SLAVE TO YOUR LOVE

         Lowell was gone. She was no longer his sole support. And the invisible chains of emotion and longing that had ruled her for so long could no longer keep her here, in this hell. Not now she’d discovered, entirely by accident, what Andrey truly thought of her.          Andrey Romanoff only watched her now, those dark amber eyes moving over her like the touch of his hands, all fire, and demand. She knew what the man in front of her saw. She had crafted her corporate image specifically to appeal to his particular tastes, to comply, as she always did, to his preferences.          Addison stood tall before his scrutiny, resisting the urge to fuss with her pencil skirt or the silk blouse she wore, both in the muted colors Andrey Romanoff, her boss, preferred.          She knew the deceptively s

         Andrey stared at his Executive Assistant as if he’d never seen her before. There was something about the way she tilted that perfect, pretty oval of her face, the way her usually calm gray eyes sparkled with the force of her temper… And something about that mouth of hers.          He couldn’t seem to look away from it. Unbidden, a memory teased through his head, of her hand on his cheek, her gray eyes warm and something like affectionate, her lips… but no. There was no need to revisit that insanity. He’d worked much too hard to strike it from his consciousness. It was one regrettable evening in five smooth, issue-free years. Why think of it at all?“I would rather draw my last breath here and now,” she said again as if she was under the misapprehension that he had not heard her the first time.“That can always be arranged, Miss Bryant

          She found him in one of the yacht’s many salons, a sleek celebration of marble and glass down an ostentatious spiral stair that was as gloriously luxe as everything else on this floating castle he’d won in a late-night card game from an old Russian oligarch.‘It was easy to take,’ he’d said with a small shrug when she’d asked why he’d wanted another yacht to add to his collection. ‘So, I took it.’          Andrey sat now in the sunken seating area with one of his many… anonymous companions melting all over him, all plumped-up breasts and sheaves of wheat-blond hair cascading here and there.          He had discarded his jacket somewhere and now looked deliciously rumpled, white shirt open at the collar and his olive skin seeming to gleam. T

          She had actually thrown herself off the side of the damned boat. Andrey stood at the rail and scowled down at her as she surfaced in the water below and started swimming for the far-off shore, fighting to keep his temper under control. Fighting to shove all of that need and lust back where it belonged, shut down and locked away in the deepest recesses of his memory.          How had this happened? Again? And yet, he was all too aware there was no one to blame but himself. Which only made things worse.“Is that Addie?”          The voice that came from slightly behind him was shocked.“‘Addie’?” Andrey echoed icily.          He didn’t want to know she had a casual nickname. He didn’t want to think of her

          There was a brief, intense sort of moment, and then Andrey leaned over, slid his hands beneath her arms, and hoisted her up and out of the water as if she weighed no more than a child.          Water sluiced from her wet clothes as Addison’s feet came down against the slippery bottom of the small boat, and she was suddenly aware of too many things. The sodden fabric of her skirt, ten times heavier than it should have been, wrapped much too tightly around her hips and thighs. The slick wetness of her blouse as it flattened against her skin in the sea breeze. The heavy tangle of her wet hair, tumbling this way and that in a disastrous mess. All of which made her feel much too cold, and, oddly, something very much like vulnerable.          But then she looked up, and the air seemed to empty out of her lungs. And she didn&