by Lynne Graham
The exact moment when he pushed her skirt higher was known to her, not because panic or denial assailed her, but because her impatience was greater than his and she was already desperate for him to touch her with greater intimacy. An exploring masculine fingertip skated over the fabric of her boxer-cut knickers and discovered the moist heat at the heart of her. Her breath caught in her throat and she gasped as he skated that caress up over her prominent mound where every nerve-ending leapt in an agony of sweet sensation. He kept his attention there and her legs shook with the stress of having to stay upright. She clung to his broad shoulders and pushed against him. With a groan he hauled her bodily up into his arms.
‘Where’s your bed?’ he growled against her satin-smooth cheek and paused for an instant to investigate the delicate expanse below her small ear, the intrinsic scent of her skin acting like an aphrodisiac on him.
Abbey was weightless with desire and longing. She couldn’t find her voice: she indicated the door at the other end of the hall and he took her there to what had once been Jeffrey’s bed, which she had never shared with her late husband or any other man. And she remembered that and inwardly cringed and hated herself; yet she could no more have pushed Nikolai away and denied herself than she could have wilfully stopped breathing. Nikolai shed his shoes, his socks and his jacket and came down on the bed with her. Abbey yanked him free of his tie and began to unbutton his shirt. In some corner of her mind she could not credit that it was she who was doing such things. But as she tugged his shirt free of the waistband of his trousers and the edges parted to display a hair-roughened bronzed slice of powerful chest her pleasure in the sight wiped out her self-doubt. His brilliant eyes were bright in his lean dark face and she was utterly entrapped by the impact of them, her heart banging as if she were running a marathon race.
Nikolai undid the ties on the halter-neck dress and bra and released a masculine groan of satisfaction when the lush abundance of her creamy curves spilled free of the constraining fabric once again. He lowered his head to the rigid pink peaks that crowned them and whisked her nipples with his tongue while his hands shaped the soft, silken swell of the pouting mounds.
Besieged by tormenting sensation, Abbey moaned out loud, her fingers sinking into his tousled black hair to pull him back to her. They shared a passionate kiss before the allure of her breasts tempted him back there, while at the same time he extracted her from the dress caught round her hips.
‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ Nikolai breathed in an unguarded admission that took even him by surprise.
Abbey parted her lips to match his confession, but then fell silent at the recollection of Jeffrey, which threatened a comparison too tasteless and painful to be endured. Nikolai searched her smoky violet eyes and sensed her reticence and its cause and it annoyed the hell out of him at that moment. He was offended by the conviction that he was continually having to measure up to another man in her estimation.
Nikolai crushed her swollen lips beneath his again, darting and delving his tongue until she responded with matching fervour. He peeled off her last garment with alacrity, surveying the voluptuous violin curves of her lush body with intense pleasure. ‘You have the most glorious shape, milaya moya.’
The madness that had seized Abbey thinned like a cloud of fog and she marvelled that she could be lying naked for this man’s admiration. But, in truth, she found his unconcealed reverence and appreciation for her body absolutely thrilling. For the first time in her life she felt sexy and feminine and proud of her curvaceous figure. But shyness and insecurity still threatened to break through the ache of arousal that held her taut and imprisoned by his spell.
Nikolai trailed a skilful hand along a slender thigh to the tenderest place of all and the last fetters of control fell from her. He probed the tight, wet depths of her secret centre and she was lost beyond reclaim in sensation and response. He caressed the tiny bud beneath the auburn curls with the pad of his thumb and instant sensation exploded inside her, sending an earthquake of desire cascading through her in a liquid surge.
‘Please…’ she mumbled, barely knowing what she was saying or even asking for.
Nikolai dug contraception out of his wallet one-handed. He gazed down at her, stunned by the response she was giving him. She was so lovely with her coppery hair spread across the pillow, her delicate face flushed with soft colour, her blue eyes half closed with passion. For a split second he hesitated, for he suspected that afterwards she might have regrets, for it was a challenge for him to believe that she had changed her mind about him so totally. But rampant arousal and need powered Nikolai. He wanted her with a hunger stronger than anything he had ever felt before and self-denial of any kind was not in his genes.
‘Ti nuzhna mne-I need you,’ he asserted in a roughened undertone.
His lean, darkly handsome face was taut with desire and his stunning eyes were locked to her in a look that made her feel a million dollars. Jeffrey had never seemed to need her or look at her in such a way. Even as her brain recoiled from that treacherous thought her spine arched with the spellbinding excitement of Nikolai’s lovemaking. Her heart was thundering, her entire body quivering with the strain.
He spread her under him and paused only to don protection before tilting her up to him and driving into her with a single powerful thrust. She was incredibly tight and he came to a halt, moving with greater caution and concern. ‘But you were married,’ he exclaimed when she cried out.
For a moment she had recoiled in surprise from the sharp pain of his entrance. Only then did she appreciate why it had hurt and why he was bewildered. ‘It was never consummated,’ she told him grudgingly.
