‘You’re falling asleep.’ Nikolai sighed, bending down to lift her up into his arms and carry her back to her bed.

‘It’s been a long night,’ Abbey mumbled, settling into the mattress like a rock embedding in soft sand. And that was her very last memory until she wakened the next morning.

Nikolai watched her sleep. It was a small bed and he didn’t want to disturb her when she was so tired. He knew he should have told her what had happened at the party. He knew he should have explained, but his news would keep until tomorrow when she had recovered the energy to listen and stay awake.

Having dimly assumed that Nikolai was staying the night, Abbey was surprised to open her eyes and discover that she was alone. She had slept like a log but something had woken her up. The doorbell? The phone? She flinched when both went off almost simultaneously. She scrambled out of bed, picked up the cordless phone and threw on her dressing gown to answer the door. She was too flustered and sleepy to check the spy hole first and it was an unpleasant shock to find a paparazzo brandishing a newspaper outside and asking her for a comment.

‘A comment on what?’ she queried as she pressed the answer button on the phone just to stop it ringing.

The man held up the newspaper page right in front of her eyes. Abbey put out a hand and snatched it out of mid-air to peer down at the photo with incredulous force.

‘Don’t answer the door until you’ve talked to me,’ Nikolai told her over the phone. ‘There’s a crazy story in the papers this morning.’

It was a photo of Nikolai on a balcony with a woman and the woman had her arms wrapped round him. Abbey recognised Ophelia Metaxis’s golden curls and her white-and-silver evening gown. The picture must have been taken with a telephoto lens from the garden the night before. ‘You bastard,’ Abbey whispered strickenly and she pressed the phone’s disconnect phone button with violent force.

‘Would you like to talk?’ the paparazzo asked hopefully.

Abbey slammed the door in his face. The phone was ringing again. She banged the disconnect button again. What an idiot she had been to trust Nikolai, to assume he was innocent rather than guilty, to refuse to accept that the most obvious explanation was usually the right one! Maybe Lysander and Ophelia Metaxis had one of those trendy open relationships she had read about, for she could not see any other explanation for Lysander’s complacent attitude to the sight of his wife blatantly seeking out another man’s company. Particularly a man with a reputation as notorious as Nikolai Arlov’s. She showered and dressed quickly, selecting a tailored black pinstripe suit from her wardrobe and teaming it with a purple fitted top. She had to knot a scarf round her neck to hide the bruise there.

Two members of Nikolai’s security team were waiting in the foyer downstairs to clear her passage through the crush of camera men waiting outside. The limo driver handed her a phone before she could even get into the car. It was Nikolai once more. ‘Don’t you cut me off again,’ he warned her with scorching emphasis.

In the mood that Abbey was in, that order was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. She depressed the disconnect button with a punitive finger and passed the phone back. There were no further calls during the drive to his apartment. Abbey was in a rage that she continued to stoke higher and higher. Anger was a welcome block for the pain that she didn’t want to acknowledge or experience. Had Nikolai left her last night to meet up with Ophelia somewhere?

Why hadn’t he just told her it was over? The affair, the pretence, everything! That was the problem, Abbey conceded fiercely, the pretence that they were engaged in a serious relationship had expanded until it had taken over her entire life and convinced even her that it was real. But Nikolai dealt more in fact than fantasy and she had to face the truth-the messy public ending to their affair was very much Nikolai, who had not hesitated to ditch his last lover at his late father’s memorial service. She supposed the truth was that he didn’t care; he only cared about what he wanted. And yet, last night, Nikolai had seemed to care about her and her family very much, a little voice reasoned at the back of her head. He had seemed sincere.

But then Jeffrey had always seemed sincere, too, Abbey conceded wretchedly, bitterly. Her late husband had lied to her and cheated on her and she hadn’t suspected a thing! Obviously she was not very good at sussing out liars. Possibly she was not very good at understanding men either. But she was determined not to allow another man to make a fool of her. She was going to tell Nikolai what she thought of him. How shabby could a guy be? Disappearing with the hostess at a very well-attended party? If he had wanted out, he should have said before it hit the newspapers and humiliated her.

