Sophie Weston - The Millionaire Affair

‘What a glamorous family.’

‘Nikolai isn’t glamorous,’ corrected Tatiana. She had standards in the matter of glamour. ‘He’s an explorer. Writes books on the behaviour of primates.’

Lisa’s eyes danced. ‘A bit of a wild man, then?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ said his fond aunt. ‘Not a wild bone in his body. He’s always completely in control of himself.’

‘But?’ prompted Lisa, hearing the reservation in her voice.

‘He wants to control everyone else as well,’ announced Tatiana. ‘And then thinks you should be delighted that he has bothered to give you so much of his attention. Men.’

Lisa had no men in her family, but she had been battling her way through a man’s world ever since she first went to work for Napier Kraus. She could only sympathise.

‘Still,’ said Tatiana brightening, ‘he came over just before Christmas, so I should have another six months before he starts trying to interfere again.’

She was wrong.

Nikolai Ivanov was as reluctant to involve himself in his great-aunt’s affairs as she was to let him.

‘Oh, not London again,’ he told his grandfather.

They were walking up from the stables to the back of the château, gleaming like gold in the spring sunshine. The gentle slopes of the Tarn valley scrolled away like a medieval painting towards the river. The vine-clad landscape hadn’t changed since his ancestor had commissioned a picture of his home in the eighteenth century. It still hung in the gallery.

‘I hate London.’ Nikolai looked at the unchanging prospect and said with feeling, ‘Who’d be in a dirty, noisy city when they could be here?’

His grandfather smiled. ‘I thought London was where everyone wanted to be these days,’ he said mischievously. ‘I suspect Véronique Repiquet would have preferred to have her wedding there. She told me London was cool.’

Nikolai raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Véronique would! I, however, am thirty-six years old. I don’t chase fads any more.’

‘You seem to manage to have a pretty good time when you get there, however,’ Pauli said drily.

Nikolai did not pretend to misunderstand him. ‘Oops,’ he said, wincing.

More than one celebrity-watch magazine had published photographs of Nikolai at last year’s fashionable Christmas parties in London. He had been with a different woman in each picture, as his grandmother had pointed out acidly to her husband at the time. Pauli had just said it was nice to see that Nicki was getting over his brother’s death and enjoying himself again.

He had tactfully not told his wife about the picture which had fallen out of one of Nikolai’s Christmas cards last year. It had shown what looked like a student party in a cellar. The Countess would have been horrified by the sight of her grandson jamming at the piano, having discarded most of his clothes. Pauli, however, was more realistic, and even, as Nikolai knew, faintly envious.

‘There must be friends you would like to look up,’ Pauli pointed out now innocently. There had been a number of lively-looking girls in that picture.

Nikolai was dry. ‘Which particular friend did you have in mind?’

But his grandfather shook his head. ‘Matchmaking is your grandmother’s department, not mine,’ he said decisively. ‘All I want is to make sure that Tatiana isn’t being—er—unwise.’

‘My great-aunt Tatiana,’ said Nikolai, who had spent several strenuous hours with her and her accountant in December, and was not anxious to repeat the experience, ‘is a self-willed old woman. She has been barking for years. I should think it is a cast-iron certainty that she is being unwise.’

Pauli did not bother to deny it. ‘But you’re fond of her,’ he pointed out. ‘You wouldn’t want anyone to take advantage of her.’

Their eyes met in total mutual comprehension. Nikolai curbed his frustration.

‘You should have been in public relations,’ he said at last bitterly. ‘Or politics. All right, Pauli. I’ll go to London and check on Tatiana. What’s the story?’

Lisa did not see much of Tatiana over the next few weeks. She was busy all day; and in the evenings, proving to herself as much as her old friends that she had not left them behind with her move, she went out clubbing.

Which was why, when the doorbell rang at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, Lisa was still in bed.

‘No,’ she groaned. She pulled the pillow over her head, blocking both ears. ‘Go away.’

But it rang again, insistently. Lisa gave up. Blearily she swung her legs out of bed and felt for a robe. Failing to find one, she pulled last night’s coat round her instead.

As the bell rang for the third time she trod heavily up the stairs, muttering.

‘What is it? Don’t you know it’s Sunday?’ she growled as she flung the door open.

Nikolai Ivanov blinked. There was not much that shook him. He had a cool and generally well-justified confidence that there was nothing he had not seen before. But Lisa was a new phenomenon, even to a man of his experience.

He took an involuntary step backwards, his eyes widening in stunned silence. He would have said that he had seen all the weirder life forms, but he had never before encountered Lisa Romaine after a heavy night’s clubbing. Getting back at five in the morning she had, quite literally, taken off her clothes and tumbled into bed. As a result her hair was still full of last night’s rainbow colours, though some of the spikes had been flattened in sleep. She was also sporting panda shadows round her eyes from unstable mascara. To say nothing of her pugnacious expression.

Nikolai stared in appalled fascination. And found he could think of nothing to say.

‘Well?’ demanded Lisa.

The man on the doorstop was so tall it hurt her neck to look up at him. Squinting into the morning sun, Lisa made out high, haughty cheekbones and deep brown eyes under lazy lids. It was an arrogant face. And spectacularly handsome.

‘What do you want?’ she said, thoroughly put out.

Lisa did not like handsome men. She had learned the hard way that they tended to be more in love with themselves than any woman who happened to cross their path. It had soured her.

The handsome stranger scrutinised her for several unnerving seconds. It did nothing to mollify her.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

Lisa gave him an evil look.

‘I’m the householder. I was fast asleep.’

He looked taken aback. Then, as if in spite of himself, he looked her up and down in one comprehensive survey. His mouth twitched.

‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ he murmured.

Lisa did not like being laughed at. She ran her hand through the residual spikes and glared.

‘Either tell me what you want or go away.’

‘Well, I did want to see the householder,’ Nikolai admitted.

He should, of course, have demanded Tatiana immediately. But now the shock had worn off he found he was intrigued by this apparition. In her bare feet she came no higher than his chest. Yet she seemed quite unconscious of being at any sort of disadvantage. She might be half asleep, but she was still definitely punching her weight, he thought. He admired that.

Lisa folded her arms with exaggerated patience. It was a mistake because it made her coat gape. That revealed, if Nikolai had not already guessed it, that she was wearing nothing underneath.

He did not pretend that he hadn’t noticed. His eyes widened and he stared openly. And if he did not actually laugh aloud, he did not try to disguise his amusement.

What he did disguise—at least Nikolai hoped so—was his sudden rush of pleasure at the sight. It was unexpected, unwelcome and deeply primitive. That intrigued him, too. He was in no rush to demand Tatiana until he had explored this feeling further.