For a moment she had recoiled in surprise from the sharp pain of his entrance. Only then did she appreciate why it had hurt and why he was bewildered. ‘It was never consummated,’ she told him grudgingly.

Nikolai studied her in frank wonderment. ‘Even before the wedding? You mean you never once had sex…? That’s crazy.’

In the heat of the passion that had brought her to bed with a man she barely knew it seemed crazy to Abbey as well. But she understood that she wasn’t thinking straight just then. Even as her mind was clearing her body was quickening with renewed excitement as Nikolai sank into her again and the delicious friction of his movements sent a wave of irresistible pleasure coursing through her.

‘Oh…’ she moaned, her body rising to meld with his in helpless response.

Nikolai was making a real effort to be gentle, which was a new departure for him. He was stunned by the awareness that he was her first lover and eager to match whatever expectations she might have of him.

‘Don’t stop,’ Abbey urged, frustrated by the feeling that she was reaching for some ultimate reaction that was still being denied her.

‘You feel like satin and velvet. I don’t ever want to stop,’ Nikolai growled, ravishing her with long, skilled strokes.

The exquisite pleasure rose to a delirious tormenting peak that made Abbey writhe beneath him. Her whole being was engulfed by the driving need to satisfy the ache he had evoked. Her heart pounding, she surrendered to the erotic pulsing heat of his driving body. When the unbearable tension and excitement gave way to an ecstatic shuddering convulsion of extreme pleasure, she screamed. Afterwards she fell into a cocoon of sweet drowning satiation, her limbs weighted to the bed by exhaustion.

But her mind was in no way able to practise the same inaction. Nikolai achieved the same pleasure with a shuddering growl and she snaked away from him in the same instant, rejection and distaste assailing her in a powerful wave. She could not believe what she had done. The horror of having slept with Nikolai Arlov held her fast even as the last tiny tremors of sexual satisfaction rippled through her. Not only had she betrayed everything she had ever believed in, she had betrayed the pure, precious love she had shared with Jeffrey. And she was genuinely appalled.

Thrust away from the embrace of her warm female body at the ultimate wrong moment, Nikolai attempted to urge her back to him. ‘Come here, lubimaya.’

Abbey viewed him with hostile smoky blue eyes. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she yelled at him in immediate rejection of his touch. Pushing him away, she scrambled off the bed at speed to snatch up the dressing gown lying on a nearby chair and envelop her slim body in its folds.

Nikolai sat up. Rage was roaring through him like a bushfire. The violence of her rejection stung like an acid bath stripping his skin from his bones. ‘I assume this is a case of remorse after the event.’

Abbey was trembling with distress. She flung him a furious glance. ‘What else? I’d like you to leave now.’

‘Isn’t it a little late for that? We have just made love,’ Nikolai reminded her drily.

‘And it was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made!’ Abbey launched at him wrathfully.

‘No, it was a normal, natural event for a passionate woman,’ Nikolai contradicted levelly. ‘It’s not a sin to want or enjoy sex.’

Abbey was outraged that he had the nerve to stick around and argue with her and, worst of all, throw her enjoyment back in her teeth. She wanted him gone. She wanted to shower, change the bedding, eradicate every piece of evidence that he had ever been in her apartment, never mind her bed. She hated him, but she hated herself even more.

‘I was weak and you took advantage of that. Well, what else could I expect from a guy like you? A guy who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing!’

Nikolai sprang upright, six feet three inches of lean, bronzed, magnificent nudity and an arresting sight in her prettily decorated pastel bedroom. ‘How dare you speak to me like this? You invited me into your bed. You wanted me…’

Abbey could not bear that reminder. Her face burning with embarrassment and remorse, she stared at Jeffrey’s photo by the bed and her sense of shame almost choked her. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for wanting you and betraying everything I believe in.’

Nikolai had already had more than enough without having that assurance hurled at him. He pulled on his boxers and gathered up the rest of his clothes without ceremony before striding out of the room and across the hall to the bathroom. He had never been so offended. His anger was like a big black stone inside him, weighing him down. It had not occurred to him that she might be a drama queen with no manners. It had certainly not occurred to him that he might have the best sex of a lifetime with such a woman. A virgin as eager for him as he had been for her, who had decided to be ashamed of what they had shared rather than proud of it. It was not a female reaction that had ever come his way before. Worse still, he had only to summon her face into his mind to feel his body surge and harden with fierce hunger for her again.

