A Rich Man's Whim - By Lynne Graham Page 0,40

… without Stas’s warning you, you would barely have noticed my absence,’ Kat countered drily. ‘You are surrounded by loads of other women tonight—’

‘But I don’t want any of them,’ Mikhail grated without hesitation. ‘I want you.’

Kat was grimly amused by that frank admission. ‘Then you were going the wrong way about attaining me.’

‘There is no right way with you. If even you don’t know what you want, how am I supposed to deliver it?’ he shot at her with stormy impatience.

‘I know exactly what I want—I want to go home,’ Kat declared, throwing her head back, spiralling russet curls falling back from her heart-shaped face.

‘Isn’t that just typical of a woman?’ Mikhail growled. ‘You light a fire and then you run away!’

Outrage rolled through Kat’s slender body in an energising wave and she took an angry step forward. ‘I am not running away!’

‘Of course you are,’ Mikhail fielded with biting assurance. ‘You want me and I want you but evidently you can’t cope with something that simple.’

‘It’s not that simple!’ Kat launched back at him furiously, inflamed that he was confidently arguing with her when she was being plunged into ever deeper turmoil.

‘It is. You can’t handle your own sexual inhibitions. Call yourself a cougar?’ Mikhail hitched an ebony brow, his derisive amusement unconcealed at the term as applied to her. ‘You’re more like a toddler in the sex stakes. One step forward, two steps back. If I didn’t know there was no malice intended by your behaviour, I’d call you a tease—’

‘How dare you?’ Kat raked at him, enraged by his censure. ‘I warned you that I wouldn’t sleep with you!’

‘While you continue to respond to my every look and touch,’ Mikhail reminded her doggedly. ‘You’re terrified of having a normal sexual relationship with a man—that’s the only reason you’re still a virgin!’

‘No, it’s not!’ Kat argued vehemently, high spots of colour burning in her pale cheeks, green eyes raw with rage that he could dare to say such a thing to her when he still didn’t know anything about the person she was. ‘I refuse to let any man use me for sex the way men used my mother!’

‘Your … mother?’ Mikhail’s brows drew together in a frown of incomprehension because, while he might have paid to have an investigative report carried out on Kat, he had paid very little heed to her past. ‘What the hell has she got to do with anything?’

Kat blinked rapidly, almost as surprised as he was that she had voiced that comment out loud. It was based on a fear that ran all the way back to her unsettled childhood when Odette had frequently complained that as soon as a man got her into bed, he lost interest in her again. ‘I don’t want to be used just for my body. Sex is all you’re interested in,’ Kat protested stiltedly.

Mikhail vaguely appreciated that he had stumbled into one of those ‘relationship’ talks he always avoided like the plague. Obviously sex was what he was interested in, but what was wrong with that? He had always regarded sex as a normal healthy appetite until he met her and desire became an endurance test.

‘I’ve been used by many women,’ he traded with cool cynicism. ‘For sex, for money, for my connections. It happens to all of us. You can’t protect yourself from such experiences and it’s spineless to run away from them—’

‘I’m not spineless!’ Yet Kat was starkly disconcerted by his admission that he had also been used by the opposite sex for what he could offer. But she was equally disconcerted by the admission she had made to him and feared that he might be about to make the same deduction that she had for herself. Could she have made it more obvious that she wanted more than sex from him? Suddenly she was praying that he didn’t think too deeply about what she had said, for the emotions that had urged her to run far and fast in self-defence were too private and new to share with anyone, least of all him.

Scanning her pale taut face, Mikhail expelled his breath in a hiss and strode forward. In a disturbingly sudden movement, he lifted her off her startled feet and ignored her dismayed gasp to settle her down firmly on the leather sofa behind her. ‘Sit down and talk to me, then … Tell me what possible influence your mother could still have over you …’

Mikhail felt benevolent as he offered that