‘Close your eyes and open your mouth,’ he ordered, his deep, accented voice as sensuous as crushed velvet. His brilliant blue eyes burned into hers, and the atmosphere between them was suddenly charged with electricity as the restaurant, the other diners and the hubbub of voices all faded and there was only Vadim.
Utterly transfixed, Ella obediently lowered her lashes and felt the cold edge of the spoon against her lips, followed by the curious texture of smooth, round berries on her tongue. The taste was indescribable: slightly fishy, slightly salty and overwhelmingly rich, she noted, as her taste buds were seduced by the intensity of flavour. Her eyes flew open and locked with Vadim’s piercing gaze. He was watching her reaction intently, and the whole experience was so incredibly sensual that Ella could not restrain the little shiver that ran down her spine.
‘What is your verdict?’
She swallowed the last morsel of caviar and touched her tongue to her lips to catch the lingering taste, the unconscious action causing heat to burn in Vadim’s groin. ‘Heavenly,’ she murmured huskily.
He inhaled sharply and forced himself to sit back in his seat, shattering the sexual tension that had held them both in its grip. ‘Then eat,’ he invited. ‘Top a blini with sour cream, add a little of the caviar, and enjoy.’#p#分页标题#e#
As Ella followed his instructions she was shocked to find that her hands were shaking. For a moment there she had been completely bewitched by Vadim, and in all honesty she knew she would have been powerless to stop him if he had walked around the table, pulled her into his arms and made love to her right there in the middle of the crowded restaurant. Panic surged up inside her and she suddenly longed for the evening to be over. Vadim was too much. He overwhelmed her and made her feel things she had never felt before. Her body felt taut, each of her nerve-endings acutely sensitive, and when she glanced down she was horrified to see that her nipples were jutting provocatively against her red silk dress.
She shot him a furtive glance, and swallowed when she discovered that he was watching her, his eyes gleaming beneath his hooded lids before he deliberately dropped his gaze to her breasts. ‘Do you go back to Russia often?’ she asked him, in a desperate attempt to break the sensual spell he had woven around her.
‘I own a house on the outskirts of Moscow, but I only go back once or twice a year now that most of my business interests are in Europe.’
‘What about your family? Do they still live in Russia?’
For a second something flared in Vadim’s eyes-a look of such raw pain that Ella almost gasped out loud. But then his lashes swept down and hid his expression, and when he met her gaze across the table his face was a handsome, unreadable mask. ‘I have no family,’ he said bluntly. ‘Both my father and my grandmother, who helped to bring me up, died many years ago.’
Still shaken by the look she had glimpsed in his eyes, Ella took a sip of her wine, feeling instinctively that the loss of his father and grandmother had not been responsible for the savage emotion that had flared in his brilliant blue depths.
‘What about your mother?’
He shrugged. ‘She left when I was seven or eight. My father was a dour man, who spent most of his time at work or busy with his duties as a communist party official. As far as I know, my mother was much younger than him. I vaguely remember her smiling occasionally, which my father and grandmother never did, and I assume she wanted a better life than the one she had.’
‘But she left you behind,’ Ella murmured. She stared at Vadim’s hard-boned face and felt something tug on her heart as she pictured him as a lonely little boy who had been abandoned by his mother. ‘Was your grandmother kind?’ What a ridiculous question, she berated herself impatiently, but for some reason his answer mattered. ‘I mean…did she take good care of you?’
He gave a sardonic smile. ‘My grandmother came from a remote village in Siberia, where winter temperatures regularly drop to minus thirty degrees centigrade, and she was as tough as the climate she grew up in. She was in her seventies when I was born, and I doubt she welcomed having to take on the role of parent in her old age. She certainly never seemed to find any pleasure in my presence, and despite her elderly years she had a heavy hand with the belt-until I learned to run fast enough to escape her, when she passed the duty of beating me over to my father,’ he said, in a voice devoid of any emotion.
‘That’s horrible,’ Ella said, paling. ‘It sounds like you had a tough childhood.’
Vadim thought briefly of the relentless greyness of his early years, and gave another shrug. ‘I survived. And compared with the two years I spent in the army my boyhood was a picnic.’