The Power of Vasilii

Oh, yes, she needed this job—a top-of-the-tree job working for Vasilii Demidov as his PA on a six-month contract that carried a salary that made her catch her breath.

Everything she knew about Vasilii Demidov 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 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.

About the Author

PENNY JORDAN has been writing for more than twenty-five years and has an outstanding record: over 185 novels published, including the phenomenally successful A PERFECT FAMILY, TO LOVE, HONOUR AND BETRAY, THE PERFECT SINNER and POWER PLAY, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. She says she hopes to go on writing until she has passed the 200 mark—and maybe even the 250 mark.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager, and has continued to live there. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her Crighton books. She lives with her Birman cat Posh, who tries to assist with her writing by sitting on the newspapers and magazines Penny reads to provide her with ideas she can adapt for her fictional books.

Penny is a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors.

Recent titles by the same author:

PASSION AND THE PRINCE

A STORMY SPANISH MARRIAGE

THE MOST COVETED PRIZE

(linked to THE POWER OF VASILII)

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Power of Vasilii

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

SHE really should not be doing this. She really shouldn’t.

It was a job—that was all. A job she needed now, thanks to what had happened, and needed badly.

A job working closely with Vasilii Demidov. Very closely. As his temporary PA, in fact. Mid-stride, Laura Westcotte stopped walking along London’s Sloane Street.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

She wasn’t fourteen any more, and in the grip of a massive crush on the very grown-up and breathtakingly, spine-shiveringly, far too excitingly male older half-brother of one of the new intake of day pupils at the school where her aunt was the matron and she’d been a pupil by virtue of her aunt’s post, was she?

No, she wasn’t.

Nor was she still the same silly girl who had secretly and eagerly searched the internet for every scrap of information she could find about Vasilii Demidov, committing to memory every single piece of information she’d managed to find about him. Thank goodness the big social networking sites hadn’t existed then, for her to make a total public fool of herself with, Laura thought wryly. Snatching that photograph of him to daydream over in private had been bad enough.

She’d taken it when he had come to the school to collect his half-sister one Friday afternoon. Her hands had been trembling as she’d watched him walk from his car to where his half-sister had been waiting for him, the muscles of his male body moving so powerfully beneath their covering of denim jeans and a black tee shirt that the sight of him had made her go hot with longing. It was a wonder that the resultant photograph hadn’t been so blurred as to be unrecognisable. She had hidden the print in her most sacred of special places: the ‘secret’ drawer of the jewellery box that had originally belonged to her mother, and which had always somehow held an echo of her mother’s special scent. She still had that jewellery box.

And the photograph?

Now she was being ridiculous. If she did then it was simply because she’d never thought to throw it away. No other reason.

She had been such a very young and idealistic fourteen-year-old that worshipping from afar had come as naturally as breathing.

She had woven such ridiculous fantasies about the two of them meeting—the kind of fantasies that only an over-romantic, lonely girl with her hormones burgeoning into reckless life could weave. In her imagination she had even allowed herself to believe that because they had both lost their mothers there was a special bond between them.

All that and she had never even come face to face with him properly, never mind spoken with him. She had, though, dreamed endless daydreams about him, torn between an aching longing for him to notice her and the thrill of fear she had felt at the thought of that happening, and how she would cope with that level of sensual excitement.

So what? That had been then. This was now. She had just mentally said his name several times without her heartbeat going into fifth gear and then overdrive, hadn’t she? No, she wasn’t fourteen any more, Laura assured herself. But she still couldn’t stop herself from glancing into the window of the expensive designer shop she was hurrying past on her way to her interview, as though she needed to reassure herself that the reflection she could see there was that of an assured twenty-four-year-old woman, and not a fourteen-year-old girl. A woman, moreover, whose brunette hair swung sleekly and under control to her shoulders, and whose blue-green eyes in her heart-shaped, Celtic pale-skinned face, like her soft full lips, were discreetly made-up—as befitted a careerwoman about to undergo an interview for a job upon which her immediate financial security depended.

