Читать книгу The Royals Collection - Ким Лоренс, Rebecca Winters - Страница 46
ОглавлениеDEMYAN DIDN’T SMILE now, but she knew the man in front of her wasn’t a shark.
Not like the overcritical Perry, and definitely not like someone even more ruthless than her stepfather. There was too much kindness in Demyan, even if he was wholly unaware of it, as Chanel suspected he was.
“What did you mean earlier?” he asked, pulling her back to the original question.
Oh, yes...right.
“It’s just...you must realize I’m a sure thing. Even if I’m not sure I want to be.”
“Why aren’t you sure?” he asked, deflecting himself this time.
Or maybe he just really wanted to know. Being the center of someone else’s undivided attention when she wasn’t discussing her work wasn’t something Chanel was used to.
When she was with Demyan, he focused solely on her, though, as if nothing was more important to him. He wanted to know things others reacted to with impatience, not interest. It was a heady feeling.
Even so, peeling away the layers to reveal her full self to him wasn’t easy. “You’ll laugh.”
“Is it funny?”
“Not to me.” Not even a little.
“Then I will not laugh.”
“How can you be so perfect?”
“So long as I am perfect for you, that is all that matters.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes.” There could be no doubting the conviction in his tone or handsome features.
“Why?”
“Are you saying you feel differently?” he asked in a tone that implied he knew the answer.
“Love at first sight doesn’t happen.”
“Maybe for some people it does.”
All the breath seemed to leave the room at his words. “Are you saying...” She had to clear her throat, suck in air and try again. “Are you saying you feel the same?”
“I want to be your perfect man.”
“You mean that.” And maybe it was past time she stopped doubting his sincerity.
How much of her feeling he was saying what she wanted to hear stemmed from her own insecurities? Why was it so hard for her to accept that this man didn’t need her to be something or someone different to want to be with her?
The answer was the years spent in a family she simply didn’t fit, the daughter of a mother and stepfather who found constant fault with a child too much like her own father for their comfort.
“I do.”
She nodded, accepting. Believing. “I’ve never had sex.”
Once again she’d managed to shock him. And this time she didn’t have to look for subtle signs.
His whisker-shadowed jaw dropped and dark eyes widened comically. “You are twenty-nine.”
“I’m not staring retirement in the face, or something.” She had eleven more years of relatively safe childbearing, even.
Not that she thought she was going to marry and have children. She’d given up on that idea when she realized that even in the academic world, Chanel was a social misfit.
“No, I didn’t mean that.” But his voice was still laced with surprise and his superior brain was clearly not firing on all cylinders. “You’re educated. American.”
“So?” What in the world did her PhD in chemistry have to do with her virginity?
“Are you completely innocent?”
Man, did he even realize how that sounded?
And people thought she was old-fashioned. “Even if I’d had sex, I would still be innocent. Sex isn’t a crime.”
“You know that is not what I was referring to.”
“No, I know, but innocent? Come on.”
The look he was giving her was way too familiar.
“I’m awkward,” she excused with a barely stifled sigh. “I told you.” Had he forgotten?
“You are refreshingly direct.” That wasn’t disappointment in his tone and the look she thought she recognized.
Well, it wasn’t. He almost looked admiring. If she believed it, and hadn’t she diced to do just that? “Mother calls it ridiculously blunt.”
“Your mother does not see you as I do.”
“I should hope not.”
They both smiled at her small joke that did nothing to dissipate the emotional tension between them.
He put his big hands on her shoulders, his thumbs brushing along her collarbone, the hold possessive like before. And just like earlier, she found a new unexpected part of her that liked that. A lot.
“Demyan.” His name just sighed out of her.
She didn’t know what she meant by it. What she wanted from him.
He didn’t appear similarly lost, his gaze direct and commanding. “You say you’ve never had sex. I want to know what that means.”
It took two tries to get words past her suddenly constricted throat. “Why does it matter?”
“You can ask that?”
“Um, yes.” Hadn’t she just done?
“You are mine.”
“Three dates,” she reminded him.
“Love at first sight,” he countered.
“You... I...”
“We are going to make love. What I want to know is what you have done to this point.” His thumbs continued the sensual caress along her collarbone. “You are going to tell me.”
“Bossy much?”
