Prince of Secrets
“Are you going to try to ignore me like the delivery man?”
“Am I going to see you again to ignore you?”
“Oh, you will definitely see me again.”
As hard as Chanel found it to believe, the gorgeous corporate guy had meant exactly what he said. And not in a business capacity.
He wanted to see her again. She hadn’t given him her number, but he’d called to invite her to dinner. Which meant he’d gone to the effort to get it. Strange.
And sort of flattering.
Then he’d taken her to an independent film she’d mentioned wanting to see.
Chanel didn’t date. She was too awkward, her filters tuned wrong for normal conversation. Even other scientists found her wearing in a social setting.
Only, Demyan didn’t seem to care. He never got annoyed with her.
He didn’t get offended when she said something she shouldn’t have. He didn’t shush her in front of others, or try to cut off her curious questioning of their waiter on his reasoning behind recommending certain meals over others.
It was so different than being out with her family that Chanel found her own awareness of her personal failings diminishing with each hour she spent in Demyan’s company.
She’d never laughed so much in the company of another person who wasn’t a scientist. Had never felt so comfortable in a social setting with anyone.
Tonight they were going to a dinner lecture: Symmetry Relationships and the Theory of Point and Space Groups. She’d been wanting to hear this particular visiting lecturer from MIT for a while, but the outing had not been her idea.
Demyan had secured hard-to-come-by tickets for the exclusive gathering and invited her.
She’d been only too happy to accept, and not just because of the lecture. If he’d invited her to one of the charity galas her mother enjoyed so much, Chanel would have said yes, too.
In Demyan’s company, even she might have a good time at one of those.
Standing in front of the full-length mirror her mother had insisted Chanel needed as part of her bedroom decor, she surveyed her image critically.
Chanel didn’t love designer fashion and rarely dressed up, but no way could she have been raised by her mother and not know how to put the glad rags on.
Tonight, she’d gone to a little more effort than on her previous two dates with Demyan. Chanel had felt the first two outings were flukes, anomalies in her life she refused to allow herself to get too excited over.
After all, he would get that glazed look at some point during the evening and then not call again. Everyone did. Only, Demyan hadn’t and he had—called, that is.
And maybe, just maybe, she and the corporate geek had a chance at something more than the connection of two bouncing protons.
He understood what she was talking about and spoke in a language she got. Not like most people. It was the most amazing thing.
And she wanted him. Maybe it was being twenty-nine or something, but her body overheated in his presence big-time.
She’d decided that even if their relationship didn’t have a future, she wanted it to have everything she could get out of it in the present.
Both her mother and stepfather had made it clear they thought Chanel’s chance of finding a lifelong love were about as good as her department getting better funding than the Huskies football program.
Nil.
Deep inside, Chanel was sure they were right. She was too much like her father—and hadn’t Beatrice said she’d married him only because she was pregnant with Chanel?
Chanel wasn’t trapping anyone into marriage, but she wouldn’t mind tripping Demyan into her too-empty bed.
With that in mind, she’d pulled out the stops when dressing for their dinner tonight. Her dress was a hand-me-down Vera Wang from her mother.
It hadn’t looked right on the more petite woman’s figure, but the green silk was surprisingly flattering to Chanel’s five feet seven inches.
The bodice clung to her somewhat generous breasts, while the draping accentuated her waist and the line of her long legs.
It wasn’t slutty by any stretch, but it was sexy in a subtle way she trusted Demyan to pick up on. She would usually have worn it with sensible pumps that didn’t add more than an inch to her height.
But not tonight. Demyan was nearly six-and-a-half feet tall; he could deal more than adequately with a companion in three-inch heels.
Chanel had practiced wearing them on and off all day in the lab.
Her colleagues asked if she was doing research for a physics experiment. She’d ignored their teasing and curiosity for the chance to be certain of her ability to walk confidently in the heels.
And she’d discovered it was like riding a bike. Her body remembered the lessons her mom had insisted on in Chanel’s younger years.
