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Alicia felt her heart thud, hard enough to bruise. She felt her mouth drop open.
But she saw nothing at all but his eyes.
Blue like no blue she’d ever seen in another pair of eyes before. Blue like the sky on a crystal cold winter day, so bright it almost hurt to look at him. Blue so intense it seemed to fill her up, expanding inside of her, making her feel swollen with it. As if the slightest thing might make her burst wide-open, and some mad part of her wanted that, desperately.
A touch. A smile. Anything at all.
He was beautiful. Dark and forbidding and still, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Something electric sizzled in the air between them as they gazed at each other, charging through her, making her skin prickle. Making her feel heavy and restless, all at once, as if she was a snow globe he’d picked up and shaken hard, and everything inside of her was still floating drowsily in the air, looking for a place to land.
It scared her, down deep inside in a place she hadn’t known was there until this moment—and yet she didn’t pull away.
He blinked, as if he felt it too, this terrible, impossible, beautiful thing that crackled between them. She was sure that if she could tear her eyes from his she’d be able to see it there in the air, connecting their bodies, arcing between them and around them and through them, the voltage turned high. The faintest hint of a frown etched between his dark brows, and he moved as if to set her away from him, but then he stopped and all he’d done was shift them both even farther back into the shadows.
And still they stood there, caught. Snared. As if the world around them, the raucous club, the pounding music, the wild and crazy dancing, had simply evaporated the moment they’d touched.
At last, Alicia thought, in a rush of chaotic sensation and dizzy emotion she didn’t understand at all, all of it falling through her with a certain inevitability, like a heavy stone into a terrifyingly deep well.
“My God,” she said, gazing up at him. “You look like a wolf.”
Was that a smile? His mouth was lush and grim at once, impossibly fascinating to her, and it tugged in one hard corner. Nothing more, and yet she smiled back at him as if he’d beamed at her.
“Is that why you’ve dressed in red, like a Shoreditch fairy tale?” he asked, his words touched with the faint, velvet caress of an accent she didn’t recognize immediately. “I should warn you, it will end with teeth.”
“I think you mean tears.” She searched his hard face, looking for more evidence of that smile. “It will end in tears, surely.”
“That, too.” Another small tug in the corner of that mouth. “But the teeth usually come first, and hurt more.”
“I’ll be very disappointed now if you don’t have fangs,” she told him, and his hands changed their steely grip on her arms, or perhaps she only then became aware of the heat of his palms and how the way he was holding her was so much like a caress.
Another tug on that austere mouth, and an answering one low in her belly, which should have terrified her, given what she knew about herself and sex. On some level, it did.
But she still didn’t move away from him.
“It is, of course, my goal in life to keep strange British women who crash into me in crowded clubs from the jaws of disappointment,” he said, a new light in his lovely eyes, and a different, more aware tilt to the way he held his head, the way he angled his big body toward her.
As if he might lean in close and swallow her whole.
Staring back at him then, his strong hands hard and hot on her arms and her palms still pressed flat against his taut chest, Alicia wanted nothing more than for him to do exactly that.
She should have turned away then and bolted for the door. Tried to locate whatever was left of her sanity, wherever she’d misplaced it. But she’d never felt this kind of raw, shimmering excitement before, this blistering heat weighing down her limbs so deliciously, this man so primal and powerful she found it hard to breathe.
“Even if the jaws in question are yours?” she asked, and she didn’t recognize that teasing lilt in her voice, the way she tilted her head to look up at him, the liquid sort of feeling that moved in her then.
“Especially if they’re mine,” he replied, his bright winter gaze on her mouth, though there was a darkness there too, a shadow across his intriguing blade of a face that she nearly got lost in. Jaws, she reminded herself. Fangs. He’s telling me what a wolf he is, big and bad. Surely she should feel more alarmed than she did—surely she shouldn’t have the strangest urge to soothe him, instead? “You should know there are none sharper or more dangerous.”
