Chapter One

If it hadn’t been for the vultures circling above the Johnsons’ old tobacco field, Rose Holland would’ve never seen the dead body.

“Oh my God!”

Slamming on the brakes, she put the Jeep in park and grabbed her cell phone, jabbing at the buttons. Nothing happened and she looked down at the screen. “No signal,” she muttered and tossed it into the passenger seat. Of course not, she was thirty miles outside of Holland Springs, North Carolina. And that, according to her Garmin, was smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

Rose had two choices: wait; or drive to town and get help.

She should wait. It was the decent thing to do, and eventually someone would come along. State troopers loved to patrol this stretch of highway that the locals referred to as a speed trap.

Tapping her fingers against the dash, she muttered, “Any minute now.”

A vulture landed and poked at the arm.

Bile rose in her throat, then pity flooded her heart. He, judging by the large shape she thought it to be a man, might have a family at home. Missing him. Worrying and out of their minds for him.

Before she could question her sanity, she’d unbuckled her seat belt, thrown open the door and now stood at the edge of the road. Staring.

Steeling her nerves, she strode to the field. Her foot slipped on mud made by last night’s rainstorm and she hit the ground with a splat. Cold water and mud seeped through her shorts, jolting her. This was ridiculous. No one in their right mind would even think of checking out a dead body, but something inside of her insisted that he wasn’t dead.

She tracked another vulture as it landed. It too began pecking, but at a bare foot. Glancing to the right, she breathed through her nose, trying to calm her racing heart. Tire tracks and footprints intermingled along the ditch bank. Deep gashes in the soft earth held puddles of water. Was he a victim of a hit and run?

A third vulture landed.

Those ugly things had always disgusted her, even more so because of their ‘nature’s garbage disposal’ reputation. Pushing away from the ground and running at the birds, she waved her arms and shouted, “Go away! Shoo, you nasty things. Shoo!”

After a good ten minutes the vultures decided that either he wasn’t worth it or she’d made it impossible for them to properly digest. She dropped to her knees in the loamy soil a few feet away from the body, panting and waiting for the stench of rotting flesh to hit her.

It never came.

She turned and the wind whipped her corkscrew curls around, blinding her to the man sprawled over rows of dirt.

He groaned and her mouth dried out.

Rose shoved her hair out of her face. Feet. She could handle looking at his feet. Another groan and this time his pinky toe moved.

Oh God! Was that a death twitch?

Finally, she made her gaze travel to his chest. No other spot but there. The tattered remnants of a button-down shirt rose and fell with shallow breaths.

“You’re alive!” she shrieked, scrambling to her feet and running to him. She stopped just inches from the body. His golden hair was matted down and dirt smeared his face.

His face.

“It’s you.”

Alexander Romanov’s lids slitted open, revealing moss green eyes glinting with pain. “Sorry to disappoint,” he rasped, his British accent more pronounced than usual. He groaned again.

“Who did this to you?” She dropped to her knees, searching his beautiful face. But for a cut at the corner of his mouth, it was unmarred. His body, however, was an entirely different story. Almost every exposed inch had a shallow cut or bruise. It looked as though someone had used him as a punching bag. “We need to go the sheriff’s office and make a report.”

“No need.” He grimaced. “Got into a row with some mates and lost.”

She pursed her lips at him. “Maybe you should rethink your circle of friends.”

“I’ll take that under consideration.” A ghost of a smile appeared and then he coughed, a spasm of pain covering his face.

She sat back on her heels. “As nice as you were to me yesterday, I should leave your sorry tail out here to rot.”

“Sorry, love,” he said as his eyes closed and the skin around his mouth turned white, “Couldn’t help myself.”

“But now you can?”

“Can we discuss this later?” Once again his green eyes focused on her, and the need to help him, really anyone in pain, negated the desire to leave him wallowing in his own misery.

Rose scanned the field. To her left it lay empty, not even the Johnsons’ fluorescent green tractor was around. To her right there were woods but it wasn’t deer season, so she couldn’t flag down a hunter.

She sighed in resignation. “Either I can go get help, or—”

“No!” He struggled to rise, managing to get into a sitting position.

“Why not?”

Shaking his head, he waved her question away with his hand. “Help me up, Rosebud,” he ordered.

She raised her brows and crossed her arms. “Ask nicely, Alexander.”

“Call me Sasha,” he’d said with a wicked grin, “All my friends do.”

Well, Sasha sure had a funny way of treating his friends. Why couldn’t someone else have found him? She had enough going on in her life without this. Him.

“Please?” he asked.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Sasha grunted. It was harder than she thought. He hated asking anyone for anything. He hated being helpless.

As she leaned forward to help him, black curls tumbled onto his blood, dirt and God-only-knew-what-else-covered chest. He had the urge to shove her away, desperate that this filth not touch her. Not even the silky tips of her hair.

The scent of night blooming jasmine drifted to him, displacing the odor of violence. He breathed deeply, then scanned the road. He found her Jeep up the small incline. “Four-wheel drive?”

“No, but I think that between the two of us, we can get you to it. The closest hospital is fifty minutes away, but—”

“No, no hospital. It looks much worse than it is.” Turning to his good leg, he put most of his weight on it, then tried the other. A fresh wave of pain rose over him and he had to clench his teeth from crying out.

Rose’s arms came around him, her slight form a human crutch. Suddenly, she stood, ramming his dislocated shoulder back in place.

His vision blackened, stars sparked and he shouted, “Son of a bitch!” Breathing through his nose, he fought down the nausea.

She looked up, her eyes shadowed. Did she feel any pity for him? Anything at all? Did he want her pity? Oh, good God, this was quickly turning into a let’s-talk-about-our-feelings moment. Although it was all in his head. Yeah, because having conversations with oneself is entirely sane.

