LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Seven

      FIVE DAYS LATER, Mikhail stood on the terrace outside his office on The Hawk sharing a drink with Lorne Arnold.

      His other guests were swimming and sunbathing down below on the main deck. He was so accustomed to half-naked women that he spared the exposed bodies barely a glance, awarding his attention only to a slender redhead moving in the shadows. As willowy and graceful in her leggy delicacy as a gazelle, Kat burned in the sun, but her smooth light skin made her stand out all the more from his fake-tanned and sun-bronzed guests.

      ‘Kat’s a real find,’ Lorne remarked carefully, watching Kat sit down with a book to read.

      Mikhail gritted his even white teeth. If only you knew, he thought in frustration. He had backed off from Kat and that hadn’t worked either. She was like a jigsaw puzzle with several missing pieces: incomprehensible and infuriating.

      ‘Very natural, warm, unspoiled …’ Lorne could not hide his appreciation

      ‘Very unspoiled,’ Mikhail fielded tongue-in-cheek.

      ‘You don’t seem to pay her much attention …’

      ‘Kat thrives on neglect,’ Mikhail told him grittily, wondering why he had had the misfortune to land the only woman in the world who didn’t react to such an approach. Mikhail, more used to women who crowded him and clung, eager to please and entertain him, was at a rare loss with one who chose to keep her distance.

      Lara settled down beside Kat in the shade. ‘I’m too hot,’ the svelte blonde complained.

      Kat knew better than to suggest that the topless blonde in her minuscule bikini briefs take a dip in the inviting pool. Most of the female guests, including Lara, avoided the water to conserve their hair styling and make-up while Kat continued to swim several times a day, frustrated by the laziness of sitting around doing very little. It had made her hair a little frizzy but with a fully staffed beauty salon on board that was hardly a problem.

      ‘Tonight is the guests’ last night,’ Lara reminded her. ‘What are you wearing to the club in Ayia Napa?’

      ‘I’ll find something,’ Kat responded lightly, watching Mikhail stand with a drink on his office terrace with Lorne. Very tall, very dark and very handsome and infuriatingly inscrutable and unpredictable. He had virtually ignored her since that fatal encounter in his office. While he was polite and gracious in company just as though they were a couple, he had not tried to touch her again and she didn’t blame him for that, having looked back repeatedly to what she had done and cringed. She had said one thing to him but had done another. If he had had enough of that, so had she. It was as if she were a split personality, one half recalling her turbulent childhood with her man-hungry mother and the other half recalling the strict moral limits she had tried to instil in her sisters while always setting her siblings a good example. Sex to scratch an uncomfortable itch of lust didn’t figure anywhere between those parameters and she was not ashamed of resisting the urge and standing by her principles.

      ‘I hope you don’t mind but I thought you might want to borrow something and I left a dress on your bed,’ Lara told her with a bright smile.

      In recent days, Kat had learned to relax more with the other Englishwoman, who had made a real effort to offer her useful advice. Gradually it had dawned on Kat that Lara usually hosted Mikhail’s guests and could have bitterly resented being supplanted by Kat. For that reason the other woman’s sociability had proved a pleasant surprise, particularly when compared to Mikhail’s cool detachment.

      ‘But I’m sure I’ve got—’ Kat began in disconcertion.

      ‘You haven’t got anything suitable to wear to a nightclub,’ Lara assured her confidently. ‘You’ll want to fit in … for a change.’

      ‘My clubbing days are behind me,’ Kat commented quietly, ignoring that less than tactful comment on her style. ‘I’m thirty-five, Lara.’

      Lara’s eyes widened in apparent disbelief. ‘But that means you’re older than him! I’m only twenty-six.’

      And probably much more suitable, Kat reflected wearily, wondering why that should bother her. Lara was beautiful and bright and posing there topless and uninhibited, infinitely more likely to please Mikhail than Kat ever could. Behind her sunglasses Kat focused on Mikhail, sunlight gleaming off his carved cheekbones and stubborn jaw line, and her heart seemed to twist at the very idea of him with Lara … with any woman. It was because she was dreaming about him every night, embarrassingly erotic dreams that made her wake up perspiring in a tangle of bedding.

      A few hours later, garbed in Lara’s short red dress and buffed and polished within an inch of her life by the beauty salon, Kat scanned her reflection and grimaced. In her own opinion she was showing too much flesh because the dress bared her back and a good deal of her legs, but what was her opinion worth? She was a fish out of water in Mikhail’s exclusive world and she didn’t want to go clubbing with the younger, livelier members of the party and stick out like a sore thumb … like an older woman got up in absurdly teenaged clothing? Mutton dressed as lamb? Kat cringed at the fear that she might look

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