she worshipped the ground he walked on because she didn’t know any better. She thought it was her duty to make her husband happy and if he wasn’t happy she believed it was her fault.’
‘It was probably the way she was raised. It’s hard to shake that kind of conditioning,’ Kat muttered soothingly, sensing the pain that he refused to express. There had been violence in his childhood. He had loved and pitied his mother and had been powerless to help her. She could imagine the wound of regret and frustration that that must have engraved on his soul.
‘You fight me every step of the way,’ Mikhail pointed out.
‘Maybe you would have preferred a subservient woman—’
‘No!’ The interruption was harsh, unequivocal. ‘I wouldn’t want you if you were scared of me or always trying to impress or please me.’
‘I never really understood why you do want me,’ Kat murmured truthfully.
Mikhail flipped her round and stared down at her with smouldering dark eyes. ‘You don’t need to understand.’
Long fingers were gently smoothing her upper arms, awakening her to the hunger she couldn’t restrain. He mightn’t scare her but the hunger did. It overpowered her will, made her desperate and needy, two things she always hid from him. Even now, when he simply looked at her, arousal ran like a current of fire through her body as her breasts swelled and peaked and liquid heat curled between her thighs.
‘I want you now, moyo zolotse,’ he husked and the dark rough edge of his voice slid over her senses like silk.
‘Because I upset you—’
‘I wasn’t upset—’
Her winged brows arched in disbelief at the claim. ‘You were furious!’
An appreciative laugh was wrenched from Mikhail. His face etched with amusement. He really was a breathtakingly handsome man, she conceded dizzily. He pulled her up against him, fingertips brushing a slender thigh as he lifted her skirt.
‘I was about to say that you’ll never make diplomatic status but perhaps I was wrong. You’re bare and you know how much I like that.’ Mikhail breathed a little raggedly as he scooped her off her feet and carried her back indoors.
Her face was burning with colour. She was a shameless hussy who rarely wore a full set of underwear in his radius. Three weeks as this man’s lover had changed her and she didn’t think she could ever go back to the prim and cautious woman she had been before. Although she was always waiting to see him betray some sign of boredom or lack of interest, he never seemed to get enough of her.
He settled her down on the bed and stood over her, ripping off his shirt to expose the six-pack abs that she so admired and unzipping his chino pants to reveal a very healthy erection. She reached out to touch him, stroking his thick hardness with gentle fingers, watching his eyes narrow below his lush lashes and shimmer with unashamed desire. He came down on top of her and kissed her with hungry driving urgency, his tongue stabbing between her parted with lips with an erotic skill.
He wasn’t prepared to free her for long enough to remove her dress in the proper fashion and as he attempted to impatiently extract her from its folds fabric ripped and she gasped, ‘Mikhail! I liked this dress—’
With a stifled curse he concluded the struggle by pulling it over her head and finally flung it aside. ‘Ti takaya valnuyishaya … you are so exciting. I can’t wait—’
‘We only got out of bed a couple of hours ago,’ Kat reminded him, swiping the tip of her tongue over his wide full lower lip, loving the scent and the taste of him.
‘Obviously you should have given me more attention while we were there,’ Mikhail quipped speciously, his hands cupping the soft full mounds of her breasts and rubbing her straining pink nipples, so that her breath caught in her throat and the smart answer on the tip of her tongue got lost somewhere in the passage from her brain.
Her eyes drifted closed as he kissed her again and stroked between her legs. She quivered, hips rising as he pleasured her with consummate sizzling ease, touching her where she needed to be touched, setting alight every nerve ending in her writhing body until an uncontrollable ache built at the heart of her.
‘You’re so hot and tight,’ Mikhail growled against her throat, pushing back from her to close his hands round her waist and turn her over onto her stomach. ‘I need