From: [email protected]
Subject: Contractual Offer
You will find $100,000 in your charity’s account today, provided I find you in my bed tonight.
Aleksy Dmitriev is after the ultimate revenge. Yet his plan backfires when he discovers that his new mistress, Clair Daniels, is a virgin who could not have been her former employer’s lover.
Revenge may be out the window, but that won’t stop Aleksy from enjoying the perks of his purchase… But Clair is destined to be more than just this Russian’s acquisition!
“Why extend your takeover to include me?” Clair asked in a voice more husky than the disparagement she was aiming for. “Didn’t you get enough out of scooping up the firm from a dead man?”
“He was still alive when I started proceedings, and no, I didn’t get anything near what I wanted. Don’t make out like you’re some kind of prey just because you’re used to being the predator. You get to keep the money,” Aleksy taunted softly.
“No matter what?” The jerky toss of her head was supposed to convey brash confidence. The question was real, though. She couldn’t help being seduced by the prospect of running the foundation her way, without needing approval on every detail. Without having to reveal that each of those details touched her personally and that that was why she was fighting so hard for them. “I’m not into anything kinky,” she warned. “If you’re looking for someone to spank you, move along to the next girl in the secretarial pool.”
“I’m not the submissive in any relationship,” he assured her drily. “I like straight sex and lots of it. I don’t hurt women, ever, if that’s what you’re dancing around asking. I might play with dominating one, controlling her…” He flexed his hands on her elbows, making her breasts press into his chest.
Excitement returned with a spear of pleasure straight into her loins. She gasped.
“If she likes it,” he murmured.
Dear Reader,
This story has a history as long and colorful as the country it’s set in.
Clair was a heroine I lived with for at least a decade before I properly wrote her story. I knew she was pretending to be a mistress to an impotent man, one who was using her to hide his criminal activities, but I had her paired with one wrong hero after another. At one point he was a CIA agent, another time he was a New England playboy. For a while she was an accountant, and in one version she asked the hero for an affair, rather than being acquired as a mistress as she is by Aleksy.
Aleksy, with his scar and very dark past, is the perfect contrast to the flawless and aloof appearance that disguises Clair’s surprisingly sensitive personality. What I love most about Clair is her ability to bring Aleksy back to the man he was meant to become. He, in turn, gives her the promise of a family that she truly deserves.
I hope you find their story as satisfying to read as it was for me to finally write it.
Dani
CHAPTER ONE
I miss waking up with you.
THE NOTE STRUCK a pang of wistfulness in Clair Daniels’s chest. She wondered if anyone would ever write something so romantic to her. Then she recalled the waves of emotional highs and lows Abby had been riding for months, all under the influence of that elusive emotion called “love.” Being independent was more secure and less hurtful, she reminded herself. And the roller coaster she’d been through in the last two weeks, after losing a man who was merely a friend and mentor, was brutal enough.
Still, she had to hide envy as she handed the note back to Abby and said with a composed smile, “That’s very sweet. The wedding is this weekend?”
Abby, the firm’s receptionist, nodded with excitement as she placed the card back in the extravagant bouquet Clair had admired. “I was just saying to everyone—” She waved at the ladies gathered with their morning coffee. “I texted him that after Saturday, we can wake up together forev…” She trailed off as it struck her who she was talking to.
The horseshoe of women dropped their gazes.
Clair’s throat closed over a helpless I wasn’t waking up with him. She’d never slept with anyone but couldn’t say so. Her confidentiality clause with Victor Van Eych had made such confessions impossible.