Nikolai shrugged, well aware that some men went for very much younger women. He was only thirty-three years old, but the idea of bedding a giggly teenager with no experience of men or the world repulsed him. He could only think that Jeffrey Carmichael must have been inadequate in some way to choose such an unequal partner as a wife.

‘How long have you been a widow?’ he queried.

‘Six years-’

‘So you couldn’t have been married that long.’

Abbey realised that he didn’t know as much about her as she had assumed. She told him about the sixteen-year-old drunken joyrider who had caused the accident as the wedding party travelled between church and reception.

Nikolai was sincerely shocked by the story. ‘That was tragic-particularly when your sister-in-law was seriously injured as well.’

‘It ripped the heart out of two families. Jeffrey’s parents have both passed away since then and are sadly missed.’

‘And you’re still mourning?’ Nikolai prompted.

Abbey nodded confirmation. ‘You don’t forget a love like that.’

‘But you and your husband were together such a short time.’

‘Time’s immaterial.’

‘Yet you won’t stay with me tonight, even though it’s what we both want?’

A hot rush of pink discomfiture mantling her cheeks, Abbey decided that it would be undignified arguing that point and she began to eat instead. ‘That’s different.’

Nikolai stroked the back of her clenched hand with a mocking fingertip. ‘I know. I’m not asking you to love me.’

Abbey suppressed a shiver of reaction as she recalled the hot hunger of his mouth on hers and the desire he had unleashed inside her. ‘I don’t need the warning.’

Nikolai surveyed her in frustration. ‘So you’ve already made up your mind about me?’

‘That we don’t suit? Yes,’ Abbey admitted.

‘But we share an amazing passion.’

‘That’s not important to me.’

‘It is to me.’

‘But by next week you’ll find it with someone else,’ Abbey told him with a calm insouciance that set his even white teeth on edge.

‘If I thought that I wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to persuade you to come here.’

Nikolai made a rare effort to be entertaining by finding out what interested her. He was on his very best behaviour. Checking her watch over the coffee, Abbey was taken aback when she realised just how much time had passed over the delicious meal. He was highly intelligent and excellent company and she was dismayed by how much she had contrived to enjoy herself.

‘I don’t want to be too late tonight because I have an early start in the morning.’

As she rose from behind the table Nikolai followed suit. He pulled her to him with confident hands. ‘You could have an early start with me.’

As she thought of it a tremor ran through her, sexual heat curling low in her pelvis. Desire was in her now like a dark enemy, undermining her defences. She had a dim picture of him lying on tumbled white sheets. She remembered how she had lost her head with him in the limo and knew that he would be utterly irresistible in less inhibiting circumstances. He bent his handsome dark head and took her parted lips with devouring hunger. She quivered against him, her heart racing as fast as the blood in her veins, driven by a heady combination of excitement and longing. Disturbed by the intensity of what she was feeling, she stiffened.

‘I’m going home,’ she breathed when he lifted his head again.

Paparazzi were waiting outside the building when they emerged. Cameras went off even as Nikolai’s security team made the waiting photographers back off and give them a clear passage to the glossy black Ferrari now parked in readiness by the kerb. Her colour high as demands for her name were loudly shot at her, Abbey climbed into the car with her head down, reluctant to give anyone the chance to get a decent picture of her.

‘They’ll follow us back to your apartment so that they can identify you,’ Nikolai forecast.

‘Surely not?’ But even as she spoke she saw two men jumping onto motorbikes across the road and her heart sank. ‘Is it always like this for you?’

‘I hate it,’ he breathed. ‘By tomorrow morning at least one paper will have offered you cash to talk about me.’

‘I won’t do it. Your secrets are safe with me. The colour of your dining-room wallpaper will go to the grave with me,’ she promised him.

He burst out laughing at that sally.

They were tailed all the way back to her apartment block and she didn’t object when he insisted on seeing her indoors, because even before she climbed out of his car she saw several men race across the pavement to lie in wait for them again. But when one of them aimed a camera, Nikolai’s minders stepped in and snatched it away. An altercation broke out between the men as Nikolai urged her through the entrance to the building with a protective arm splayed to her narrow spine.

‘You don’t need to come all the way upstairs,’ she said as the lift doors sprang open beside them.