“In all of London?” She couldn’t seem to keep herself from smiling again, or that sparkling cascade of something like light from rushing in her, making her stomach tighten and her breasts pull tight. Alive. At last. “Have you measured them, then? Is there some kind of competition you can enter to prove yours are the longest? The sharpest in all the land?”
Alicia felt completely outside herself. Some part of her wanted to lie down in it, in this mad feeling, in him—and exult in it. Bask in it as if it was sunshine. As if he was, despite the air of casual menace he wore so easily, like an extra layer of skin. Was that visible to everyone, or only to her? She didn’t care. She wanted to roll around in this moment, in him, like it was the first snow of the season and she could make it all into angels.
Her breath caught at the image, and somehow, he heard it. She felt his reaction in the sudden tension of his powerful frame above her and around her, in the flex of his fingers high on her arms, in the tightening of that connection that wound between them, bright and electric, and made her feel like a stranger in her own body.
His blue eyes lifted to meet hers and gleamed bright. “I don’t need to measure them, solnyshka.” He shifted closer, and his attention returned to her mouth. “I know.”
He was an arctic wolf turned man, every inch of him a predator—lean and hard as he stood over her despite the heels Rosie had coerced her into wearing. He wore all black, a tight black T-shirt beneath a perfectly tailored black jacket, dark trousers and boots, and his wide, hard shoulders made her skin feel tight. His dark hair was short and inky black. It made his blue eyes seem like smoke over his sculpted jaw and cheekbones, and yet all of it, all of him, was hard and male and so dangerous she could feel it hum beneath her skin, some part of her desperate to fight, to flee. He looked intriguingly uncivilized. Something like feral.
And yet Alicia wasn’t afraid, as that still-alarmed, still-vigilant part of her knew she should have been. Not when he was looking at her like that. Not when she followed a half-formed instinct and moved closer to him, pressing her hands flatter against the magnificently formed planes of his chest while his arms went around her to hold her like a lover might. She tilted her head back even farther and watched his eyes turn to arctic fire.
She didn’t understand it, but she burned.
This isn’t right, a small voice cautioned her in the back of her mind. This isn’t you.
But he was so beautiful she couldn’t seem to keep track of who she was supposed to be, and her heart hurt her where it thundered in her chest. She felt something bright and demanding knot into an insistent ache deep in her belly, and she found she couldn’t think of a good reason to step away from him.
In a minute, she promised herself. I’ll walk away in a minute.
“You should run,” he told her then, his voice dark and low, and she could see he was serious. That he meant it. But one of his hands moved to trace a lazy pattern on her cheek as he said it, his palm a rough velvet against her skin, and she shivered. His blue gaze seemed to sharpen. “As far away from me as you can get.”
He looked so grim then, so sure, and it hurt her, somehow. She wanted to see him smile with that hard, dangerous mouth. She wanted that with every single part of her and she didn’t even know his name.
None of this made any sense.
Alicia had been so good for so long. She’d paid and paid and paid for that single night eight years ago. She’d been so vigilant, so careful, ever since. She was never spontaneous. She was never reckless. And yet this beautiful shadow of a man had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, and the saddest mouth, and the way he touched her made her shake and burn and glow.
And she thought that maybe this once, for a moment or two, she could let down her guard. Just the smallest, tiniest bit. It didn’t have to mean anything she didn’t want it to mean. It didn’t have to mean anything at all.
So she ignored that voice inside of her, and she ignored his warning, too.
Alicia leaned her face into his hard palm as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and smiled when he pulled in a breath like it was a fire in him, too. Like he felt the same burn.
She stretched up against his hard, tough body and told herself this was about that grim mouth of his, not the wild, impossible things she knew she shouldn’t let herself feel or want or, God help her, do. And they were in the shadows of a crowded club where nobody could see her and no one would ever know what she did in the dark. It wasn’t as if it counted.
She could go back to her regularly scheduled quiet life in a moment.
It would only be a moment. One small moment outside all the rules she’d made for herself, the rules she’d lived by so carefully for so long, and then she would go straight back home to her neat, orderly, virtuous life.
