side. ‘Katherine Marshall. I want a background check done on her. I want to know everything there is to know about her …’
Stas stiffened. ‘Why?’ he dared as if he had not noticed that very interesting hostile exchange at the back door.
‘I want to teach her some manners,’ Mikhail grated with a brooding glance back in the direction of the house. ‘She was rude!’
Astonished by that outburst, Stas said nothing. As a rule Mikhail never got worked up over a woman. Indeed his marked indifference to the many women who pursued him and even the chosen few who shared his bed was a legend among his staff and Stas could not begin to imagine what Katherine Marshall could have done to arouse such a strong reaction in his employer.
Kat was grateful to be busy once the helicopters had gone. She stripped the beds and in the act of filling the washing machine found herself pressing the striped sheet that had been on Mikhail’s bed to her nose, catching the elusive scent of him from the cotton before she even realised what she was doing. Her face hot, she stuffed the sheet into the machine, poured powder into the dispenser and turned it on. What the heck had he done to her? She had sniffed his sheet … She was acting like a loon! It was as though Mikhail had switched on some physical connection inside her and she couldn’t switch it off again. She was embarrassed for herself.
Roger Packham called that afternoon with the firewood he had promised her and she invited him in for a cup of tea. With satisfaction he told her the outrageous sum he had charged to clear the snow for the helicopters to land that morning. ‘City boys must make easy money,’ he remarked with scorn.
‘I was grateful to get three guests out of the snow,’ Kat admitted, knowing she would use that money to stock up on food because, with the current state of her finances, getting hold of ready cash was a problem. ‘Business has been anything but brisk recently.’
‘But it must have been difficult for you to have three strange men staying here,’ Roger remarked disapprovingly. ‘Very awkward for a woman living on her own.’
‘I didn’t find it awkward,’ Kat lied with a determined smile, keen not to play up to the older man’s preferred image of her as a poor, weak little female. ‘And Emmie’s back from London, so I won’t be alone any more. She stayed in the village last night.’
Mikhail was gone and he wouldn’t be back. She could bury all those squirming, inappropriate feelings and reactions that he had aroused, forget the mortification they had caused her, forget him …
‘Don’t use it,’ Stas advised, sliding the file onto Mikhail’s desk. ‘You’ve never been the kind of man who would use this kind of stuff against a woman …’
His appetite whetted by the rare event of Stas coming over all moral and censorious, Mikhail lifted the file and flipped it open. He read the extensive information about Katherine Marshall with keen interest, noted the figures, raised a black brow in surprise and knew exactly where Stas was coming from. She was on the edge of bankruptcy, struggling to hang onto the house, a sitting duck of an easy target. Now he knew why he had never seen a smile on her face. Serious financial problems caused stress and might that explain why she had blown him off that weekend? He knew he could act on such information, employ it like a weapon against her. It was what his father would have done with an unwilling woman. Mikhail’s handsome mouth hardened, his eyes darkening, for the most unwilling woman of all had been his own mother, a living doll ultimately broken by his father’s rough handling. But he was not his father and Katherine Marshall was not an unwilling woman, simply a defiant screwed-up one, he mused impatiently.
What was it about her that had kept her image alive for him? He frowned, frustration gripping his big powerful frame, for he was suspicious of anything he didn’t immediately understand. Three weeks had passed yet he still thought about her every day, hungering for that elusive image even as more immediately available woman failed to ignite the same urgency. His stubborn desire for Kat Marshall was obsessional and impractical and that he could see that and still feel that way greatly disturbed him. He wanted his head back in a normal place