Nikolai was in the hall when she arrived. Her gaze lit on him like the dart of a flame and then cloaked as she mentally shut a door against his stunning dark good looks. ‘You have a very hot temper, lubimaya,’ Nikolai drawled. ‘Think before you lose it because Lysander and Ophelia are here and I do not think I will easily forgive you for making us both look stupid.’

Abbey was thrown badly off balance by that opening speech, for she could think of no circumstance that could reasonably explain the presence of both Lysander and Ophelia Metaxis at his apartment at nine o’clock in the morning. ‘What on earth is going on?’ she demanded shakily.

Nikolai closed a hand over hers. ‘Ophelia and I have just had DNA tests taken. We suspect that her mother may also have been mine,’ he shared tautly. ‘If it’s true, it’s a discovery that would mean a great deal to me.’

Abbey’s fingers were almost crushed in the tense grip of his. That astonishing statement plunged her into a state of bewilderment. ‘DNA tests for siblingship?’ she prompted. ‘You think that you and Ophelia Metaxis might be related by blood?’

‘We hope so. Lysander and Ophelia tracked me down. Lysander came to see me yesterday and shared the evidence he had found. Together we were able to piece together the most likely explanation for the events that culminated in my birth over thirty years ago.’

‘You think that Ophelia may be your sister?’ Abbey’s brain was functioning extremely slowly. It was a challenge to take on board any facts which, on first hearing, struck her as beyond the bounds of credibility. ‘But surely that’s very unlikely?’

‘Before my grandfather put my father out of his life, he apparently used his influence to get his son a junior diplomatic position in the embassy in London. I was not aware of the fact that for several years my father and his family lived here. During that period he sent my half-sister, Feodora, to an exclusive English girls’ school,’ Nikolai advanced as he walked her into the elegant drawing room with its spectacular views. ‘That’s where Feodora met Ophelia’s mother, Cathy.’

Ophelia Metaxis sprang up from a sofa with the bubbling energy that characterised her and extended a photograph to Abbey. ‘I found this photo in my mother’s personal effects.’

Abbey stared down at the black-and-white snap of a strikingly handsome man who bore a strong resemblance to Nikolai. ‘Is this your father?’ she prompted, turning it over and striving without success to read the name scrawled on the back of it.

‘Yes. Kostya Arlov,’ Nikolai supplied. ‘Feodora was willing to confirm certain facts. She and Cathy became friends, and Feodora twice had Cathy to stay with her in London. My father had few moral scruples. He wouldn’t have thought twice about seducing a schoolgirl. She was only seventeen…’

‘And very impulsive,’ Ophelia piped up wryly.

‘But this long after the event we can only guess at what happened between them. Feodora remembered feeling envious of the attention her father gave to Cathy and she was able to confirm that Cathy disappeared from school several months later, supposedly suffering from glandular fever. Of course she had fallen pregnant. I was born in a private clinic and handed straight over to my father,’ Nikolai continued. ‘But his father-my grandfather-was not prepared to allow me to be adopted out of the family.’

‘My maternal grandmother, Gladys, would never have allowed my mother to keep an illegitimate child. The whole matter was hushed up and buried, and I’m afraid my mother died a long time ago,’ Ophelia explained. ‘I only found out that I might have an older brother recently and it’s taken a great deal of detective work to get us this far.’

‘We have already discovered that, like Ophelia, I, too, share our mother’s rare blood group,’ Nikolai murmured, closing a hand to Abbey’s spine and drawing her beneath the shelter of his arm.

‘What must you have thought when you saw that photo of us on the balcony last night?’ Ophelia commented with a grimace.

‘You were rather inconsiderate last night,’ Lysander Metaxis scolded his wife with a frown.

Ophelia gave Abbey an apologetic look. ‘I’m sorry, Abbey. I was gasping to meet Nikolai and too impatient to be polite about it. Then once I got him all to myself, I got very emotional telling him about Mum and my sister, Molly, and I started to cry and he hugged me.’

‘I don’t think I’ll tell you what I thought,’ Abbey confided, drawn by Ophelia’s natural warmth, her own defensive rigidity evaporating. ‘I knew something was going on between all of you-’

‘And Abbey always thinks the worst of me,’ Nikolai imparted above her head.

‘No, of course I don’t,’ she argued for the sake of appearances, but she knew his accusation was the truth.

‘We’ll have the DNA results in a couple of days,’ Lysander Metaxis pronounced with a note of finality.