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She must be worn out.
The first flicker of unwilling sympathy for her stirred within him.
He might not agree with the decisions she was planning, but he could appreciate how stressful it must be. He knelt and scooped her up against his chest. She made a tiny mewing sound, and her lashes fluttered. Then she burrowed in against his shoulder.
She smelt of a soft, old-fashioned scent.
Lilacs...
Yevgeny bit back a curse.
Straightening to his full six-foot, three-inch height, he strode out of the glossy white-and-gray office. At the end of the carpeted corridor a door stood ajar. With one foot, he knocked it wide to reveal what was clearly the main bedroom in the town house.
What a difference.
While white once again dominated, it wasn’t the glossy white of leather and lacquer that he’d seen in the rest of the house. No reflective glass and silver mirrors in here. This was...
Holding her against him, he let his eyes travel around.
A bed decked out with snowy-white linen was the centerpiece of this pretty, feminine room. In his peripheral vision Yevgeny caught sight of a French-style dressing table with a collection of antique, glass perfume bottles and a set of silver-backed hairbrushes. His gaze stopped on two pairs of ballet shoes suspended by faded pink satin ribbons from an ornately carved brass hook. He started to smile. On the opposite wall hung a large acrylic painting of a dancer in a style reminiscent of Degas.
It was a bedroom filled with nostalgia and romance.
Not quite what he would’ve expected, given the brisk business exterior Ella McLeod presented to the world.
He entered the bedroom.
Instantly he was enveloped in a mist of that flowery, feminine scent—the scent he was fast coming to associate with the essence of Ella. Gently he laid her down on the pristine white linen of the bed, then stepped back. He could hear her breathing. Deep and even through slightly parted pale pink lips. Pale pink lips that held him enthralled.
Just one kiss...and she could waken.
The idea was ridiculous, but it persisted. Sense warred with temptation. Until, at last, he succumbed to the tantalizing temptation and bent forward. He placed the softest of kisses on her lips then straightened, his color high, feeling unaccountably foolish.
Ella didn’t stir.
He’d gotten the legend wrong—she was not Sleeping Beauty—and instead of waking, the Ice Queen slept on.
* * *
It was already Tuesday. Keira and Dmitri had departed for Africa—without changing their minds about the baby. It had taken all Ella’s willpower not to scream at her sister that she was making the biggest mistake of her life.
To Ella’s intense relief, Holly had already survived four full days and nights, and Ella herself had managed to keep from becoming too attached to the newborn.
But this evening Deb was leaving to go to a friend’s housewarming party. The party had been planned long before the agency had sent her, and Ella waved aside her apologies.
“Go, enjoy yourself,” she said. Holly was sleeping peacefully in her cot upstairs. The speaker for the baby monitor lay on top of a pile of magazines on the low, wide coffee table beside the collection of shopping bags that had been delivered not long ago.
With Deb gone, Ella shut the front door and took advantage of the solitude. She was busily manhandling the huge, cut-pine Christmas tree into the corner of the living room, when the doorbell chimed.
She bit back a curse. No choice but to set the tree down...and undo all the progress she’d made in the past few minutes.
Impatient, she wrenched open the door.
Yevgeny stood on the doorstep, every inch the city billionaire, immaculate in a dark, conservative business suit and a white shirt that still managed to look crisp at the end of the day.
“May I come in?”
Before she could respond, he’d brushed past her. Irritation spiked through her at his high-handedness.
Her voice heavy with irony, she muttered, “Sure you can.”
He turned and grinned. “Thank you.”
The flash of that wolfish smile, the gleam of wicked laughter in his eyes, indicated that he was fully mindful of her irritation. Ella couldn’t halt the unfurling awareness that blossomed through her, starting deep in her chest, near her heart and spreading outward in a glow of warmth. Like a flower following the path of the sun.
The man was dynamite.
And she didn’t even like him. He was obnoxious, arrogant, inconsiderate. So why the melting heat in the pit of her stomach? Why wasn’t she recoiling? What on earth was wrong with her? Didn’t she have any sense of self-preservation? Ella drew in a deep breath and was instantly flooded with the woody aroma of his aftershave.
God help her if he ever set himself the task of trying to charm her—she’d be in serious trouble!
