by Lynne Graham
Her eyes opened wide and rounded in bewilderment. ‘Move in with you? And exactly what would that entail?’
‘What it usually entails when a man and a woman live together,’ Nikolai countered, wondering why he wasn’t just spelling the terms out with his usual directness.
Possibly he was a little squeamish about the terms. Her reactions, the unmistakeable shyness she couldn’t hide, were persuading him that, unlikely as it seemed, she might indeed be a virgin. He would very much like to take her to bed but he really didn’t want her there on sufferance. He didn’t particularly want to be the man who deflowered her either, although, when he thought about that aspect, he realised that he didn’t want any other man to do it for him.
All of a sudden his brain was leaping about in directions he hadn’t counted on, throwing up objections to what had seemed perfectly simple and straightforward only an hour before. And all that had changed was that Ella Palmer was now in front of him, and, instead of being merely a step in an ongoing project, was becoming very much a lust object in her own light.
Nikolai was confounded by that too because she was not his usual type. He went for tall, curvy blondes and Ella was tiny, skinny and almost as bare of curves as a teenaged boy. So, he had no understanding of precisely why he had developed a throbbing hard-on the instant a slight movement made her tiny, unfettered breasts shift below her T-shirt. Now he could see pointed nipples poking through the thin fabric and his body was eager to see a lot more of that slender but highly feminine body of hers. However, that was sex, nothing more, and he had many more convenient options in that line, didn’t he? Diavole, why was he thinking such thoughts? What was the matter with him? He had never allowed himself to be driven by what lay south of his belt.
‘You want me to be your girlfriend...?’ Ella mumbled in wonderment, barely crediting that they were truly having such a conversation.
Nikolai winced. ‘I don’t have girlfriends... I have sex.’
‘So, you’re a man whore,’ Ella pronounced before she could think better of it, for in her experience there were only two types of men available. One type was open to the possibility of meeting the one and commitment while the other type only wanted to sleep around with the maximum possible number of women.
His dark-as-jet eyes flashed like golden flames. ‘Don’t apply that label to me!’
‘Oddly enough I wasn’t trying to be insulting. I just meant that you only want sex and I know there are women like that too, so, although I shouldn’t have said it, I was simply stating a fact.’ Ella finally fumbled to a perspiring halt, her skin dampening below her clothing while she inwardly acknowledged the foolishness of saying anything he could find offensive. ‘I’m only trying to interpret what you suggested as an option—if not girlfriend...?’
‘Mistress,’ Nikolai slotted in cool as ice.
Ella blinked, thinking he did not just say that...did he? Such a delightfully old-fashioned role for such a modern man. But then what did she know about Nikolai Drakos? She turned away from him, wandered over to the window and was surprised to see a big glossy dark limousine complete with driver parked outside. The limo could only belong to him, which meant that Nikolai was rich and privileged and that the concept of having a mistress to cater to his sexual needs might not seem as much of an anomaly to him as it was to her.
Unhappily, shock had welded Ella’s tongue to the roof of her mouth because he was sexually propositioning her and nothing could have prepared her for that possibility. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous...ironically, he was! Male heads didn’t tend to swivel when Ella walked down the street because she had neither the length of leg nor the curves usually deemed necessary to attract such attention. Why on earth could he be making her such an offer?
‘But we don’t even know each other,’ she framed dazedly. ‘You’re a stranger...’
‘If you live with me I won’t be a stranger for long,’ Nikolai pointed out with monumental calm.
And the very sound of that inhuman calm and cool forced her to flip round and settle distraught eyes on his lean, darkly handsome face. ‘You can’t be serious about this!’
‘I assure you that I am deadly serious. Move in and I’ll forget your family’s debts.’
‘But it’s a crazy idea!’ She gasped, having failed to get him to acknowledge that reality and floundering against his restrained silence. It was obvious that he was determined to behave as though such a proposition were an everyday occurrence.
