LITMIR.BIZ

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sister, Topsy, was home from boarding school and staying at the farmhouse with Emmie, and although Kat phoned her sisters most days it wasn’t the same as seeing them in the flesh and catching up on the gossip. Three more weeks marooned on Mikhail’s giant floating palace threatened like a prison sentence.

      Kat sat beside Lara in the VIP chill-out room where several yards away at another table Mikhail appeared to be holding court like a reigning king. Surrounded by bottles of champagne and beautiful girls vying for his attention, he was in his element.

      ‘Is it always like this for Mikhail?’ Kat heard herself ask her blonde companion.

      Lara made no pretence of not grasping the question. ‘You must understand that even when he was a boy he was very much in demand. He excites women because very rich, handsome and still young men are rare. They all want to be the one he marries but he doesn’t want to get married.’

      ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Kat responded, sliding upright to go to the cloakroom, glancing back over her shoulder at Mikhail to note that two young women in very revealing outfits were performing some ridiculous form of suggestive belly dance for him and his companions. Their giggling display of their nubile bodies set her teeth on edge and made her feel about a hundred years too old for such nonsense. Mikhail’s arrogant dark head lifted and turned as though he could sense her watching him. Dark eyes gleaming, he summoned her with a lean brown hand to join him … as if she were a waitress or a pet dog or something! Stiffening at that suspicion, Kat reddened and ignored the signal. Her earlier attack of homesickness and alienation returned with even greater force. She didn’t want to be in Cyprus at an exclusive club for the rich and bored. She didn’t want to go back to Mikhail’s yacht either. She didn’t belong in either place and she missed her sisters.

      She had persuaded herself that regaining the ownership of her home was worth any sacrifice and only now was she finally questioning that conviction. Mikhail was upsetting her. She could never remember feeling more unhappy than she currently felt and her self-esteem had sunk to an all-time low. Earlier he had scanned her in the crimson dress, had frowned but said nothing. The absence of his admiration, however, had been blatant and from that moment on the red dress had felt like a colossal unflattering mistake. But why was she allowing Mikhail’s opinion to matter so much to her? The means to stop the process of what felt like humiliation dead had always been within her own hands and perhaps it was past time that she acted. Her fingers tightened on her envelope purse, which contained her passport. Stas was poised by the exit doors and she walked over to him, her head high, eyes alight with sudden energy again.

      ‘Could you arrange a taxi to take me to the airport?’ she asked, knowing she couldn’t just walk out and disappear without causing an inexcusable furore.

      Momentarily, Stas seemed to freeze. ‘Of course,’ he told her nonetheless. ‘Give me five minutes to organise it.’

      Her decision made to fly home as soon as she could get a flight, Kat felt loads happier, as if a giant weight had fallen from her shoulders. She would go home, find a job and somewhere else to live, she reflected as she freshened up in the cloakroom. She didn’t need to look to Mikhail to do anything for her, certainly not to give her a house she had lost through her own mistakes and done nothing to earn!

      When Kat reappeared Stas was waiting to show her through the double exit doors and then he surprised her by throwing open another door off the corridor and she hesitated with a frown. ‘Where are you taking me?’

      Mikhail filled the doorway like a big dark storm cloud. ‘You’re not walking out on me.’

      Kat settled outraged green eyes on him. ‘Watch me!’ she advised.

      ‘We’ll discuss it first, milaya moya,’ Mikhail declared, blocking her path with his tall lean body and pressing the door wider.

      Kat supposed she owed him some sort of an explanation. Possibly it had been unrealistic to believe that she could just leave without a confrontation because Mikhail Kusnirovich would never accept anything less blunt. But he didn’t own her and she hadn’t signed away her life or anything stupid when she signed that wretched agreement with him.

      ‘I’m not your prisoner,’ Kat told him, lifting her chin. ‘I can leave any time I like—’

      ‘And where are you planning to go at this time of night in a foreign country?’ Mikhail demanded harshly.

      ‘I can wait at the airport until there’s a flight. I believe the London flights are quite frequent,’ Kat pointed out, swallowing so hard in the smouldering silence that her throat muscles ached. In truth she didn’t have enough cash in her bank account to pay for a flight home, but she had planned to phone Saffy and ask her sibling to buy a ticket for her.

      Mikhail counted slowly and internally to ten but it didn’t work any magic on his aggressive mood. The realisation that she was prepared to simply walk out on him had struck him like a punch in the gut and he was genuinely stunned by the concept. A woman had never walked out on him before but he thought it was typical that she would be the first to try and do it. There she stood, her slim figure rigid with resolution, beautiful green eyes defiant and angry, pointed little chin at a combative angle, just daring him to argue. She was as unstable as gelignite, he told himself grimly. Maybe he should have paid her more attention in recent days instead of shelving her like a difficult project, he thought furiously, maybe he should have talked to her sooner … but talked to her about what exactly? The number of serious chats Mikhail had enjoyed with women outside business hours couldn’t have covered a postage stamp. He didn’t do the talking thing; he wasn’t in touch with anyone’s feelings, least of all his own, and he didn’t do serious … which meant there really wasn’t much left to talk about.

      ‘I don’t want you to leave,’ Mikhail spelt out in a harsh undertone, spectacular dark eyes pinned to her with driving tenacity.

      ‘Let’s face it … without Stas’s warning you, you would barely have noticed my absence,’ Kat countered drily. ‘You are surrounded by loads of other women tonight—’

      ‘But I don’t want any of them,’ Mikhail grated without hesitation. ‘I want you.’

      Kat was grimly amused by that frank admission. ‘Then you were going the wrong way about attaining me.’

      ‘There is no right way with you. If even you don’t know what you want, how am I supposed to deliver it?’ he shot at her with stormy impatience.

      ‘I know exactly what I want—I want to go home,’ Kat declared, throwing her head back, spiralling russet curls falling back from her heart-shaped face.

      ‘Isn’t that just typical of a woman?’ Mikhail growled. ‘You light a fire and then you run away!’

      Outrage rolled through Kat’s slender body in an energising wave and she took an angry step forward. ‘I am not running away!’

      ‘Of course you are,’ Mikhail fielded with biting assurance. ‘You want me and I want you but evidently you can’t cope with something that simple.’

      ‘It’s not that simple!’ Kat launched back at him furiously, inflamed that he was confidently arguing with her when she was being plunged into ever deeper turmoil.

      ‘It is. You can’t handle your own sexual inhibitions. Call yourself a cougar?’ Mikhail hitched an ebony brow, his derisive amusement unconcealed at the term as applied to her. ‘You’re more like a toddler in the sex stakes. One step forward, two steps back. If I didn’t know there was no malice intended by your behaviour, I’d call you a tease—’

      ‘How dare you?’ Kat raked at him, enraged by his censure. ‘I warned you that I wouldn’t sleep with you!’

      ‘While you continue to respond to my every look and touch,’ Mikhail reminded her doggedly. ‘You’re terrified of having a normal sexual relationship with a man—that’s the only reason you’re still a virgin!’

      ‘No, it’s not!’ Kat argued vehemently, high spots of colour burning

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