The Man She Shouldn't Crave

She just did. And for the first time in his life he didn’t know what to do.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ROSE opened her eyes, pushing herself up, yawning hugely, widening her eyes as she saw Plato standing at the end of the bed in grey sweatpants that rode low on his lean hips and nothing else. Just lots of male skin and muscle, and a hazing of dark hair all over that broad chest narrowing down to his taut abdomen and lower.

Oh, my. This was the best dream ever.

She smiled, the cat that got the cream, and stretched, the sheet dropping and settling around her waist.

That ought to do the job.

‘Cold chicken, salad, bread, cheese, fruit.’

He laid it out before her on the bed as if in offering to a goddess. Which was exactly how Rose was feeling right about now.

‘And the pièce de resistance.’ He grinned. ‘Blueberry pie. Texas-style.’

Food winning over sex, Rose peered with interest at the pie. Gathering the sheet around her, she inched forward on her knees, inspecting her feast. She was a hungry goddess.

Plato dealt with the champagne. Rose laid out the plates and cutlery.

Plato handed her the glasses and propped himself up against the bedhead, dragging Rose onto his lap. They fed from a single plate.

‘Plato?’

Her soft Texan drawl, the cadence that was hers alone, made his name sound unfamiliar and yet absolutely right. The soft ‘plah’ when everyone else said ‘play’. The scent of violets in her damp hair so close to his face teased his senses, and as she turned her head towards him he could see the pugnacious tilt in that dimpled chin of hers.

‘What happened to you?’

He angled a look at her. ‘What sort of question is that?’

‘I mean how did you get from the Urals to this?’

So this was it. The inquisition that would tell her what she needed to know. He wished he could give her a story that would please her romantic heart, but all he had was the truth. He was what he was, and he had never hidden it from anyone. He wouldn’t start now.

Blood, sweat and tears. He wound a long dark tress around his hand. Luck, opportunity, making every moment count. The usual. All of this he could have said to her—had said before in interviews.

‘I won a hand in poker.’

Her expression filled with delight. ‘Don’t tell me—you parlayed it into a fortune?’

‘No, I bought a train ticket and washed up here in Moscow. Did a load of jobs, worked security. Army service intervened. I got out, did a couple of years of economics at university, and worked nights as a bouncer.’ He watched the surprise bloom on her face and the familiar coldness closed around his heart as he continued. ‘I figured the guy I was working for didn’t know how to turn a kopek into a rouble, and he was making a fair living from it, so I opened my own place in a neighbourhood about to turn from a slum into a growing concern and from there I expanded.’

‘How did you know the neighbourhood was going to turn?’

‘I was living there, malenki.’ He watched her reaction closely, his eyes hooded.

‘Oh.’ She tried to picture that—Plato without the accoutrements of wealth. In her mind’s eye he was still Plato. She imagined he’d been born in charge, taking names, issuing orders. She relaxed back against him. ‘And now you’re famous for it.’

‘Free market capitalism has been very good to me.’ He stroked her long hair. ‘Otherwise I’d still be that tow-headed country boy playing hockey in winter and kicking a football around in summer.’

‘I like to think of you as that boy. When I was a kid I wouldn’t play any sport at all, on principle. My brothers always made such a song and dance about having to include me that I walked away rather than be made a fool of.’

Plato tried to imagine her as a little girl. She would have been plump, he could see that, with that cute little nose of hers unformed, and probably with her hair in pigtails and a whole heap of temperament too big for a child to handle. He wondered how her brothers had survived it.

He was more than ready to take the focus off himself. ‘Tell me about these brothers.’

‘Cal, Boyd, Brick and Jackson. Jackson has got three years on me, and they just go up from there.’