Chapter 9
ZINAIDA
Pigalle Mayfair, where I keep my main office, is a mile and a half from my apartment. Normally I arrive in a chauffered car. The day after I sign Mak’s contract, however, I arrive on foot, long before sunrise. I’ve already run five miles, done a hot yoga workout, and had an ice bath.
If I keep this up, I’ll be a fucking machine.
The truth is that after calling Mak, I could have run a marathon and still had a sleepless night.
And not only because the memory of Luke’s unwavering eyes watching me come makes every cell of my body tingle in an entirely unprofessional fucking way.
I wanted to prepare for his arrival.
That’s a lie.
To prepare myself for his arrival.
Theater is everything.
It’s a lesson I learned early on. Set the stage, place the props. Put on your costume, paint your face, and say your lines with enough conviction to make your audience believe it’s real.
That is what business comes down to, really. Especially my kind of business.
And after my utter failure in the Viewing Gallery, I need to ensure that today’s performance is world-fucking-class.
I open the wrought iron gate and follow the path up the stairs into Pigalle Mayfair. This early before dawn the marble foyer is still and silent.
I take my private lift to the penthouse.
It occupies the entire top floor, since it serves as both my business center and my official residence, the place where I hold the cocktail parties and fancy dinners my kind of business sometimes requires.
If my Lowndes Square apartment is a cozy space of worn timber floorboards and mellow afternoon sun, the Mayfair penthouse is a vast, elegant display of polished marble and discreet lighting.
It’s not really to my taste, but then I don’t have to live in it.
I do, however, maintain a private bedroom suite here, since if I have to pull an all-nighter, which happens more often than it probably should, then I like to be comfortable.
I keep a walk-in wardrobe stocked with designer clothes for every occasion, including workout gear for the fully equipped gym on a lower floor of the club.
The bathroom is done in black marble, with a rain shower I can get lost in and a Jacuzzi I’ve never gotten around to using.
The bed is vast and incredibly comfortable, crafted by the genius Swedish designer who supplies all my establishments.
The designer was once a burlesque dancer in my first club. All of the girls in my clubs have ambitions beyond their current roles, which I strongly encourage.
I know what it means to work in one thing while you dream of building another.
I gave the designer the start-up funds to take her business to the next level and have been enjoying a decent share of the profits ever since.
I invest in a lot of start-ups.
I love the challenge of building a business. Of taking one pound and turning it into a million. Of creating irresistible places, and products, that give people exactly what they didn’t know they needed.
And I’m fucking good at it.
It took a decade of building up my clubs, and seeding many other small businesses, before I truly allowed myself to acknowledge that.
Up until I banked my first billion, I still felt like a phony, a fucked-up little girl just playing a part. I felt convinced that, sooner or later, someone would expose me as a fraud and I’d be sent back to the gutter I came from, humiliated and broken.
Imposter syndrome, they call it, apparently. I read that in a magazine one of my dancers left lying around.
I strip and head into the shower, reveling in the steady jets massaging my body. I’m pumped after my morning workout, blood pulsing as I mentally run through my look for the day. I have an early-morning meeting with the home secretary that I would normally dress conservatively for.
Directly after that meeting, however, is my first with Luke. Which means I need to find something a little more . . . arresting.
Let Luke Macarthur find out exactly who—and what—he’s dealing with.
I always start my costume from the skin up.
That means layering my signature scent, starting with the body wash.
I soap myself with a generous amount as I think through my lingerie choice, deciding on a mint silk ensemble and a sheath dress in the same color with a scoop neck and a slit up one side which, teamed with killer heels, caused a British Cabinet member to trip over his own feet in the Savoy at a recent lunch.
I comb conditioner through my white-blonde hair, the one part of my costume I never need to think about.
My hair falls to my waist, but nobody ever sees it that way.
I’ve been wearing it in the same French twist since I was a teenager, swept straight back from my face, its length disguised by the clean style.
I don’t do messy buns or short crops. I like the unsettling use of direct eye contact with no distractions.
Direct eye contact.
I shiver, the memory of Luke’s flat turquoise stare sending a bolt of heat through me that has nothing to do with the steady stream of water beating down on my skin.
I can still see him as he was on the water: raw, primal strength and a poetry of motion that I can’t get out of my damned head no matter how hard and fast I run. Just like those flat, brilliant eyes seem to follow me everywhere, from my dreams to the gym and now into the shower.
Thinking of him while I’m naked, blood still racing from my early-morning workout, is a big mistake.
I rinse my hair and turn the taps off, leaning against the marble wall in an effort to calm the insistent pulse of desire.
I have to get myself under control, pull my iron-hard mask down and keep it in place. I haven’t come this far just to be undone in a matter of days by a body that looks like it’s been carved from granite and a pair of eyes that make my insides dissolve.
I turn decisively and step out of the shower, reaching for a towel.
I’ve just wrapped it around my body when an arm locks around my waist in an iron grip and the unmistakable touch of a pistol muzzle presses into the base of my spine.
The eyes that have been haunting my every thought stare flatly at me in the mirror.
“Clearly,” comes Luke’s low, slightly rough voice in my ear, “there are holes in your security that we need to discuss.”
Fuck.
For a hard moment, I freeze completely.
Don’t lose your shit, Zin.
It’s a primal instinct honed throughout a life where danger has lurked in every shadow, whether it shows its face or not.