The doorbell rang and she rushed to answer it.
Demyan stood on the other side, his suit a step up from his usual attire on their dates, too.
He adjusted his glasses endearingly and smiled, his mahogany gaze warm on her. “You look beautiful.”
Her hand went to the crazy red curls she rarely did much to tame. Tonight she’d used the full regimen of products her mother had given her on her last birthday, along with a lecture about not getting any younger and looking like a rag doll in public. “Thank you.”
“Do we have time for a drink before we leave for the dinner?” he asked, even as he herded her back into the small apartment and closed the door behind him.
“Yes, of course.” Heat climbed up her neck. “I don’t keep alcohol on hand, though.”
The look in his eyes could only be described as predatory, but his words were innocuous enough. “Soda will do.”
“Iced green tea?” she asked, feeling foolish.
Her mother often complained about the food and drink Chanel kept on hand, using her inadequacies as a hostess to justify the infrequent motherly visits.
Demyan’s eyes narrowed as if he could read Chanel’s thoughts. “Iced tea is fine.”
“It’s green tea,” she reiterated. Why hadn’t she at least bought soda, or something?
“Green tea is healthy.”
“Lots of antioxidants,” she agreed. “I drink it all the time.”
He didn’t ask if the caffeine kept her up, but then the man drank coffee with his meals and had gotten a large-size fully caffeinated Coca-Cola at the movie.
“I keep both caffeinated and decaf on hand,” she offered anyway.
“I’ll take the caffeine. I have a feeling we’ll be up late tonight.” The look he gave her was hot enough to melt magma.
Suddenly, it felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her apartment’s cheerfully decorated living room. “I’ll just get our tea.”
He moved, his hand landing on her bare arm. “Don’t run from me.”
“I’m not.” How could two simple words come out sounding so breathless?
His hand slid up her arm and over and down again, each inch of travel leaving bursts of sensation along every nerve ending in its wake, landing proprietarily against the small of her back. “I like this dress.”
“Thank you.” Somehow she was getting closer to him, her feet moving of their own volition, no formed thought in her brain directing them.
“You’re wearing makeup.”
She nodded. No point in denying it.
“I didn’t think you ever did.”
“I stopped, except for special occasions, after I moved away from home.”
“An odd form of rebellion.”
“Not when you have a mother who insists on image perfection. I wore makeup from sixth grade on, the whole works.”
“And you hated it.”
“I did.”
“Yet you are wearing it now.” The hand not resting on her back came up to cup her nape. “For the visiting MIT professor?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.” Then Demyan’s head lowered, his mouth claiming hers with surprisingly confident kisses.
And she couldn’t think at all.
Sparks of pleasure kindled where their lips met and exploded through her in a conflagration of delight. It was only a kiss. He was barely touching her, just holding her, really. And yet she felt like they were in the midst of making love.
Not that she’d actually done the deed, but she’d come close and it hadn’t been anything as good or intimate as this single kiss. She’d been naked with a man and felt less sensation, less loss of control.
Small whimpers sounded and she realized they were coming from her. There was no room for embarrassment at the needy sounds. She wanted too desperately.
She’d read about this kind of passion, but thought it was something writers made up, like werewolves and sentient beings on Mars. She had always believed that this level of desire wasn’t real.
Before meeting Demyan.
Before this kiss.
The hands on her became sensual manacles, their hold deliciously unbreakable. She didn’t want to break it. Didn’t want to take a single solitary step away from Demyan.
Their mouths moved together, his tongue barely touching hers in the most sensual kind of tasting. He used his hold on her nape to subtly guide her head into the position he wanted and she found it unbearably exciting to be mastered in this small way.
Demyan was one hundred percent in control of the kiss, and Chanel reveled in it with every single one of her sparking nerve centers.
The hand on her waist slid down to cup her bottom. He squeezed. The muscles along her inner walls spasmed with a need she’d never known to this intensity.
