Nik didn’t know what to do with that. ‘No, you’re not,’ he said.
She shoved him. ‘You’re not supposed to say that.’
He nudged up her chin to look at her, so incredibly lovely with her light-in-a-forest eyes and her pale pre-Raphaelite curls tumbling over her shoulders and those gorgeous breasts, and he knew in that moment what all men knew: they would never understand women.
‘Listen, Lady Godiva, my interest in fairies ended around about the age of four. I want a woman in my bed, and I want her soft and warm and capable of giving as good as she gets—in and out of bed. Your Simon was young, yes?’
‘Twenty-two when we got married.’ Sybella’s voice was soft and she was looking at him hopefully, as if he might say the very thing that was going to fix all this for her.
Nik wasn’t so sure. He knew from personal experience how deep resentments could shoot those roots when they attached young. Rejection by your parents had to leave deep fault lines, and Sybella had just admitted hers. To him. As if he was worth her trust. But to respond in kind was something he couldn’t do.
So he took hold of the surface problem and strangled the life out of it for her.
‘I’d pretty much sussed it by twenty-two,’ he said, meeting her eyes, ‘but it can take some men a lifetime. Whatever package it comes in, Sybella, it’s the woman inside who makes you notice her, who reduces you to an idiot and has you promising all kinds of things just to get her naked.’
Her mouth had fallen open slightly in the same way it had when he’d swooped her up into his arms earlier this evening and carried her up here.
Then her eyes began to kindle.
‘You didn’t promise me anything,’ she said in a low voice.
He grinned at her. ‘You should have asked, dushka.’
She was clearly trying not to smile.
‘You’re just saying that because you think it will get you laid again.’
‘Da, there is that.’
The wounded vulnerability in her eyes had been replaced by the light he’d seen earlier.
That light was like a lighthouse beam guiding him right back to her and all that female lusciousness deep down she must know drove men mad.
‘So how about it?’
And her mouth, which had become an instrument of both torture and pleasure to his body, curved up in a smile, carving that dimple deeply.
Bogu, he wanted to kiss that sweet mouth.
But she tucked her hand behind his neck again and brought his mouth down to where she wanted it, on her breasts.
Yeah, he’d died.
This was heaven.
CHAPTER NINE
SOMETHING GAVE A CRACK and the bed lurched to one side and then another crack and the headboard came away from the iron frame.
Nik sprang out of bed and, saying something in Russian, went around and checked out the situation.
‘Should I get out?’ she asked, not wanting to move in case it all collapsed.
‘Hold still,’ he grunted. ‘I’ll fix this.’
She gave a soft shriek as he dislodged the mattress base from the rest of the frame and Sybella found herself staring up at a ceiling that was significantly farther away than it had been a moment ago.
Nik carried the iron base in its two pieces out into the hall and leaned it up against the wall. Sybella watched him, craning her neck.
‘You don’t have to go, do you?’ she called. ‘The bed still works.’
Sybella screwed shut her eyes. The bed still works? Why didn’t she say I still work and be done with it?
When Nik came back into the room he sized up the bed and then lowered the lean strength of his magnificent male body down beside her.
He shifted on the mess of twisted sheets and Sybella was suddenly very conscious of the lack of space in general, of how absurd this situation was in her small bedroom where she’d spent the last six years being nothing more than a harried working mum with no head space for what had happened here now.
No, space at the moment was definitely at a premium.
His eyes were like dark onyx in the available light from the steadily burning lamp, and Sybella could see herself reflected in them but in a way she’d never really viewed herself before. This wanton creature who had revelled in her seduction of this powerful man, whom she’d pretty much brought to his knees—literally given a couple of the positions he’d held her in.