CHAPTER 1

“Is that all, Miss Bryant?” he asked after signing the documents she handed him.

          He didn’t even look at her… Like she was invisible or something… ‘Well, Andrey Romanoff, prepare to be blown away!’ she thought gathering all her courage.

“No, Mr. Romanoff. I have to tell you something… I quit my job as your Executive Assistant!”

“You quit your job? Really? Hmm… I don’t’ think so. Now, if this is all…” he added and waved his right hand dismissing her like she was an annoying mosquito.

“Mr. Romanoff, I don’t think you heard me. I’m resigning my position as your Executive Assistant… effective immediately!” she said forcing herself not to look straight at him, focusing on how to stop her knees from wobbling.  

“I heard you well, Miss Bryant. And my answer is the same as the first time. No. Of course, you are not resigning your position,” Andrey Romanoff said impatiently, not even glancing up from the wide expanse of his granite and steel desk.

          The desk loomed in front of a glorious floor-to-ceiling view over a gleaming wet stretch of the City of London, not that he had ever been observed enjoying it. The working theory was that he simply liked knowing that it was widely desired by others… Addison was absolutely sure that this idea pleased him more than the view itself.

          That was what the Russian tycoon Andrey Romanoff loved above all else, after all: owning things others coveted. It gave Addison tremendous satisfaction that she would no longer be one of them. His days as her ‘owner’ were about to end that day.

“I am not going to take no for an answer, Mr. Romanoff…”

“Don’t be so damn dramatic,” he made a low, scoffing sound.

          Addison forced herself to smile at the man who had dominated every aspect of her life, waking and sleeping and everything in between, for the past five years. Night and day. Across all time zones and into every little corner of the globe where his vast empire extended.

          She’d been at his beck and call around the clock as his Executive Assistant, dealing with anything and everything he needed to be dealt with, from a variety of his personal needs to the vagaries of his wide-ranging business concerns.

          And she absolutely despised him. Oh no… More than this… She loathed him. She really did. It surged in her, thick and hot and black and deep, making her skin seem to shimmer over her bones with the force of it.

          It was hard to imagine, now, knowing the truth, that she’d harbored softer feelings for this man for so long… But it didn’t matter, she told herself sternly. It was all gone now. Of course, it was… He’d seen to that, hadn’t he?

          Addison felt a fierce rush of that hard sort of grief that had flooded her at the strangest times in these odd few months since her twin brother Lowell had died. Life, she had come to understand all too keenly, was intense and often far too complicated to bear, but she’d soldiered on anyway.

          What other choice was there? She’d been the only one left to handle Lowell’s disease… his addictions. His care. His mountain of medical bills, the last of which she’d finally paid in full this week.

          And she’d been the only one left to sort through the complexities of his death, his cremation, his sad end. That had been hard. It still was. But this? This was simple. This was the end of her treating herself as the person who mattered least in her life.

          She was doing her best to ignore the swirling sense of humiliation that went along with what she’d discovered in the files this morning. Addison assured herself that she would have resigned anyway, eventually, soon… That finding out what Andrey had done was only a secondary reason to leave his employment.

“This is my notice, Mr. Romanoff,” she said calmly this time.

          Addison used that serene and unflappable professional voice that was second nature to her, and that she resolved she would never again utilize the moment she stepped out of this office building and walked away from this man.

          She would cast aside the necessarily icy exterior that had seen her through these years, that had protected her from herself as well as from him. She would be as chaotic and emotional and yes, dramatic even, as she wished, whenever she wished. She would be flappable unto her very bones. She could already feel that shell she’d wrapped around her for so long beginning to crack.

“Effective immediately.”

