Vaughn (Russian Dragon Heat 2) Read online

  Vaughn

  Russian Dragon Heat 2

  Carole Mortimer

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Newsletter and Social Media Links

  About the Author

  Other books by Carole Mortimer

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2021 Carole Mortimer

  Cover Design Copyright © Glass Slipper WebDesign

  Editor: Linda Ingmanson

  Formatter: Glass Slipper WebDesign

  ISBN: 978-1-910597-93-4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Dedication

  Jo, with many thanks.

  Author’s Note

  Terms of address in Russian change depending on the relationship to that person. For ease of reading I have kept to a simple male/female term of address e.g. Petrov/Pretrova

  Chapter One

  Vaughn pulled uncomfortably at the stiff white collar of his evening shirt, which then necessitated him having to straighten his black bow tie. He also checked that his below-shoulder-length blond hair was still secured at his nape with a leather tie.

  He rarely, if ever, wore formal clothing, unlike his eldest brother, Vladimir, who was rarely seen in anything other than a bespoke suit, silk shirt, and tie.

  Vaughn drew in a deep breath, flexed his wide shoulders inside his own black evening jacket, and straightened his spine before stepping inside the theater and the preperformance madness of too many people confined in too small a space.

  Which was one of the reasons he’d stopped attending events like this years ago; everyone talked too loudly and drank too much champagne before taking their seats for the performance, only to come back and do the same during the first interval and then the second. Vaughn didn’t drink alcohol, mainly because it had no effect on him, happy or sad. His new introspective nature also meant he preferred not to talk to anyone, least of all complete strangers.

  Vaughn wished he had never agreed to come to London in the first place, let alone attend one of the performances of Swan Lake by the The Turov Ballet Company from St. Petersburg. The troupe of dancers had performed all over Europe during the last three months, and these last two weeks in London would be their last venue before they returned to Russia.

  In truth, Vaughn wasn’t even sure he had agreed to come here, or if Vladimir had made it more of an instruction than a choice. Right now, Vladimir was impatient and dismissive of anything that kept him away from being with the woman he had only just found and whom he loved with every fiber of his being.

  Not that Vaughn could fault his brother for that. It was what all the brothers wanted, that exclusive connection to the woman who was perfect for them.

  Either way, Vaughn had left St. Petersburg two days ago to fly to London. Even so, he had agreed to nothing yet. His only reason for being here tonight was so that he could assess the situation, and the people involved, before making his presence known to Leonid Antipov, the ballet company’s director. Then would be the time to inform the other man as to whether or not he would agree to act as bodyguard to Anastasia Chenkova.

  To that end, Vaughn had booked one of the eight boxes at the side of the auditorium so that he was closer to the stage and could clearly see and assess the woman he was here to protect before meeting her.

  He’d actually reserved all the theater boxes. If they were already taken, then Vaughn had paid an exorbitant amount to see that they became unbooked.

  He was here to study Anastasia, and the less distraction he had from doing that, including having people sitting in the boxes either side of him, the better.

  He knew the bare basics about the prima ballerina from her public profile online. She was only twenty years old and already the principal dancer in The Turov Ballet Company. An orphan, she had been dancing from five years of age, after her delicacy of appearance and tendency to dance everywhere had been noticed. After that, she had been taken into one of the state ballet schools, both for her education and to train as a ballerina.

  Vaughn knew such establishments still existed, but Anastasia was the first person he had ever known to attend one of them. Doing so would have precluded her ever being adopted, but as the chances of that were never very high in his country, Vaughn believed she would have been happier in the ballet school than remaining in one of the orphanages.

  He and his brothers had tried to improve conditions in the state orphanages, and they were finally starting to make headway in that endeavor, but it was obviously far too late to be of any help to twenty-year-old Anastasia.

  Vaughn had seen several photographs of her performing. She was blonde-haired, with blue eyes, and adulthood had given her that graceful but too-thin and fragile appearance of all ballet dancers.

  A deceiving appearance, if her grueling daily schedule was an indication. Anastasia habitually practiced seven or eight hours a day when she wasn’t performing and five hours when she was, with the nightly performance lasting for another three hours every evening except Sundays.

  Apparently, the dancers were given that one evening off a week.

  Vladimir had explained what he knew of the circumstances of the stalker. The man was apparently leaving gifts of a flower for Anastasia, a single white lily, after every performance, either in the theater or her hotel suite. Very recently, the flowers had started being accompanied by a card, all warning that tomorrow would be Anastasia’s last performance. Except it never was, and like all toothless threats, it had quickly become nothing more than an irritation.

  Until their last night in Paris.

  The company director had become alarmed by what was written on the card after their last performance in the French capital the previous week. Vaughn agreed, “Die, bitch” was certainly a step up from those previous warnings.