I know how to keep my cool.
Even naked, dripping, and held by an arm thick as a tree trunk, in an apartment that is supposed to be a fortress.
“Clearly.” I step lightly forward, holding Luke’s eyes in the mirror. His arm drops instantly, not attempting to prevent my movement.
His eyes are as laser clear as they were in the viewing room, and just as unreadable.
Standing so close to the mirror highlights the shocking difference in our respective sizes.
The top of my head barely reaches his armpit.
The massive width of his shoulders and chest loom behind me, as still and unmovable as a megalith.
“I see you managed to buy a decent suit.” I pull my eyes away from his with an effort, scanning his black-clad form with as much scathing disinterest as I can muster.
Another mistake.
He wears the fucking thing like he was born to it.
I need to regain the upper hand.
I raise my eyes to his in the mirror and very deliberately drop the towel.
His expression doesn’t alter by the merest twitch.
Is the bastard carved from ice?
“Holes in my security, huh?” Turning my back, I saunter into the bedroom, swaying my ass like I’m dancing burlesque. “We can discuss them now, if you like.” I walk directly to the closet and bend slowly over, giving him a perfect glimpse of what he wouldn’t look at the other night.
Which, given the current state of my body, probably isn’t overly wise.
How the hell am I turned on by having a gun held to my back?
I straighten up before he can see that my body is calling my own bluff.
“We’ll discuss security as soon as you’re done here.” His voice has a low, gravelly timbre of command that sets up a delicious vibration at the base of my spine. “You have a breakfast meeting scheduled for seven, which means we have an hour.”
I’d ask how he knows that, but I’m guessing that if he can break into my bathroom, his skills extend to hacking into my schedule.
“Before we begin,” he continues, “we need to get one thing straight.”
Put on a robe, Zinaida.
I might be able to keep the best poker face in the business, but my body has a mind of its own.
And right now, my body is reacting to Luke like a traitorous bitch.
There’s also no fucking way I’m giving him the advantage in whatever game we’re playing here.
Oh, sure, Zinaida. That’s why you’re still naked.
I turn to face him, horribly aware of the pulse jumping between my legs.
The bastard doesn’t even blink.
“Contract or not, I will walk away, effective immediately, unless you understand how this is going to work.” His eyes hold mine, the low, deliciously rough voice so measured it’s almost hypnotic.
“From this moment on, the only person with full access to your security and schedule will be me. No secrets, no private access I don’t know about, and no off-limits personnel files. ”
No secrets.
Heat, sudden and urgent, licks through me.
Full access.
My mouth goes dry.
Fuck.
“My staff—”
“Your staff need to know I have full access,” he says calmly. “Beyond that, it’s up to you what you tell them.” He doesn’t move. He doesn’t raise his voice, and his eyes don’t leave mine for even a second.
He might as well be reading a shopping list, for all this seems to be affecting him.
There’s no arrogance in his voice. No hint of bravado or any visible effort to exert his dominance.
And yet there’s no mistaking his authority.
Luke delivers his orders with the quiet certainty of someone who knows they will be obeyed, rather than with the aggression of someone who thinks they deserve to be.
I know the difference, the same way I know that if I don’t agree to his conditions, he will walk out of this room as easily as he walked into it. And that if he does, there won’t be any way to get him back.
I don’t want him to walk away.
I also don’t want to think about exactly why that is.
“Is that all?” I’m battling to hold on to the last vestiges of my infamous cool. Every low-voiced command, every second he holds my eyes with quiet authority, turns me to liquid heat between my legs.
Another minute of this and I’ll be on my fucking knees.
That mental image almost undoes me completely.
“No, that isn’t all.” Crossing the distance between us with a speed that is profoundly unsettling, Luke plucks a robe from its hanger and throws it at me.
I inhale sharply.
There are barely inches between us.
“Sex is off the table,” he says flatly. “I don’t sleep with clients. Ever. You either get that, or I get gone.”
The unflinching way his turquoise eyes hold mine makes it absolutely clear that he means every word.
I want to call him on it. To let the robe slide to the floor and press my hot, restless body up against that rock-hard fucking bulk that I can’t seem to stop seeing in my mind.
To make him crack.
The problem is that the same instinct that made me the most successful female crime boss in London is screaming that this time my old games won’t work.
It’s also reminding me of the conclusion I reached yesterday: that Luke Macarthur is the best man for the job.
So instead of dropping the robe, I pull it closed and cinch it at the waist.
“Noted,” I say lightly. I lift a shoulder and give him half a smile. “Although I guarantee you will be the one to go back on that promise.”
“I assure you, Zinaida: you could crawl to me on your knees, naked and begging, and I still wouldn’t break it.”
Oh, fuck.
His voice is slow and deliberate, and the picture his words paint is so close to my thoughts of a moment ago that it’s suddenly all I can see, all my body can think about.
I need to get him out of here.
“I’ll be in the meeting room when you’re done.” He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t look smug or self-satisfied.
Luke Macarthur just tilts his chin and is gone, as suddenly as the bastard arrived.
I slump against the wall, every nerve alight, my heart thudding and heat pounding between my legs.
Jesus.
I can’t do business like this. Not with slick thighs and a swollen clit, unable to think of anything but Luke’s low, sexy drawl talking about me naked and begging on my knees.
Tearing at my robe, I head for the bed and the vibrator in my drawer.