Nikolai studied her in frank wonderment. ‘Even before the wedding? You mean you never once had sex…? That’s crazy.’
In the heat of the passion that had brought her to bed with a man she barely knew it seemed crazy to Abbey as well. But she understood that she wasn’t thinking straight just then. Even as her mind was clearing her body was quickening with renewed excitement as Nikolai sank into her again and the delicious friction of his movements sent a wave of irresistible pleasure coursing through her.
‘Oh…’ she moaned, her body rising to meld with his in helpless response.
Nikolai was making a real effort to be gentle, which was a new departure for him. He was stunned by the awareness that he was her first lover and eager to match whatever expectations she might have of him.
‘Don’t stop,’ Abbey urged, frustrated by the feeling that she was reaching for some ultimate reaction that was still being denied her.
‘You feel like satin and velvet. I don’t ever want to stop,’ Nikolai growled, ravishing her with long, skilled strokes.
The exquisite pleasure rose to a delirious tormenting peak that made Abbey writhe beneath him. Her whole being was engulfed by the driving need to satisfy the ache he had evoked. Her heart pounding, she surrendered to the erotic pulsing heat of his driving body. When the unbearable tension and excitement gave way to an ecstatic shuddering convulsion of extreme pleasure, she screamed. Afterwards she fell into a cocoon of sweet drowning satiation, her limbs weighted to the bed by exhaustion.
But her mind was in no way able to practise the same inaction. Nikolai achieved the same pleasure with a shuddering growl and she snaked away from him in the same instant, rejection and distaste assailing her in a powerful wave. She could not believe what she had done. The horror of having slept with Nikolai Arlov held her fast even as the last tiny tremors of sexual satisfaction rippled through her. Not only had she betrayed everything she had ever believed in, she had betrayed the pure, precious love she had shared with Jeffrey. And she was genuinely appalled.
Thrust away from the embrace of her warm female body at the ultimate wrong moment, Nikolai attempted to urge her back to him. ‘Come here, lubimaya.’
Abbey viewed him with hostile smoky blue eyes. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she yelled at him in immediate rejection of his touch. Pushing him away, she
scrambled off the bed at speed to snatch up the dressing gown lying on a nearby chair and envelop her slim body in its folds.
Nikolai sat up. Rage was roaring through him like a bushfire. The violence of her rejection stung like an acid bath stripping his skin from his bones. ‘I assume this is a case of remorse after the event.’
Abbey was trembling with distress. She flung him a furious glance. ‘What else? I’d like you to leave now.’
‘Isn’t it a little late for that? We have just made love,’ Nikolai reminded her drily.
‘And it was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made!’ Abbey launched at him wrathfully.
‘No, it was a normal, natural event for a passionate woman,’ Nikolai contradicted levelly. ‘It’s not a sin to want or enjoy sex.’
Abbey was outraged that he had the nerve to stick around and argue with her and, worst of all, throw her enjoyment back in her teeth. She wanted him gone. She wanted to shower, change the bedding, eradicate every piece of evidence that he had ever been in her apartment, never mind her bed. She hated him, but she hated herself even more.
‘I was weak and you took advantage of that. Well, what else could I expect from a guy like you? A guy who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing!’
Nikolai sprang upright, six feet three inches of lean, bronzed, magnificent nudity and an arresting sight in her prettily decorated pastel bedroom. ‘How dare you speak to me like this? You invited me into your bed. You wanted me…’
Abbey could not bear that reminder. Her face burning with embarrassment and remorse, she stared at Jeffrey’s photo by the bed and her sense of shame almost choked her. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for wanting you and betraying everything I believe in.’
Nikolai had already had more than enough without having that assurance hurled at him. He pulled on his boxers and gathered up the rest of his clothes without ceremony before striding out of the room and across the hall to the bathroom. He had never been so offended. His anger was like a big black stone inside him, weighing him down. It had not occurred to him that she might be a drama queen with no manners. It had certainly not occurred to him that he might have the best sex of a lifetime with such a woman. A virgin as eager for him as he had been for her, who had decided to be ashamed of what they had shared rather than proud of it. It was not a female reaction that had ever come his way before. Worse still, he had only to summon her face into his mind to feel his body surge and harden with fierce hunger for her again.
Remorse attacked Abbey while he was gone. She had responded to his advances and slept with him. Her regrets were not his fault, but, although intellectually she accepted that, she also sensed that Nikolai was intelligent enough to have known how she would feel and yet he had still taken what was on offer. She was in the bedroom doorway when he reappeared.
‘I know you don’t understand how I feel,’ she breathed tautly. ‘But I once loved and was loved by someone very special and, tonight, I feel I betrayed that bond with an intimacy that was meaningless and empty.’
Although Nikolai had never sought meaning in sex, he was more insulted than ever by a declaration that once again demoted him to second-rate status and he sent her a sardonic appraisal. ‘Your husband has been dead for six years. You should have moved on by now.’
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘And your deifying the dead won’t make the process any easier,’ Nikolai told her drily.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever loved anyone.’
