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‘Hardly an innocent,’ Anne said tartly.
He looked at her under dark brows. ‘Hardly an urban sophisticate either. A sophisticate protects herself. You don’t even remember to lock your door, let alone use the most intimate form of self-protection.’
It took a heartbeat before she realised what he was talking about and in a flare of temper she forgot she was supposed to be avoiding the subject. ‘What makes you think I forgot? Maybe I wanted to get pregnant!’ she snapped.
‘Why? To trap your Russian virgin into marriage?’
‘No, for the experience of motherhood,’ she parroted Katlin’s astonishing explanation. ‘How can I write from a true female perspective if I haven’t experienced the completeness of being a woman?’
He froze in the act of raising his glass. ‘You got pregnant as an intellectual experiment?’
Her first reaction was purely instinctive and she quickly tried to disguise her exclamation of shocked distaste. ‘No! I mean, yes—I mean, of course it wasn’t quite that deliberate, but…’
He drank, watching her over the rim. ‘Somehow I can’t see you being that calculating. Maybe that’s what you tell yourself now, but I think the truth is that you lost your head in the heat of passion.’
Anne’s eyes flashed pure gold. ‘I never lose my head.’
‘Really?’ he drawled disbelievingly.
‘Yes, really.’ A clever idea occurred to her as he continued to regard her with obvious scepticism. ‘I save all my passion for my writing,’ she said loftily.
‘How disappointing for Dmitri.’ He looked amused rather than impressed. ‘In that case I look forward immensely to reading your book,’ he continued smoothly. ‘When do you expect to finish it?’
‘I don’t. I mean, I haven’t given myself a deadline, I just go with the flow. And I don’t like to talk about work I have in progress,’ she said, forestalling any further question. ‘It drains the—er—’
‘Passion? The creative juices?’
Was he laughing at her? She looked at him with narrowed eyes but his were rounded and innocent.
‘Does Ivan usually sleep all night?’ he said casually as he poured himself another glass of wine. His third, she mentally counted, and wondered whether the faint glitter in his dark eyes was the beginnings of drunk- enness. Certainly he seemed a great deal less aggressive.
‘Why?’ she asked warily.
‘Because I want to know whether my plan to ravish you right here and now on the floor can proceed without interruption.’
She winced at the irony in his voice. ‘He’s always slept through the night.’ She couldn’t help looking at the hard, polished floor out of the corner of her eye and frowning. It would have to be very uncomfortable, particularly with a man as big as Hunter…
‘I’d let you get on top,’ he said silkily, catching her out in her mental gymnastics and causing her clear, sungold complexion to bloom.
To her relief he didn’t pursue her embarrassment. ‘Is that the real reason you prefer writing at night? Because it’s the only time you can get uninterrupted peace? Why don’t you just pay a baby-sitter during the day?’
‘Because I can’t afford to.’ She was still distracted by her furtive imagination, trying to damp down the awful little thrill prompted by an image of herself dominantly astride that big, muscular body.
‘I understood that the grant is pretty generous. Certainly enough for you to afford day-care.’
‘I can. Ivan stays at the university crèche—’
‘Only when you’re in class. I would have thought it was more important for you to free up your writing time—’
She woke up suddenly to the trend of the conversation. ‘I told you, I’m best at night.’ She jumped to her feet and began to clear away the dirty plates. ‘Speaking of which, I suppose I’d better get down to it.’
He rose meekly, but getting rid of him wasn’t so easy, she discovered, as he insisted on helping her with the dishes while he finished his wine.
‘Just don’t think this means I’m coming next door to help you wash your pots,’ she warned him, her attempts at polite denial giving way to a flat-out rudeness to which the man seemed equally impervious.
‘I wouldn’t dream of thwarting the nightly flow of your passion.’
Her toes curled in her shoes at the teasing remark. ‘At least I don’t have to worry about you driving home,’ she grumbled as she filled the sink with hot water.