“Do you want me to take you to your cousin’s house?” she asked.

“He’s not home and I don’t have a key.” And as things stood, he wasn’t welcome there.

Her arms tightened around him. “Can you still make it to my Jeep?”

Nodding once, he began to hobble towards the small SUV. Of course, he could do this.

He’d done it before.

***

The ride into the backwoods town of Holland Springs wasn’t as bad as he thought. It was worse. Every pothole and bump served to remind him of how his new motto of “Just say no” got the living hell beat out of him.

However, there were just some things a man didn’t do. Like be a sperm donor for some eighty-year-old nutter with a twenty-year-old trophy wife because he needed an heir for his empire. No matter how painful the consequences.

Now that he’d been properly punished, he’d get some time off before his uncle tried to persuade Sasha to his way of thinking again. And next time, Sasha knew, Vladimir would pull out the big guns.

“I need to change, and you need a shower,” Rose said, wrinkling her nose as she parked the Jeep behind her store. “There’s a bathroom on the second floor you can use. The store used to be a house and there’s a studio apartment upstairs. We mainly use it for storage.”

“You can wash me up next time, dear.” He gave her a suggestive smile and tried to wiggle his brows, but it hurt too damn much to follow through. Moving his shoulder experimentally, he opened the door and braced for a sharp pain, but there was only a dull ache.

By the time he managed to get out of Rose’s Jeep, she had the back door propped open. Exhausted, he waited for her to come to him, her sweet body his personal rock of Gibraltar.

“Lean on me.”

Lean on her? He wanted to crawl all over her, caress every curve and take her to bed—the way he’d wanted to a month ago.

“It’s only a few steps,” she coaxed. “You can do it.”

Eventually, they made it up the stairs and to the bathroom. He leaned against the wall as she prepared the shower and brought in a chair from the other room.

“Thought you might need this.” She stood there, one hand on the chair and the other at the base of her throat.

He sank down on it gratefully, almost too weary to undress himself. But pride made him shoo her from the room, then he pulled his cell phone from his pocket, texted his uncle and got a reply a few seconds later. He had forty-five minutes to be ready. Sooner than Sasha thought it would be.

He placed the cell phone behind the faucet of the bathroom sink. How considerate of Vladimir to have Sasha’s old cell phone replaced with a new one. Grimacing, he made his fingers work the buttons of his shirt and pants. Getting his damn trousers off was the hardest part and he nearly asked Rose to help him.

“I need to go get you some clothes. I’ll be right back, okay?” she called out as he stepped into the tub, one agonizing limb at a time.

“Brilliant.” Hot water hit his face, making the cut on his lip sting. He stood under the shower head until it become a dull throb. Until his battered and bruised body began to relax. He must have fallen asleep standing up, because the next thing he knew, Rose was calling his name. His eyes popped open.

“Sasha?”

“I’m fine, Rose.”

He didn’t sound fine. Rose peeled off her muddy clothes and shoved them into a plastic grocery bag. She dropped the bag by the door to the stairs and shivered in the air-conditioning. Quickly dressing in the middle of the makeshift storage room, she pulled on a pair of faded jeans and a green t-shirt she’d found in the back of her jeep, not quite sure what do with the very naked man showering only a few feet away.

“Rosebud, I need you,” he yelled at the same time she heard a loud thunk.

Throwing open the bathroom door, she skidded to a halt when she saw his wavy outline through the shower curtain. She placed a hand on her chest. “Good grief, I thought you fell.”

He slid the curtain to one side, a mischievous grin on his gorgeous face. “I dropped the soap. Care to get it for me?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Pick it up yourself.”

“Didn’t you need to take a shower, too?”

“No.”

“You had mud all over your very nice bottom,” he pointed out, the compliment making her flush.

“I changed.”

“Shame, I was so looking forward to you joining me,” Sasha said as he bent over to pick up the bar of homemade soap. He stood, propping himself against the window above the claw-foot tub and gingerly moved the soap over his skin. Steaming hot water ran down his body, washing away the suds, blood and grime, revealing his lean, muscular form. The large cross tattoo on his bicep contracted and expanded with his movements. Gold nipple rings flashed in the morning sun.

Heat flared in the pit of her stomach. She’d kissed those rings. Put her lips around them and tickled his nipples with her tongue. She whirled around to face the sink. And the conveniently placed mirror above it.

“Generally, I shower alone.” Generally…Really, couldn’t she have just said I always shower alone or—better still—kept quiet?

He raised his brows, a slight smile at his lips. “And the other times?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Smart woman to play it close to the vest. I’ve always loved an intelligent female.”

“You love women—period.”

He turned, giving her a full view of his tight butt and she ogled him in the mirror. Most of what she’d thought to be bruises on his body turned out to be dried mud, but all the shallow cuts needed to be treated.

“Like the view?”

Yes! She wanted to lick him up one side and down the other. “I’m only making sure you don’t pass out. Do you know how hard it is to get blood stains out of woven rugs?”

“Your concern is heartwarming,” he drawled.

“Just hurry up. I’ve got other things to do.” She crossed her arms. Apparently, it was her go-to gesture of the day.

“It was your idea, remember?” Their eyes met in the mirror and he chuckled when she looked away, the sound making her heart flip. “I think you like watching me.”

“I think you like being watched,” she grumbled.

“By you? Absolutely.”

She rolled her eyes. A small pot of ointment containing calendula flowers and almond oil sat on the edge of the sink. It was one of Carolina Dreams’ biggest sellers for the men and women who worked two towns over at the paper mill. They swore by its healing properties.

He turned off the shower and stepped out, wrapping a towel around his lean hips. “You can dry me off if you’d like,” he said, peering through his lashes at her and making her fingers itch to do just that.

Did he ever quit being so…him? “I’d like for you to hurry up.”