The Ultimate Seduction

* * *

The landscape from the airport was one of a country in recovery. When her brother had said Bregnovia could use their firm’s expertise, he hadn’t been kidding. They left the partially bombed-out tarmac, wound past a scorched vineyard and turned away from one end of a shattered bridge that spanned a canyon to zigzag into the riverbed, where they four-wheeled over a makeshift crossing before climbing the hairpin curves on the far side to enter a city that looked like a child had kicked over his blocks.

But what a city it had been. Bregnovia’s capital, Gizela, was a medieval fairy tale on a river that, until dammed for electricity and irrigation, had been a trading arm in and out of the Black Sea. Low canals still lapped at the stone walls in its village square. Beyond that quaint center, stark communist housing stood next to even more modern shopping malls, but nothing escaped the wounds of recent war. Rubble punctuated in a small landslide off a facade here, crooked fencing kept children out of a teetering building there.

Fascinated by the contrast of beauty and battle, Tiffany barely spoke until they drove through gates that were twelve feet high and thirty-six feet wide. Their ornate wrought-iron grillwork with gold filigree appeared startlingly new and grand.

“This is your home? It looks like Buckingham Palace.”

“It is a palace,” Ryzard confirmed casually. “Built as the dacha for a Russian prince during tsarist times. The communists spared it—a KGB general appropriated it—but it was the last stand for my predecessor. We’re still repairing it from the siege. It’s only mine while I’m president, but I’m paying for the refurbishment, as my legacy.”

Despite the bullet holes and the pile of broken stones that might have once been a carriage house, the palace made the White House look like a neglected summer cottage, especially with its expansive flower bed that formed a carpet beneath a bronze statue of a woman with an arm across her breast, the other outstretched in supplication—

Tiffany read the nameplate as the limo circled it. Inexplicably, her heart invaded her throat, pulsing there like a hammered thumb. Luiza.

Ryzard had said she was his country’s martyr, revered like their Lady Liberty, but this statue wasn’t staid. It didn’t project a state of peace and optimism with a torch to light the way forward. It was anguished and emotional and raised all the hairs on her body. This statue wasn’t a symbol or an ideal. She was a real person.

Whose name was tattooed on Ryzard’s chest.

Not wanting to believe the suspicion flirting around the periphery of her consciousness, Tiffany left the car and walked inside to confront an oil portrait of the same woman in the spacious drawing room. Here, Luiza’s serene smile was as exquisite as Mona Lisa’s, only eclipsed by her flawless beauty.

Again it didn’t seem like a commemorative pose that a country hung in the National Gallery. There was a wistful quality to the painting. It was the kind of thing someone lovingly commissioned to enshrine a memory.

Luiza’s eyes seemed to follow Tiffany as she accepted introductions to Ryzard’s staff. Thankfully they quickly left her behind as Ryzard and his porters took her up the stairs and along the colonnaded walk that circled the grand entrance below and brought her to a place he called the Garden Suite.

“It’s the only one in the guest wing that’s habitable,” he said with a minor twist of apology across his lips. “But your work space is here.” He left the bedroom and crossed the hall to push through a pair of double doors into a sitting room that had been tricked out with office equipment and a replica desk that Marie Antoinette would have used if she had run a modern international construction firm. “You won’t have any problem working outside your country? With the different time zone?”

“We’re global and I’ve been working from the family mansion. The advantage to living like a recluse is that no one will expect me to show up in pers— My umbrella!” The stained glass piece hung at a cocked angle in front of the window, just high enough for her to stand under it. “You said we slept through the auction,” she accused.

“I placed a reserve bid before we left.”

Moving in a slow twirl, she closed her eyes and imagined she could feel the colors as they caressed her face. “You’re spoiling me.”

“I want you to be happy. You will be?”

She opened her eyes to the window and the back of Luiza’s bronzed head beyond the glass. Her floating spirits fell like a block of lead. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Ryzard had a statue of his old girlfriend on the lawn.

“Tiffany?” he queried, voice coming closer.

“Where will you be?” she asked, leaving the window and leading him back across the hall to the bedroom. Here, at least, the windows faced the river.

“Too damned far away,” he replied.

“Why? Security? No outsiders in the president’s bedroom?” she guessed.

“Certain customs remain quaintly adhered to.”

“Mmm.” She pushed her mouth to the side, hiding that she was actually quite devastated. “I don’t suppose our president could get away with bringing women home, either.” The porter had gone so she jerked her chin at the door, saying, “See if that door locks.”

“Subtle,” he said drily, “but I can’t.”

“I don’t know what you think I’m suggesting,” she challenged, tossing her head to cover up that she rather desperately needed to reconnect physically. The emotional hit of what looked quite literally like a monumental devotion to Luiza shook her tenuous confidence. Badly. Now he was rejecting her, inciting a quiet panic. “I only meant that if I’ll be sleeping alone, I need to feel safe.”

“You won’t be alone.”

“I can have a guard with me?”

“That would be detrimental to the state of peace I’m trying to maintain,” he stated with one of his untamed smiles. “No, I will sleep with you, but right now I have to go outside and salute my flag. It’s a custom I observe when I return after being away. People gather to see it. It reassures them of my commitment. Would you do me the favor of putting on something suitable and joining me? They’ll be curious.”

Here we go again, she thought with an unexpected face-plant into dread.

I bet Luiza would do it, a taunting voice sang in follow-up.

“Problem?” he asked, obviously reading something of her reluctance.

“Just disappointed we can’t test the bed,” she prevaricated.

“They stand at the gate, if you’re worried they’ll see you close up.”

“It’s fine,” she assured him.

It was. When she stood outside thirty minutes later, face shaded by a hat from the surprisingly hot sun, her entire being swelled with admiration as she watched Ryzard in his presidential garb stand tall and make a pledge to his flag. He wasn’t a man going through the motions. His motives were pure, his heart one hundred percent dedicated.

With tears brimming her eyes, she watched him step away from the flag with a bow, taking his respectful leave. Then he turned and saluted the statue of Luiza, first pressing the flats of his fingertips to his mouth then offering the kiss to her in an earnest lift of his palm.

Tiffany stood very still, fighting not to gasp at the slice of pain that went through her. It wasn’t the gesture that struck her so much as the anguish on Ryzard’s face.

Her suspicions were confirmed. He loved Luiza, really loved her as a strong man loves his soul mate. His pain was so tangible, she could taste its metallic flavor on her tongue.

She reached out instinctively, longing to comfort him, but he stiffened under her touch, catching her hand and gently but firmly removing it from his sleeve.

“When I asked about your tattoo, you never said—”

“I know,” he cut in, releasing her and taking one step away. “It’s difficult to talk about.”

“Of course,” she managed, curling her fingers into a fist even though the blood was draining from her head, making her feel faint. Would she have come here if she’d known? The starkness of his rejection felt so final she could barely stand it. “I’m so sorry.”

She meant she was sorry for overstepping, but he heard it as a lame platitude and dismissed it with an agitated jerk of his shoulder.

“I never want to go through anything like it again. To love like that and lose— Never again,” he choked, flashing her a look that was both adamant and apprehensive.

He quickly looked away, but that glimpse of his resolve struck like a blow. She knew what it meant: he would never allow himself to love again. It would make him too vulnerable.

Making another quarter turn, he bowed his head toward the gates.

That’s when Tiffany noticed the crowd of fifty or sixty people with faces pressed through the uprights of the gate, witnessing his rebuff and her humiliation. They didn’t applaud, didn’t wave, just stared at them for a few moments before slowly beginning to disperse.