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She took another step back into her house and began to close her door. But he hadn’t finished with her yet.
‘Anything more you’d care to tell me before the lawyers get involved?’
She halted and then stuck her head out again. ‘What do you mean “lawyers”?’
‘I seem to have an echo,’ he observed.
She pinned her lips together and those hazel eyes fixed pensively on him as she stepped reluctantly outside again.
‘I—I hardly think lawyers are necessary.’
‘Fortunately that decision is mine.’
Awful man. Why was he so set on blaming her for everything? And why was she still finding it difficult not to drink in every last masculine inch of him?
Sybella tried to find something reasonable to say but what popped out was, ‘Why are you down here bothering people?’
He leaned in a little closer.
‘I told you,’ he said in that fathom-deep voice. ‘I am visiting my grandfather.’
Sybella could have told him right now it didn’t feel that way. After the events of last night it felt as if he were visiting her! For purposes that felt entirely too hormonal on her behalf.
‘Well, perhaps if you’d bothered to turn up before now you’d know what was going on here,’ she threw back at him a little desperately, ‘instead of stomping around like a big bully and making everyone go through lawyers.’
‘Given I’m based in St Petersburg, turning up isn’t that simple.’
‘Is that where you live?’ The question just slipped out, openly curious, and Sybella knew she’d given herself away. Her stupid interest in him.
She could feel the heat rushing into her face.
‘Da,’ he said, and there was a silence during which Sybella remembered how much she’d told him about her life last night. The intimacy that had created.
‘Well, maybe it isn’t so easy for you to get down here regularly,’ she admitted reluctantly, ‘but your grandfather needs family around him at this time of his life.’
His eyes iced over. ‘My grandfather is well taken care of.’
‘Is he? Do you know he doesn’t like his nurse? He doesn’t trust her.’
Nik frowned. ‘He hasn’t said anything to me.’
‘Perhaps if you visited once in a while you could talk to the people around him who matter, not the people you’re employing, and you might have a better idea of what’s really going on instead of making up these stupid stories and—and picking on me!’
‘And you’re one of the people who matter?’ he asked.
‘I don’t matter, but I am here. I do see what goes on.’
Nik didn’t like the picture she painted, that his grandfather was unhappy, that in some way he was failing.
Only her hands had migrated to her hips again, and he was finding it difficult not to be distracted by the way her chest lifted every time she made her point and the button holding back the mystery of her cleavage strained.
‘Here’s what I think, Mrs Parminter. You’ve been using my grandfather’s kindness to benefit yourself.’
‘Yes, you would think that.’
Sybella glared back at him.
The truth was so much more simple and delightful than anything this man could make up in his suspicious mind.
His grandfather had forged one of those charming inter-generational friendships with her small daughter.
Sybella had watched a lonely and reserved man come to life in the company of her forthright, imaginative Fleur, and the sight of Mr Voronov’s white head bent over a book with Fleur’s small dark one as they read together made every Thursday afternoon a treasure.
Fleur didn’t come easily to reading. She was a child who wanted to be out of doors, climbing trees, chasing cows and getting muddy. All the things possible because they lived in the country. She was, in short, very much like her late father.
Simon had always struggled with reading comprehension and he wouldn’t want his daughter to go through that.
His own father shared the same difficulty.
Mr Voronov was a godsend.
Furthering her career had been the last thing on her mind.
But she wasn’t telling this man any of that.
She’d told him too much in her stupid confessional last night.
