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Like she wanted to pretend it wasn’t him.
20
Valeriya
“You can wait,” Valeriya Orlov told her driver as she reached for the handle in the backseat.
“You father doesn’t like—”
“I don’t need a shadow while I buy underwear.” She used her most imperious tone, the one she used when someone had forgotten their place or when they were simply stupid. “I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
He met her gaze in the rearview mirror but didn’t make a move for the door.
She stepped onto the sidewalk in front of Saks Fifth Avenue’s venerable stone building, ten stories of luxury goods ripe for the picking, and clutched her Gucci bag as she headed for the department store’s glass doors.
She pulled her coat more tightly around herself and silently cursed the cold. She hated New York City after Christmas. Without the festive cheer of holiday window dressings, it was gray and drab and she longed fervently to be in the Mediterranean wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and sunning herself on the deck of the superyacht her father quaintly called “the boat.”
Soon.
She passed several shoppers leaving the store with Saks’s signature black shopping bags and stepped inside, wrinkling her nose at the dizzying mixture of scents drifting from the perfume counter.
She hadn’t been to a perfume counter since she was a girl when her father had helped her choose her first perfume, Oud Ispahan by Dior, which had become her signature scent. It was nearly a thousand dollars a bottle and Valeriya had never given it a thought — then or now.
Her father had more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes and he was still willing to pimp out his only daughter for more power.
He could buy her nice perfume.
She rode the escalator past several floors of apparel merchandised atop white linoleum and exited on the ninth floor, then started toward the lingerie section. She stopped to browse along the way, just to make sure the driver hadn’t followed her into the store against her wishes.
Technically he was her driver, but Valeriya was under no illusion: everything and everyone in her world was owned by her father.
Even her.
But not for long.
It hadn’t been an easy decision to accept Roman Kalashnik’s offer of a partnership. She wasn’t a monster. She loved her father in the limited way that love could pass between them.
But she was a realist. He didn’t truly love her. She knew this to be true because one didn’t use someone they loved.
Or so she’d heard.
She’d never been in love and she was almost certain no one had ever loved her.
It was the one thing the Orlov money couldn’t buy, and her attainment of it had taken on an almost mythical quality.
Was it real? Could she find it? Did she deserve it?
They were questions to which she didn’t have answers, and she certainly wasn’t going to find those answers married to Erik Kalashnik, the manic junkie son of Igor.
The prospect of marrying Roman had been different. She hadn’t deluded herself into thinking he loved her now — they hardly knew each other — or even that he might come to love her.
She’d heard love was a fickle thing, dependent on things like shared interests and goals and the ever-elusive chemistry.
But he was a man with ambition, and ambition, she admired.
It hadn’t hurt that he was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met in spite of — or perhaps because of — his crooked nose, cold eyes, and a demeanor that whispered of violence.
An erotic thrill passed through her, followed by a whiff of disappointment.