“Only in bed.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him, was even less sure if it mattered. She wasn’t worried about standing up for herself. She’d never conformed when it counted, no matter how much easier it would have made her life—especially with her family.
Right now she found she wanted to answer his question, needed to. Still, she kept it general. “Heavy petting, I guess you’d say.”
“Be more specific.”
“No.” Heat crawled up her neck.
He shouldn’t care, should he? Virginity wasn’t an issue for modern men. Or modern women, her inner voice mocked her, and yet you are a virgin.
He bent so close their lips almost touched. “Oh, yes.”
Thoughts came and went, no words making it past her lips until she made a sound she’d never heard from her own vocal cords before. It was something like surrender, but more.
It was sexual.
The air between them grew heavy with the most primal kind of desire, pushing against her, demanding her acquiescence.
In a last-ditch desperate bid for space, she shut her eyes, but it did no good. She could feel his stare. Could feel his determination to get an answer.
She was super sensitive to his nearness, too, her body aching to press against his, her lips going soft in preparation for his kiss.
The kiss didn’t come.
“Tell me,” puffed across her lips.
The sound of his voice whispered through her, increasing the sensual fire burning through her veins.
“It wasn’t anything.”
“Were you naked?”
“Once.”
“Good.” He kissed her, his lips barely there and gone before she could lose herself in the caress she wanted more than air or research funding. “When?”
“In college.”
He just waited.
“He told me he loved me.” She’d wanted to be loved so badly, she realized later.
“You didn’t let him into your body.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It didn’t feel right.” Old pain twisted through her heart.
She turned her head away, stepping back when a few seconds before she would have said she wasn’t capable of moving at all, much less away from him.
“He hurt you.” The growl in Demyan’s voice made Chanel’s eyes snap open, her gaze searching for him, for visual proof of what had been in his tone.
The anger in his eyes wasn’t directed at her, but it still made Chanel shiver. “He broke up with me.”
Her ex had called her a dried-up relic, a throwback woman who belonged in a medieval nunnery, not a modern university. Chanel had a lot of experience with disappointing her family, so her ex-boyfriend’s words should not have had the power to wound.
She should have been inured.
But they’d cut her deeply, traumatically so.
She’d never shared with another person the experience that had left her convinced her mother and stepfather were right, had never admitted her ultimate failure.
“I’m hopeless with men.” What was she doing here, wanting to give her body to a man destined to eviscerate her heart?
He wasn’t ever going to stay with her. He said they were going to make love, but they couldn’t. He didn’t love her, no matter what his words had implied. He couldn’t.
She wasn’t that woman.
Chanel wasn’t a bubbly blonde beauty like her sister, Laura. She wasn’t a cool sophisticate like her mother. Chanel was the awkward one who could make perfect marks in chemistry courses but utterly fail at the human kind.
She shook her head, her hands cold and shaking. “You should leave.”
Another primal sound of anger came out of him before he crossed the small distance between them and yanked her body into his with tender ruthlessness. “I’m not going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever.”
“You can’t make promises like that.” His breaking them was going to destroy something inside her that her parents and ex had been unable to touch.
The belief that she was worth something.
“I can.”
“What? You’re going to marry me?” she demanded with pain-filled sarcasm.
“Yes.”
She couldn’t breathe, her vision going black around the edges. Words were torn from her, but they came out in barely a whisper. “You don’t mean that.”
He cupped the back of her head, forcing her gaze to meet his. “I do.”
“You can’t.”
“I am a man of my word.”
“Always?” she mocked, not believing.
No one kept all their promises. Especially not to her. Hadn’t her father told her he’d always be there for her? But then he’d died. Her mother had promised, in the aftermath of Jacob Tanner’s death, that she and Chanel would always be a team, that she wouldn’t leave her daughter, wouldn’t die like her husband.
Beatrice hadn’t died, but she’d abandoned Chanel emotionally within a year of her marriage to Perry, making it clear from that point on that the only team was the Saltzmans’. Chanel Tanner had no place on it.
“Try me,” Demyan demanded, no insecurity about the future in his words.
“You’ll destroy me.”
“No.”
“Men like you...” Her words ran out as her heart twisted at the thought of never seeing him again.
“Know our own minds.” There was that look in his eyes again.
As if he was a man who always got what he set out to, no matter what he had to do to get it. As if she might as well give in because he never would.
“I wanted to wait until I got married. I didn’t want to trap someone into a lifetime they would only resent.”
