he should continue to move his mouth on hers in the slow, delicious tasting that caused a curious throbbing ache in the pit of her stomach.
She had no idea how long the kiss lasted. It could have been minutes, hours. While she was in his arms she lost all sense of time, and when at last he lifted his head and withdrew his hand from her waist she swayed slightly, the dazed expression in her eyes gradually changing to one of appalled self-disgust.
‘How dare you?’ she whispered through numbed lips, the realisation that she had capitulated utterly to his mastery sending shame cascading through her, so that her face flooded with hot colour.
He gave her an amused smile. ‘How can you ask that after responding to me with such passion?’ He ran his finger lightly over her flushed cheek, and then traced the swollen contours of her lips, his eyes darkening when he caught the faint catch of her breath. ‘The word among some of your male friends is that you are frigid. But what do they know?’ he murmured, his gravelly accent sounding deeper and more sensual than ever. ‘They’re just young bucks who are piqued that you have not chosen one of them to be your boyfriend. But you should not have boys, Ella. You need a man who appreciates your sensual nature.’
‘Are you suggesting I need you?’ she choked, seizing anger as a weapon to fight the insidious warmth that his sexy voice and provocative statement evoked inside her. The sultry gleam in his eyes was too much to bear. ‘Your ego is…monumental. And I don’t care what anyone thinks of me,’ she added tightly.
She was aware of the speculation among the brothers of some of her friends that her refusal to date them must mean she was either frigid or gay. The true explanation was that she simply wasn’t interested, but Vadim’s suggestion that she had been holding out for a highly sexed, overconfident man like him—a man like her father—was laughable. She had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with him, and it was his problem if his ego couldn’t accept her refusal to have dinner with him.
She had given out a mixed message tonight, though, she conceded grimly, shuddering at the memory of how she had responded to him with shameful enthusiasm. She should have pulled away from him the moment he had touched her, but instead she had melted in his arms. Mortification swept through her, together with a growing sense of panic as Vadim traced his finger down her throat and continued lower, coming to rest on the faint swell of her breasts, visible above the neckline of her dress. Her breath hitched in her throat, and she was terrified that he must be able to see her heart jerking unevenly beneath her ribs. Every instinct screamed at her to slap his hand away, but to her shame a little part of her longed for him to move his fingers the few necessary inches to curve around her breast.
Her eyes flew to his face, and the feral gleam she saw beneath his heavy lids warned her he had read her mind. ‘The game of cat and mouse has been amusing,’ he said in his sinfully sexy accent, ‘but now I grow bored with it. Perhaps you are shocked by the intensity of the sexual chemistry between us, Ella, but you cannot deny it exists. When we kissed, you felt it here.’ He placed his hand directly over her heart, his fingers brushing against her breast. ‘Just as I did. Passion pounds in your veins as it does in mine, and the only logical conclusion is for us to become lovers.’
She could not possibly be tempted, Ella told herself frantically. She was incensed by Vadim’s arrogant assumption that she was his for the taking, that he could simply pluck her like a ripe peach, and yet she could not block out the little voice in her head which was urging her to agree, to succumb to the passion that, as he had rightly guessed, was pounding in her veins, making her feel hot and flustered.
Common sense fought the wild recklessness that had gripped her and won. She would not be Vadim Aleksandrov’s plaything. She recalled a newspaper article about his recent split from glamour model Kelly Adams, in which Kelly had accused him of cruelly dumping her by text message. The accompanying photo had shown the stunning redhead sobbing heartbrokenly outside the hotel where Vadim had taken up residence since his arrival in the capital. ‘Vadim Aleksandrov has a lump of granite instead of a heart,’ Kelly had told the tabloids, and the image of the model’s tear-streaked face had reminded Ella of her mother’s anguished expression when Lionel Stafford had rejected her for one of his many mistresses.
‘When you say lovers, what exactly do you have in mind?’ she queried coolly. ‘I know from press reports that you travel widely for your company, and I am frequently on tour with the RLO, so I’m not sure how we could maintain a meaningful relationship.’
He frowned, clearly taken aback by her words. ‘To be honest, I had not thought that far ahead,’ he drawled. ‘I am suggesting that we explore the sexual attraction that exists between us, but talk of a relationship is a little premature, don’t you think?’
Vadim Aleksandrov and the late Earl Stafford had a lot in common, Ella brooded, not least their cavalier attitude towards women. ‘I might have known that a man like you would only be interested in physical satisfaction,’ she said bitterly, forcing herself to sound coldly dismissive to disguise her intense awareness of him.
Vadim’s eyes narrowed at her haughty tone. ‘A man like me?’ he queried softly. The expression on Ella’s face was dismissive, scornful, and anger flared inside him. Did she think he was beneath her because he had started out in life with nothing, while she had been born into the wealthy, privileged lifestyle of the British upper class?
He was used to women who played games, and he had cynically assumed that Ella had been cool with him because it amused her. Now he wondered if her refusal to date him was because she deemed him a lowly immigrant from the Eastern bloc who had made a fast buck, not worthy of her. He assured himself he did not give a damn about her opinion of him, but to his annoyance his pride stung. ‘What kind of a man do you think I am?’ he demanded harshly.
As Ella stared at his hard-boned face her mind flew back across the years and she was back at Stafford Hall, huddled at the top of the stairs, peering through the banisters to the hall below, where her mother was sobbing as she pleaded with a cold, arrogantly handsome man.
‘You’re going to her again, aren’t you? Did you think I was unaware of your latest mistress when the whole of London knows you spend your nights with your tart instead of with me? For pity’s sake, Lionel…’
Judith Stafford lifted her hands beseechingly towards her husband, but there was no pity in the Earl’s eyes, just cold indifference which turned to anger when his wife clutched the lapels of his jacket.
‘Why on earth would I want to spend any more time than I have to with you? You’re a neurotic, pathetic mess.’ Lip curling with distaste, Lionel Stafford pushed the weeping woman away from him with such force that she stumbled and fell to her knees. ‘Pull yourself together, Judith, and be thankful I go elsewhere for my pleasures when you consistently deny me my rights in the marriage bed.’
‘I’m not well, Lionel. You know my heart condition means I have to be careful…’
‘Well, I’m bored with your illness.’The Earl flung open the door and gave one last withering glance at his wife, still kneeling on the cold marble floor. ‘Don’t wait up,’ he said mockingly. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back.’
Ella remembered the anger that had surged through her as her father had slammed the door behind him, and the pity and the feeling of utter helplessness as she’d watched her mother slowly drag herself to her feet and make her way wearily to the stairs. At twelve years old she had been unable to voice her hatred of her father, and less than a year later, after her mother had died of heart failure, she had been packed off to boarding school and left in the charge of a nanny during the holidays, while the Earl disappeared abroad. Her