She would. She had to. She would.
But first Alicia obeyed that surge of wild demand inside of her, leaned closer and fitted her mouth to his.
CHAPTER TWO
HE TASTED LIKE the night. Better even than she’d imagined.
He paused for the barest instant when Alicia’s lips touched his. Half a heartbeat. Less.
A scant second while the taste of him seared through her, deep and dark and wild. She thought that was enough, that small taste of his fascinating mouth. That would do, and now she could go back to her quiet—
But then he angled his head to one side, used the hand at her cheek to guide her mouth where he wanted it and took over.
Devouring her like the wolf she understood he was. He really was, and the realization swirled inside of her like heat. His mouth was impossibly carnal, opening over hers to taste her, to claim her.
Dark and deep, hot and sure.
Alicia simply...exploded. It was like a long flash of light, shuddering and bright, searing everything away in the white hot burn of it. It was perfect. It was beautiful.
It was too much.
She shivered against him, overloaded with his bold taste, the scrape of his jaw, his talented fingers moving her mouth where he wanted it in a silent, searing command she was happy to obey. Then his hands were in her hair, buried in her thick curls. Her arms went around his neck of their own volition, and then she was plastered against the tall, hard length of him. It was like pressing into the surface of the sun and still, she couldn’t seem to get close enough.
As if there was no close enough.
And he kissed her, again and again, with a ruthless intensity that made her feel weak and beautiful all at once, until she was mindless with need. Until she forgot her own name. Until she forgot she didn’t know his. Until she forgot how dangerous forgetting was for her.
Until she forgot everything but him.
When he pulled back, she didn’t understand. He put an inch, maybe two, between them, and then he muttered something harsh and incomprehensible while he stared at her as if he thought she was some kind of ghost.
It took her a long, confused moment to realize that she couldn’t understand him because he wasn’t speaking in English, not because she’d forgotten her own language, too.
Alicia blinked, the world rushing back as she did. She was still standing in that club. Music still pounded all around them, lights still flashed, well-dressed patrons still shouted over the din, and somewhere out in the middle of the dance floor, Rosie was no doubt still playing her favorite game with her latest conquest.
Everything was as it had been before she’d stumbled into this man, before he’d caught her. Before she’d kissed him.
Before he’d kissed her back.
Everything was exactly the same. Except Alicia.
He was searching her face as if he was looking for something. He shook his head slightly, then reached down and ran a lazy finger over the ridge of her collarbone, as if testing its shape. Even that made her shudder, that simple slide of skin against skin. Even so innocuous a touch seemed directly connected to that pulsing heat between her legs, the heavy ache in her breasts, the hectic spin inside of her.
She didn’t have to speak his language to know whatever he muttered then was a curse.
If she were smart, the way she’d tried to be for years now, she would pull her hand away and run. Just as he’d told her she should. Just as she’d promised herself she would. Everything about this was too extreme, too intense, as if he wasn’t only a strange man in a club but the kind of drug that usually went with this kind of rolling, wildly out-of-control feeling. As if she was much too close to being high on him.
“Last chance,” he said then, as if he could read her mind.
He was giving her a warning. Again.
In her head, she listened. She smiled politely and extricated herself. She marched herself to the nearest exit, hailed a taxi, then headed straight home to the comfort of her bloody laundry. Because she knew she couldn’t be trusted outside the confines of the rules she’d made for herself. She’d been living the consequences of having no rules for a long, long time.
But here, now, in this loud place surrounded by so many people and all of that pounding music, she didn’t feel like the person she’d been when she’d arrived. Everything she knew about herself had twisted inside out. Turned into something else entirely in that electric blue of his challenging gaze.
As if this really was a Shoreditch fairy tale, after all.
“What big eyes you have,” she teased him.
His hard mouth curved then, and she felt it like a burst of heat, like sunlight. She couldn’t do anything but smile back at him.
“So be it,” he said, as if he despaired of them both.
Alicia laughed, then laughed again at the startled look in his eyes.