So why the need to check? Surely she didn’t really fear that somewhere within her that lonely, overly idealistic and romantic girl she had once been still existed, and that by some dangerous alchemy Vasilii Demidov could resurrect that girl and her crush on him just by the mere fact of them breathing the same air?

Instead of thinking about the past she should be focusing on her own present, Laura reminded herself. To mangle that famous Oscar Wilde quote, to be rejected and dismissed for one job for which she was well qualified might be overlooked as merely unfortunate, but to be rejected for a second would be a bad mark against her that would lie on her career history for a long time to come.

She was under no illusions, of course. She knew exactly why she hadn’t been given the verbally promised promotion in her previous job. The reasons had, after all, been made more than clear to her by the company’s new CEO.

The pain and humiliation of what she had undergone momentarily drove the colour from her face.

Oh, yes, she needed this job—a top-of-the-tree job working for Vasilii Demidov, as his PA, on a six-month contract that carried a salary that had made her catch her breath. It was nearly twice as much per month as she had been earning, plus it would open doors for her and enhance her CV—not to mention distance her from the present calamity to her career.

The fact that she had recently been on the internet once again, researching Vasilii Demidov, meant nothing other than that—like any candidate for a new job—she wanted to arm herself with as much knowledge about the business for which she hoped to be working as she could. And, in the case of Vasilii Demidov’s business, Vasilii himself was the business.

And 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 of double doors off the hallway opened automatically, and a disembodied voice from within the room beyond them commanded curtly, in an upper class English accent, ‘Come.’

It was hardly the warmest of welcomes, Laura recognised as she stepped towards the doors and then through them, into the smartly modern room beyond. Her attention, though, wasn’t focused on the expensive designer furniture and decor of the room. Instead it had flown like a homing pigeon to the man standing in front of one of the room’s two tall balconied windows, with his back to her.

Like her, he was wearing formal business clothes—a dark suit. His equally dark hair just touched the white collar of his shirt. His hands, which were at his sides, were tanned and ring-free. His head was angled slightly to one side, so that the light from the window caught the sharp bone structure.

The flutters she had felt in her tummy when she’d got out of the lift had turned into a distinct and discomforting curl of sensation—not, of course, awareness of him as a man, and certainly not helpless female appreciation of that maleness. That could not be allowed to be possible. Not with the very personal knowledge she had of herself and the way other people might translate it were they to know. It wasn’t as though she had actually chosen to be that way. And it certainly didn’t have anything to do with Vasilii Demidov and those teenage feelings she had had for him.

What she was feeling was simply a very natural anxiety, Laura insisted to herself. Professional anxiety because she needed this job so desperately. That was all.

And then he turned round.

The man her fourteen-year-old self had adored must have been stored in her memory in soft focus, and that focus had been gentled by idealism, Laura acknowledged, torn between wishing that there was a chair for her to steady herself on and being glad that there wasn’t as she withstood the searing, biting hostility of a gaze that felt like the coldest wind that had ever blown off the winter steppes.

She had taught in Russia for a while, just as she had in China, whilst studying the languages of both countries, and she knew exactly how that wind could burn into one’s flesh and senses, destroying those who weren’t strong enough to withstand its onslaught.

That wind and the whip of desert sand and its burning heat had surely carved the bone structure of this male face that was stripped of all softness. The tanned flesh might look velvet-warm, and human enough to tempt any woman’s yearning touch, but the flint-grey eyes warned of the fate that would destroy anyone reckless enough to attempt the forbidden intimacy of doing so. That this was a man who prided himself on not having any human vulnerabilities within his make-up, Laura already knew from her research, but seeing the reality of all that delineated so clearly and harshly in his features was still a heart-jolting shock. His tall, broad-shouldered frame might be clothed in what looked like the best that Savile Row could produce, but it was abundantly clear to Laura that beneath those twenty-first-century clothes lay not vulnerable flesh but instead a hardened steel armour.

