and it was astonishing how much he enjoyed seeing that rare vulnerability in this particular woman. She had no sophisticated front to hide behind. He believed he could read her like a book and he relished the idea. She wouldn’t be that experienced, he guessed, wondering why that thought didn’t put him off because he was accustomed to women who were more likely to introduce him to new techniques in the bedroom, women as practised as whores but a good deal less honest in the impression they liked to make.
Kat turned her head, glossy russet curls flowing back over a slim shoulder, and refused to look directly at him, focusing on his flat midriff instead. ‘Yes, but it won’t be fancy food, it will be plain.’
‘We’re so hungry it won’t matter.’
She shook out the duvet, hurried into the bathroom to check it, gathering up her sister’s toiletries to tip them into a bag and snatch up the used towels. ‘I’ll come back up and clean it,’ she said, crossing the bedroom.
But Mikhail wanted to keep her with him. He spread out an Ordnance Survey map on the top of the dressing table. The dusty dressing table, Kat noticed in consternation, shocked by how much she had neglected her once thorough cleaning routine since guest numbers dwindled and daily financial stress took its place.
‘Could you show me where this house is?’ he asked although he knew perfectly well. ‘I want to work out how far we are from our four-wheel-drive …’
‘Give me a minute,’ Kat urged, leaving the room to dump the remains of her sister’s belongings and extract clean towels from the laundry press. Drawing in a deep steadying breath, she settled the fresh towels on the bed and returned to his side. He was uncomfortably close: she could feel the heat emanating from his lean, powerful body, hear the even rasp of his breathing and smell a hint of cologne overlying an outdoorsy male scent. It was a wickedly intimate experience for a woman who had long since closed the door on such physical awareness around men and it made her every treacherous sense sing. Her body quickened as though he had touched her, a chain reaction running from the sudden heaviness of her breasts to the clenching sensation low in her belly.
With fierce force of will she stabbed a finger down on the map, for she had often studied maps with walking guests to offer them advice on the best routes and view points. ‘We’re right here …’
His hand covered hers where it rested on the map, warm, strong, ensnaring, a thumb lightly enclosing and massaging her wrist as though to soothe the wild pulse beating there. ‘You’re trembling,’ Mikhail murmured in a roughened undertone, using his other hand to turn her round to face him, long fingers firm on her slight shoulder.
‘Must be c-cold …’ Kat said jerkily, terrified that she was guilty of encouraging a complete stranger to touch her and shocked that she was allowing it to happen. He could hardly have failed to notice her staring, but she was convinced that a male with his stunning looks had to be used to that kind of attention. In a minute he would surely be laughing at her shaking and stuttering like an old maid afraid of her own shadow in his presence.
And it was that last thought, that terror that he had to be seeing her as a figure of fun, that made her compose herself and lift her head high in a determined display of control. It was a mistake for he was gazing down at her, black eyes blazing like fireworks flaring against the night sky, utterly riveting, utterly inescapable. Her throat tightened, her breath entrapped there and a shot of pure driving heat raced through her tall slender body like a living flame. Cold was the very last thing she was feeling, but then she had never before felt anything quite that painfully intense. It was as if time stopped and in the interim he lifted his hand from her shoulder to trace the plump pink line of her lower lip with the tip of a long forefinger and her entire skin surface tightened over her bones in response.
‘I want to kiss you, milaya moya,’ he breathed thickly.
And his words freed her as nothing else could have done, so lost was she in what she was experiencing while she also tried to withstand the hurricane force of his strong personality. She reeled back in sudden shock from him, seriously alarmed by her loss of control and common sense, no matter how brief that moment had been. ‘No … absolutely not,’ she framed jaggedly, her heart still accelerating like a racing car while his face hardened and his black-diamond eyes turned to crystalline black ice instead. ‘For goodness’ sake, I don’t even know you—’
‘I don’t usually ask for permission to kiss a woman,’ Mikhail retorted with chilling cool. ‘But you should be more careful—’
Suddenly the tables were being turned with a vengeance on Kat and she was hopelessly unprepared for the tactic. ‘I beg your pardon? I should be more careful?’ she gasped blankly.
‘It’s obvious that you’re attracted to me,’ Mikhail countered with a rock-solid assurance that glued Kat’s tongue to the roof of her mouth in sheer horror. ‘I saw that and reacted to it … You’re a very beautiful woman.’
The humiliation he inflicted with that first sentence was enough to burn Kat up from inside out with shame. So, it was her fault he had made a pass at her? That was certainly putting a new spin on an unwelcome approach from a man. He was quick of tongue and even faster to take advantage, she registered with seething resentment. As for that old flannel he had tossed in about her being a ‘very beautiful’ woman … Who did he think he was kidding? Did she look as if she had been born yesterday? Was that piece of outrageous flattery supposed to mollify her and remove her embarrassment? Furious as she was, Kat clenched her teeth together tight because in some remote corner of her brain she was very much afraid that in some mysterious way she had encouraged his advances and that he might have a right to reproach her for the mistaken impression she had evidently given him.
Kat hurriedly shut down her troubled thoughts in the brooding silence; her most pressing desire was to escape the scene of her apparent crime. ‘I need to cook,’ she said succinctly like an automaton and, spinning round, she walked straight out of the room.
I need to cook? Mikhail was as astounded by that unfathomable declaration as he had been moments earlier when she had backed away from him as though a desire to kiss her were the equivalent of an assault. He knew women—he knew women well enough not to make a move on an uninterested one, he reflected angrily. What the hell was she playing at? Was this stop-start nonsense her idea of flirtation? Was he supposed to want her more because she held him at arm’s length? He swore long and low in Russian, still taken aback by what had happened: the absurd and unthinkable, the impossible. For the first time in Mikhail’s adult life a woman had rejected him.
Kat dug meat out of the freezer and set about defrosting it. A basic beef stew was the best she could offer her guests. She still hadn’t cleaned his bathroom but no way was she going back up there to face him again! It was not that she was scared—she was simply dying a thousand deaths of embarrassment with that accusation still ringing in her ears. It’s obvious that you’re attracted to me. The wretched man had turned her knowledge of herself upside down and inside out within the space of an hour. For the first time in more years than she cared to count she had been attracted to a man. He was right on that score; she certainly couldn’t deny it to herself. But the last time she had reacted to a man that way she was working as a conservation trainee in a London museum, light years back in her past when she had still been young and full of dreams, hopes and ambitions. And even then, even when she had got all silly and tingly about Steve, her one-time boyfriend, it had not hit her anything like as hard as the explosive effect of Mikhail Kusnirovich had! No, back in those days in a similar situation she had still found it possible to act normally and not like a brainless idiot!
But my goodness, how had he known how she felt? How had she shown herself up? Her ignorance of what might have betrayed
