CHAPTER 3

“Miss Bryant, if memory serves,” he said in a cool tone that was at complete odds with that dark savagery in his burnished gold gaze, “your contract states that you must give me two weeks following the tendering of your notice.”

          It was Addison’s turn to blink.

“You’re not serious...”

“I may be an… ‘oversexed King Kong’, Miss Bryant…”

          He bit out each word like a bullet she shouldn’t have been able to feel, and yet it hurt, it hurt like hell, and all the while the gold in his gaze seemed to sear into her, making her remember all the things she’d rather forget.

“But that has yet to impede my ability to read a contract. Two weeks, which, if I am not mistaken, includes the investor dinner in Milan we’ve spent months planning.”

“Why would you want that?”

          Addison found she’d turned to face him without meaning to move, and her hands had become fists at her sides.

“Are you that evil? What kind of perversity is this?”

“Being my Executive Assistant, I’m surprised you haven’t already found the answer to that from my ex-lovers, with whom you are so close, apparently,” Andrey Romanoff threw at her, his voice a sardonic lash. “Didn’t you spend all of those hours of your wasted life placating them? I believe you said that…”

          Andrey folded his arms over his chest, and Addison found herself noticing, as always, the sheer, lean perfection of his athletic form. It was part of what made him so lethal. So dizzyingly unmanageable.

          Every inch of him was a finely honed weapon, and he was not averse to using whatever part of that weapon would best serve him. That was why she understood, he was standing over her like this, intimidating her with the fact of his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the inexorable force, and the power of his relentless masculinity.

          Even in a bespoke suit that should have made him look like some kind of dandy, Andrey Romanoff looked capable of anything. There was that hint of wildness about him, that constant, underlying threat he wore proudly. Deliberately.

          She didn’t want to see him as a man. She didn’t want to remember the heat of his hands against her skin, his mouth so demanding on hers. She would die before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing that he got to her now. Even if she still felt the burn of it… the searing fire.

“You know very well what they say,” Addison murmured, sounding almost entirely calm to her own ears… almost blasé. “Those who sleep with someone for the money earn every penny.”

          He didn’t appear to react to that at all, and yet, Addison felt something hard and hot flare between them, almost making her step back, almost making her show him exactly how nervous he made her.

          But she was done with that. With him. She refused to cower before him. And she was finished with quiet obedience, too. Look what it had got her.

“Take the rest of the day off,” he suggested then, a certain hoarseness in his voice.

          That was the only hint of the fury she couldn’t quite see but had no doubt was close to liquefying them both. And perhaps the whole of the office building they stood in as well, if not the entire City of London besides.

“I strongly suggest you do something to curb your newfound urge toward candid commentary. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Punctual, as usual, Miss Bryant.”

          And it was suddenly as if a new sun dawned, bathing Addison in a bright, impossible light. Everything became stark and clear. He loomed there, not three feet away from her, taking up too much space, dark and impossible and faintly terrifying even when quiet and watchful.

          And he would never stop… She understood that about him. Addison understood it the way she comprehended her own ability to breathe. His entire life was a testament to his inability to take no for an answer, to not accept what others told him if it wasn’t something he wanted to hear.

          Andrey Romanoff, the mighty tycoon, the ruthless CEO, the ‘Russian Lucifer’, had never encountered a rule he didn’t break, a wall he couldn’t climb, a barrier he wouldn’t slap down simply because it dared to stand in his way.

          He took. Always and without asking questions… That was what he did. At the most basic level, that was who Andrey Romanoff was. He’d taken from her and she hadn’t even known it until today, had she?

          Some part of her, even now, wished she’d never opened that file drawer, never discovered how easily he’d derailed her career three years ago without her ever the wiser. But she had. Addison could see the whole rest of her life flash before her eyes in a sickening, infinitely depressing cascade of images.

          If she agreed to his two weeks, she might as well die on the spot. Right here, right now… Because he would take possession of her life the way he’d done of her last five years, and there would be no end to it. Ever!