  That all those flowers mysteriously appeared in Anastasia’s locked dressing room or hotel suite was also of concern.

  The ballet company had its own security, of course, brought with them from Russia, but those men were there to ensure the safety of every member of the ballet company rather than any individual. So far, no one in that security detail had managed to catch the stalker in the act, and no one had reported seeing a stranger before or after any of the flowers were delivered, at the theater or hotel.

  Vaughn would check the situation, and the dancer, before he made his presence known to Antipov. No one else had even seen the stalker, and they had no one’s word but Anastasia Chenkova’s that the man even existed. Oh, the flowers were real enough, but anyone could have sent those. Even Anastasia herself. In other words, she could just be an attention whore who had invented the stalker and sent those flowers to herself.

  Vaughn would know more once he had seen the dancer in the flesh. Which, considering it was only ten minutes until the curtain rose and the performance began, meant he only had that same amount of time to reach his box.

  Vaughn didn’t give so much as a glance to either left or right as he strode through the foyer of the theater toward the hallway leading to the private boxes.

  As a result, he was completely unaware of the way the conversation stopped and peop
le instinctively rushed to move out of the way of the six and a half foot tall man, aged in his mid-thirties, with the wide shoulders and piercing green eyes set in the sharp features of a predator.

  Because that’s exactly what Vaughn was.

  A two-hundred-year-old Russian dragon shifter, and the youngest of the seven Romanov brothers.

  He’d literally flown himself from Russia to London and arrived earlier today, in his dragon form. He’d relished the freedom of flying so far, and with purpose, after spending the past three months alone in the snow-covered Russian countryside at the family dacha. Even if his aloneness had been by choice.

  Just days before he went to the dacha, Vaughn had been attacked and almost died, virtually an impossibility for a dragon shifter. Unless that attacker knew to slice off his head, the only way the Russian dragon shifter brothers could be killed. Life could become a living death if their fated mate refused them, but they wouldn’t die. But as Vladimir was the only Romanov brother to have recently found his mate during the last thousand years, Vaughn wasn’t too worried about that.

  Vaughn pulled at his shirt collar as if to ease the pressure on a scar that wasn’t there. Dragon shifters didn’t scar. He was still furious with himself for allowing the attack on him to take place on the streets of St. Petersburgh, the city of his birth.

  Doubly furious because his attacker had been a woman, and someone whom he’d had no reason to distrust and intended having sex with later that night.

  Vaughn had been attacked by the woman and her brother, his head almost severed from his body. Because of the nature and severity of the attack, his recovery had been slower than normal, even with the help of his brother Viktor, the healer of the family.

  Now, apart from his six brothers, Vaugh trusted no one, least of all the word of what was probably a narcissistic prima ballerina seeking attention by claiming she had a stalker.

  “Did you see the man sitting alone in the private box?” Irina prompted excitedly as she sat at the vanity beside Anastasia, the two of them removing their makeup at the end of the performance.

  Had Anastasia seen him?

  She had felt as if she was being devoured by the man within minutes of dancing onto the stage!

  Leonid would be furious if he knew her attention had wandered from her performance for even a second. But the intensity of the other man’s presence as he sat alone in that private box, surrounded by the empty ones, despite Anastasia knowing that every performance had been sold out for months, had penetrated even the usual depth of her concentration as she put her heart and soul into her dancing.

  The man wasn’t sitting at the front of the box, but back in the shadows. His shoulders and chest appeared massive, and his height in the chair indicated he was well over six feet tall. Impossible to see his features, but she was sure the intensity of his pale gaze—blue or green, or possibly gray?—had been leveled solely on her for the whole evening as she moved fluidly about the stage in her principal role of Odette in Swan Lake. He didn’t look as if he’d so much as moved from his seat, during either of the intervals, when the dancers returned to the stage.

  “I caught a glimpse of him before the lights dimmed for the final act,” Irina continued to gush as she stood to change into her street clothes, her dark hair loose about her shoulders.

  “One of these nights, Leonid is going to catch you standing in the wings eyeing up the male members of the audience,” she warned.

  “When else do we have the opportunity to look at the handsome European men?” Irina gave a disgruntled wrinkling of her nose. “Leonid doesn’t give us any free time to meet anyone outside the ballet.”

  Anastasia’s smile was rueful. “I think that’s the point.” Russia might not have any restrictions on travel nowadays but dancers and musicians, tennis, and chess players, were still watched carefully so that they didn’t decide to take their talent to another country. “Besides, you have Lev,” she said, referring to the male dancer Irina was currently involved with.

  She and Irina not only shared a dressing room but a hotel suite, and Anastasia knew for a fact that the second twin bed was rarely slept in.

