Deliberately he played to her sense of fairness—another trait he had forgotten to tuck away in his mental box of her characteristics.
From the pursing of her lips he could tell she was thinking about it. He pressed a little harder. ‘All you have done since we left London is work. You need to take a break.’
‘All right,’ she relented grudgingly. ‘I’ll come with you. But I don’t want a late night.’
‘Not a problem. We have a busy day tomorrow, so an early night will do us both good.’ Not that he would confide what type of busy day they would be sharing. If he were to tell her he was certain she would hijack a yacht and sail all the way to the mainland to catch a flight home.
‘I’ll go and get ready.’ She slid past him and grabbed her handbag from the desk.
A tiny brown mole on the nape of her neck caught his attention. He had never noticed it before. Did she have others...?
A weird compulsion to press a kiss to it and taste that creamy skin crept through him. Before he could act on it she’d walked off, leaving him to blow out tiny puffs of air, struggling to control the ache spreading through his loins.
His physical reaction to a tiny mole perplexed him.
His growing physical reaction to her perplexed him.
All this flirting was becoming a major turn-on—which was strange in itself as he was not a man given to flirting. But Rosa’s reaction to it was such an unexpected delighted that the more he did it, the more he wanted to do it.
Maybe he had been telling the truth when he’d said his tastes were becoming more discerning?
Women had always been an exotic mystery to him. He enjoyed sex, but he found intimacy on any other level repellent. He had certainly never before become fixated on a mole.
He was sure some psychoanalyst would put his repulsion down to being brought up solely by an undemonstrative father. Since leaving the Siberian mining town where he’d grown up, Nico had learned that some men displayed physical affection towards their children. Not his father. Mikhail Baranski was a real man’s man: hard-drinking and hard-working. He had provided for Nico, but expected his son to take care of himself. All Nico’s knowledge about physical affection and intimacy came from books. When he’d left home and moved to Moscow he had assumed relationships would be as easy to conduct as they were in the books. But they weren’t.
It had taken his relationship with Galina for him to realise he simply wasn’t wired for it. Emotions and affection were for other people. Not for him. He had sampled failure once and had no intention of tasting it again.
His marriage to Rosa had been the perfect solution to this inbred aversion to intimacy. He had a discreet woman of intelligence to share his life, without any of the mumbo-jumbo sex seemed to provoke in the female of the species—the mumbo-jumbo that was totally alien to him.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘WILL I DO?’
Nico looked up from his laptop and appraised his wife, who had just made an appearance from the bedroom.
She posed before him, hands on hips, chin cocked upwards. ‘I assume the dress code is casual?’
She had finally released her ebony hair from the confines of that dreadful ponytail she favoured. She’d had it cut since the last time he had seen her wear it loose. Her silky locks still fell in waves down her back, but the front had been feathered, softening her angular features. Tonight she had opted for simplicity, wearing a demure dusky-pink dress that flared slightly to her knees and matching it with silver sandals with heels that added a good four inches to her short, curvy frame. Her concession to make-up was a touch of mascara and some pale pink lipstick. She looked wickedly pretty, but beneath the truculent expression he detected a hint of apprehension in her eyes.
He searched for the right words to tell her how beautiful she looked.
‘You look fine,’ he said. ‘I’d better get ready. I’ve opened a bottle of white—it’s in the fridge.’
He showered quickly and methodically, trying to banish the glimmer of hurt his off-hand compliment had briefly evoked in Rosa’s eyes.
At first glance she was just a reasonably attractive woman. It wasn’t until you studied her face and became trapped in the depth of those striking caramel eyes that you became aware of her radiant yet understated beauty. Unlike most other women, whose beauty faded after a couple of dates, becoming—dared he say it?—a touch boring, Rosa’s beauty increased with each subsequent look. There was always something new to see: a new profile of her snub nose if looked at from a new angle, lines that appeared depending on whether she was smiling or frowning, lips that changed colour depending on her tiredness and mood.