A Rich Man's Whim - By Lynne Graham Page 0,59

move easy for her by sending professional packers to Birkside. Her belongings and the pieces of furniture that Emmie didn’t want were now stored in a barn on the estate for her to go through at her leisure. Emmie was living in the farmhouse now, drawing up plans to open a business while earning a living from the pedestrian job she had found locally. But on her days off, Emmie regularly got on the train and met up with her sister in London for a shopping trip. On this particular occasion the sisters were looking for a dress for Kat to wear to Luka Volkov’s wedding.

‘Kat?’ Emmie persisted.

‘Look, Mikhail’s only thirty. He’s got years and years ahead of him when he can choose to have a family and naturally he’s not in any hurry,’ Kat said lightly.

‘But if he loves you—’

‘I don’t think he loves me. I don’t think I’m in a for-ever-and-ever relationship with him,’ Kat confided truthfully, lifting the silver dress off the hook and heading gratefully off to pay for it with one of the string of credit cards that Mikhail had insisted she accepted from him.

Even so, Kat disliked feeling like a kept woman and she would have preferred to look for employment. But Mikhail wanted her to be available when he was free and able to travel if need be and there was no way she would be able to manage that feat and him and his vast Georgian home and even larger staff there if she had a job to go to every day. She had had to ask herself which was more important: her pride and independence or her love. And love had won because when Kat wasn’t being tormented by her various sisters’ awkward questions about her relationship with Mikhail, she was deliriously happy, certainly much happier than she had ever thought she could be. He was the sun, the moon and the stars for her, but she knew that she had to accept that outside the bounds of marriage many such relationships eventually came to an end.

Her phone buzzed. It was Mikhail.

‘Meet me at the office and we’ll go for lunch, milaya moya,’ he suggested huskily, his dark deep drawl sending a responsive tremor down her spine.

Kat smiled into the phone, delighted that he was so eager to see her. He had stayed in his city apartment the night before and she had missed him. Possibly he had missed her as well, she reasoned with satisfaction, for otherwise he would have been willing to wait until he got back to the hall later that evening to see her.

Emmie gave her a stern look. ‘He owns you … that’s what I don’t like.’

Kat’s eyes widened in dismay. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘You’re like … addicted to him,’ Emmie pronounced with unhidden distaste and disapproval. ‘Even Topsy noticed that weekend she stayed with you that when Mikhail enters the room, you can’t see anyone else but him.’

‘I do love him and I don’t think it does Topsy any harm to see that I care deeply for the man I’m living with,’ Kat said gently, wishing she knew more about the background to Emmie’s pregnancy, for with every week that passed Emmie seemed to be becoming more of a man hater.

A limo whisked Kat to Mikhail’s London headquarters. She was accompanied by Ark, Stas’ kid brother. Mikhail, from Kat’s point of view, appeared to be obsessed by the idea that she might be mugged or attacked and had insisted she accepted Ark’s presence when she was out in public. Only when she had recognised that that risk was a source of very genuine concern for him had she finally agreed, but she often felt sorry for Ark, reduced to hanging around bored while she shopped or sat gossiping over lengthy coffee sessions with her sisters.

Mikhail was in a meeting when Kat arrived and she stowed her shopping by the wall and sat down in Lara’s office to wait while Ark hovered in the corridor.

Lara glided across the room to greet her with a rather tight smile of welcome and bent down to study more closely the emerald pendant that Kat wore. ‘May I see it?’ the other woman prompted politely.

Kat flushed with self-consciousness and nodded uneasy agreement as Lara minutely examined the emerald. She guessed that the other woman probably thought the pendant was far too ostentatious to wear out on a shopping trip and Kat could actually have agreed with her on