Nikolai thought about that. ‘No woman. I loved my grandfather,’ he admitted in a rare burst of confidence, ‘but your grief strikes me as obsessive.’
‘That’s my business,’ Abbey told him defensively.
‘As you say.’ Nikolai opened the door. ‘Dubroynochi, goodnight,’ he drawled softly before he pulled the door closed behind him.
Abbey wrapped her arms round herself in the silent hall and snatched in a charged breath. She was still in shock. Indeed her entire body was quivering uncomfortably in the aftermath of the passion they had shared. A passion such as she had never dreamt existed, and her body ached from it. She wondered why she felt so much more alone than usual and what it was about Nikolai that got to her to such an extent. She found him amazingly attractive and that was incredibly hard to cope with. Jeffrey had never desired her to that extent. It was a disloyal thought and even thinking it bothered her, but Abbey believed in being honest with herself. Jeffrey might have loved her enough to make her his wife, but when it came to the physical side of their relationship he had been more lukewarm than passionate. Perhaps she had been the more highly sexed of the two of them, she reasoned frantically, but her sense of guilt simply deepened. She barely slept a wink that night.
The next morning she received a phone call from a well-known tabloid offering her money to talk about her date with Nikolai. She turned it down with disdain. It was an unpleasant surprise to be greeted by a crowd of paparazzi and cameras when she drove out of the underground car park to head to work. Her face was hot enough to fry eggs on while she wondered if the journalists appreciated that Nikolai had got her into bed on the first date, fully living up to his notorious reputation with women.
When she arrived at Support Systems, two rather grim-looking men were striding out of the building. ‘Who were those men just leaving?’ Abbey asked, walking into her brother’s office.
Drew was pale and he shot her a troubled glance. ‘Potential customers. I didn’t like the look of them, so we won’t be taking them on.’
‘They looked like bouncers.’
‘Oddly enough, that’s pretty much what they are. They wanted us to hire more security staff for a West End club-not our field of expertise, I explained.’
‘No, indeed, but then we do say in our literature that we’ll have a go at any task that the customer needs done,’ Abbey pointed out.
Her brother frowned. ‘We have to draw the line somewhere. By the way, you have an appointment in an hour with Nikolai Arlov-’
‘Nikolai? What does he want?’ Abbey gasped in dismay.
‘I haven’t a clue, but hopefully he wants to put some lucrative work our way. Why are you so shocked? I understand that you dined with him last night.’
‘Yes.’ But Abbey was outraged by the idea that Nikolai still had the nerve to try to make her do what she didn’t want to do. He had to be well aware that she never wanted to see him again in this lifetime, so why set up an appointment with her? Last night she had dined with him purely because of his donation to Futures. Too late had she recognised the trap she had fallen into in allowing him to effectively buy her indulgence and her time. That had given him entirely the wrong message. Just how had she failed to appreciate what a ruthless bastard she was dealing with?
‘Do we really need more work?’ Abbey pressed.
‘Very much so,’ her brother emphasised.
Abbey went into her own office, where her assistant asked her to call back a catering firm that had been in touch about an unpaid bill. Abbey frowned, for she had assumed that the bill had been settled weeks earlier, and went to check Support Systems’ bank statements. Her skin turned clammy and shock brought up goose bumps on her flesh when she saw the parade of minus signs on the first statement that warned that the company was running on a substantial overdraft. Naturally, she knew that they had an agreed overdraft facility, for occasionally clients were slow to pay, but she had not been aware of quite how tight matters were in the financial field.
Drew was irritable when she questioned him. ‘It’s not my fault you don’t keep up with the latest bank statements,’ he told her with a curtness that made her view him in surprise.
‘I know, but I didn’t appreciate that we were quite so short of funds. What’s brought that about?’
‘All our operating costs have risen and we have some very late payers on our books.’
‘Give me the names,’ Abbey urged, feeling guilty that she had not kept abreast of the firm’s dwindling cash-flow situati
on. ‘I’ll chase them up for payment.’
As she returned to her office to make good on that proposal she thought that it would be a good idea for her to spend an evening going through the accounts in an attempt to identify exactly when and how things had gone wrong. Just a few months earlier, Support Systems had been riding high with more clients than they could cope with. Unhappily, expansion appeared to have come at a massive cost in overheads. Even so, while that overdraft might suggest a downturn in the firm’s fortunes, Abbey and her colleagues were still so busy they were run off their feet.
Chasing up the firm’s debtors gave her little time to agonise over the approaching interview with Nikolai. But as she crossed the city to the massive office block that housed the UK headquarters of Arlov Industries she was painfully aware that, while she might not want to accept work from Nikolai, Support Systems currently needed all the business it could get. Even so she totally hated and despised him for forcing her to face him again and in a professional capacity. He was the very last man alive she wanted to see again.
CHAPTER FIVE
W HILE Abbey waited in the elegant reception area on the top floor, she was conscious of being under scrutiny. She was already aware of the identity of two of the women who had wandered out past reception to get a better look at her: she recognised both Olya and Darya from the audience at the fashion show.
