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“Katie.” He caught her wrist, pressed a kiss into her palm. “I won’t let him have you.”
“There’s
no way out, Kaz. I told you, my mother is dying. I can’t tell her the truth. It would hurt her more than you can imagine. She thinks I will be happy and cared for and—”
Kaz captured her lips in a long, deep kiss.
And did the one thing he could do to make them both forget, if only for a little while.
He made love to his Katie, his Ekaterina, until she wept with joy in his arms.
* * * *
They showered together, and had breakfast at the little round table by the window. Then Katie put on what she had worn last evening—the heavy white fisherman’s sweater, black tights, black boots. She tied her hair back in a ponytail.
She looked as if she were eighteen, Kaz thought, and his heart clenched like a fist.
He put on what he’d been wearing yesterday: suit, shirt, tie, shiny black shoes. The doorman hailed a taxi that took them downtown, to Kaz’s Gramercy Square penthouse. They held hands through the twenty-minute cab ride, held hands as Kaz hurried Katie through the lobby, and when they got into the elevator, he hauled her into his arms and kissed her.
He linked his hands at the base of her spine.
“You are,” he said softly, “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
She laughed and leaned back in his arms. “Liar.”
“Never about you,” he said, with such seriousness that her smile faded. “You’re beautiful, Katie. Everything about you is beautiful.”
Her smile was all a man could ask for.
“And you,” she said, “you are—you are wonderful. You are all that I ever hoped—all that I ever dreamed—”
He kissed her. A very good thing, she thought, because she’d come close to saying something impossible.
She’d almost told him that she’d hoped and dreamed of finding a man like him.
A man to whom she could give her heart.
* * * *
Kaz changed into jeans, a navy turtleneck sweater, a leather bomber jacket and well-worn Tony Lamas. At the last second, he recalled that he’d turned off his phone, so he switched it on, scrolled through message after message.
He answered the ones that had to do with business.
And hesitated over the ones from Sardovia.
His jaw tightened.
By now, they would know that Zach had handed responsibility for Ekaterina to him.
He called up the first message. He was right. It was from the minister of state, reminding him that he had to “deliver” her to him on Christmas Eve.
Deliver. As if she were a package, not a woman.
Kaz deleted the message. He deleted all of them. He cleared the phone of everything from Sardovia, turned the damn thing off and dumped it on his night table.
Then he walked out of his bedroom, took Katie in his arms, and spun her in circles until she squealed.
“How do you feel about snow?”
