The Last Kolovsky Playboy by Carol Marinelli Read Free Book Online

survive. I’ll always need a full-time PA.’
    ‘The size of the commitment you require, Aleksi, is one I can only give my daughter.’ She hated him sometimes—hated the carrot he dangled in front of her because she so badly wanted it. She wanted that education for Georgie, but what she didn’t want was a nanny for when Kate inevitably had to traipse around the world following Aleksi, when she worked till midnight, or had to leave mid-race at the school athletics carnival because some VIP had arrived and couldn’t negotiate the walk from Arrivals to the awaiting limo without her…
    Aleksi Kolovsky’s full-time PA could not be the mother she wanted to be to her little girl.
    ‘She’ll be fine where she is,’ Kate said, without any hope of believing herself.
    ‘Please!’ Aleksi snorted. ‘She’ll be cleverer than her teachers soon!’ He said it with a conviction that came from experience. ‘Bored and restless and getting into trouble.’
    ‘I’m saving for a good secondary school.’
    She would be. Aleksi knew that. He admired her for it, and for her decision not to work full-time for him too—but it also annoyed him. He wanted her full time, wanted her quiet efficiency. It galled him that the one PA he could work with refused to commit to him.
    Aleksi always, always got what he wanted. ‘She needs her peers. She needs children her own age to play with.’
    ‘ You didn’t have that,’ Kate said, because Aleksi had been home-schooled. ‘And you seem to have done all right. Iosef too!’
    ‘I hated every moment.’ He looked over to her. ‘By the time I was fourteen there was nothing my tutor could teach me. By the time I was sixteen…Well, at that point there was a little more. While Iosef studied to be a doctor, I worked with my teacher one-to-one on…we’ll call it lessons in human biology…’
    Her cheeks were flaming. Sometimes she didn’t know if he said things to get a reaction from her—to shock her, to embarrass her.
    ‘She was a very good teacher!’ Aleksi said, and then smirked. ‘But, again, by seventeen already I knew more than her. At seventeen and a half I was showing her how things could better be done…’
    Cheeks still flaming, Kate stood up. Aleksi laughed. ‘Have I embarrassed you, Kate?’
    ‘Not at all,’ Kate said coolly, ‘I’d love to stay and reminisce about your depraved childhood, but I’ve got the Princess arriving and I need to escort her to her fitting and make sure everything is in order.’
    ‘Given she’s already met her, surely Lavinia can do it?’
    ‘But I’ll do it better,’ Kate said firmly.
    ‘Really?’
    And then their eyes locked and her blush wouldn’t fade and her lungs were hot with breath that tasted of fire and she felt as if they’d just crossed a line.
    It hadn’t been anything other than a point she often made—Lavinia was rubbish with the dignitaries. She didn’t get the nuances, especially with Arabian visitors. It would be far, far easier for Kate to greet their esteemed guests—see the father to the elevator and then walk with the mother of the bride and the Princess herself to the hallowed fitting rooms, which only the most pampered bride ever glimpsed.
    A Kolovsky bridal gown was worth a fortune, and not a small one either.
    The PAs of the newly rich and famous often had to put up with tantrums and tears when their spoiled brides-to-be finally understood that the price of a personally designed and fitted Kolovsky gown worked out to cost more than their luxurious wedding and honeymoon combined.
    Both Ivan and Levander had refused to include a bridal range in Kolovsky’s ready-to-wear lines. Even Aleksi, with the opening of Krasavitsa, would not put bridalwear in it.
    If the bride wore Kolovsky she was someone—but not if Nina had her way.
    Only they weren’t talking about bridal gowns now.
    ‘I’m quite sure,’ Aleksi said, his dark eyes searing into hers, ‘that you’d be wonderful.’
    It was Kate who looked away