‘Then play for me,’ he bade her, leaning back on the sun lounger and folding his arms beneath his head. ‘I’ll conserve my energy for later.’
For the next hour Ella was utterly absorbed in her music, but at last she lowered her bow and flexed her fingers. Vadim was no longer watching her play, and instead was staring across the garden to the sea, which sparkled like a sapphire beneath the dense blue sky.
‘Penny for them?’ she said cheerfully, her teasing smile fading when she glimpsed an expression of raw pain in his eyes, before his urbane mask slipped back into place. ‘Is—is something troubling you, Vadim?’ she faltered, so shaken by what she had seen that she ignored his warning frown that he did not welcome questions about his personal life. It was not the first time she had sensed that his thoughts were far away, and when he stared at her without replying she found his brooding silence unnerving.
He shrugged laconically. ‘What could be troubling me, angel face?’ he drawled. ‘I’m enjoying good weather, fine food and the company of a beautiful mistress in my bed every night. What more could any man ask for?’
Mistress! How she hated that word, Ella thought savagely, looking away from him so that he would not see how much his casual description of her role in his life had hurt her. Vadim was a charming and charismatic companion, and a generous lover, but she sensed that there were secrets in his past that he would never reveal to her.
‘I just thought you looked bothered by something,’ she muttered stiffly, telling herself that it was ridiculous to feel rejected just because he chose not to confide in her. They did not have that kind of relationship, she reminded herself. She was his temporary mistress, and all the wishing in the world would not change the situation.
‘It’s sweet of you to be concerned about me,’ he said, in a faintly amused tone that caused a flush of embarrassment to stain her cheeks. ‘But I assure you there is no need.’ Vadim’s conscience gnawed at him when he saw the flare of hurt in her eyes. He knew he had sounded abrupt, but he had no intention of revealing to Ella that her rendition of Mozart’s exquisite Eine Kleine Nachtmusik had reminded him of an evening many years ago, when he had taken Irina to a concert by the Moscow State Symphony.
It had been a few months after their marriage, a celebration of the news that Irina was pregnant with their first child, and he could still recall the excitement he had felt that he was going to be a father. Why had he allowed his ambition to make money to become more important than his wife and child? he wondered bleakly. His obsession with developing his business had hurt Irina, but by the time he had realised just how much she and Klara meant to him they had already made their fateful journey to Irina’s home village, and although he had followed them he had arrived too late to save them.
‘Did you remember we’re meeting Sergey and Lena Tarasov for dinner tonight?’ He dragged his mind from the past and forced a casual tone.
‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ Ella glanced at her watch. ‘I think I’ll go and shower and start getting ready now,’ she muttered, needing to get away from him before she gave in to the stupid urge to burst into tears.
She had met Vadim’s Russian friends the Tarasovs on several occasions. They were a charming couple, and she enjoyed their company, but if she was honest she would have preferred an intimate dinner on the terrace with Vadim, followed by a stroll along the beach in the moonlight before he swept her off to bed. When they had first arrived in Antibes they had spent many evenings alone together at the villa, but lately he had accepted invitations to social events every night, and she wondered if it was a sign that he was growing bored of her.
She’d known right from the start that their relationship would only ever be a temporary affair, she reminded herself when she stepped out of the shower, smoothed fragrant lotion onto her lightly tanned skin and returned to the bedroom to dress. She had also known that falling in love with him would be emotional suicide—but Vadim had dismantled her defences one by one, until she feared she was in danger of losing her heart to him irrevocably.
A noise from the doorway alerted her to his presence, and she pinned a smile to her face as she spun round and swept a hand over her dress. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think you look stunning,’ Vadim said truthfully, feeling the familiar tug of sexual hunger in his groin when he studied her. The black silk strapless sheath was deceptively simple, its bodice cut low over the upper curves of her breasts, and the side split in the skirt revealing a glimpse of slender thigh encased in gossamer-fine black hose.