‘It’s not crazy to me,’ Nikolai asserted. ‘When I want anything, I go after it hard and fast.’
Her lashes dipped. Did he want her like that? Enough to track her down, buy up her father’s debts, and try and buy rights to her and her body along with those debts? The very idea of that made her dizzy and plunged her brain into even greater turmoil. ‘It’s immoral...it’s blackmail.’
‘It’s definitely not blackmail. I’m giving you the benefit of a choice you didn’t have before I came through that door,’ Nikolai Drakos fielded with glittering cool. ‘That choice is yours to make.’
‘Like hell it is!’ Ella fired back. ‘The choice you’re offering is totally unscrupulous.’
‘When did I say I had scruples?’ Nikolai asked almost conversationally. ‘I want what I want and I want you in London to take out and show off.’
‘But...why?’ she interrupted, helpless in the grip of her desire to know that answer. ‘Why pick me? I said no that night...was that all it took to fire you up? For you to suggest this?’
‘I’m not going to answer those questions. I don’t need to,’ Nikolai told her without apology. ‘My motivation is my own. Either you want to consider the option I’ve offered or you don’t. It’s entirely up to you.’
‘But a mistress...!’ A driven laugh fell from Ella’s convulsing throat because she was struggling to accept that he could have confronted her with such an insane choice. ‘Don’t you understand that even if I wanted to say yes I couldn’t?’
He frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘My father wouldn’t live with himself if he knew I was sleeping with a man just to get him out of trouble! No, the mistress option is a total impossibility as far as I am concerned.’
‘That’s for you to decide.’ Nikolai settled a business card down on the desk. ‘My phone number. I’ll be staying at the Wrother Links Hotel until tomorrow.’
‘I’ve already made my decision and it’s a no,’ Ella hastened to tell him.
Nikolai flashed her a slow wicked smile that radiated charisma. ‘Think about it properly before you say no but if you discuss it with anyone else, I’ll withdraw the offer,’ he warned her smoothly. ‘It’s a strictly confidential option.’
‘You know, you can’t simply ask a woman you don’t know to live with you,’ she bit out, fit to be tied at his sheer nerve and nonchalance.
Black curling lashes screening his shrewd gaze, Nikolai shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘I believe I just did.’
‘But it’s barbaric!’ she exclaimed. ‘A complete cheat of a supposed offer!’
Nikolai sent her a gleaming sideways glance. ‘No, the real cheat was you kissing me the way you did last year and then saying no and acting as if I had grossly insulted you,’ he murmured with lethal quietness.
‘You did insult me!’ Ella flung back, her cheeks hot as fire while she wondered if her refusal that night had started off his whole chain reaction. What else could possibly be driving him?
Nikolai straightened lazily as he opened the door. ‘If you take offence that easily, maybe it’s just as well that the answer is no.’
Strangely that wasn’t what she wanted to hear and she didn’t understand that truth, nor the feeling that his departure was somehow a low point rather than something to be celebrated. She watched the limo drive off, her thoughts miles away, trailing back down the timeline t
o the moment she had first met Nikolai Drakos...
* * *
Her stepmother’s best friend, Ailsa, had been a wedding planner and when one of Ailsa’s part-time workers had taken ill, Joy had insisted that Ella step in. Ella could have declined but she had been too well aware that if she crossed the older woman Joy would throw a tantrum and rain down misery on the whole family. And she had always hated listening to her stepmother torment her father with nasty, sneering comments. When Ella had arrived at the country house that evening she had been startled to be asked to park cars rather than wait tables as she had dimly expected. And, truth to tell, with an advanced driving test under her belt and a love of fast cars, parking the luxury models driven by the wedding guests would have been fun, had her foot not slid off the pedal of that McLaren Spider, causing the wing of it to be grazed against an overhanging bush.
