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‘No, although…’ He crouched down in front of her. ‘How about I ask you what your plans are for the future?’
‘Hugging my daughter and not letting her go for a couple of days,’ Sybella admitted honestly.
‘I was thinking a little more along the lines of your plans for me.’
He started to smile but he was serious too and she could feel her heart thumping like Dodge’s hind legs on the kitchen floor.
She thought of her kitchen at this moment, the menagerie of animals, of Fleur running riot and leading a pack of her little friends up and down the stairs like Napoleon orchestrating his Grande Armée, and tried to picture Nik amidst it all. She failed.
‘You won’t fit,’ she blurted out.
‘Lyubov, I think we’ve already tested that out.’
Sybella couldn’t help it. She snorted. ‘I mean in my kitchen,’ she said softly, worryingly.
‘I’ll build you a bigger one.’
She had a vision of her cottage writ large, squashing all the others in the row and Nik with a big hammer.
As silly as it was, it was also true. He had a way of taking over.
She knew she should be happy; instead she was beginning to panic. It was crazy.
‘We’ll take it a day at a time,’ he told her gravely. ‘There’s no schedule on this.’
She snorted again. With Nik there was always a schedule. He was the busiest man she knew and she had seen the way his grandfather had jockeyed for his attention.
God knew she wouldn’t be here if old Mr Voronov hadn’t been driven to desperate means to get his grandson down to Edbury…
Sybella had the odd thought she didn’t ever want to be in that position.
Driven to desperate means to get Nik’s attention.
She just hoped he could accept she came as a package, and she still wasn’t at all sure if Nik understood that.
It had been incredible. The boat, the time together. But it wasn’t real life.
‘One day at a time, Sybella,’ he said, leaning forward until she was drowning in his eyes and all of her worried thoughts were subsumed, and then he was kissing her and nothing else seemed to matter.
* * *
They had been home for more than four weeks and Nik had spent most of that time under her thatched roof, although he was officially living at the Hall.
It was a situation that delighted his grandfather and caused no end of gossip in the village.
But Sybella didn’t mind the talk, especially as she put her head around the door and watched Nik reading to Fleur. Her daughter was leaning against him on the sofa and had her thumb tucked inside her mouth and was deep inside the Wild Wood. Nik’s dark velvet voice lent an exotic charm to the story Sybella knew herself off by heart from listening to his grandfather.
These Voronov men had somehow colonised her daughter’s life, and for the better. Nik had made an effort to be around and was currently running his empire with a small staff and a state-of-the-art computer system he had set up at the Hall. Some evenings he could be found pacing into the night across her living room as he argued in a mixture of Russian and English via video conference with various boardrooms around the world. If Fleur wandered in he would break off to help her with some puzzle she had or answer her questions. She was a good girl and knew not to interrupt when people were on the phone, but it gave Sybella enormous satisfaction Nik didn’t view her comings and goings in her own home as an interruption to his work.
After dinner, when Fleur had been put to bed and the house locked up and Nik had done his usual round of phone calls and she’d gone over the invoicing for the refurbishment of the gatehouse, they bumped into each other in the bathroom.
Nik was shaving, and she just wanted to be with him as well as wash her face.
She shimmied in between him and the basin. He grinned and she wriggled her bottom teasingly as she wrung the warm face cloth to clean off the remains of her make-up.
‘Can you ever see yourself getting married again?’
The question took her off guard.
‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ she said truthfully.
She couldn’t help noticing what a good pair they made in the mirror. Because she was tall most men looked her in the eye, but Nik’s height and strong frame made her curvy body shape fit him, and she saw what he’d been showing her in bed: that they were a perfect physical match.