This man had the heritage of both his mother’s people’s blood and his father’s business success soldered into him and onto him. His already critical scrutiny told Laura that. He might by his blood be of the desert, but there was a coldness about him—an air of distance, almost a total rejection of his own humanity allied to a contempt for the vulnerability of others. The sheer onslaught of the information being relayed to her by her own senses was almost too intense for her to manage.

Every warning system her body and her mind possessed was telling her to turn and leave, to run if necessary. And yet … that frisson of sensation, that unwanted but determined sensual awareness of him as a man that trembled through every nerve ending and tingled every pore of her skin meant—Meant nothing. And if it did exist, and wasn’t merely something ridiculous left over from her teens, a product of her imagination, it should be ignored, Laura told herself firmly.

The photograph of her on her CV hadn’t revealed the female delicacy and the perfection of her heart-shaped face and its features anything like as clearly as the reality of Laura in the flesh, Vasilii was forced to acknowledge as he studied the young woman standing in front of him. Intriguingly—or suspiciously, depending on your mindset, and his always veered towards the suspicious—she had no internet presence. No unseemly photographs of university antics, no gossipy posts to reveal any real aspects of her personality. But of course he didn’t need them. He already had a direct insight into exactly what kind of person she was. The kind he most despised.

She might be physically attractive, and she might have dressed her elegantly slender five feet nine inches in a smart, businesslike, summer weight off-white dress, over which she was wearing an equally smart mid-grey jacket, accessorised with mid-height grey leather pumps and a workmanlike black leather bag, but he knew the reality of her. Just as he knew that beneath the clothes that discreetly skimmed her body she had the kind of curves that most appealed to the heterosexual male’s desires, and that they were entirely natural.

Inside his head Vasilii discovered that he was making an illogical and totally unnecessary calculation as to the number of months it had been since he had last cupped the full softness of a woman’s breasts in his hands whilst he slowly kissed his way from her throat down towards them. Her skin would be creamy pale, a sensual incitement all of its own to the man who wanted her. But he of course was not that man. He controlled his own male reactions. They did not control him. The powerful lightning strike of sexual awareness jolting through him meant nothing. It was merely an instinctive physical reaction. Nothing more. He had far more important things to think about than the brief, inconvenient surge of male desire, both inexplicable and un-desired, that had surged through him.

Turning away from her, Vasilii reached for some papers on his desk, demanding curtly as he turned back, ‘I see you speak Russian as well as Chinese? Why Russian, when most Russians who need to speak and understand English already do so?’

His question caught Laura completely off guard, and made her feel self-conscious. She could easily remember how her desire to learn Russian had been fired, and by whom, but she could hardly tell him that it had been the thought of speaking to him in his own language that had motivated her all those years ago.

‘My parents were linguists. They both spoke Russian, and I started speaking it myself, picking it up from them. I thought … I felt … It seemed natural to follow in their footsteps.’ It was in part the truth, after all—even if she was not telling him the whole of that truth.

‘You decided to follow in their footsteps rather than strike out and make your own path through life? Is that what you mean? Wouldn’t you say that that shows a lack of self-determination and ambition?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Laura defended herself firmly. He was deliberately trying to make her feel uncomfortable, she was sure, but she wasn’t going to let him. ‘Certain abilities do pass down through the generations, after all. In your own case you followed your father into the same line of business, and your success has proved that you have an aptitude for it. I had an aptitude for languages. After I lost my parents, developing that aptitude and those skills and following in their footsteps helped me to feel that they continued to be a part of my life. I loved languages, and I wanted something I could hold on to that felt as though it was part of them.’

Something to hold on to. An image of his mother the last time he had seen her alive flashed briefly and harrowingly through Vasilii’s head before he could deny it. The fact that it had been there at all only increased the dislike and rejection he felt towards Laura. She was stirring up within him memories she should not have the ability to stir up, raising issues that no one was ever allowed to raise with him, crossing lines that no one was permitted to cross with her conversation about her parents and her foolish sentimentality. Why? And, even more importantly, how? It was absurd that a woman like her, whom he already knew he could not trust, should somehow have managed to breach the defences that not even the gentle, loving touch of his late stepmother had been allowed to breach. Absurd and dangerous. The day that a woman like Laura Westcotte could represent any kind of danger whatsoever to him would never come, Vasilii assured himself.