“The dourness is a lovely touch,” she told him. “You must be beating them off with a stick. A very grim stick.”
“No stick,” he said, in an odd tone. “A look at me is usually sufficient.”
“A wolf,” she said, and grinned. “Just as I suspected.”
He blinked, and again looked at her in that strange way of his, as if she was an apparition he couldn’t quite believe was standing there before him.
Then he moved with the same decisiveness he’d used when he’d taken control of that kiss, tucking her into his side as he navigated his way through the dense crowd. She tried not to think about how well she fitted there, under his heavy arm, tight against the powerful length of his torso as he cut through the crowd. She tried not to drift away in the scent of him, the heat and the power, all of it surrounding her and pouring into that ache already inside of her, making it bloom and stretch and grow.
Until it took over everything.
Maybe she was under some kind of spell, Alicia thought with the small part of her that wasn’t consumed with the feel of his tall, lean frame as he guided her so protectively through the crowd. It should have been impossible to move through the club so quickly, so confidently. Not in a place like this at the height of a Saturday night. But he did it.
And then they were outside, in the cold and the damp November night, and he was still moving in that same breathtaking way, like quicksilver. Like he knew exactly where they were headed—away from the club and the people still milling about in front of it. He led her down the dark street, deeper into the shadows, and it was then Alicia’s sense of self-preservation finally kicked itself into gear.
Better late than never, she thought, annoyed with herself, but it actually hurt her to pull away from the magnificent shelter of his body, from all of that intense heat and strength. It felt like she’d ripped her skin off when she stepped away from him, as if they’d been fused together.
He regarded her calmly, making her want to trust him when she knew she shouldn’t. She couldn’t.
“I’m sorry, but...” She wrapped her arms around her own waist in an attempt to make up for the heat she’d lost when she’d stepped away from him. “I don’t know a single thing about you.”
“You know several things, I think.”
He sounded even more delicious now that they were alone and she could hear him properly. Russian, she thought, as pleased as if she’d learned his deepest, darkest secrets.
“Yes,” she agreed, thinking of the things she knew. Most of them to do with that insistent ache in her belly, and lower. His mouth. His clever hands. “All lovely things. But none of them worth risking my personal safety for, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Something like a smile moved in his eyes, but didn’t make it to his hard mouth. Still, it echoed in her, sweet and light, making her feel far more buoyant than she should have on a dark East London street with a strange man even she could see was dangerous, no matter how much she wanted him.
Had she ever wanted anything this much? Had anyone?
“A wolf is never without risk,” he told her, that voice of his like whiskey, smooth and scratchy at once, heating her up from the inside out. “That’s the point of wolves. Or you’d simply get a dog, pat it on the head.” His eyes gleamed. “Teach it tricks.”
Alicia wasn’t sure she wanted to know the tricks this man had up his sleeve. Or, more to the point, she wasn’t sure she’d survive them. She wasn’t certain she’d survive this as it was.
“You could be very bad in bed,” she said, conversationally, as if she picked up strange men all the time. She hardly recognized her own light, easy, flirtatious tone. She hadn’t heard it since before that night in her parents’ back garden. “That’s a terrible risk to take with any stranger, and awkward besides.”
That smile in his eyes intensified, got even bluer. “I’m not.”
She believed him.
“You could be the sort who gets very, very drunk and weeps loudly about his broken heart until dawn.” She gave a mock shudder. “So tedious, especially if poetry is involved. Or worse, singing.”
“I don’t drink,” he countered at once. His dark brows arched over those eyes of his, challenging her. Daring her. “I never sing, I don’t write poems and I certainly do not weep.” He paused. “More to the point, I don’t have a heart.”
“Handy, that,” she replied easily. She eyed him. “You could be a killer, of course. That would be unfortunate.”
She smiled at that. He didn’t.
“And if I am?”
“There you go,” she said, and nodded sagely. Light, airy. Enchanted, despite herself. “I can’t possibly go off into the night with you now, can I?”