An ebony brow climbed. ‘I won’t overstay my welcome,’ he declared.

He took the key out of her fingers and pressed open the front door to follow her in. ‘A model castle,’ he said in surprise, crossing the hall to peer into it.

‘It’s a doll’s house. I always wanted one when I was a child but I had to wait until I grew up and could afford to buy my own.’

A moment’s appraisal of his surroundings had been sufficient to assure Nikolai of the modern minimalist nature of her home, so the interior of the fairy-tale castle was a revelation. A red-headed miniature doll in a voluminous white lace nightdress was getting ready to climb into a curtained four-poster bed. Two tiny Siamese cats were curled up by the blazing fire. Every inch of doll’s house space was packed with diminutive antique furniture and every surface was cluttered with books, art and bric-a-brac. Although a little row of beds and a cot in the attic occupied by several weeny dolls testified to the existence of a large family of children, there wasn’t a man in the whole building. He wondered if she appreciated how much that cosy domestic fantasy revealed of her true nature.

‘Interesting,’ he remarked truthfully.

Abbey hovered. She wanted him to kiss her again and despised herself for her weakness. She could no more have walked away and denied that temptation than she could have stopped breathing. The tip of her tongue slid out to moisten her full lower lip. She saw his attention drop to her mouth and linger and she tried the tongue trick again. Even as she did it quite deliberately to attract, she was shocked and incredulous at the way she was behaving. He groaned something in his own language and hauled her to him, a long-fingered hand splaying across the swell of her bottom to gather her close. The expert dart of his tongue into the moist cavern between her lips set her on fire as much as the unmistakable hard male heat of his erection. She shivered violently against his lean muscular physique, her knees trembling under her. It had never occurred to her that wanting might hurt so much or that she might be quite so hungry for a man’s passion.

Nikolai scored the pad of his finger along the swollen curve of her lush lower lip in wonderment: he couldn’t believe she was sending him away unsatisfied. Her pupils were dilated, her breathing as fractured as his own. She was as hot for him as he was for her. ‘You burn me up,’ he confided. ‘When can I see you again?’

‘This was a one-off,’ Abbey reminded him uncomfortably.

‘You can’t be serious.’

Abbey stiffened and pulled back from him, imposing the physical separation that her every sense and urge protested. ‘I’m afraid that I am.’

Smouldering dark golden eyes assailed her evasive gaze. ‘Let me stay…’

‘No.’ Her breath snarled up in her dry throat while her imagination took erotic wing. She envisaged her body entwined in intimacy with the lean hard potency of his and her tummy contracted, tiny burning sensations stabbing low in her pelvis. All of a sudden she was a woman she didn’t know and couldn’t comprehend. Self-control had never been a problem for her and, aside of her understandable regrets over her unconsummated marriage, she had never dreamt that sex might be so important to her. But now, while she trembled in a man’s presence with the heat and damp of arousal blossoming between her legs, the extent of her own ignorance terrified her. Nikolai was tearing her inside out with sexual longing and that truth made her cringe.

He brought up his hands and used them to frame her stunning violet eyes as he gazed down at her with brooding frustration. ‘I won’t leave you alone-’

‘You must,’ she told him. ‘I don’t believe in casual sex.’

‘And that’s all that I will offer, lubimaya. I don’t have anything else to give.’

‘And what’s your excuse?’

‘Excuse?’ His smooth ebony brows drew together in a frown of incomprehension.

‘I don’t do casual sex because I believe in love and commitment.’

‘I only commit to sex.’ Only inches away from her, Nikolai tilted her back up against him. ‘And I’m very good at it.’

All of a quiver, eyes starry, cheeks pink, she stared up at him, mesmerised by a sexual charisma and presence that left her brain as befuddled as a magic spell. He kissed her again, slowly, savouring every nuance of her helpless response. His forefingers curled into the hem of her dress and trailed back up her slim thighs, lifting the fabric out of his path.

‘No, Nikolai,’ Abbey breathed, shaking from the gliding brush of his skilful fingers against her slender thighs, her mind leaping ahead of his every move to picture an even more exciting development.

‘Da, Nikolai, is what I want and need to hear,’ he murmured thickly, toying with and teasing her mouth with his lips and the edge of his even white teeth. ‘Ti takaya nezhnaya.’