Too Proud to be Bought by Sharon Kendrick

Author:Sharon Kendrick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd
Published: 2011-04-29T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

FOR the third time in a row, the phone went dead in his ear and Nikolai stared at it with a growing feeling of disbelief. Had she hung up on him—again? He shook his head. No. It was inconceivable. How could the sexy little waitress who should have been grateful for all he’d given her have possibly slammed the phone down on him?

He paced the floor of his penthouse office which gave a picture postcard view of London—and which he had once vowed never to take for granted—but for once the soaring skyline made no impression on him. What the hell was she playing at?

He clicked his intercom and one of his aides came on the line immediately. ‘That woman, Zara Evans?’ he said crisply. ‘You remember—the one I asked you to find for me?’

‘Da, Nikolai.’

‘Do we have an address for her?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then send someone round there. Now. I want to know when she’s there and I want to know who she’s with.’

His fury growing as the minutes ticked away, he had to wait until past midnight before word came through that she’d arrived home—alone—presumably after she’d finished one of her shifts. Nikolai knew it would be sensible to leave what he had to say until the next morning—the trouble was that he wasn’t feeling in a particularly sensible mood. He was feeling impatient, angry and mystified—and none of this was helped by remembering the way she’d kissed him when he had been deep inside her body …

At half-past midnight his limousine came to a halt in front of a tiny mid-terrace house in a run-down part of town he was unfamiliar with. Dustbins stood at the front of each property—presumably because there was nowhere else to store them—and further down the road graffiti had been scrawled on a wall. It was the kind of place where shops were boarded up after dark—or where a car might find its tyres missing in the morning.

The driver turned round with a frown on his face. ‘You sure this is the right place, boss?’ he questioned, in Russian.

For a moment, Nikolai was quiet. It certainly wasn’t the worst place he’d seen in his life—far from it—and every city in the world had areas where the less fortunate lived. But these days he rarely encountered poverty and it took him back to a time and place which he usually kept locked away. Funny how vividly it all came back, if he let it. Memories vivid enough to make the little hairs on the back of his neck stand on end now came into sharp focus. A Moscow tenement, an apartment shared with three other families. The cold eyes and suspicious glances of his hungry neighbours. And a boy who did whatever he could to get a ruble to put food in his mouth.

His mouth hardened as he got out of the car and rang the bell on a fading door. It took a moment or two before a hall light went on and

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