Nikolai had started shouting and Ailsa had come running out to smooth over the incident. Unfortunately, Ella’s immediate apology had had no effect and Ailsa had made a big deal out of supposedly sacking Ella simply to comfort Nikolai. That was when Nikolai had suddenly cooled off, dismissed the matter and insisted that he didn’t want Ella sacked before striding into the house to join the rest of the guests.
It had been much later that night before she’d seen Nikolai again. She had been outside the ballroom listening to the DJ playing for the evening party while half dancing to the beat of the music to keep warm in the cold. And when she had heard something behind her, she had spun and he had simply been standing there watching her, dark eyes glowing golden as melted caramel in the reflected lights.
‘If you want your car, you can fetch it for yourself,’ Ella told him.
‘You’re right. I wouldn’t allow you behind the wheel of it again,’ he admitted, strolling almost soundlessly closer to gaze down at her. He had moved very quietly for such a big male. ‘When do you finish tonight?’
‘I’m finished now. I’m waiting for a lift home from one of the bartenders.’
‘Could be a long wait,’ he murmured softly.
‘Could be.’ Lifting her head, Ella shook her hair back from her face because the breeze was blowing it into her eyes.
‘You have gorgeous hair,’ he breathed.
‘Thank you...’ In the light flooding through the windows behind her, she could see his lean dark features with clarity and all she could think at that moment was that he was definitely the most gorgeous man she had ever come across.
‘And stunning eyes...but, you’re a rubbish driver.’
‘My shoe slid on the pedal. I have an advanced driving test.’
‘Don’t believe you.’
Ella lifted her chin. ‘Your problem, not mine.’
‘My problem is that I want you,’ Nikolai said boldly. ‘I saw you dancing by the window and it gave me a high.’
Sharply disconcerted, Ella reddened. ‘Oh—’
‘Oh?’ he mimicked with derision. ‘That’s it, that’s all you’ve got to say?’
‘What do you want me to say?’ Ella rolled her eyes expressively. ‘I’m not looking for a man right now.’
‘And I’m not looking for a woman... I’m looking for one night,’ Nikolai admitted silkily, lean brown fingers reaching up to curl into the fall of her hair and urge her closer than she would have chosen to be, had she been in her right mind.
As for that, what happened next proved to her that she was not in her right mind when Nikolai was around her because he closed his other hand to her spine and tilted her forward into sudden searing contact with his long, hard body. Within seconds he was kissing her as she had never been kissed before, forcing apart her lips with the hard pressure of his, sliding in his tongue, and sending such a jolt of wild excitement through her that her head swam and her knees buckled. He was passionate and demanding and all-male hungry, every sinuously sexual movement of his lean hips and powerful thighs against her warning her that a kiss could be almost as sizzlingly intimate as a naked embrace.
He lifted his handsome dark head and the chill of the night air on her back contrasted with the heat of his powerfully aroused body against hers. Immediately, Ella remembered who she was and where she was and the chill on her skin slivered inside right down to her stomach, and sickened her.
‘Thanks, but no, thanks,’ she said tartly, pulling free and starting to walk away.
‘You can’t be serious,’ he breathed, his surprise audible because he knew she had been fired up just as much as he.
But what he didn’t know was that Ella had never been that aroused...ever. And mere weeks after she had watched the love of her life being laid in the ground at twenty-four years of age, that truth hurt so bad that she almost sobbed over it. She had believed she truly wanted Paul but Paul had never made her feel like that and the pain of that acknowledgement tore into her grief and ate her alive with guilt.
‘Watch me go,’ she told Nikolai thinly, walking towards the back entrance of the country house where she would wait for her lift...regardless of how long because it would be infinitely safer than going any place with the male who had just kissed her. Kissed her until there was no yesterday and no Paul in her mind. Kissed her for now, for the moment, for a cheap pickup and one-night stand. She knew she was in a big enough emotional mess without making that mistake and doing something she would undoubtedly regret...
