A Reputation For Revenge

He looked away, and she found herself able to breathe again. “And, as usual, you are jumping to the wrong conclusions,” he said. “Lindsey is my secretary, nothing more.”

Anna had been his secretary once, too. “Yeah, right.”

“And whatever her failings,” he said, looking at her with hard eyes, “at least she’s loyal. Unlike you.”

“I never—”

“Never what? Never tricked a bodyguard into taking you to the doctor’s office so you could sneak out the back? Never promised to name my son Andreas, then called him something else out of spite? I did everything I could to keep you safe, Anna. You never had to work or worry ever again. All I asked was your loyalty. To me. To our coming child. Was that too much to ask?”

His dark eyes burned through her like acid. She could feel the power of him, see it in the tension of hard muscles beneath his finely cut white shirt.

A flush burned her cheeks. The day of her delivery, surrounded by strangers in a gray Minneapolis hospital, she’d thought of her own great-grandfather, Mikhail Ivanovich Rostov, who’d been born a prince but had fled Russia as a child, starting a difficult new life in a new land. It had seemed appropriate.

But, whatever her motives, Nikos was right. She’d broken her promise. She pressed her lips together. “I’m...sorry.”

She could feel his restraint, the way he held himself in check. “You’re sorry?”

“A-about the name.”

He was moving toward her now, like a lion stalking a doomed gazelle. “Just the name?”

She backed away, stammering, “But some might say y-you lost all rights to name him when you—” Her heels hit a wall. Nowhere to run. “When you—”

“When I what?” he demanded, his body an inch from hers.

When he’d ruined her father.

When he’d taken a mistress.

When he’d broken her heart...

“Did you ever love me?” she whispered. “Did you love me at all?”

He grabbed her wrists, causing her to gasp. But it was the intensity in his obsidian gaze that pinned her to the wall.

“You ask me that now?” he ground out. But there was a noise down the hall, and he turned his head.

Three maids stood with their arms full of linens, gawking at the sight of their employer pressing Anna against the wall. It probably looked as if they were having hot sex. Heaven knew, they’d done it before, though they’d never been caught.

He lifted a dark eyebrow, and the maids scattered.

With a growl, he grasped Anna’s wrist and pulled her into the privacy of the nearby library. He shut the heavy oak door behind him. The sound echoed against the high walls of leatherbound books, bouncing up to the frescoed ceiling, reverberating her doom.

His dark eyes were alight with a strange fire. “You really want to know if I loved you?”

She shook her head, frightened at what she’d unleashed, wishing with all her heart that she could take back the question. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does. To you.”

“Forget I asked.” She tried desperately to think of a change of subject—anything that would distract him, anything to show that she didn’t care. But he was relentless.

“No, I never loved you, Anna. Never. How could I? I told you from the start I’m not a one-woman kind of man. Even if you’d been worthy of that commitment—which obviously you’re not.”

Pain went through her, but she raised her chin and fired back, “I was loyal to you when no other woman would have been. You kept me prisoner. You fired me from the job I loved. When you took Lindsey in my place I should have left you. But it wasn’t until I saw what you did to my father...”

“Ah, yes, your sainted father.” He gave a harsh laugh. “Those papers you found, Anna, what did they prove? That I withdrew all financial support from your father’s company?”

“Yes. Just when he needed you most. He’d been doing so well, finally getting the company back on its feet, but just when he needed extra cash to open a new factory in China, to compete in the global market—”

“I withdrew my support because I found out that your father embezzled my investment—millions of dollars. There was no new factory, Anna. He’d laid off most of his workers in New York, leaving Rostoff Textiles nothing more than a shell. He used my investment to buy cars and houses and to pay off his gambling debts to Victor Sinistyn.”

“No.” A knife-stab went through her heart. “It can’t be true.” But even as she spoke the words she remembered her father’s frenetic spending in those days. He’d stopped pressuring her to marry Victor, and instead had suddenly been prosperous, buying a Ferrari for himself, diamonds for Mother and that crumbling old palace in Russia. He wanted to remind the world of their royalty, he’d said, that the Rostoffs were still better than anyone.

“I didn’t tell you,” Nikos continued, “or press charges, because I was trying to protect you. I cut off his lines of credit and informed the banks that I was no longer responsible. If he’d just asked me for the money I would have given it to him, for your sake. But he stole from me. I couldn’t allow that to continue.”

She turned to stare blindly at a nearby gold and lacquer globe. Turning the smooth surface of the world, her fingers rested near St. Petersburg. She wished with all her heart that she was still there, in the dark, cold, crumbling palace without a ruble to her name. She wished Nikos had never found her and dragged her back to luxury. Russia was numb peace compared to this hell.

“And so he went bankrupt. Then died from the shame of it.” She closed her eyes, fighting back tears.

“He was weak. And a coward to leave his family behind.” She felt his hand on her shoulder as he brushed back her hair with his thick fingers. “I’m done protecting you from the truth. You stole from me. Just like him.”

Barely controlling her body’s involuntary tremble at his touch, she blinked fast, struggling to contain tears that threatened to spill over her lashes. She pressed her nails hard against her palms. If he sees me cry, I’ll kill myself.

“I hate you,” she whispered.

His grip on her shoulder tightened. “Good. We’re even.”

“Let me go.”

Pressing her back against the wall of leather-bound books, he ran his hand along the bare flesh of her arm. “You chose to come back with me. Did you think it would cost you nothing?”

Heaven help her, but even now, hating him, she wanted to run her hands along his back, to touch the strength of his muscles and the warmth of his skin. She wanted to lace her fingers through the curls of his short dark hair and pull him down to her, to taste the sweet hardness of his mouth.

Oh, God, what had come over her? Trembling from the effort, she forced her body to stay still and betray nothing. “You’re not some medieval warlord. You can’t toss me in a dungeon and torture me into surrender.”

He gently traced the back of his hand down her cheek. “We have no dungeons here. But I could keep you in my bedroom. Every night. And you wouldn’t escape.” He whispered in her ear. “You wouldn’t want to.”

She sucked in her breath as a hard shiver rocked her body. She couldn’t stop it even though she knew, pressed against her as he was, he’d be able to feel the movement.

He rewarded her with a smug, masculine smile. “Would you like that, Anna?” he murmured against the soft flesh of her ear, his breath hot on the tender skin of her neck. “Would you like to sleep against me again? Or would I have to tie you to the bed and force you to remember how good it once was between us?”

She felt his closeness and power over her and she hated it, even as part of her longed for him with all the strength of her body’s memory.

“I don’t want you,” she gasped, but even as she spoke the words she felt her traitorous body slide against him, melding every soft curve against his well-muscled form.

“We’ll see.”

He leaned forward, lowering his head. Involuntarily she closed her eyes, licking her lips as her body moved against him.

She felt the warmth of his breath. She could smell his skin, a scent of soap and hot desert sun and something more—something she couldn’t describe but that made her yearn for him with all the ferocity of her heart, as she’d once hungered for Christmas as a child.

But Nikos was in no hurry. The seconds it took before his lips finally touched hers were exquisite torture. And when he finally kissed her the world seemed to whirl around them, making her dizzy, making her knees weak.

She’d expected him to savage her lips, to try and break her in his embrace. But his kiss was gentle. Pure. Just like the very first time he’d kissed her, long ago, that night he’d shown up at her door half-mad with confusion and grief...

He deepened the kiss, brushing his hand through her hair as his tongue caressed her own. She clung to him, returning his caress with a rising passion.