  “The man sitting in the box looks like the actor who played that superhero,” Irina continued unperturbed. “The one with the long blond hair and carrying his mighty hammer.”

  Anastasia’s brows rose. “Thor?”

  “That’s the one!” Irina confirmed. “This man is as big, if not bigger, than that actor, with long blond hair tied back at his nape. His eyes are the palest green I’ve ever seen. He also has that fashionable two-day-old scruff on his jaw.”

  “And let’s not forget his mighty hammer!”

  “Oh, I’d never forget that,” the other woman came back cheekily.

  “How can you be sure, as he was seated the whole time, that his hammer is mighty?”

  “It would have to be if it’s in proportion to the rest of him.” Her nose wrinkled. “Fate really couldn’t be so cruel as to give a tiny penis to a man so tall and muscular.”

  The man’s height and build sounded terrifying to a two-inches-over-five-feet-tall Anastasia, and with a body weight of only one hundred pounds. It was probably lower than that right now because she usually lost a couple of pounds during a performance. She’d order some supper once she was back at the hotel. In the meantime, she’d already drunk one bottle of water and would drink another one on the drive back to the hotel.

  She was nevertheless grateful that she had a naturally slender body. Irina wasn’t so lucky and had to continuously fight to keep her weight down to the level Leonid demanded of all his dancers.

  “I thought Sergei was a little off tonight,” Irina said slyly.

  She was referring to the company’s principal male dancer who had played the role of Prince Siegfried during the whole of the tour. Sergei hadn’t missed a single performance. In fact, it had been Lev, his understudy, who had missed two performances when they were in Paris. Some sort of family crisis, Irina had told her, without showing any real interest.

  Sergei had been a little off in his performance tonight. He could also be very moody and would often do his best to throw Anastasia off in her performance. Ballet was a cutthroat business. As the two principal dancers, the only way for Sergei and Anastasia to go was down, when they would be replaced by younger or more capable dancers. In this case, Irina and Lev.

  Ordinarily, the principal dancers would each have a dressing room of their own, but Leonid believed such preferential treatment bred elitism, and he wasn’t about to allow any of that in his ballet company. Consequently, Anastasia shared a dressing room and hotel suite with her understudy, Irina, and Sergei did the same with Lev.

  “If he was, then I’m sure Leonid will have also noticed,” she answered noncommittally.

  Irina shook her head. “You’re always so nice to everyone.”

  “If I am, then it’s to balance out your bitchiness,” she came back teasingly.

  Irina, now fully dressed, gave her an unrepentant grin. “I’m going out there to see if the sexy blond god is anywhere around.”

  “Doubtful,” Anastasia dismissed as, her face now free of the heavy makeup necessary for being onstage, she took the pins from her hair before shaking it to fall loosely onto her shoulders and down her back. “Leonid doesn’t allow sexy blond gods, like that man sitting in the private box, to come anywhere near us, let alone one ‘wielding a mighty hammer,’” she added suggestively. “Irina?” she prompted when the other woman didn’t answer her.

  The reason for that became obvious the moment Anastasia turned in her seat and saw the “sexy blond god” was now standing in the open doorway of their dressing room.

  Not wielding his hammer, thank God, mighty or otherwise.

  Vaughn’s mouth twitched with a humor he hadn’t felt for the past three months at hearing himself described as a “sexy blond god wielding a mighty hammer.”

  At least he presumed, as he’d been the only man sitting in any of the private
boxes of the theater tonight, the remark had been made about him.

  He’d spent the past three hours watching Anastasia dance. Her grace. Her beauty. The perfection of her dancing. The different emotions she put into the taxing role of Odette. Her performance had been both flawless and mesmerizing.

  Her eyes, Vaughn had realized, weren’t merely a clear blue. Instead, the iris had a ring of purple at its edges, giving her eyes an otherworldly appearance that was magnetic.

  At no time during those totally enthralled hours would he ever have imagined such a young and graceful woman making risqué remarks about a man’s “mighty hammer.”

  The blush rapidly coloring her cheeks seemed to imply it wasn’t something she would normally do either.

  Vaughn glanced at the other woman in the dressing room. The challenging way the dark-haired woman returned his gaze told him that she would have absolutely no problem discussing a man’s physical attributes. Mighty or otherwise!

  Vaughn had sought out the company director after the performance had finished, easily identifying Leonid Antipov as he stood backstage issuing a string of orders to dancers and stagehands alike.

  The first thing Vaughn intended doing, if he decided to take this assignment, was tighten the security into and out of the backstage area of the theater. It had been too damned easy for him to tell the security guy guarding the door that he had an appointment with Leonid Antipov and to then be allowed in without the man double-checking that information or asking for any ID.