A Rich Man's Whim(57)
‘You’re not even giving me a chance to defend myself?’
Kat froze and spun to see Mikhail poised in the doorway, his lean darkly handsome face grim and taut as he asked that question. He had discarded his tie and his jacket and stood there in shirt sleeves, his black diamond eyes hard. He was toughing Lara’s confession out, Kat assumed, determined to admit no fault. She turned her head away from him because she felt as if her heart were breaking inside her.
‘Kat?’ Mikhail prompted.
‘Yes, I heard what you said but I don’t really know how to respond. Sometimes it’s best to say nothing. I don’t want to argue with you—what’s the point?’
‘The point is us,’ Mikhail growled. ‘Isn’t what we have worth fighting for?’
Kat dropped the clothing in her hands into the open case and shot him a furious glance of reproach. ‘OK. Did you sleep with her?’
‘No,’ Mikhail framed succinctly, hard dark eyes challenging her.
Kat turned back to her packing. ‘Well, of course you’re going to say that,’ she told him, totally unimpressed.
‘What the hell was the point of asking me, then?’ Mikhail roared back at her. ‘You know you’ve put me through one hell of an afternoon?’
Refusing to be intimidated by that lion’s roar, Kat kept on packing. ‘I can’t say that I enjoyed my afternoon either—’
‘First of all I had to put up with a melodramatic tantrum from an employee, then you went missing!’ He stressed the word.
Infuriated, Kat whipped back to him. ‘I did not go missing!’
‘How do you think I felt when you took off after that nonsense Lara spouted to you? I was worried sick about you!’ Mikhail bit out furiously. ‘I knew you were upset and—’
Kat lifted a russet brow and turned to him again, hating him at that minute, convinced she knew exactly why he was behaving the way he was. ‘How could you know I was upset? You got a spy hotline to my brain or something? I wasn’t upset. Naturally I was surprised, rather disgusted, in fact,’ she confided with growing vigour. ‘And I needed some time to myself—’
‘You needed time to yourself to think about that poison like you needed a hole in the head!’ Mikhail shot back at her with lethal derision.
‘Don’t you dare shout at me!’ Kat shrieked back at him.
Sudden smouldering silence fell. Mikhail breathed in deep and slow, his broad chest expanding. ‘I didn’t intend to shout.’
‘When you’ve been accused of infidelity, bellowing like a bull in a china shop is not a good idea,’ Kat informed him curtly.
‘Wrongly accused,’ Mikhail fired back at her, his stunning dark eyes scorching hot with annoyance. ‘That is the crucial fact.’
‘Mikhail …’ Kat swallowed hard and collected her churning thoughts, unhappiness bowing her shoulders like a giant weight as she accepted that the scene could not be avoided. ‘Lara knew that we didn’t spend that last night together before I was supposed to leave The Hawk. She must’ve been with you that night to know that.’
‘Wrong!’ Mikhail framed grittily. ‘She was standing on the deck outside the office below us eavesdropping on our last exchange over dinner that night when you told me you wanted to sleep alone. So, if that’s your only piece of evidence against me, you’re on a losing streak!’
Kat’s lashes fluttered in confusion. ‘Are you sure that’s how she knew we were sleeping apart?’
‘How the hell else could she have known?’ Mikhail swore suddenly in Russian and shifted his hands as he moved towards her. ‘Kat, you saw me at three in the morning that same night and I was still in my own room,’ he reminded her.
‘Yes, but—’
Mikhail withdrew a mobile phone from his pocket and pressed several buttons. ‘Watch this …’ he urged. ‘Stas was clever enough to record Lara screaming at me …’
Kat focused on the screen and saw a flurry of blurred movement and heard a noise. The blur became Lara, blonde hair whipping round her enraged face and she was shouting. ‘Why didn’t you want me? You could have had me! What’s wrong with you that you didn’t want me? She’s old, she’s past it! It’s an insult. I’m young and beautiful—how could she be the one you move into your home?’
Kat was transfixed. There were another few sentences of distraught ranting from Lara before she suddenly appreciated that a camera was recording her tantrum and she launched herself at Stas in a vitriolic fury, whereupon the recording came to a sudden telling halt.