“There are such things as birth control.”
“My mom was on the Pill when she got pregnant with me. I was not part of her future plans. Neither was my father.”
“She didn’t have to marry him.”
“She loved him. At first.” Chanel didn’t know when that had changed.
She’d been only eight when her dad died, but she’d believed her parents loved each other deeply and forever. It was her mother’s constant criticism and unfavorable comparisons later that made Chanel realize Beatrice had not approved of her husband any more than she did their daughter.
“They were not compatible.” Demyan said it like he really knew—not that he could.
“I thought they were, when I was little. I was wrong,” she admitted.
“We aren’t them. We are compatible.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know more than you think I do. We belong together.” There was a message in his words she couldn’t quite decipher, but his dark gaze wasn’t giving any hints.
“I told you I was a sure thing.” Though she wasn’t sure that was true. Part of her was still fighting the idea of total intimacy, especially at the cost of opening herself up like this. “You don’t have to say these things.”
“I am not a man who makes a habit of saying things I do not mean.”
“You never lie.” He’d as good as said so earlier.
Something passed across his handsome features. “I have not lied to you.”
His implication was unbelievable. “You really plan to marry me. After three dates?”
“Yes.” There was so much certainty, such deep conviction in that single word.
She could not doubt him, but it didn’t make sense. Her scientific brain could not identify the components of the formula of their interaction that had led to this reaction.
In her lab she knew mixing one substance with another and adding heat, or cold, or simply agitation resulted in identifiable and documented results.
Love wasn’t like that. There was nothing predictable about the male-female interaction, especially for her.
But one thing she knew—a man could not hide his true reaction to a woman in bed. It was why she’d refused her ex back at university. He hadn’t been completely into it.
Oh, he’d wanted to get off, but she could tell that it didn’t matter it was her he was getting off with.
“Show me,” she challenged Demyan now. “Make me believe.”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t pretend not to understand what she wanted.
* * *
Demyan could not let Chanel’s challenge go unmet.
Whatever the cretin who had turned her off sex had done to her, at least part of her thought Demyan would do the same thing. He could see it in the wary depths of her gray eyes.
“You will see, sérdeńko. I am not that guy.”
“You keep calling me little.” She didn’t sound as if she was complaining, just observing.
He noticed she did that when the emotions got too intense. She retreated behind the barrier of her analytical mind.
When this night was over there would be no barriers between them.
“You speak Ukrainian.” Her dossier had mentioned she studied the language, but not how proficient she was.
To translate the endearment, which was a diminutive form of heart, implied a far deeper knowledge of his native tongue than the investigative report had revealed.
“I studied it so I could read scientific texts by notable scientists in their native tongue.”
“And sérdeńko came up in a scientific text?” he asked with disbelief.
“No.” She sighed as if admitting a dark secret. “I like languages. I’m fluent in Ukrainian, Portuguese and German.”
“So you could read scientific texts.”
“Among other things.” She blushed intriguingly.
“What things?” he asked, his mouth temptingly close to hers.
He wanted to kiss her. She wanted the kiss, too—there could be no doubt.
“Erotic romance.”
“In Ukrainian?” he asked, utterly surprised for the third time that night.
This woman would never be a boring companion.
“Yes.”
“I am amazed.”
“Why?”
“If you like reading about sex so much, how are you still a virgin?”
“I like reading murder mysteries, too, but I haven’t gone out and killed anybody.”
He laughed, unable to remember the last time he’d been so entertained by a female companion.
This marriage he had to bring about would not be a hardship. Chanel Tanner would make a very amiable wife.
With that thought in mind, he took the first step in convincing her that they belonged together.
He kissed her, taking command of her mouth more gently than he might have before her revelation.
She couldn’t know it, but her virginity was a gift to him in more ways than one.
First, that he was the only man who would ever share her body in this way was not something to take lightly. Not even in this modern age.
But second, and more important to his efforts on behalf of Volyarus, once Demyan had awakened her passions for the first time, Chanel would be more likely to accept his proposal of marriage.
It meant adjusting his schedule up for her seduction, but he wasn’t leaving her tonight. Doing so might cause irreparable harm to the building of trust between them. She needed to know he wanted her, and he did.
Unlikely as he would have considered it, he desired this shy, bookish scientist above all other women.