But it was terrifying how much she wanted to go off with him, wherever he’d take her, and instead of reacting to that as she should, she couldn’t stop smiling at him. As if she already knew him, this strange man dressed all in black, his blue eyes the only spot of color on the cold pavement as he stared at her as if she’d stunned him somehow.
“My name is Nikolai,” he said, and she had the oddest impression he hadn’t meant to speak at all. He shifted, then reached over and traced her lips with his thumb, his expression so fierce, so intent, it made her feel hollowed out inside, everything scraped away except that wild, wondrous heat he stirred in her. “Text someone my name and address. Have them ring every fifteen minutes if you like. Send the police. Whatever you want.”
“All those safeguards are very thoughtful,” she pointed out, but her eyes felt too wide and her voice sounded insubstantial. Wispy. “Though not exactly wolfish, it has to be said.”
His mouth moved into his understated version of a smile
“I want you.” His eyes were on fire. Every inch of him that wolf. “What will it take?”
She swayed back into him as if they were magnets and she’d simply succumbed to the pull. And then she had no choice but to put her hand to his abdomen, to feel all that blasting heat right there beneath her palm.
Even that didn’t scare her the way it should.
“What big teeth you have,” she whispered, too on edge to laugh, too filled with that pulsing ache inside of her to smile.
“The biting part comes later.” His eyes gleamed again, with the kind of sheer male confidence that made it difficult to breathe. Alicia stopped trying. “If you ask nicely.”
He picked up her hand and lifted it to his mouth, tracing a dark heat over the back of it. He didn’t look away.
“If you’re sure,” she said piously, trying desperately to pretend she wasn’t shaking, and that he couldn’t feel it. That he didn’t know exactly what he was doing to her when she could see full well that he did. “I was promised a wolf, not a dog.”
“I eat dogs for breakfast.”
She laughed then. “That’s not particularly comforting.”
“I can’t be what I’m not, solnyshka.” He turned her hand over, then kissed her palm in a way that made her hiss in a sharp breath. His eyes were smiling again, so bright and blue. “But I’m very good at what I am.”
And she’d been lost since she’d set eyes on him, hadn’t she? What use was there in pretending otherwise? She wasn’t drunk. It wasn’t like that terrible night, because she knew what she was doing. Didn’t she?
“Note to self,” Alicia managed to say, breathless and dizzy and unable to remember why she’d tried to stop this in the first place, when surrendering to it—to him—felt so much like triumph. Like fate. “Never eat breakfast with a wolf. The sausages are likely the family dog.”
He shrugged. “Not your family dog,” he said with that fierce mouth of his, though she was sure his blue eyes laughed. “If that helps.”
And this time, when she smiled at him, the negotiation was over.
The address he gave her in his clipped, direct way was in an extraordinarily posh part of town Alicia could hardly afford to visit, much less live in. She dutifully texted it to Rosie, hoping that her friend was far too busy to check it until morning. And then she tucked her phone away and forgot about Rosie altogether.
Because he still moved like magic, tucking her against him again as if there was a crowd he needed to part when there was only the late-night street and what surged between them like heat lightning. As if he liked the way she fitted there as much as she did. And her heart began to pound all over again, excitement and anticipation and a certain astonishment at her own behavior pouring through her with every hard thump.
At the corner, he lifted his free hand almost languidly toward the empty street, and for a second Alicia truly believed that he was so powerful that taxis simply materialized before him at his whim—until a nearby engine turned over and a powerful black SUV slid out of the shadows and pulled to a stop right there before them.
More magic, when she was enchanted already.
Nikolai, she whispered to herself as she climbed inside the SUV, as if the name was a song. Or a spell. His name is Nikolai.
He swung in behind her on the soft leather backseat, exchanged a few words in curt Russian with the driver and then pressed a button that raised a privacy shield, secluding them. Then he settled back against the seat, near her but not touching her, stretching out his long, lean body and making the spacious vehicle seem tight. Close.
And then he simply looked at her.
As if he was trying to puzzle her out. Or giving her one last chance to bolt.
But Alicia knew she wasn’t going to do that.