nonsense Lara spouted to you? I was worried sick about you!’ Mikhail bit out furiously. ‘I knew you were upset and—’
Kat lifted a russet brow and turned to him again, hating him at that minute, convinced she knew exactly why he was behaving the way he was. ‘How could you know I was upset? You got a spy hotline to my brain or something? I wasn’t upset. Naturally I was surprised, rather disgusted, in fact,’ she confided with growing vigour. ‘And I needed some time to myself—’
‘You needed time to yourself to think about that poison like you needed a hole in the head!’ Mikhail shot back at her with lethal derision.
‘Don’t you dare shout at me!’ Kat shrieked back at him.
Sudden smouldering silence fell. Mikhail breathed in deep and slow, his broad chest expanding. ‘I didn’t intend to shout.’
‘When you’ve been accused of infidelity, bellowing like a bull in a china shop is not a good idea,’ Kat informed him curtly.
‘Wrongly accused,’ Mikhail fired back at her, his stunning dark eyes scorching hot with annoyance. ‘That is the crucial fact.’
‘Mikhail …’ Kat swallowed hard and collected her churning thoughts, unhappiness bowing her shoulders like a giant weight as she accepted that the scene could not be avoided. ‘Lara knew that we didn’t spend that last night together before I was supposed to leave The Hawk. She must’ve been with you that night to know that.’
‘Wrong!’ Mikhail framed grittily. ‘She was standing on the deck outside the office below us eavesdropping on our last exchange over dinner that night when you told me you wanted to sleep alone. So, if that’s your only piece of evidence against me, you’re on a losing streak!’
Kat’s lashes fluttered in confusion. ‘Are you sure that’s how she knew we were sleeping apart?’
‘How the hell else could she have known?’ Mikhail swore suddenly in Russian and shifted his hands as he moved towards her. ‘Kat, you saw me at three in the morning that same night and I was still in my own room,’ he reminded her.
‘Yes, but—’
Mikhail withdrew a mobile phone from his pocket and pressed several buttons. ‘Watch this …’ he urged. ‘Stas was clever enough to record Lara screaming at me …’
Kat focused on the screen and saw a flurry of blurred movement and heard a noise. The blur became Lara, blonde hair whipping round her enraged face and she was shouting. ‘Why didn’t you want me? You could have had me! What’s wrong with you that you didn’t want me? She’s old, she’s past it! It’s an insult. I’m young and beautiful—how could she be the one you move into your home?’
Kat was transfixed. There were another few sentences of distraught ranting from Lara before she suddenly appreciated that a camera was recording her tantrum and she launched herself at Stas in a vitriolic fury, whereupon the recording came to a sudden telling halt.
Mikhail switched it off. ‘Do you want to see it again?’ he enquired smoothly.
‘No …’ Kat’s admission was small, her face heavily flushed with chagrin. She had listened to a vain and immature hysteric’s fantasy and swallowed her ridiculous lies as solid fact. Her legs were wobbly and she sank down on the edge of the bed with ‘old, past it!’ still ringing unpleasantly in her ears.
‘Ark heard everything she said to you, his attention drawn by the fact that she called you a rude word in Russian,’ Mikhail explained. ‘He informed me and I confronted her and, as you saw, she went crazy. There was a lot more that Stas didn’t manage to record. She was jealous of you and furious that I didn’t find her attractive but the situation that developed today was still my fault.’
‘How was it your fault?’ Kat asked limply, shot from the conviction that he was an unfaithful rat to the conviction that she had misjudged him at such speed that her head was still spinning. She felt dizzy and bewildered and stupid, much as though a huge rock had landed on her from a height.
‘Lara came on to me when I first hired her. That’s happened to me many times and I didn’t consider it sufficient grounds to sack her.’
Kat’s eyes were wide with consternation at the news. ‘You … didn’t?’
‘I made it clear I wasn’t interested and as a rule that is sufficient to bring an end to such behaviour, but Lara is extremely vain about her own attractions and her resentment grew when you came into my life. I