been dreaming how you would look, and I can hardly believe that you’re just as I pictured you.’
‘And you’re every bit as beautiful as your photographs, Countess.’
‘Do, please, call me Xenia.’ She moved past her to the blue and yellow brocade armchair. ‘I’ve asked Bowers to bring some tea. Did my son tell you about the research trip to St Petersburg?’
Natasha at once found herself enthusing over the prospect, and before long they were both swapping love-stories over St Petersburg, Imperial history, and Russia.
Bowers brought the tea on a silver trolley.
‘Just wait until you see Peterhof!’ Xenia was saying as she poured from the silver pot. ‘It’s the Russian equivalent of Versailles.’
‘I’ve seen photographs of it.’
‘And, you know, Peter the Great’s study is still there,’ Xenia informed her. ‘I’ve seen it. Actually stood in the same room that he did, when he made all those plans. What a marvellous tsar he was.’
They talked on and on, skipping from one topic of conversation to the next. They clearly had similar minds, similar personalities, similar interests.
Time slipped by unnoticed.
Xenia called for more tea.
They talked about the tragedy of the Romanovs, and Natasha was thrilled to discuss in detail the last months of the Tsar, his imprisonment first in Tsarskoe Selo, then in Tobolsk, and finally at the Impatiev house in Ekaterinburg, where the family were slain.
‘I can see you’re going to be my dream secretary.’ Xenia was as excited as Natasha. ‘I’ve always longed for a secretary who understood Russian history as you do.’
‘I’ve spent my whole life reading every book on Russian history I could lay my hands on,’ Natasha confessed with a smile.
‘Of course you have. With your ancestry.’
‘It’s mainly because I look so much like the Russian side of the family,’ Natasha told her. ‘I’m apparently the living image of my great-grandmother.’
‘She must have been very beautiful.’
Natasha laughed, thinking herself not very beautiful at all.
‘Dominic remarked on it, too,’ Xenia continued. ‘He said you were the most strikingly beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And very Russian.’
Her heart skipped a stupid beat. ‘Well…that was very kind of him.’
‘He’s always been irresistibly attracted to Russianlooking women. He was even in love with one, once. A ballerina, funnily enough. Kyra, her name was. I thought for some time that he would marry her.’
‘Do you think he’s the marrying kind?’ Natasha asked wryly, somehow doubting that a man like Dominic Thorne would ever settle down.
‘He’s thirty-seven now, and beginning to think of having a family. But it’s difficult for him, because he wants the woman to have Russian blood, or at least some Russian connection. And that’s not so easy——’
The doorbell rang softly in the marble hallway.
‘Who on earth can that be?’ Xenia frowned, looking at her elegant watch, then gasping, ‘Oh, no, I completely forgot! Dominic said he’d drop by for lunch!’
Natasha’s heart leapt violently, and a second later she heard his deep, dark, gorgeously masculine voice in the hall.
No fast-beating hearts, she thought angrily, struggling to control her responses. No blushing and no pulsesoar, and definitely no smiling at him like a besotted idiot.
Dominic Thorne isn’t interested in you, he never will be, and you’re not interested in him, either. You mustn’t be interested in him or you’ll do the same thing, all over again, that you did with Tony. Besotted, obsessed, fixated…and then people find out and you’re humiliated.
So ignore his stunning looks, his intellect, his dynamism, his sex appeal, his power and his Russian ancestry. Stop being romantic and start being a bit more level-headed.
‘I know!’ Xenia said. ‘Why don’t you stay for lunch, too?’
‘Oh, no, I really couldn’t.’
‘Why not? I’m sure Dominic would be delighted, and so would I.’
‘I have an appointment with my bank manager at two o’clock,’ Natasha remembered with relief.
‘Oh, what a shame that——’
The door opened and Dominic Thorne, a superb masculine presence, strode in, dominating the room at once with his height and power and air of effortless authority.
‘Still here?’ he drawled, smiling dazzlingly at Natasha, whose heart leapt like mad in response. ‘I take it you’ve got the job, then?’
‘Yes, I have.’ Natasha got to her feet, her face icily serene, determined not to let him know how devastatingly attractive she found him.
‘Good,’ he drawled. ‘I look forward to running into you frequently from now on.’
‘How kind.’ Natasha’s voice dripped ice.
He frowned, because of course she wasn’t even smiling at him, and he had given her the kind of smile that made her do back-somersaults inside.
There was a brief, tense pause.
‘Well!’ Xenia clapped her elegant hands together. ‘Shall we have a little champagne? To seal the bargain and welcome Natasha into the fold?’
‘Yes, why not?’ Dominic gave a hard smile, still frowning, and turned to walk to the door, opening it, drawling over one broad shoulder, ‘I’ll tell Bowers to set the table for three, shall I?’
‘No, I can’t stay for lunch,’ Natasha clipped out coolly. ‘I have a previous engagement.’
He paused in the doorway, eyes narrowing on her, aware of her sudden icy hostility and not understanding it, particularly after the passionate kiss she had given him yesterday when she left his office.
Then he went out, closing the door with an angry click.
Natasha relaxed, turning to her new employer. ‘When do we leave for St Petersburg? Where are we staying?’
‘We leave in a fortnight, and we’ll be staying at the Hotel Europe, right in the centre of the city.’
Dominic’s footsteps came clicking angrily back down the hall.
Natasha’s mouth went dry. ‘Is it a nice hotel?’
‘Ravishing. Malachite pillars, gilded mirrors, hot and cold running waiters…’
The door opened and Dominic strode in, hard-faced and holding a bottle of Bollinger, the neck smoking, three champagne flutes in his strong hand.
‘But Dominic will give you the details next week, won’t you, darling?’
‘Yes,’ he said tersely, putting the glasses down on the gold oak coffee-table and pouring champagne into each of them.
Xenia frowned at him, then at Natasha.
He handed Natasha her glass, his face tough. ‘I’ll drop in at your flat some time next week with the details. Meanwhile, I need you to fill out a form for the entry visa.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said coldly.
Straightening, he took the form from his inside jacket pocket, giving her a glimpse of that powerful chest, the taut stomach, and the dark grey silk lining of his jacket, the unmistakable black-silver label reading Gieves and Hawkes, No. 1, Savile Row.
Natasha took a pen from her handbag and sat down to fill the form out, marvelling at the excitement she felt on seeing