‘How the hell else could she have known?’ Mikhail swore suddenly in Russian and shifted his hands as he moved towards her. ‘Kat, you saw me at three in the morning that same night and I was still in my own room,’ he reminded her.
‘Yes, but—’
Mikhail withdrew a mobile phone from his pocket and pressed several buttons. ‘Watch this …’ he urged. ‘Stas was clever enough to record Lara screaming at me …’
Kat focused on the screen and saw a flurry of blurred movement and heard a noise. The blur became Lara, blonde hair whipping round her enraged face and she was shouting. ‘Why didn’t you want me? You could have had me! What’s wrong with you that you didn’t want me? She’s old, she’s past it! It’s an insult. I’m young and beautiful—how could she be the one you move into your home?’
Kat was transfixed. There were another few sentences of distraught ranting from Lara before she suddenly appreciated that a camera was recording her tantrum and she launched herself at Stas in a vitriolic fury, whereupon the recording came to a sudden telling halt.
Mikhail switched it off. ‘Do you want to see it again?’ he enquired smoothly.
‘No …’ Kat’s admission was small, her face heavily flushed with chagrin. She had listened to a vain and immature hysteric’s fantasy and swallowed her ridiculous lies as solid fact. Her legs were wobbly and she sank down on the edge of the bed with ‘old, past it!’ still ringing unpleasantly in her ears.
‘Ark heard everything she said to you, his attention drawn by the fact that she called you a rude word in Russian,’ Mikhail explained. ‘He informed me and I confronted her and, as you saw, she went crazy. There was a lot more that Stas didn’t manage to record. She was jealous of you and furious that I didn’t find her attractive but the situation that developed today was still my fault.’
‘How was it your fault?’ Kat asked limply, shot from the conviction that he was an unfaithful rat to the conviction that she had misjudged him at such speed that her head was still spinning. She felt dizzy and bewildered and stupid, much as though a huge rock had landed on her from a height.
‘Lara came on to me when I first hired her. That’s happened to me many times and I didn’t consider it sufficient grounds to sack her.’
Kat’s eyes were wide with consternation at the news. ‘You … didn’t?’
‘I made it clear I wasn’t interested and as a rule that is sufficient to bring an end to such behaviour, but Lara is extremely vain about her own attractions and her resentment grew when you came into my life. I suspect she tried to cause trouble between us before in small ways. Luckily she wasn’t close enough to me to have the power to do more. I think you can probably blame her for the horrible make-up you wore the first night when you dined with me.’
‘And for not telling me when to meet you,’ Kat guessed.
‘And persuading you to wear red that evening at the club—I hate the colour red, always have,’ he confided.
‘Such trivial things,’ Kat commented seriously. ‘I’m grateful she didn’t have the ability to cause more trouble.’
‘Lara isn’t clever enough to appreciate that a man wants a woman for more than her looks …’
Kat wasn’t quite sure how to take that statement.
Mikhail laughed out loud, his amusement smashing the strained silence. He snatched up her case and tossed it on the floor and sank down beside her on the bed. ‘I find you much more beautiful than Lara.’
‘You couldn’t possibly. I’m old and past it,’ Kat muttered shakily, the tears gathering.
‘You knocked me sideways the very first time I saw you. And you had class and strength and you refused to want me back, which shocked me.’
‘It did you good to have a woman say no to you for a change,’ Kat countered a shade tartly, unwilling to let all her tension go for fear that something bad was still about to happen that would part them.
Mikhail curved a powerful arm round her taut body to draw her close. ‘It did, but the fear of losing you that I suffered today almost brought me to my knees,’ he admitted gruffly. ‘I was so determined to stay in control of our relationship and not give way to my strong feelings for you, and then suddenly I was facing the prospect of losing you and all that seemed so trivial in comparison—’
‘Strong feelings?’ Kat prompted, one small hand awkwardly engaged in stroking the arm wound round her.
His fingers curved to her chin to turn her face gently round to his. His eyes were warmer than she had ever seen them. ‘I love you very much, Kat … so much I can’t contemplate a life without you. But until today I saw that as a weakness and a fault. I watched my father slowly drink himself to death after he lost my mother. He was cruel to her and he was never faithful, but when she died he went to pieces. He was much more dependent on her than any of us ever realised,’ he related ruefully. ‘I was terrified of ever needing a woman that much. I thought he was an obsessional personality. I thought I had to protect myself from that because, in common with my father, I do tend to be rather intense in personality, and then I met you and right from the start you had a very potent effect on me …’
The chill still inside Kat was soothed by the tenderness in his gaze and his honesty and she pushed her face into a broad muscular shoulder, revelling in the warm familiar scent of him and the new sense of soul-deep security flooding her. ‘I love you too,’ she whispered fervently.
‘You should have guessed how I felt about you that morning I prevented you from boarding the helicopter,’ Mikhail muttered with a frown. ‘I tried to make myself let you go and I found that I literally couldn’t face sending you away. The night before was the longest and worst night of my life. I wanted you. I needed you: choice didn’t come into it. You’ve owned my heart ever since.’
‘That may be so, but you’ve been pretty good at hiding it,’ Kat voiced, although when she thought back to recent weeks it occurred to her that he had probably shown it every time he looked at her, every time he curled her into his arms and held her tight through the night, only unfortunately she had been too insecure to recognise and interpret what she was seeing.
‘I won’t be hiding it any more. If you had known I loved you today you might have been more inclined to talk to me and trust my word rather than Lara’s. Would you have believed me without having seen that recording?’
‘Yes … deep down inside me it was a real struggle to believe that you would behave that way,’ Kat acknowledged with quiet certainty.
Mikhail lifted her hand and carefully threaded a ring onto her wedding finger. ‘I’ve had this in my possession since the first day you moved in.’
Kat studied the fabulous diamond solitaire with wide eyes of sheer wonderment. ‘But you resisted giving it to me?’
‘Yes. I’m a stubborn man, lubov moya,’ Mikhail groaned. ‘That means, “my love” and you are the only woman I’ve ever loved. You’ve had the chance to see the worst of me. Will you still marry me? And soon?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ Kat carolled, flattening him to the mattress in a sudden marked demonstration of enthusiasm. ‘As soon as it can be arranged … when I let you out of bed, which is not going to be any time soon,’ she warned him with sparkling eyes from which the last shadow of insecurity had fled.
A wolfish grin of satisfaction slashed his handsome mouth. ‘I should have given you the ring the day I bought it.’
‘Yes, you’re a slow learner as well as stubborn,’ his future wife conceded. ‘But you did buy the ring weeks ago, which gains you points … not that you need them.’
‘I only need you,’ Mikhail told her, running his fingers lazily through the spirals of her russet hair. ‘And I won’t feel secure until I see my wedding