‘I asked you for an explanation of why you chose to learn Russian. I expected a business reason, not a self-indulgent description of your childhood emotions.’

The harshness in his voice made Laura want to recoil from it—and from him. She’d felt so sorry for him when she’d learned how he’d lost his mother. She’d even felt as a girl that it gave them a shared bond. Was that why she had mentioned her own parents? Did she still want to create a shared bond with him? No! There wouldn’t be any point, because no woman would ever be allowed to share any kind of bond with the man he actually was, Laura suspected.

His criticism had stung, and under normal circumstances—if she hadn’t needed this job so badly—it would have had her questioning whether he was the kind of person she wanted to work with. She might need this job, but she certainly wasn’t going to allow his comment to go undefended.

Straightening her shoulders, she told him spiritedly, ‘I may have chosen Russian for personal reasons, but my decision to learn Mandarin—which was not one of my parents’ languages—demonstrates that I was looking towards the future of business. My parents passed down to me an ability to learn languages, but I made the decision to study Mandarin based on my awareness of the growing importance of China in the world market.’

She was daring to challenge him? That wasn’t something Vasilii was used to at all. Not from anyone and especially not from women, who were normally all too eager to court and flatter him.

‘You attended the same school as my half-sister. As far as I am aware Mandarin was not on the syllabus there.’

He knew she had been at school with Alena? A mental image of herself trying to find out from her aunt when Vasilii was likely to come to the school to collect his sister and then positioning herself at the window that would give her the best view of his ar rival flooded her body’s defence system with guilty self-consciousness. He couldn’t possibly know about that—just as he couldn’t know how often she had mentally rehearsed walking oh, so casually past his stationary car as he waited for Alena, only to have always lacked the courage actually to do so. She was being ridiculous, Laura warned herself. Of course he would know that she had been at school with Alena, just as he would know that her aunt had been the matron there, because—naturally, as her prospective employer—he would have checked up on her.

‘No. Mandarin wasn’t on the syllabus,’ she agreed.

One dark eyebrow lifted in a manner that Laura felt was coldly censorious.

‘Private lessons must have been an added expense for your aunt.’

He really did not like her. Laura could tell.

‘I paid for them myself,’ she informed him, her voice every bit as cold as his had been. ‘Some of the private pupils stabled their horses locally, and I worked at the stables mucking out. They got an extra hour in bed every morning and I earned the money to pay for my Mandarin lessons. Oh, and before you ask me, I saved up and bought an old bicycle so that I could cycle to the stables.’

Against his will Vasilii had a mental image of a much younger version of Laura Westcotte—ponytailed, fresh-faced and determined—setting off on her bicycle every morning, no matter what the weather, in order to do the chores that girls from better off families were too indulged by their parents to want to do, before returning to the school to begin a day’s education. His own father had always insisted that he work for his spending money as a boy, and even Alena, protected though she had been, had had her own special chores to do.

Vasilii pulled himself up. He wasn’t used to thinking about other people with his emotions, never mind mentally linking their situation to his own. Quite how and why it had happened he had no idea, but he did know that it must and would not happen again.

‘I would like you to read these notes aloud to me, translating them into Mandarin as you do so,’ he told Laura, firmly dismissing the unwanted image of her as a teenager from inside his head.

Very quickly Laura scanned the first paragraph of the technical data she had been handed. As an employee of a business specialising in handling translations of and negotiations for highly complex business operations she had become very much at home with the kind of thing Vasilii had asked her to do, so there was no reason whatsoever for her hand and then her whole body to tremble slightly, or for the colour to come and go in her face—apart, that was, from the fact that Vasilii’s hand had brushed her own as he handed her the piece of paper. That was ridiculous. Vasilii’s touch couldn’t possibly have made her feel like that.