She’d been tempted to make love before, but never to the point of overcoming the promise she’d made to herself never to have sex—only to ever make love. In her mind, that had always meant being married and irrevocably committed to the man she shared her body with.
For the first time, she considered it could well mean giving her body to someone she loved.
Not that she loved Demyan. How could she? They barely knew each other.
The feelings inside her had to be lust, but they were stronger than anything she’d ever considered possible.
He kneaded her backside with a sensual assurance she could not hope to show. She tilted her pelvis toward him, needing something she wasn’t ready to give a name to. Her hip brushed the unmistakable proof of his excitement; they moaned into one another’s mouths, the sounds adding to the press of desire between them.
The knowledge he wanted her, too, poured through her like gasoline on the fire of her desire.
Her hands clutched at his crisp dress shirt as she rocked against him, wanting more, needing something only he could give her. He rocked back against her, the sounds coming from him too feral and sexy for the “normal corporate guy” he was on the outside.
The disparity so matched her own newly discovered sexual being inside the science geek, the connection she felt with him quadrupled in that moment.
Without warning, he tore his mouth from hers and stepped back, his breathing heavy, his eyes dark and glittery with need. “Now is not the time.”
Her own vision hazy with passion, all that she saw in focus was his face, the expression there an odd mixture of confusion and primal sexual need that could not be mistaken.
Even by someone as socially inept as she was.
Why was he confused? Didn’t he realize how much she wanted him, too?
“We don’t have to go to the dinner.” She stated the obvious.
CHAPTER TWO
“NO. WE WILL GO.” He took a deep breath, like he was trying to rein in the passion she so desperately wanted him to let loose.
On her.
What would it be like to be the center of the storm she could see swirling in his intent gaze?
Shivering, she knew with absolute certainty that was one query she wanted answered.
“Do not look at me like that,” he ordered.
“Like what?”
“You want to be naked,” he gritted out as if it was an accusation.
Though how could it be? With the erection pushing so insistently against his dinner trousers, there could be no question his body was on board with hers in the desire department.
More to the point, she wanted him naked, but she didn’t have the moisture in her mouth to say so. She simply nodded a hazy agreement.
“No. We have the dinner. Sex…” He shook his head as if finding something difficult to comprehend. “Sex will come later.”
“Please tell me you aren’t into delayed gratification.” She’d found her voice and cringed at how blunt she’d been, not to mention needy sounding. “It’s just that I don’t get a lot of gratification at all. I don’t want to put it off.”
She snapped her mouth shut, biting her lips from the inside to stop any more untoward words from escaping.
Instead of reassuring her that it would be perfectly okay to miss the lecture, and dinner, and anything else that stood between them and making love, he seemed amused by her words. Darn it.
Demyan’s mouth curved slightly and the need in his eyes receded a little. “Rest assured when we make love, you will not feel in any way ungratified.”
Chanel usually objected to the euphemism of lovemaking for what was essentially a physical act between two people. An act she had heretofore refused to indulge in completely. They weren’t in love, so how could they make love?
Only, she found the words of objection stuck in her throat. In fact, she could do nothing but agree with his assertion. “I’m sure.”
He might be something of a corporate geek, but his confidence in his sexual prowess was too ingrained not to be well based.
Demyan helped Chanel into her seat, his head still reeling from how quickly he’d lost control with her back at the apartment.
He’d very nearly taken her right there in the living room. No finesse. No seduction. Just raw, consuming, needy passion.
Demyan did not do consuming. He did not do need.
Raw exposure of desire was for other men. He didn’t hold back, but he didn’t lose control either. He was known for showing maximum restraint in the sexual realms, bringing his partners to levels of pleasure they showed great appreciation for.
He did not lose it over a simple kiss.
His tongue had barely penetrated Chanel’s mouth. With two layers of clothing between them, their bodies had not been able to touch intimately. He’d still been so close to coming, he’d had to pull away before he shamed himself with a reaction he’d never even evinced in adolescence.
