A Prize Beyond Jewels

Nina looked at him beneath lowered lashes. ‘Am I such an open book?’

‘Hardly!’ Rafe chuckled softly. This woman had been a mystery to him from the first, and the more he came to know her, it seemed the more of a mystery she became.

His forays on the Internet had told him that Nina and her father had lived alone together since she was five years old, and that she had spent her earlier years being educated at home. Her childhood seemed to have been spent exclusively with her wheelchair-bound father, and the muscled men that made up her security detail—making it doubly amazing that she had managed to escape and attend university at all.

Rafe was even more convinced, since meeting Dmitri Palitov, that the other man must have been having heart palpitations over that one. At the same time Rafe couldn’t help but admire Nina for having had the strength to break out of that protective cocoon.

And yet, having broken free for three years, Nina had then stepped back into that repressive ring of security when she’d returned to New York. Admittedly she now had her own apartment in the building her father owned, but it was still very much under her father’s protection. And the design work she did was always within her father’s corporation.

Rafe’s efforts last night to find out more about Dmitri Palitov had hit wall after wall after Nina was five and her mother had died. Nor could Rafe find any record of Anna Palitov’s death, or the reason for it. As there had been only the briefest mention made of the accident just weeks later that had resulted in Dmitri Palitov being in a wheelchair. A car accident that had apparently killed two of the three men travelling in the other car.

Mystery, after mystery, after mystery.

And Nina, slightly shy, vibrantly beautiful, sexy as hell, as well as intelligent, and incredibly talented in her designs, was front and centre of that mystery.

‘I didn’t telephone your father, or tell him of our dinner date, with any idea of challenging his warning last night, Nina,’ Rafe assured her softly now.

‘No?’ She winced.

‘No,’ he replied evenly, having known it would, but hoped it wouldn’t, be her conclusion regarding his actions. ‘I would hope I’m neither that petty nor that vindictive.’

A delicate blush coloured her cheeks at the reproof in Rafe’s tone.

‘Then why did you tell him?’

‘So that you didn’t have to.’ Rafe reached over and placed one of his hands on the top of hers as it rested on the tabletop. ‘Nina, I’m fully aware of how close you and your father are, and the last thing I want is to be the cause of any tension between the two of you. What I do want is for the two of us to get to know each other better, and I have no intention of doing that by leaving you to be the one who has to do the explaining to your father.’

Nina felt the sting of tears in her eyes. Rafe was already too much for one woman to handle: too wickedly handsome, too charming, too amusing, definitely too sexually attractive for his own good. Or, as she had realised last night, her own good.

And she had been totally physically aware of Rafe this evening from the moment she had opened her apartment door and looked at him standing out in the hallway. His hair had still been damp from the shower he must have taken, he had obviously shaved too, but his beard was so dark there was still a sexy shadow along his jawline. And as for the warmth in those golden eyes as his gaze roved slowly over her...

Adding understanding and compassion to Rafe’s already long list of attractions was just being unfair to any woman.

And yet Nina had no doubts that whatever Rafe had said to her father during their telephone call earlier today, it had helped pave the way for her own conversation with her father this evening.

‘Dmitri and I may not be altogether sure that we like each other yet,’ Rafe continued dryly, ‘but I think we respect each other. Which is a start.’

Yes, Nina could appreciate that her father was old-fashioned enough to have appreciated the fact that Rafe had been the one to tell him of their dinner date this evening, even if he hadn’t particularly liked or approved of it. Her father admired strength, respected that strength, and Rafe had it in abundance.

She gave a rueful grimace. ‘I’m sorry I was so suspicious of your motives just now.’

‘Let’s not spend the whole evening apologising to each other, Nina,’ Rafe cut across that apology, giving her hand one last squeeze before sitting back as the waiter placed the first course in front of them.

‘So tell me what you do at Archangel,’ Nina prompted once the waiter had departed.

‘What do I do?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I know that you and your two brothers manage the galleries, but I’m sure that doesn’t take up all of your time,’ she prompted interestedly.