Brides For Billionaires. LYNNE GRAHAM

equally disconcerted by the admission she had made to him and feared that he might be about to make the same deduction that she had for herself. Could she have made it more obvious that she wanted more than sex from him? Suddenly she was praying that he didn’t think too deeply about what she had said, for the emotions that had urged her to run far and fast in self-defence were too private and new to share with anyone, least of all him.

      Scanning her pale taut face, Mikhail expelled his breath in a hiss and strode forward. In a disturbingly sudden movement, he lifted her off her startled feet and ignored her dismayed gasp to settle her down firmly on the leather sofa behind her. ‘Sit down and talk to me, then … Tell me what possible influence your mother could still have over you …’

      Mikhail felt benevolent as he offered that unparalleled invitation. If it stopped Kat walking out, he would listen to anything, while on another level he was surprisingly keen to know why she gave him so many conflicting messages.

      While Kat watched Mikhail open the door to speak to Stas before he sank lithely down opposite her, her mind was already filling with uneasy images. Drinks arrived while she struggled to suppress her unfortunate memories of her childhood. Her mother, Odette, the woman Kat had loved without return until she too became an adult, was someone Kat rarely let herself think about because, even after all this time, Odette’s essential indifference to her daughter could still hurt. Odette had always liked to play the victim and, as Odette’s biggest audience, Kat had often witnessed more than she should of her mother’s tangled love life. Long ago she had buried those distressing memories deep and moved on with her life and it was only now, as she was forced to dig those memories out again, that she appreciated that everything now looked rather different. Reality no longer matched up with the facts, she conceded ruefully. Suddenly she felt exceedingly foolish for not having seen the obvious much sooner.

      ‘Kat.?’ Mikhail prompted, surveying her highly expressive face and deeply troubled eyes with frowning force, exasperation clawing at him when they were interrupted by the arrival of the drinks he had ordered.

      Kat moistened her lips with the bubbling champagne, grateful for something to hold in her trembling hand. ‘My mum, Odette, was a successful model but probably not a very nice person. Our lives were unsettled because her relationships were always breaking down,’ she admitted stiffly, reluctant as she was to reveal any vulnerability to him. ‘She married my dad for security and then divorced him when her career took off. She deserted the twins’ father when he went bankrupt, but still all she ever talked about while I was growing up was how men let her down and used her. It’s only now that I can see that in most cases she was much more of a user than they were.’

      Mikhail lowered lush black lashes over his bemused gaze. ‘And how does that comparison apply to us?’

      ‘It doesn’t,’ Kat conceded, ashamed that she had let her mother’s self-pitying conditioning influence her outlook without her awareness for so many years. Odette had believed that simply engaging in sex with a man constituted a relationship and that having his baby would make him commit, she reflected wryly, and it was that shallow short-sighted outlook that had ensured that none of her mother’s relationships had prospered. ‘Do you still want to go back to the UK?’

      Her tummy gave an apprehensive lurch as she looked into brilliant dark golden eyes, still the most beautiful she had ever seen in a man’s face. He was a very dangerous man, she conceded dizzily, for he had chosen the perfect moment in which to ask that leading question and she could not believe that the timing was accidental. She didn’t want to leave Mikhail now, she acknowledged guiltily, wasn’t yet ready to close the door on what she might still discover about him. Without even realising it, she had been running away, forced into a corner by her mother’s brainwashing during her impressionable adolescence and her own terror of being hurt. But logic told her that life was to be lived, mistakes included, and that in any case she was not following her mother’s example.

      Kat lifted her bright head. ‘Not just yet …’ she confessed and drained her glass.

      ‘Let’s get back on board Hawk,’ Mikhail urged huskily, as mystified as ever by the strange way in which her mind worked but satisfied by the result. He closed a hand over hers and tugged her up from the sofa.

      ‘What about your guests?’

      ‘They’re too busy partying on their own account to notice my absence,’ he replied dismissively, long brown fingers tightening resolutely round hers, his breath fanning her cheek as he bent over her. The warm scent of his body tinged with the exclusive cologne he wore infiltrated her. A little quiver of almost painful sexual awareness engulfed her slim length and tensed her muscles.

      Kat reddened when she saw Stas study their linked hands but she knew that there wasn’t a romantic edge to that connection for Mikhail. No indeed, for once she could read her Russian billionaire’s mind. As long as he kept a physical hold of her she couldn’t go anywhere he didn’t want her to go: he really was that basic. If only she could be as cool-headed and practical as he was, she ruminated worriedly as he tucked her on board the tender that would whisk them out of the harbour and back to the yacht. He had fallen in lust but she was falling in love …

      As he pushed open the door of her suite Kat was scarcely breathing from nervous tension and anticipation, but once again he surprised her by stepping back to head for his own accommodation next door.

      ‘Decision time, milaya moya,’ he quipped, glancing back at her from heavily lidded dark sensual eyes. ‘If you want me, you know where to find me.’

       Chapter Eight

      KAT LEANT BACK against her door, her heart hammering inside her chest … You know where to find me.

      On the other side of the door she had locked. Could she really blame him for telling her to take the initiative for a change? She had made such a deal over not sleeping with Mikhail and, without ever meaning to be unfair, she had allowed him to touch her and then had withdrawn that licence at the last possible moment. But then right from the first minute she had laid eyes on Mikhail Kusnirovich, she had wanted him, wanted him more than she had ever thought she could want any man, and, unhappily for both of them, desire had decimated her common sense and control.

      And common sense and control, Kat recognised, had absolutely nothing to do with the way she felt about Mikhail. Desire was a much more primitive feeling it was an unquenchable craving that it literally hurt to deny. With impatient hands she shed the green dress and her underwear and left her clothing lying in a heap, defying her instinctive urge to put every item tidily away. For too long she had lived by a rigid set of rules and she had questioned nothing. Instead she had blindly obeyed those rules like an obedient little girl.

      Now all of a sudden she was looking back at the last conservative decade of her life and she was finally done with playing safe and even more sick of always trying to do the right thing to set a good example! What gains had her good example achieved? It hadn’t stopped Emmie from getting pregnant outside marriage any more than it had stopped Emmie’s twin, Saffy, from getting married and divorced too young.

      But it was still that conviction that she had to set a good example that had ensured that Kat hadn’t had a man in her life for more years than she cared to recall. How dared Mikhail call her a coward? Cowardice had had nothing to do with it! There had been no arbitrary decision to remain a virgin. Instead she had consciously chosen to put her sisters’ need for stability ahead of her own needs as a woman.

      But would it really have damaged her siblings so much had she enjoyed intimacy with a lover? Now her sisters were moving on, making their own lives and leaving her behind, still ridiculously ignorant for a woman of her age. Continuing such self-denial was pointless. It really didn’t matter if she only slept with Mikhail to satisfy her curiosity about sex, she thought painfully. It didn’t even matter if she loved him and hoped for more than she would ever receive from him. A mistake was a mistake and not a disaster, and she was strong enough to survive making mistakes. Never