With her hair swept up into a chignon, she looked elegant and desirable—the perfect attributes for a mistress. She would turn heads tonight, and he knew that other men would fantasise about her slender body beneath her dress and envy him. But she belonged to him, and only him. He was surprised by the feeling of possessiveness that surged through him. She meant nothing to him, he reminded himself grimly. She was just another blonde, passing briefly through his life, and the realisation that he was becoming addicted to her company—in and out of the bedroom—was the reason he had started to accept social invitations which ensured that he spent less time alone with her.
‘I have a present for you,’ he said, strolling over to her and taking a slim black velvet box from his pocket.
Ella caught her breath when he extracted a glittering diamond necklace from the box and fastened it around her throat. ‘I can’t possibly accept it,’ she faltered as she stared at her reflection in the mirror and watched how the diamonds sparkled in the golden glow of the setting sun. ‘It must be worth a fortune.’
He shrugged. ‘You deserve it.’ Unlike his previous mistresses, Ella never expected him to lavish her with gifts. ‘It pleases me to buy things for you. Don’t you like it?’ he murmured, his voice whispering against her skin as he traced his lips up her neck and found the sensitive spot below her ear.
‘It’s beautiful.’ Ella said quietly, but the words ‘you deserve it’ echoed in her mind. Did he regard the necklace as payment for her services in the bedroom—along with the designer clothes he had bought her? She was his mistress, she reminded herself dully, and he was a billionaire who probably bought all his mistresses diamonds. She remembered the daisy chain he had made for her the previous day, when they had lain on the grass beneath the shade of the olive trees, and wondered what he would say if she told him she would rather wear the simple necklace made of flowers that was now hidden in her bedside drawer than the priceless and meaningless precious gems that felt like a weight around her neck.
Vadim’s Aston Martin had been shipped to the villa a few days after their arrival. The powerful car ate up the twenty miles between Antibes and Monaco, and they drove through the Principality to the famous Grand Casino, where they met up with the Tarasovs.
‘It’s a spectacular place, isn’t it?’ Lena Tarasov murmured, after the two couples had dined in the exclusive restaurant and were strolling through the casino’s opulent gaming rooms, where magnificent crystal chandeliers sparkled down on the array of glittering diamonds and gems worn by every designer-clad female guest. ‘Monte Carlo is a world away from the slums of Moscow, where Sergey, Vadim and I grew up.’
Ella glanced at the beautiful dark-haired Russian woman at her side. ‘Did you know Vadim when he was a child?’ she asked curiously.
‘No, he and Sergey became friends when they were in the army, and Vadim was best man at our wedding. When Sergey’s electronics company folded a few years ago, Vadim offered him the position of company director at his Russian headquarters.’ Lena smiled. ‘Vadim is a good man and loyal friend. To be honest I think he was glad of the opportunity to hand over the Russian operation to someone he knew he could trust and move to Europe. Russia holds bad memories for him.’
Ella nodded, recalling Vadim’s description of his unhappy childhood with his father and cruel grandmother, after his mother had abandoned him. ‘Yes, he’s told me about his family.’
‘He has?’ Lena gave her a speculative glance. ‘I ha
d not realised. As far as I know, Vadim has never spoken about his wife and daughter to anyone but his closest friends.’ She appeared unaware of the shock wave that had ripped through Ella, and gave her another warm smile. ‘Losing them both was such a terrible tragedy. I don’t think Vadim has ever really come to terms with it. He has always maintained he would never fall in love again. But…’ She shrugged her shoulders expressively. ‘You are different to all his other women. I said so to Sergey the first time we met you. Maybe you can unlock Vadim’s heart and make his eyes smile again?’
They had reached the salon, where the two men were already seated at the roulette table. The room was hot and busy, and buzzing with the hubbub of conversation, and Ella struggled to squeeze through the crowds thronged around the tables, trying to keep up with Lena so that she could question the Russian woman about her astounding revelation that Vadim—the most commitment-phobic playboy on the planet—had once had a wife and child.