The plan had been to give her a small taste of passion before leaving the apartment, to flirt with Chanel in subtly sexual ways over dinner and then leave her after a make-out session that left her wanting more.
Gaining her acquiescence to a hasty marriage with the prenuptial agreement the royal family’s lawyers had already drawn up required strict adherence to his carefully thought out strategy.
The plan was to keep her reason clouded by emotion, unfulfilled lust built into consuming desire being the primary element.
He didn’t plan to consummate their relationship for another week, at least. He wanted her blinded by her own physical wants, ready to commit to him sexually and emotionally.
Instead, he felt like an untried boy gasping for the chance to feel up under her skirt.
“Are you okay?” Chanel asked, worry in her tone.
Shaking off the disturbing thoughts, he gave her his most winning smile. “Of course. I am here with you, aren’t I?”
“Don’t say things like that.” Her frown was far too serious for his liking.
“Why not, when they are true?”
“They don’t sound true.” There was too much knowing in her gray eyes for his comfort. “That smile you give me sometimes, it’s just like a plastic mannequin.”
How odd that she should claim to know the difference. No one doubted his sincerity.
A smile was a smile. Except when it wasn’t. As he well knew but had not expected his less-than-socially-adept companion to. Taken aback, he sat down, noting as he did so the interested looks of their neighbors.
He turned the smile on them. “What do you say? Am I sincere?” he asked an older woman wearing something he was sure fit a lecture hall better than a formal dinner hosted in the Hilton ballroom.
Her returning smile was the besotted one he was used to getting from women. Even academics. “Very. Perhaps your companion can’t help her insecurities. Women like us don’t usually snag such lovely escorts.”
Chanel made a small, almost wounded sound next to him.
Before he could respond to it, the short, rather round man beside the older woman puffed up like a rooster. “Is that meant to imply that I am not as imposing?”
The woman looked at her date, and the smile she gave him shone with the kind of emotion Demyan found incomprehensible. “No, you are not, and that’s exactly the way I love you. I would not have married you nearly forty years ago and stayed this long otherwise.”
Feathers suitably smoothed, the man relaxed again in his chair, even deigning to give a somewhat superior smile to Demyan before turning to his wife. “Love you, too, m’dear.”
The older couple became obviously lost in a moment Demyan felt uncomfortable witnessing. He turned his attention to Chanel, only to find her frowning, her expression sad and troubled.
“What is it?”
“She’s right. You don’t belong with me.”
“That is not what she said, Chanel.” He put his hand on the green-silk-clad thigh closest to him. “I would say there is great evidence to the contrary.”
“What do you mean?”
He did not answer, but his expression was as meaningful as he could make it.
He could tell the exact moment all the tumblers clicked into place in Chanel’s scientific brain.
Her eyes widened, color surging up her neck into her face. “That’s just chemistry. A kiss hardly constitutes a claim.”
On that, he could not agree. Loss of control or not, their kiss had been a definite claim-staking on his part. “I’m surprised a woman of your education would declare there was anything mere about chemistry.”
“We’re here.”
“And?”
“And if the chemistry was so amazing, we wouldn’t be.”
He couldn’t believe she’d said that. He’d damn near ruined a pair of Armani trousers because of the heat between them.
They were not back at her apartment making love for two important reasons only, and neither had a thing to do with how much he’d wanted what she offered so innocently.
Making love tonight wasn’t according to plan. Even if it had been, Demyan would have changed the plan because he’d needed the distance from his passion.
He couldn’t tell her that, though. Not even close. “I thought you wanted to hear this lecture.”
“I did.”
He let one brow quirk.
“I do,” she admitted with the truculence of a child, made all the more charming because he was fairly certain she had not been a truculent child.
Just a very different one than her mother had expected her to be.
From everything he’d learned about her, both from the investigative dossier and herself, Chanel Tanner took after her father, not her mother. Not even a little. Mrs. Saltzman had clearly found that very trying when raising her daughter.
