The Ruthless Magnate’s Virgin Mistress

thought you’d be good for him and give him a chance of happiness. I honestly believed that he would make you happy as well.’

‘I suppose I’d never have got him any other way,’ Abbey muttered heavily, thinking of the gauche teenager she had been, easily impressed and duped by a male of Jeffrey’s intelligence and sophistication.

‘Stay here with us tonight,’ Caroline pleaded. ‘You’re devastated by all this. Nikolai Arlov is a total bastard for giving you this file!’

‘I don’t think so. Whatever Nikolai’s motives, it was past time that I knew the truth and I wish you had at least had the courage to tell me after Jeffrey died.’ Averting her gaze from Caroline’s discomfited face, Abbey stood up. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I want to go home and come to terms with this in private.’

Abbey started trembling violently when she got back into the limo. She was hanging on to her composure by a slender thread. Tears were clogging her throat. The man she had loved had not returned her love. Jeffrey had lied to her and cheated on her and had played her for a fool. Their relationship had been an unpleasant charade that a more experienced woman might have questioned. Jeffrey had had no desire to sleep with Abbey while he still had Jane in his life. She remembered the day he had touched her red hair and asked her if she had ever thought of tinting it blond. Anguish exploded inside her like a grenade going off in a confined space. Guess who had blond hair? She remembered Lady Jane on her husband’s arm at Jeffrey’s funeral, long golden blond hair streaming across the shoulders of her elegant black coat, her beautiful face frozen as ice.

Abbey pressed clammy hands to her quivering cheeks. Her best friend had stood by and watched her marry a man who was besotted with another man’s wife. That awareness had ensured that Abbey had felt unable to share her innermost feelings with Caroline as she once would have done. She felt utterly betrayed. The passenger door beside her opened and only then did she realise that the journey was over and she was home.

She saw her face in her hall mirror and it scared her. Tears had smeared her eye shadow and mascara and she bore a close resemblance to a corpse in the horror film she had watched earlier. Her attention fell on the photo of her and Jeffrey on that long-ago wedding day and she snatched the frame from the wall and smashed it down on the tiled hall floor. That surge of violence shocked her to the core and she was staring down in surprise at the broken glass when the doorbell sounded.

Nikolai hammered the knocker when Abbey didn’t immediately answer the bell. Relief swept him when the door finally opened and she peered out.

‘I was worried about you,’ he confessed in a driven undertone. ‘How are you?’

‘How did you think I would be?’ Abbey demanded, animation and energy entering her again when she saw him. He might be the author of her evening of disillusionment, but at least she didn’t have to watch her words with him. ‘Happy?’

Nikolai pressed the door back and strode in, his feet crunching across broken glass. Even though the photo frame was lying face down, he recognised it and felt almost jubilant at such a demonstration of disrespect. His ambivalence towards her gnawed at him. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’

‘I’m not hurt,’ Abbey proclaimed.

But Nikolai could see the shock still etched in her dilated pupils and rigid bone structure. ‘You need a shot of vodka.’

‘No. I’m fine.’ A discordant laugh fell from her lips to punctuate the strained silence. ‘It’ll just be a long time before I play the grieving widow again!’

Nikolai reached out in a sudden movement and gathered her into his arms.

‘The bastard!’ she sobbed suddenly. ‘I really, really loved him. I thought he was the most wonderful guy in the world!’

‘He didn’t deserve your love.’

‘He didn’t want or need it!’ Abbey gasped in stricken disagreement. ‘He didn’t even really want or need me! I was just a substitute for the woman he loved and couldn’t have.’

Nikolai, who avoided emotional scenes with women like the plague, could not believe that he had got himself into such a situation. But he had found it impossible to stay away from her when he was concerned about her state of mind. Once it had entered his thoughts that she might do something foolish in her distress, he had had to seek her out and he had no intention of leaving her until he was convinced that she was all right. Right now, she was very far from being all right. She was sobbing into his chest with the abandon of a distraught child, her slim body shaking and shuddering with emotion. He smoothed her tumbled curls back from her damp brow and dug out his mobile to make a call with one hand.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m taking you home with me. I’m not leaving you here alone.’

‘I’m used to being alone,’ Abbey argued.

‘So am I. It doesn’t mean we have to like it,’ Nikolai quipped, hauling open the door again and guiding her out towards the lift.

‘I look a total mess and I am not sleeping with you again-’

‘You’re so forward,’ Nikolai breathed. ‘At least wait until you’re asked.’

She almost laughed, and then she remembered Jeffrey again and the urge evaporated, for life as she knew it was over. She no longer had the comfort and security of looking back and wrapping herself in her fond memories of Jeffrey’s love. ‘I was always second best to Jeffrey,’ she whispered. ‘According to what his sister told me, he only settled for me because Jane wouldn’t leave her husband. Everything I thought I knew about him was wrong. He even invited her to our wedding with her husband. He always talked as if he was so moral and there he was carrying on with someone else’s wife and cheating on me throughout our engagement!’

‘You’re as close to being someone else’s wife as I’ve ever got,’ Nikolai remarked wryly. ‘Stop torturing yourself. That affair and your marriage all ended a long time ago.’

‘But I believed that he loved me.’ Until that moment, Abbey had not appreciated just how good that belief had made her feel about herself. ‘That meant so much to me. I was a lanky beanpole at school-none of the boys were interested-’

‘They’d be kicking themselves if they saw you now,’ Nikolai told her, pressing her head into his shoulder in a protective move when he saw the paparazzi on the pavement outside, a sharp jerk of his head telling his bodyguards to be as aggressive as they liked in shielding them from the cameras.

‘I bet you were one of the popular ones at school,’ Abbey commented when they had got through the crush and were safe inside his limo.

Nikolai was pouring drinks from the well-stocked bar. He handed her a shot glass of perfectly chilled vodka. ‘No. My father was a crooked loan shark despised by most people. My grandfather was ashamed of him and so was I,’ he admitted, only to wonder why he was telling her something that until that moment he had not even admitted to himself. His little nasty weasel of a parent had been a chronic embarrassment to him while he was growing up.

Abbey knocked back the vodka and then almost choked as it burned a liquid passage of icy fire down her throat and brought tears to her eyes. ‘My word!’ she spluttered as he banged her between the shoulder blades so that she could breathe again.

‘Full marks for not sipping, but you didn’t even give me time to make a traditional toast.’

Abbey was still thinking about what he had said. ‘Why were you closer to your grandfather?’

‘I lived with him until he died when I was nine years old. My father wanted nothing to do with me.’

‘Why?’ Abbey fixed expectant eyes on his lean dark face, her curiosity raised to a height.

‘He was already married with three children when he got my mother pregnant. My grandfather took me in and raised me against my father’s wishes. I think my grandfather saw it as a second chance to be a father.’

‘My mother died of a heart attack a day after I was born,’ Abbey confided, accepting a refill and holding it high to say. ‘To a new and better understanding between us! My father never warmed to me after my mother died. He hadn’t the slightest interest in me or my achievements. I was surplus. My brother was important to him because he was a boy-’

‘That may be why you married an older man.’

‘Nothing’s that simple. I fell in love with Jeffrey.’

‘But now you’re going to get over that,’ Nikolai intoned with cool conviction.

Shivering in the cool night air, Abbey allowed Nikolai to assist her out of the limousine and wrap her in his dinner jacket. His unexpected gallantry made her smile while his protectiveness surprised and pleased her. ‘Thank