She felt numb with shock. He’d never said a word to her in all the time they had spent together. But of course he did not regard her as one of his closest friends, she thought bitterly. She was just his temporary mistress, and he kept her shut out of his life. Contrary to what Lena thought, she certainly did not have the key to his heart.
CHAPTER TEN
‘YOU’RE very quiet tonight. What’s the matter?’ Vadim queried as the Aston Martin sped along the road back to Antibes.
Ella shot him a lightning glance and felt her heart contract at the sight of his hard, classically sculpted features highlighted by the moonlight. ‘I’ve got a headache. I’ll take a couple of migraine tablets when we get back.’ She turned away from him and stared out of the window, wondering why misery had settled like a lead weight in her stomach. What did it matter if he had been married and had had a child? His past had nothing to do with her. But during their time in Antibes she had felt closer to him than she ever had to any other human being, and, fool that she was, she had kidded herself that he was beginning to regard her as more than a convenient sex partner. The discovery that he had deliberately withheld important details about his past made a mockery of her stupid daydream that he would ever want a meaningful relationship with her.
‘I have to make a call to the US,’ he told her when they entered the Villa Corraline, and immediately headed for his study. ‘Why don’t you go up to bed? You look all in.’
As soon as she reached the bedroom, Ella stripped out of her evening dress and took off the diamond necklace. Maybe she was oversensitive, but all evening she’d felt as though the glittering gems had screamed the fact that she was Vadim’s mistress, and she had been aware of speculative glances from various predatory women, clearly wondering how long she would hold on to her position.
Recalling that Vadim had dropped the velvet box that had contained the necklace into his bedside cabinet, she crossed to his side of the bed, opened the drawer and deposited the diamonds. She was about to shut the drawer again when something caught her attention.
The rag-doll was clearly old, and cheaply made. Someone had repaired the stitching on the arms and legs with a slightly darker thread, and some of the stuffing must have escaped because the doll was limp and strangely misshapen. Carefully, Ella took the doll from the drawer. Beneath it were two photographs: one of a woman with a mass of brown hair, holding a baby in her arms, the other depicting a little girl of maybe four or five, with an impish smile and a mop of blonde curls. The photos were not of particularly good quality and were curled at the edges, as if they had been held many times. They could only be of Vadim’s wife and child, she realised, her heart thumping as she stared at them in fascination, unaware of the faint sound of footfall until he materialised in front of her.
Flushing guiltily, she quickly dropped the photographs into her lap. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,’ she mumbled. ‘I was putting the necklace away when I saw the pictures…and I was curious.’ Vadim’s silence was unnerving; the expression on his hard face unreadable, and her hands shook slightly as she handed the doll and photos to him. ‘Cute little girl,’ she commented, striving to sound normal as she got up from the bed.
‘Yes.’ He finally spoke, and gave a faint shrug of his shoulders, his eyes veering from her face to the pictures. ‘They’re friends—in Russia.’
Ella nodded. ‘I see.’ She picked up her robe and headed swiftly for the en suite bathroom. She was not one of Vadim’s closest friends; she was the woman he had sex with. There was no reason why he would confide in her, she reminded herself.
In the bathroom she removed her make-up, washed her face and released the pins from her chignon, pulling the brush through her hair with automatic strokes until she could not put off returning to the bedroom any longer. Thank God she’d made the excuse about having a headache earlier, she thought bleakly. She knew she was being stupid, but she could not bear to make love with Vadim tonight, when his lie about the identities of the woman and child in the photographs emphasised how unimportant she was to him.
He had switched off the lamps so that the room was shadowed; fingers of silvery moonlight were glimmering through the windows. Vadim had stepped outside onto the terrace. She could see him sitting on the garden bench, his shoulders slumped in an air of such utter loneliness that instead of sliding into bed she was drawn towards the open doors, her grey silk gown rustling as she hurried down the steps.
He looked up as she approached, and she caught her breath at the expression of haunted agony on his face.
‘The woman in the photo was my wife,’ he said harshly.
