‘Nik.’ It came out with a load of longing she’d rather he didn’t hear. She swallowed, revised her plan. The plan she was trying to formulate as he stood there looking more gorgeous than she even remembered. The best she could come up with was, ‘I didn’t invite you up here!’
‘Bit late for that.’ He was looking at the bed. ‘We’ll get that shifted. You might want to get dressed and come down and supervise Fleur. She’s trying to catch those damn rabbits. I think I let one out.’
‘Oh, Lord!’ Sybella dropped the towel—the hand towel, not the bath sheet—and went to hurry past him but he caught her around the waist with those big hands of his.
‘One more thing,’ he said as she looked up in astonishment, her body instantly melting like an ice cream in the sun under his touch, and he bent his head and kissed her.
A brief but comprehensive exploration of her mouth and then he let her go.
Sybella stuttered for a moment on her feet, not sure whether to tell him off or ask him to do it again, but that was all taken out of her hands when she heard a high-pitched cry from Fleur and she was down those stairs in a flash. Vaguely she was aware Nik wasn’t far behind her.
Fleur was standing in the hall, holding Dodge in her arms, his head pushed comfortingly under her chin as Sybella had taught her.
‘Mummy, Daisy got out.’ She extended an accusatory finger at the man standing behind her mother. ‘He let her out. She’ll be squashed!’
Nik deftly set Sybella aside with the timely utterance, ‘Go and put some clothes on,’ and strode down the hall, clearly a man with a purpose.
Sybella sent Fleur into the kitchen to put Dodge in his hutch, grabbed her raincoat, shoved her feet into her galoshes and ran outside, doubting Nik was going to have much luck. She passed the two men carrying a quilted bed end. They stared at her with her bath sheet clearly visible under the semi-transparent plastic. She looked at the bed end, a little baffled by what she was supposed to do. She didn’t want Nik buying her a new bed! But at the same time she was currently sleeping on a mattress on the floor and she had a frightened female rabbit to corral.
Sure enough, Daisy had hopped into the compost, long brown ears quivering.
Good girl, thought Sybella, making sure the bath sheet was secure with one arm, scooping Daisy out with the other. At least one of the females around here had some sense.
She carried her back to the kitchen and made sure the hutch was firmly latched. She could hear thumping overhead, which meant someone was in her bedroom. Just what she needed. A man-free zone since they’d arrived here six years ago and now she had them coming down the drainpipe.
She shivered in her towel and plastic raincoat. She really needed to put some clothes on!
Fleur was jumping up and down excitedly in the doorway. ‘They’ve taken away the old mattress, Mummy!’
Sybella tried to access her own hallway but there were three men and Nik and a new mattress wrapped in plastic.
Which was when Nik came up beside her, put a hand to her waist and angled her out of the way.
‘Do you think you can get dressed?’ he growled.
‘I’d like to. I am aware the delivery men don’t know where to look.’
‘I think they know exactly where to look. Go and put some clothes on.’
‘I would but they’re in my bedroom! Nik, listen, I can’t accept this.’
‘Let me do this for you,’ he said for her ears only in that quiet, sexy Russian drawl of his. ‘I did break it.’
She found herself a little transfixed by the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes. For a single moment she forgot the fact there were strange men in her house, she was wearing a towel under a raincoat and she had to meet Catherine in twenty minutes…
‘Sybella! What on earth?’
Then she remembered, Catherine was meeting them, and it had just got worse.
‘My mother-in-law,’ she bleated. Then more plaintively, ‘I have to get all this cleaned up.’
‘I’ve called a cleaning service,’ Nik said, observing the well-groomed older lady standing on the doorstep at the end of the hall.
Sybella blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Cleaners are coming. Go and dry your hair, whatever it is you need to do. I’m taking you and your daughter to lunch.’