His Best Acquisition: The Russian's Acquisition / A Deal Before the Altar / A Deal with Demakis

The man ended by fetching Clair a plate of blini, round pancakes covered in caviar, mushrooms, butter and sour cream.

“I can’t eat all this. You’ll have to buy me a whole new wardrobe,” Clair protested after a few bites of the deliciously rich food. “Here. Please,” she prompted Aleksy.

“No.” He held up an adamant hand. “I can’t eat pancakes.”

“Too many as a child?” she teased, imagining him as a strapping boy gobbling everything in sight.

“Far too many,” he said grimly. “If you can’t eat it, give it to the dog.”

She followed his nod to where a German shepherd was licking a plate, the owner unconcerned. Clair let the dog wolf down what was left of her blini and disposed of the trash, her mind stuck on Aleksy’s remark.

They moved under an ornately carved archway built of ice to a park filled with ice sculptures. The angels, castles and mythical creatures were beginning to thaw, their sharpest edges blurred, but they were still starkly beautiful, transparent and glinting in the sun.

“The driver said the festival has only been revived recently. You weren’t eating pancakes just for Lent growing up, were you?” she mused aloud, stepping back and hiding behind her camera to keep the question less personal.

“No, we ate them for survival,” he said flatly, gaze focused somewhere beyond the stunning sculptures.

“You weren’t working for Grigori then?”

“I was hardly working at all. My mother wouldn’t let me quit school.”

Clair lowered her camera. “Somehow I can’t imagine you taking orders from anyone, even your own mother.”

“I would have given her anything,” he said with a gruff thread of torture weaving through his tone. “I couldn’t give her what she really wanted—my father’s life back. I worked ahead and was in my last semester when Grigori hired me. My mother still worked at first, and at least we ate something besides pancakes. I gave her that much, at least, before she withered away.”

His bitter self-recrimination caught her off guard, making her want to touch him again, but she was learning. He would talk a little, but only if they kept it to the facts.

“Cancer?” she guessed, unable to help being affected by his loss. He gave an abbreviated nod and she murmured, “That’s tragic.”

“It was suicide,” he bit out. “She knew something was wrong and didn’t seek treatment. I would have done anything—” His jaw bit into the word. “But she felt like a burden on me.” His hand opened, empty and draped with futility before he shoved it into his pocket. “And she wanted to be with my father.”

Clair caught a sharp breath, frozen with the need to offer him comfort, but very aware she couldn’t reveal too much empathy right now.

“She must have loved him very much,” she murmured, voice involuntarily husky.

“She was shattered by his death. Broken.” His gaze fixed on a sculpture that had fallen over and splintered into a million pieces, its original form impossible to discern. “I hated seeing her like that. Hated knowing I—” He cut himself off and shuddered, looking around as though he’d just come back into himself. “Are you finished here?”

Clair huddled in the constricting layer of her jacket, aching for Aleksy even as she silently willed him to finish what he’d started to say, sensing he needed to exorcise a particularly cruel demon. Yes, she needed to keep from becoming too connected to him, but she couldn’t ignore his terrible pain.

Carefully stowing her camera in her pocket, she put her hand on his arm. He stiffened against her touch, rejecting her attempt to get through to him.

“I’m sure you did what you could. Don’t blame yourself for something you couldn’t control,” she said.

“Who else is there to blame?” he countered roughly, utter desolation in the gaze that struck hers like a mallet before he yanked it away.

A name popped into her head and she spoke it impulsively. “Victor?”

“Chto?” The word came out in a puff of condensed breath as he swung his head to glare at her.

“Did Victor—” It sounded stupid as she thought it through, but she’d been keeping up with the headlines in London. Victor’s perfidies were being revealed with glee by the press. Victims were pouring out of the woodwork day by day. Aleksy’s hatred of the man was bone deep. His remark from last night, “after my father was killed,” still rang in her brain. Perhaps she was being melodramatic, but…?

“Did Victor have anything to do with how you lost your father?” she asked, tensing with dread as she tested this very dangerous ground.

A spasm of anguished emotions worked across his dark expression. There was grief and the reflexive hostility anyone showed when their deepest pain was exposed, but there were other things too. Frustration. Resolve. Remorse?

“It’s not a connection I can prove,” he said through lips that barely moved.

Her whole body felt plunged into an ice bath. To hear her vague suspicion met with such a condemning remark gave her goose bumps. He believed Victor had played a part in his father’s death. No wonder he held her in such contempt for accepting generosity from a man with no right to the wealth he’d used to dazzle and persuade her. She felt sick for letting the advantages Victor offered outweigh a proper examination of the type of man he was.

Clair barely recalled the walk back, lost in absorbing the gravity of the injury Victor had dealt to Aleksy’s family. No wonder Aleksy was such a hard, bitter man. The greater wonder was that he hadn’t swept her onto the street the way he’d threatened to.

“Are you all right?” he asked when they entered the suite.

She looked up from removing her shoes, startled to see they were in the apartment. “F-Fine.” Her lips were numb. “I think I need a warm bath.” She could barely face him. “Walking might have been a bad idea after all.”

His scarred cheek ticked in silent agreement.

Clair swallowed. “You can go into your office if you want. I won’t go out again. I promise.”