* * *
As she filed paperwork to tidy Rosie’s desk, Ella drifted back from that powerful memory and shivered. She had blown him off. Even though it hadn’t been intentional, she had given him the impression that she was with him every step of the way during that kiss and then she had changed her mind. But a woman was entitled to change her mind and she had exercised that right. Yet had she become that much more desirable after she walked away? How many women had said no to Nikolai? Ella reckoned that score would be low because he was very handsome and evidently wealthy into the bargain. Nikolai was a hard hitter, an achiever. Had she challenged his male ego?
Was it really pure coincidence that he now owned her father’s debts? He hadn’t answered her questions. He had said he was giving her a choice she hadn’t had before he arrived, and, although she didn’t like to see it that way, she saw that it was the unwelcome truth. The father and grandmother she adored were on the brink of losing everything they had left. How could she stand back and let them suffer when she had been given an alternative?
Throughout the day her mind seethed with wild ideas. She was willing to do just about anything to save the roof over her family’s head. Freed from the burden of those awful debts and Joy’s extravagance, her father would finally be in a position to make a reasonable living again. Although he had lost the furniture shop, he remained a qualified accountant and the ability to work again would give him his self-respect back.
Yet while Ella might want to help her family, Nikolai Drakos had put her in an impossible situation. Her father would never accept such a sacrifice on her part. So, how could she get around that obvious stumbling block?
Well, one possibility would be offering Nikolai the intimate night she suspected he felt cheated out of. She shuddered at the prospect of having sex with anyone in such circumstances but just as quickly told herself off for being a drama queen. Why make a three-act tragedy out of a perfectly normal feature of life? If possessing her body meant that much to the man, he was welcome to it.
It was not as though she were still a virgin because she had actively chosen to embrace that state. She had waited for Paul, for the miraculous day when he would be ‘well enough’, only that opportunity had failed to arrive. Now and not for the first time she wished Paul had not been so exacting in his wishes, so determined that everything be right and perfect before they became intimate, because going to bed with Nikolai would have been much less intimidating had Ella already acquired some sexual experience. One night, she told herself bleakl
y, yes, she could do one night if it saved her family. Were there any other options?
Well, instead of making her a mistress, Nikolai could marry her, lending their entire arrangement the sort of respectable patina that would allow her father to accept his debts being paid off, because a son-in-law was a family member while a lover who was a stranger was something else entirely. Somehow she didn’t think Nikolai would want to go for the wedding-ring option. In fact a reluctant giggle was forced from between Ella’s tense lips at even the idea of making such a suggestion. The man who didn’t date and only had sex was unlikely to warm to the prospect of holy matrimony...
At the end of her working day, Ella called the number on the business card Nikolai had left her and before he could even speak said, ‘I want to come and see you this evening.’
Taken aback by that bold declaration, Nikolai frowned. ‘You’ve changed your mind?’
‘I want to talk...’
Nikolai was dubious. He had already wondered how sure she was of Cyrus’s support if she was willing to turn his offer down without hesitation. Had his old enemy already proposed to her? Yet wouldn’t she have thrown that information at him?
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he countered.
‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ Ella quoted Gramma in her desperation to get him to listen.
Ten minutes later, Ella walked into the exclusive Wrother Links Hotel. Rather belatedly she became conscious of her shabby work clothing, which consisted of a tee and worn skinny jeans thrust into sensible ankle boots. Perhaps she should have gone home first and changed and used some make-up, she reflected uneasily. But then Nikolai had outlined his outrageous proposal at the start of her working day when she was looking far from glamorous. Her smooth brow indented.
What did the wretched man want from her?
The obvious, she told herself irritably as the receptionist directed her into the lift with a curious appraisal. Just because she had never viewed her body as a means of negotiation didn’t mean Nikolai felt the same. He had to want her for something and her body was the most likely explanation, Ella reasoned uncomfortably. Over the years she had listened to friends insist that men saw sex as being of crucial importance, which had left her confused, dealing with Paul’s rigid self-discipline.