be late because she was daydreaming about the man who would be interviewing her.
From his exclusive concierge apartment on the top floor of one of London’s most prestigious hotels, Vasilii had an excellent view of Sloane Street and the surrounding neighbourhood as he stood at the window of the apartment’s smart boutique-hotel-style sitting room. A shaft of late July sunshine falling across his face threw into relief the harsh scimitar-sharp angle of his cheekbones and the taut line of his jaw.
To his Russian compatriots the golden warmth of his skin and the autocratic boldness of his nose might mark his genes as those of an outsider—someone who belonged more to the Arab world than their own—but he had grown up just as much of an outsider to the world in his late mother’s family as he had his father’s: truly accepted by neither, marked physically by his mother’s genes and mentally by his father’s brilliance as a businessman. An outsider who had learned young to walk alone and to trust no one other than himself. Especially after his mother had been kidnapped and then murdered by her kidnappers in a rescue attempt that had gone wrong.
To have been as emotionally dependent on his mother’s love as he had been as a child, and then to lose that love, had taught the man he had become the necessity of protecting himself against such vulnerability. And that was exactly what he had done, holding other people at a distance and promising himself that he would never allow himself to become vulnerable to the pain of love and loss again.
Right now, though, it wasn’t the past that was making him frown, it was the present. The present and a certain Miss Laura Westcotte.
If it had been unfortunate that his PA had had to take compassionate leave for six months to be with his sick wife, then it had been irritating that the temp hired to take his place had gone down with a particularly vicious form of the norovirus bug—just when Vasilii had been at the most delicate state possible of negotiations with the Chinese, and thus most in need of a PA who was not only fluent in Mandarin but also in Russian, and of course English, and who understood the protocol and etiquette complexities of negotiating with high-ranking Chinese dignitaries and officials. Vasilii might be fluent in all three languages himself, but one of the things one did not do when negotiating with high-status Chinese officials was risk losing face or, even worse, risk causing them to lose face by doing one’s own translating.
Vasilii had quickly discovered that when dealing with the Chinese the existence of an impressive retinue of personnel was extremely important. Which was why right now he was waiting to interview Laura Westcotte, the applicant best qualified to suit his needs according to the headhunters he had hired to find someone.
However, there were excellent reasons why Laura Westcotte was not the applicant or the PA Vasilii wanted. The first was that she was female—Vasilii never took on female staff to work closely with him. He had quickly learned that female graduates were far too likely to see him—unmarried and extremely wealthy—as potential husband material, and Vasilii had no intention of getting married—ever.
A muscle flickered in his jaw, as though he’d had to tense his body against a surge of unwanted emotion. Marriage, like any close relationship, meant giving something of yourself to others. It meant commitment, and it meant being vulnerable to loss and thus to the most terrible pain.
The contradiction within him that came from his dual heritage meant that living alongside the modern Russian was a fierce desert warrior, whose handed-down moral code and beliefs were hopelessly out of step with modern-day life. And why should he marry? There wasn’t any need. His half-sister Alena’s recent marriage to a fellow Russian meant that in all probability there would at some stage be children from that marriage, to work for and take over the family business in due course.
But it wasn’t just his aversion to having a female PA that made him antagonistic towards having Laura Westcotte as his PA. Despite her impressive CV, what he’d learned about her through Alena, along with the investigations he’d had made about her, proved she lacked both responsibility and ethics, and therefore could not be trusted. In short, morally she was everything he did not want in his PA. Unfortunately, though, there was no other applicant for the post who was anywhere near as well qualified for it.
It wasn’t just that her Mandarin and Russian were, according to all the enquiries he had made about her, beyond compare, it was also that her grasp of the manners and customs of both the modern-day-business and diplomatic Chinese worlds was so nuanced as to be in a class of its own. Those skills were exactly what he desperately needed right now if he was to secure the Chinese contract he had been pursuing for the last fifteen months. Not to secure it wouldn’t just affect his business empire and its profits, but also its future growth potential
No, he had no other choice. He would have to offer Laura Westcotte the job.
It was the incredibly swift upsurge of the lift that was responsible for the unwanted fluttery sensation in her stomach, and not the thought of coming face to face with the man who had been responsible for those embarrassing to remember feverish teenage fantasies and romantic daydreams, Laura assured herself as she waited for the outer door to Vasilii Demidov’s serviced apartment to be opened. This was a job interview she was attending, after all—for a job she desperately needed, she reminded herself. She simply could not afford to show any kind of nervousness—no matter what the cause. Given what she had read about Vasilii’s ice-cold clinical ability to slice through anything that stood in the way of his targeted business goals, he was obviously not someone who would be sympathetic to uncertainty or nervousness in others. He was far more likely to use that vulnerability to his own advantage.
The clicking and whirring of internal locks accompanied by a mechanically controlled voice instructing her to ‘enter when the green light shows’ had Laura stepping as confidently as she could into a marble-floored rectangular inner hallway brilliantly lit by concealed modern lighting.
A pair