* * *

“You’re still here.”

Clair’s bemused voice startled him, in a good way. She looked better. Her face was clean of makeup, her cheeks glowing from the heat of her bath. She wore yoga pants and a thickly woven pullover that hugged her bottom and clung to her thighs. Gorgeous.

He swallowed.

She’d been so wan after their morning out that he’d been worried about her, which unnerved him; he didn’t normally feel more than superficial concern for anyone. She was turning him inside out.

“What do you have there?” he asked, trying to distract himself, rising with the intention of taking her load of laptop and files.

“I was going to work on the foundation in here, but if you’d rather I used the dining room—”

“No, here is fine.” He looked at the cover of the laptop balanced on the stack of file folders as he set everything on the desk. The label jumped out at him with the company logo and its scrolled initials: V.V.E.

“It…was something he gave me to work on, then said I should keep it.” She bit her lip, her upward glance culpable.

Aleksy tensed. The man was dead, but he just wouldn’t die.

“I’ll get rid of it,” Clair said flatly. “I just want the foundation files off it. Then I’ll throw it in the incinerator. Honestly, I feel so sick with myself!” She covered her cheeks with her hands, her blue eyes clouded with repentance. “I didn’t realize he contributed to your father’s death. You must be so disgusted with me for having anything to do with him. I am.”

Mental walls were clashing into place, trying to lock out what she was saying, but the words were spoken. He couldn’t ignore them. All he’d said earlier crept around him like coils of barbed wire, warning him any move would only tangle him up more painfully. He didn’t know why he’d let himself delve back into his mother’s grief or Victor’s role in his father’s death. He just wished he could forget them.

He suddenly stopped cold. What was he thinking? For twenty years those horrors had been uppermost in his life, driving him toward making Victor pay for them. To put any of it out of his mind was a betrayal of his parents’ memory—but somehow the passionate hatred that had kept him going was now evaporating.

While Clair was seeping in.

His heart gave a hard, uncomfortable lurch—she was starting to mean too much to him.

She inhaled deeply, rousing him from his thoughts. He realized she was interpreting his expression and grim silence as confirmation that he did hold her in contempt. He scowled. “We met because of him. That’s it,” he tried.

“How can you say that when it’s obvious you’re angry and hate me for having anything to do with him?”

He was angry. Something was rising in him that he didn’t even understand. Clair wasn’t stupid, weak or avaricious. Why, then, had she let herself become involved with such a man?

“All right, yes,” he ground out with enough fervor to make her start. “I want to know how, Clair. How could you let him near you? How could you not see him for what he was?” Unexpected, bile-green jealousy rose in him. “How could you—”

Not wait for me.

He jerked his head to the side, hands fisting defensively, terrified by what he’d almost said. His heart pounded and sweat broke on his brow and upper lip. He reminded himself that for all his possessive urges, he really had no right to her.

“In part, I was just very naive,” she said with quiet self-reproach.

“I know you’re naive,” he countered, incensed by the reminder. Everything in him was programmed to protect that vulnerability in her, even from—especially from—himself. After all, if he’d finished his story earlier, he’d have revealed that he was ultimately responsible for his father’s death. That his father had stepped into a fight Aleksy had started and that when Aleksy had finished it, he’d walked away with two lives on his conscience. Three if he counted his mother.

He kept looking for qualities in Clair that he disliked so he could feel less disgusted with himself for pressuring her into this arrangement, but she kept reinforcing that he was taking advantage of an innocent. Her next words proved it.

“It was the first time I’d been singled out as special. I was susceptible to that,” Clair admitted in a small voice, eyebrows pulling together with humiliation.

Aleksy seemed to freeze into an even stiller statue. Clair experienced that old feeling of wanting to fade into the wallpaper, hiding her flaws so no one would see why she didn’t deserve to be chosen and taken home. It was painful to stand tall and own her mistake. She clasped the edge of his desk, drawing strength from its solid weight.

“When I was growing up, the home had an arrangement with the school nearby. If we kept our noses clean, we could attend and have the same chance at scholarships and higher education as the rich kids. I gave it a shot, but I wasn’t a genius, just average. And I wasn’t rich. I always wore secondhand uniforms, never had trendy shoes, never got invited to parties. The kids weren’t trying to be mean. I just wasn’t one of them.”

Aleksy’s intense scrutiny nearly evaporated her voice. It was so hard to crack herself open and reveal this tainted, imperfect neediness inside her.

“When I got to London I wasn’t special there either. I worked three jobs to make rent, so I didn’t have time to date or party even if I’d wanted to. Then along came Victor. He treated me like I was the only one who could get things right. He needed me to be places for him and when I walked down the hall, people noticed me because they thought I was important.” The last part tasted bitter. She’d known she wasn’t important, but she’d liked that others had been deluded into thinking it. How pathetic.

Letting her hips rest on the edge of the desk, she gripped it with both hands, shoulders hunching as she spilled the rest. “He gave me things I’d never had, money for clothes. New clothes. He said he’d support the foundation.”

“I’m doing that. Do I make you feel special?” His harsh voice grated over her exposed, sensitive core.

It sounded like a trick question. “I realize I’m just another mistress to you. I don’t expect you to treat me as anything special,” she said.

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