Remorse attacked Abbey while he was gone. She had responded to his advances and slept with him. Her regrets were not his fault, but, although intellectually she accepted that, she also sensed that Nikolai was intelligent enough to have known how she would feel and yet he had still taken what was on offer. She was in the bedroom doorway when he reappeared.

‘I know you don’t understand how I feel,’ she breathed tautly. ‘But I once loved and was loved by someone very special and, tonight, I feel I betrayed that bond with an intimacy that was meaningless and empty.’

Although Nikolai had never sought meaning in sex, he was more insulted than ever by a declaration that once again demoted him to second-rate status and he sent her a sardonic appraisal. ‘Your husband has been dead for six years. You should have moved on by now.’

‘It’s not that easy.’

‘And your deifying the dead won’t make the process any easier,’ Nikolai told her drily.

‘I don’t think you’ve ever loved anyone.’

Nikolai thought about that. ‘No woman. I loved my grandfather,’ he admitted in a rare burst of confidence, ‘but your grief strikes me as obsessive.’

‘That’s my business,’ Abbey told him defensively.

‘As you say.’ Nikolai opened the door. ‘Dubroynochi, goodnight,’ he drawled softly before he pulled the door closed behind him.

Abbey wrapped her arms round herself in the silent hall and snatched in a charged breath. She was still in shock. Indeed her entire body was quivering uncomfortably in the aftermath of the passion they had shared. A passion such as she had never dreamt existed, and her body ached from it. She wondered why she felt so much more alone than usual and what it was about Nikolai that got to her to such an extent. She found him amazingly attractive and that was incredibly hard to cope with. Jeffrey had never desired her to that extent. It was a disloyal thought and even thinking it bothered her, but Abbey believed in being honest with herself. Jeffrey might have loved her enough to make her his wife, but when it came to the physical side of their relationship he had been more lukewarm than passionate. Perhaps she had been the more highly sexed of the two of them, she reasoned frantically, but her sense of guilt simply deepened. She barely slept a wink that night.

The next morning she received a phone call from a well-known tabloid offering her money to talk about her date with Nikolai. She turned it down with disdain. It was an unpleasant surprise to be greeted by a crowd of paparazzi and cameras when she drove out of the underground car park to head to work. Her face was hot enough to fry eggs on while she wondered if the journalists appreciated that Nikolai had got her into bed on the first date, fully living up to his notorious reputation with women.

When she arrived at Support Systems, two rather grim-looking men were striding out of the building. ‘Who were those men just leaving?’ Abbey asked, walking into her brother’s office.

Drew was pale and he shot her a troubled glance. ‘Potential customers. I didn’t like the look of them, so we won’t be taking them on.’

‘They looked like bouncers.’

‘Oddly enough, that’s pretty much what they are. They wanted us to hire more security staff for a West End club-not our field of expertise, I explained.’

‘No, indeed, but then we do say in our literature that we’ll have a go at any task that the customer needs done,’ Abbey pointed out.

Her brother frowned. ‘We have to draw the line somewhere. By the way, you have an appointment in an hour with Nikolai Arlov-’

‘Nikolai? What does he want?’ Abbey gasped in dismay.

‘I haven’t a clue, but hopefully he wants to put some lucrative work our way. Why are you so shocked? I understand that you dined with him last night.’

‘Yes.’ But Abbey was outraged by the idea that Nikolai still had the nerve to try to make her do what she didn’t want to do. He had to be well aware that she never wanted to see him again in this lifetime, so why set up an appointment with her? Last night she had dined with him purely because of his donation to Futures. Too late had she recognised the trap she had fallen into in allowing him to effectively buy her indulgence and her time. That had given him entirely the wrong message. Just how had she failed to appreciate what a ruthless bastard she was dealing with?

‘Do we really need more work?’ Abbey pressed.

‘Very much so,’ her brother emphasised.

Abbey went into her own office, where her assistant asked her to call back a catering firm that had been in touch about an unpaid bill. Abbey frowned, for she had assumed that the bill had been settled weeks earlier, and went to check Support Systems’ bank statements. Her skin turned clammy and shock brought up goose bumps on her flesh when she saw the parade of minus signs on the first statement that warned that the company was running on a substantial overdraft. Naturally, she knew that they had an agreed overdraft facility, for occasionally clients were slow to pay, but she had not been aware of quite how tight matters were in the financial field.