He closed his eyes, reliving the moment when he’d opened the study door and seen her whiling away the working day with her head in a book. It was as if time had somehow slipped back.

He shook his head at the stupidity of it.

Natasha had possessed an ethereal pale gold Nordic beauty that the more substantial, earthier Ellie March could never aspire to.

And Tasha would not have been wasting her time reading a nineteenth-century gothic romance, but Yevtushenko, or Turgenev. In Russian.

Yet, even while he’d known it was just an illusion, he’d still been drawn in. Like a moth to a flame.

Why couldn’t his sister just mind her own business? What arrangement had she tied him into? Whatever it was, he’d have to give the woman reasonable notice, time to find somewhere else.

It could take weeks, he thought, flexing his shoulder, easing the muscle he’d pulled as she’d felled him, then lain there, as warm and soft a handful of womanhood as any man could wish for, her hand against his heart, her hair brushing against his cheek, her scent tugging at buried memories.

He’d kept his eyes closed then, in a vain attempt to keep them from surfacing. He kept them closed now, hoping to claw them back, hold the moment.

Stupid, stupid…

And yet there was a warmth in Ellie’s soft brown eyes that sparked and flared and stirred at something he’d thought long dead inside him. Something that he did not want resurrected.

Forcing himself to confront the reality, rather than some fantasy brought on by jet lag, he watched as she tried to scoot the bike into motion. She seemed to be having trouble, and as soon as she put all her weight on her leg she pulled up short, letting the bike fall. Then she aimed a heartfelt kick at it.

The kick was a mistake.

He was right, he decided, heading for the door. He should have turned around and walked away while he’d had the chance.