She didn’t want to believe in forever with him, but she would learn. He had spoken the truth earlier. Prince Demyan of Volyarus did not break his promises.
And he had promised King Fedir that Demyan would marry Chanel Tanner.
She whimpered against his lips, her sexual desire so close to the surface he thought she needed her first climax to come early so she could enjoy the lead-up to the next one.
With careful precision, he built the kiss until the small sounds of need were falling from her lips to his in a steady cascade. Control starting to slip, he deepened the kiss, wanting more of her taste, more of her response...more of everything Chanel had to give.
A small voice in the back of his mind prompted that the time had come to pull back and lead her into the bedroom.
Only, his lips didn’t want to obey, and for the first time in memory Demyan found himself lost in a kiss, his plans for a suave seduction cracking under the weight of his more primitive need.
He had just the presence of mind to move her backward toward the sofa. Unbelievably, neither of them was going to be able to stay vertical much longer.
Demyan maneuvered them both so Chanel sat sprawled across his lap, her dress hiked up, her naked thighs pressing against his cloth-covered ones.
He never let her lips slide so much as a centimeter away from his.
Demyan liked sex. According to Maks, he’d had more than his fair share of partners. Some of them were very experienced in the art of seduction, women who knew exactly how to use their bodies for maximum effect. None of them had turned him on as much as the uncalculated and wholly honest way Chanel responded to his kiss.
She moved with innocent need against him, her body undulating in unconscious sensuality that drove him insane with the need to show her what those types of movements led to.
He brought his hand down and cupped her backside, guiding those untutored rolls of her hips into something that would give them both more pleasure and fan the flames of desire between them into an all-out inferno.
She jolted and moaned as her panty-clad apex rubbed over his trapped hard-on. He couldn’t hold back his own sounds of raw sexual desire and keep from arching his hips to increase the friction.
The kiss went nuclear and he did nothing to stop it, demanding entrance into her mouth with his tongue and getting it without even a token resistance.
This woman did not play the coquette. Her honest passion was more exciting than any practiced seduction could be. She couldn’t know, though; she was too unused to physical intimacy. For that ignorance, at least, he could be glad.
She could not take advantage of a weakness she did not recognize in him, and damned if he would point it out. He might not be able to control himself completely this first time with her, but no doubt that was a big part of the reason why.
It was her first time and he found that highly erotic.
The one benefit was that it was clear Chanel was completely out of control and definitely imprinting on him sexually.
Equally important, after what she’d revealed, was for her to realize he wanted her.
As she’d demanded, he would show her.
She would never again doubt her feminine appeal to him, not after tonight. And perhaps that, even more than her virginity, would lead her to accept his speed-record-breaking proposal when it came.
That it might no longer be completely about his duty to country was a thought he dismissed as unimportant.
He would have her. She would have him and whether she knew it or not, she needed him. He was good for her.
It started with now, giving her what she hadn’t realized she was missing.
After insuring she kept the rhythm that made her body shake, he mapped her body with his hands through the soft green silk of her dress, caressing her in ways reserved for a lover.
He enjoyed this part of sex, touching a woman in ways no one else was allowed and, in Chanel’s case, never had been.
Knowing a woman had put her body in his very-capable-to-dole-out-pleasure hands turned him on. Demyan liked that control, too. For reasons he didn’t feel the need to dwell on, that knowledge was even more satisfying with Chanel than it had been with other women.
She might not realize it, but the kind of response she gave meant she would let him do anything. That acknowledgment came with a heady kind of enjoyment destined to undermine his self-control further if he wasn’t very careful.
It was important for her pleasure, particularly this first time, that he not let that happen. He had to maintain some level of premeditation, or he could hurt her.
That reminder sobered him enough to think—at least a little—again.
Touching her was good, though. Too damn good.
He cupped her breasts, reveling in the catch of her breath as his thumbs brushed over turgid nipples. He wanted to feel them naked, but even this was incredible.
His sex pressed against the placket of his trousers in response to the feel of her in his hands.
He pinched, knowing the layers of silk and her bra would be no true barrier between those buds and the sensation he gave her.
She tore her mouth from his, her eyes opening, pupils blown with bliss almost swallowing the stormy irises. “I... That...”
“Is good.” He did it again, increasing the pressure just enough to give maximum pleasure that might border on pain but would never go over. “Say it.”