Ella’s eyes flew to the photographs in his hands, and her heart contracted when she saw him stroke his finger lightly over the face of the little girl.
‘And this was my daughter—Klara.’ The silence trembled between them before he added in a tightly controlled voice, ‘They’re both dead.’
He passed his hand over his eyes, and the betraying gesture tore Ella’s heart to shreds. She was stunned to see this powerful man suddenly so vulnerable. She wanted to go to him, hold him, but fear that he would reject her sympathy held her immobile.
‘I’m so sorry.’ She didn’t know what to say, and the words seemed desperately inadequate. When Lena Tarasov had revealed that Vadim had been married, she had been bitterly hurt that he had never spoken about his past to her. But now, as she witnessed his raw pain, she hated herself for having been so childish. He had clearly been devastated by the loss of his wife and daughter, and who could blame him if he found it hard to talk about their deaths?
‘What…what happened?’ she asked huskily.
His throat worked, and his lashes were spiked with moisture when he lifted his head and met her startled gaze. ‘They were killed in an avalanche which hit Irina’s parents’ village,’ he explained harshly. ‘Most of Rumsk was wiped out.’ He stared down at the photos in his hand. ‘My parents-in-law lived on the lower slopes of the mountain, and when hundreds of tons of snow hurtled down the mountainside no one in the house stood a chance. It was three days before the rescue team found Irina, and another two before they reached Klara.’ His voice cracked with emotion. ‘Of course it was too late. When they found Klara she was still holding her doll.’
He picked up the rag-doll and swallowed the constriction in his throat. He could sense Ella’s shock, and knew she was struggling for something to say. But there was nothing to be said. Irina and Klara were gone, and no amount of words would bring them back.
Ella’s throat ached with tears, but she forced herself to speak. ‘When?’ she whispered.
‘Ten years ago.’ His mouth twisted into a grimace. ‘Today would have been Klara’s fifteenth birthday.’ The memories had been agonising today, but he had suppressed his pain in the same way that he always did, and had arranged to socialise with friends to prevent himself from dwelling on the past. But now the evening was over, and he could no longer banish the images in his head of his angelic-faced little girl.
‘I suppose your…wife…’ El
la stumbled slightly over the word ‘…had taken your daughter to visit her parents.’ She fell silent, finding it impossible to imagine how terrible it must have been for Vadim when he’d heard news of the disaster.
Vadim stared silently across the dark garden, reliving those harrowing hours and days when he had joined the search teams and dug through the snow until his shoulder muscles had burned with his frantic efforts to find Klara, so that he could place her body with Irina’s in the mortuary. Even after ten years, the memory of finding his lifeless daughter still ripped his heart out.
He didn’t understand why he suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to confide in Ella. All he knew was that somehow she had crept beneath his guard, so that for the first time in a decade he found himself contemplating a relationship that encompassed more than mindless sex.
Ella looked ethereal and achingly fragile, with her silver-grey gown fluttering gently in the breeze and her pale gold hair streaming like a river of silk down her back. But her loveliness was more than skin-deep. He had discovered that she was funny, witty, fiercely intelligent, and she possessed a depth of compassion that he had never found in any other woman. He admired her strength of will as she fought her nerves to pursue her career as a soloist, and he recognised the vulnerability she tried so hard to disguise. She needed—deserved—more than he could give her. He had failed in one relationship, and that failure had resulted in unimaginable pain. He could never risk failing again.
‘If you want the truth, Irina was in Rumsk because she had walked out on our marriage,’ he told her savagely, the familiar feeling of self-loathing rushing over him. ‘I had been away on yet another business trip, and on my return I found a note from her explaining that she felt I didn’t love her, and that she was taking Klara to stay with her parents. I knew Irina had been upset that I spent so much time at work,’ he admitted heavily. ‘I was determined to reassure her that she and Klara were more important to me than anything, and I raced after them, but I reached Rumsk after the avalanche had hit.’
Ruthless Russian, Lost Innocence Page 14