The Last Kolovsky Playboy Read Online Free PDF Page B

him a little, perhaps. Had hoped that the rest would do him good. Instead he was leaner and if anything meaner, more hungry for action, and, no matter how he denied it, he was savage with pain.
    ‘Get my mother in here.’
    ‘I’m here.’ Nina came in. She was well into her fifties, but she looked not a day over forty—as if, as Aleksi had once said to Kate, she had stepped straight out of a wind tunnel. She had lost a lot of weight since Ivan’s death, and was now officially tiny—though her size belied her sudden rise in stature at House of Kolovsky. Dressed in an azure silk suit, her skinny legs encased in sheer black stockings and her feet dressed up in heels, with diamonds dripping from her ears and fingers, her new-found power suited her. She swept into the room, ignoring Kate as she always did. Lavinia came in behind her.
    ‘It is good to see you back, Aleksi,’ Nina said without sentiment, and Kate could only wonder.
    This was her son—her son who had been so very ill, who had clawed his way back from the most terrible accident—and this was how she greeted him.
    ‘Really?’ Aleksi raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t sound very convincing.’
    ‘I’m concerned,’ Nina responded. ‘As any mother would be. I think that it’s way too soon.’
    ‘It’s almost too late,’ Aleksi snapped back. ‘I’ve seen your proposals.’
    ‘I specifically said you were not to be worried with details!’ She glared over to Kate, who stood there blushing. ‘Leave us!’ she ordered. ‘I will deal with you later. I assume this is your doing.’
    ‘It was your doing,’ Aleksi corrected. ‘ Your grab for cash that terminated my recuperation. You may leave,’ he told Kate, and she did.
    It was a relief to get out of there, to be honest.
    And oh, so humiliating too. Before the door closed she heard Nina’s bitchy tones. ‘Tell your PA she is supposed to remove the coat hanger before she puts on her skirt.’ Kate heard Lavinia’s mirthless laugh in response to Nina’s cruel comment and fled to the loos, but there was no solace there.
    Mirrors lined the walls and she saw herself from every angle.
    Even her well-cut grey suit couldn’t hide the curves—curves that wouldn’t matter a jot anywhere else, but at the House of Kolovsky broke every rule. She turned heads wherever she went, and not in a good way. And by the end of the day, no matter how she tamed it, or smothered it in serum or glossed it and straightened it, her hair was a spiral mass of frizzy curls. Her make-up, no matter how she followed advice, no matter how carefully she applied it, had slid off her face by lunchtime, and her figure—well, it simply didn’t work in the fashion industry.
    Kate pretended to be washing her hands as an effortless beauty came in and didn’t even pretend she was here for the loo. She just touched up her make-up, hoiked her non-existent breasts a little higher in her bra and played with her hair for a moment before leaving.
    She didn’t acknowledge Kate—didn’t glance in her direction.
    Kate was nothing—no challenge, no competition. Nothing.
    If only she knew, Kate thought, watching in the mirror as the trim little bottom wiggled out on legs that should surely snap.
    If only they knew her secret.
    That sometimes…Kate stared in the mirror at the glitter in her eyes, a small smile on her lips as she recalled the memories she and Aleksi occasionally made. Sometimes, when Georgie was at her grandparents’, Aleksi would come to her, would leave the glitz and the glamour and arrive on her doorstep in the still of the night.
    They never discussed it. He was always gone by the morning. And it wasn’t as if they slept together. In fact in their entire history they’d shared just two kisses—one when Georgie was born; one the night before the accident.
    And, yes, a kiss from a Kolovsky meant very little. It was currency to them, easily earned, carelessly spent, but for Kate it was her most treasured memory.
    Oh, if