          Slowly, incredulously, a kind of menace and that disconcerting pulse of power that was uniquely his emanating from him like a new kind of electricity, Andrey Romanoff, much-celebrated founder and CEO of the ‘Romanoff Group’ and its impressive collection of hotels, airlines, businesses and whatever else took his fancy, richer than all manner of sins and a hundred times as ruthless, raised his head. Finally…

          Addison caught her breath. His black brows were low over the dark gold heat of his eyes. That fierce, uncompromising face made almost brutally sensual by his remarkable mouth that any number of models, actresses, and socialites swooned over daily was drawn into a thunderous expression that boded only ill…pure hell…

          The shock of his full attention, the hit of it, that all these years of proximity had failed to temper or dissipate, ricocheted through her, as always. Addison hated that most of all. Her damnable weakness…

          The air seemed to sizzle, making the vast expanse of his office, all cold contemporary lines and sweeping glass that seemed to invite the English weather inside, seem small and tight around her.

“I beg your pardon?”

          She could hear the slight lilt of Russian flavor behind his words, hinting at his past and betraying the volatile temper he usually kept under tight control. Addison restrained a small ripple of sensation, very near a shiver, that snaked along her spine.

          They called him the ‘Russian Lucifer’ for a reason… She would like to call him far worse.

“You heard me, sir.”

          The bravado felt good. Almost cleansing. He shook his head, dismissing her.

“I don’t have time for this,” he said. “Whatever this is. Send me an email outlining your concerns and…”

“You do… sir,” she interrupted him.

          They both paused, perhaps both noting the fact that she had never dared interrupt him before. Addison smiled coolly at him as if she were unaware of his amazement at her temerity.

“You do have time,” she assured him. “I cleared this quarter-hour on your schedule especially.”

          A very tense moment passed much too slowly between them then, and he did not appear to so much as blink. And she felt the force of that attention, as if his gaze were a gas fire, burning hot and wild and charring her where she stood.

“Is this your version of a negotiation, Miss Bryant?”

          His tone was as cool as hers, his midnight amber gaze far hotter.

“Have I neglected your performance review this year? Have you taken it upon yourself to demand more money? Better benefits?”

          Andrey Romanoff’s voice was curt, clipped. That edge of sardonic displeasure with something darker, smokier, beneath. Behind her professional armor, Addison felt something catch. As if he could sense it, Andrey smiled.

“This is not a negotiation and I do not want a raise or anything else, sir,” she said, matter-of-factly, wishing that after all this time, and what she now knew he’d done, she was immune to him and the wild pounding of her heart that particular smile elicited. “I don’t even want a reference. This conversation is merely a courtesy.”

“If you imagine that you will be taking my secrets to any one of my competitors,” he said in a casual, conversational tone that Addison knew him far too well to believe, “you should understand that if you try, I will dedicate my life to destroying you. In and out of the courts. Believe this, if nothing else…”

“I love nothing more than a good threat,” Addison replied in the same tone, though she doubted very much that it made his stomach knot in reaction. “But it’s quite unnecessary. I have no interest in the corporate world… Not anymore…”

          His mouth moved into something too cynical to be another smile.

“Name your price, Miss Bryant,” Andrey Romanoff suggested.

          His voice was like smoke and sin, and it was no wonder at all that so many unfortunate rivals went over all wide-eyed and entranced and gave him whatever it was he wanted almost the very moment he demanded it.

          He was like some kind of… corporate snake charmer or something similar. But she wasn’t one of his… snakes, and Addison refused to dance to his tune, no matter how seductive. She’d been dancing for far too long, and this was where it ended. It had to. It would. Today.

“It might sound strange to you, Mr. Romanoff, but I have no price,” she said with perfect honesty.

          Once… yesterday, for example, he could have smiled at her and she’d have found a way to storm heaven for him. But that was yesterday. Today she could only marvel, if that was the word, at how naive and gullible she’d been. At how well he’d played her… like a violin…

“And you’re wrong again… Everyone has a price, Miss Bryant.”

          And in his world, she knew, this was always true. Always! One more reason she wanted to escape it. Him… The Russian Devil…

“I’m sorry to break this to you, Mr. Romanoff, so I will do it gently,” she replied and she even shrugged. “I don’t.”

          Not anymore.