          Addison knew perfectly well that she was the best Executive Assistant he’d ever had. That was the truth, no place for modesty… She’d had to be, because she’d needed the money he’d paid her and the cachet his name had afforded her when it came time to wrangle Lowell into the best drug-treatment clinics and programs in the States, for all the good it had done.

          And she still believed it had all been worth it, no matter how little she had to show for it now, no matter how empty and battered she felt. Lowell had not died alone, on a lonely street corner in some desperate city neighborhood, never to be identified or mourned or missed. That was what mattered.

          But Lowell had only been the first, original reason. Her pathetic feelings for Andrey had been the second, and far more appalling reason she’d made herself so indispensable to Andrey.

          She’d taken pride in her ability to serve him so well. It left a bitter taste in her mouth today, but it was true. She was that much of a masochist, and she’d have to live with that.

          If she stayed even one day more, any chance she had left to reclaim her life, to do something for herself, to live, to crawl out of this terrible hole she’d lowered herself into all on her own, would disappear into the big black smoke-filled vortex that was Andrey Romanoff.

          He would buy more things and sell others, make millions and destroy lives at a whim, hers included. And she would carry on catering to him, jumping to do his bidding and smoothing the path before him, anticipating his every need and losing herself, bit by bit and inch by inch, until she was nothing more than a pleasant-looking, serene-voiced husk.

          A robot under his command… Slave to feelings he would never, could never return, despite small glimmers to the contrary in far-off cities on complicated evenings never spoken of aloud when they were done.

          Worse, she would want to do all of it. She would want to be whatever she could be for him, just so long as she could stay near him. Just as she had since that night In Cadiz, she’d seen such a different side of him.

          Addison would cling to anything, wouldn’t she? She would even pretend she didn’t know that he’d crushed her dreams of advancement with a single, brutal email. She was, she knew, exactly that pathetic. Exactly that stupid. Hadn’t she proved it every single day of these past three years?

“No,” she said.

          It was, of course, a word he rarely heard. His black eyebrows lowered. His hard gold eyes shone with amazement. That impossibly lush mouth, the one that made his parade of lovers fantasize that there could be some softness to him, only to discover too late that it was no more than a mirage, flattened ominously.

“What do you mean, no?”

          The lilt of his native Russian cadence made the words sound almost… musical, but Addison knew that the thicker his accent, the more trouble she was in… And the closer that volcanic temper of his was to eruption.

          She should have turned on her heel and run for safety. She should have heeded the knot in her belly and the heat that moved over her skin, the panic that flooded through her.

“I understand that you might not be familiar with the word,” Addison continued, sounding perhaps more empowered, more sure of herself than was wise. Or true.

“It indicates disagreement. Refusal. Both concepts you have difficulty with, I know that very well. But that is, I am happy to say, no longer my problem.”

“It will become your problem,” Andrey told her, a note she’d never heard before in his voice.

          His gaze narrowed further, into two outraged slits of gold, as if he’d never actually seen her until this moment. Something about that particular way he looked at her made her feel lightheaded.

“I will…”

“You will do what? Go ahead, Mr. Romanoff, and take me to court,” Addison countered, interrupting him again with a careless wave of her hand that, she could see, visibly infuriated him. “What do you think you’ll win?”

          For the first time in as long as she’d known him, Andrey Romanoff was rendered speechless. The silence was taut and breathless between them, and, still, was somehow as loud as a siren. It seemed to hum. And Andrey simply stared at Addison, thunderstruck, an expression she had never seen before on his ruthless face. Good! That was a first…

“What are you going to do, Mr. Romanoff? Will you take my flat from me?” she continued, warming to the topic.

          Emboldened, perhaps, by his unprecedented silence. By the chaos inside of her, that was all his fault.

“It’s only a leased bedsit. You’re welcome to take it. I’ll write you a check right now, if you like, for the entire contents of my current account. Is that what it will take for me to walk away?”

          She laughed and could hear it bouncing back at her from the glass wall, the tidy expanse of her desk, even the polished floor that made even the outer office seem glossy and that much more intimidating to the unwary.

“I’ve already given you five long years of my life… sir. I’m not giving you two more weeks. The hell with everything! I’m not giving you another second... I’d rather die.”