door, he walked around to the back of the house, where the French windows were thrown wide open and the lilting notes drifted on the air.
She was totally absorbed, and did not look up as he lowered himself onto one of the patio chairs, leaned back and closed his eyes, shutting out everything but the music. He had never played an instrument in his life; luxuries such as music lessons had not been affordable during his childhood, growing up in what had at that time been the USSR. His father’s job as a factory worker had barely brought in enough money to pay the rent on the tiny apartment they had shared with Vadim’s grandmother, and life had been dominated by the struggle to buy enough to eat during the frequent food shortages. He knew little about the great composers, or of musical techniques, but for some reason music had the power to soothe his restless soul, to reach deep inside him and force a chink in the granite wall around his heart.
As the last lingering notes of the melody faded Ella flexed her fingers, suddenly aware that the room was no longer flooded with afternoon sunlight, but shadowed with the onset of dusk.
‘You play like an angel.’
The familiar, toe-curlingly sexy accent caused her to jerk her head towards the French windows, and her heart thudded beneath her ribs as she jumped to her feet and stared at Vadim.
‘How long have you been there?’ Shock at his appearance sharpened her voice. Playing the piano was an intensely personal experience, a special link with her mother, and she had poured her soul into the music. She had been unaware that she had an audience, and she felt as though she had unwittingly exposed her private emotions to Vadim.
He shrugged and stepped into the room. ‘Twenty minutes or so.’ His brilliant blue gaze skimmed over her tee shirt and faded jeans, and moved up to her hair, falling in a curtain of pale gold silk around her shoulders. This was the Ella Stafford the world did not see. Over the past few years she had been expertly marketed as a violin virtuoso; much had been made of her aristocratic pedigree, and she was portrayed on the covers of her numerous CD albums as a sophisticated artiste. The woman staring at him across the grand piano looked younger than her public image, and her intense awareness of him that flared, undisguised, in her stormy grey eyes made her seem painfully vulnerable.
A kinder man would not take his pursuit of her any further, Vadim knew. Beneath her ice-cool image he sensed an emotional fragility that warned him not to get involved. He liked his affairs to be uncomplicated, and he ensured that the women he bedded always knew the score: mutually satisfying sex with no strings attached. Ella seemed curiously innocent, although in reality that was unlikely for a modern and successful woman in her mid-twenties, he reminded himself. Seeing her like this, in jeans that moulded her slender hips like a second skin, her face bare of make-up and her hair falling loose to halfway down her back, only intensified his desire for her.
The sexual chemistry between them was white-hot, and kindness was not an attribute he possessed—he had learned that of himself many years ago, Vadim acknowledged grimly. He was hard; undoubtedly he was selfish, and he took what he wanted without compunction or compassion. He would take Ella because he found her pale, elfin beauty irresistible, but he would accept no responsibility for her emotions once he had slaked his hunger to possess her body.
‘I had no idea you could play the piano with the same skill with which you play the violin.’
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