An hour later, Chanel looked up from the furious notes she’d been taking for the past twenty minutes on her smartphone. “I’m enjoying myself. Thank you.”
A genuine smile creased his lips. “You’re welcome.”
He liked seeing her like this, enthusiastic, clearly in her element.
“Dr. Beers has made at least two points I hadn’t considered before. They’re definitely worth additional consideration and research.” Chanel glowed with satisfaction Demyan found oddly enticing.
He liked this confident side of her.
Afterward, Demyan made sure she got the opportunity to talk to not only the visiting lecturer but also the head of the university department overseeing her lab’s research.
Her boss, who had attended the dinner as well, kept shooting her accusing glances from across the ballroom.
Demyan observed, “The head of your research is not happy to see you here.”
“He doesn’t like any of his assistants to make connections outside the department.” Chanel didn’t sound particularly bothered by that fact.
“That is very shortsighted.”
“He’s a brilliant scientist, but petty as a human being.” She shrugged. “I have no aspirations to run my own lab.”
“Why not?”
“Too much politics involved.” She looked almost guilty. “I like the science.”
That sounded like what Demyan knew of her father. “Why the frown?”
“My mother and stepfather would be a lot happier if I had more ambition, or any at all, really.”
“Yes?”
“When Yurkovich Tanner offered my schooling scholarship, they made it clear I could attend any school I wanted to.”
This was not news to Demyan, but perhaps she would explain why she’d opted for a local state school when she’d had the brains, the grades and the SAT scores to attend MIT, or the like.
“You graduated from Washington State University.”
“It was close to home. I didn’t want to move away.”
Pity. It might have done both Chanel and her mother a world of good. “You were still looking for a relationship with your mother.”
He understood that, though he’d never told another soul. His parents had given him up in everything but name, but he’d never cut ties completely with them.
He’d spent his angst-ridden teen years waiting for them to wake up and realize he was still their son. It hadn’t happened and by the time he left to attend university in the States, he’d come to accept it never would.
“I think I still am,” Chanel answered with a melancholy he did not like.
“You are very different people.”
“I’m the odd one.”
“You are not odd.” Unique, but not in a bad way.
“I wasn’t the daughter she wanted. My younger sister is the much-improved model.”
“That’s ridiculous. You are exactly as you should be.”
“Sometimes even I think you’re being sincere.”
Once again, she’d startled him. Because she was right. In that moment, he’d been speaking nothing but the truth with no thought of his final agenda.
Chanel wasn’t sure of the proper way to go about inviting a man up to her apartment for sex.
Demyan wasn’t making it easy, either. She wasn’t entirely sure, despite the kiss earlier, that he would accept. He’d been attentive over dinner, made sure she enjoyed herself to the fullest. She’d even caught him giving her that look, the one that said he wanted her.
Only, she got this strange sense that he was holding back.
And not for the same reason she was so uncertain about this whole sex thing. No way was Demyan a virgin.
She couldn’t help it—no matter how much her body was clamoring for sexual congress with this man, there was still a part of her that insisted that act was supposed to be a special one. Not very scientific of her, she knew.
Everyone from her mother, who had given up on Chanel’s nonexistent love life, to friends who could not comprehend her “romanticized view of sex,” agreed on one thing. Chanel’s virginity was just another sign of how she did not fit into the world around her.
But making love was supposed to be something more than two bodies finding physical release, she was sure of it.
Chanel had never wanted just sex. Wasn’t sure what effect it would have on her sense of self if she indulged in it now.
Things looked different at twenty-nine than they had at nineteen, though.
She should be more relaxed about the prospect of casually sharing her body with another person. She wasn’t.
If anything, the older she got the more important she realized each human connection she made was. Sex was supposed to be the ultimate act of intimacy.
She had to admit she’d never felt the bone-deep connection with the few men in her past that she’d felt in that single kiss with Demyan.