by Lucy Ellis
‘That’s wicked.’
Nik stretched his arms and gave his shoulders a roll, showing off that honed physique she already knew very well. But she also got the impression he was shucking off all the tension that had gathered as their conversation had progressed.
‘That’s my stepmother,’ he observed dryly. ‘She’s a classic fairy tale villain.’
‘Will you ever get it back?’
He scrutinised her through those thick lashes. ‘You underestimate me, Sybella. I purchased it for several million US dollars two years ago. We settled out of court. It paid for that very nice villa on Lake Geneva you were admiring.’
Sybella shook her head at the figures involved but mostly the weight Nik must have carried all those years, wanting to restore his father’s reputation and unable to do so.
It wasn’t just the absence of his brother that had weighted him down but the loss of his father’s legacy.
‘At least she’s out of your lives. Is she out of your lives?’
Nik consulted his watch. ‘How about we take the tender to a cove near here and I’ll show you some of the sights?’
Sybella was changing into shorts and a T-shirt when she realised Nik had once again very neatly sidestepped her question for the second time.
*
An afternoon spent ashore, climbing to a lookout with spectacular views of the coast, concluded with a swim at dusk near the boat.
The water was warm and Sybella’s legs entangled around his, her hair falling in heavy ropes over her shoulders like the mermaid he’d discovered she was, her arms looped around his neck.
Talking about his brother and his stepmother this morning had brought the two sides of his life dangerously close together.
He didn’t want to think about his plans for Galina and the money she’d extorted out of him when he was with Sybella. She made it seem unimportant, and, worse, mean and small. Like a spiteful act she wouldn’t recognise him as being capable of.
She bobbed in the water in front of him, holding onto him like her own personal life buoy.
‘So have you met him? Your real dad?’ She was gazing into his eyes as if daring him to change the subject.
Trust Sybella to be worrying over this.
‘I’ve got a name. I know where he is.’
‘And?’
‘Helsinki.’
‘And?’
‘I still haven’t done anything about it. I don’t know if I ever will. I mean, he has a family, a life. I’m busy.’
He could feel her stroking the back of his neck, treating him like Fleur or one of those damned rabbits she kept. Only he found he didn’t mind because it was Sybella.
‘No, you’re not. You’re just like all of us, a little afraid of what might happen when we let down our guard with other people.’
‘Is that what I am, dushka?’ He tried not to sound too disparaging of her well-meant words.
‘You know you are.’ She smiled at him as if she knew all his cynical thoughts but didn’t believe one of them.
The truth was it was getting harder and harder to hold onto that cynicism when he was around Sybella. Her lashes were wet and sticking around her eyes like a doll’s. She was so beautiful it hurt. Did she know how strange it was for him, letting another person into his head like this?
‘I’ve let my guard down with you,’ he said, almost as a warning, although to her or to him he wasn’t sure.
Her arms tightened around him and he could hear her breathing quicken, the almost ferocious way she hung onto him as if that was all she’d wanted to hear, and it answered a need in him he hadn’t known until now existed.
‘How lucky you are, to at least have known one dad, and now you have a chance with another,’ she said urgently. ‘Don’t let that chance go by, Nik.’
She meant it, and coming from Sybella with her history it had a great deal of force.
He put his mouth close to her ear. ‘How lucky your Simon was, to be first in your heart.’
Sybella’s grip tightened. ‘He’s not first in my heart any more.’
*
They were flying home to Heathrow in his jet from Cape Town International Airport when Sybella, comfortable in a ridiculously luxurious seat, began to giggle.
Nik, standing over her with two glasses of bubbly, raised an eyebrow.
‘What’s so funny?’
She looked up, smiling at him. ‘One day I’ll be telling this story and no one will believe me.’
‘What, is it the champagne? I thought you’d appreciate it before you were back in that storybook cottage of yours hiding spirits in the airing cupboard.’
‘How do you know about that?’
‘Your mother-in-law at the restaurant.’
Sybella rolled her eyes.
‘So this is my last taste of luxury?’ she queried lightly as she accepted her glass, because suddenly they were bang, smack in the middle of making decisions.
‘No, although…’ He crouched down in front of her. ‘How about I ask you what your plans are for the future?’
‘Hugging my daughter and not letting her go for a couple of days,’ Sybella admitted honestly.
‘I was thinking a little more along the lines of your plans for me.’
He started to smile but he was serious too and she could feel her heart thumping like Dodge’s hind legs on the kitchen floor.
She thought of her kitchen at this moment, the menagerie of animals, of Fleur running riot and leading a pack of her little friends up and down the stairs like Napoleon orchestrating his Grande Armée, and tried to picture Nik amidst it all. She failed.
‘You won’t fit,’ she blurted out.
‘Lyubov, I think we’ve already tested that out.’
Sybella couldn’t help it. She snorted. ‘I mean in my kitchen,’ she said softly, worryingly.
‘I’ll build you a bigger one.’
She had a vision of her cottage writ large, squashing all the others in the row and Nik with a big hammer.
As silly as it was, it was also true. He had a way of taking over.
She knew she should be happy; instead she was beginning to panic. It was crazy.
‘We’ll take it a day at a time,’ he told her gravely. ‘There’s no schedule on this.’
She snorted again. With Nik there was always a schedule. He was the busiest man she knew and she had seen the way his grandfather had jockeyed for his attention.
God knew she wouldn’t be here if old Mr Voronov hadn’t been driven to desperate means to get his grandson down to Edbury…
Sybella had the odd thought she didn’t ever want to be in that position.
Driven to desperate means to get Nik’s attention.
She just hoped he could accept she came as a package, and she still wasn’t at all sure if Nik understood that.
It had been incredible. The boat, the time together. But it wasn’t real life.
‘One day at a time, Sybella,’ he said, leaning forward until she was drowning in his eyes and all of her worried thoughts were subsumed, and then he was kissing her and nothing else seemed to matter.
*
They had been home for more than four weeks and Nik had spent most of that time under her thatched roof, although he was officially living at the Hall.
It was a situation that delighted his grandfather and caused no end of gossip in the village.
But Sybella didn’t mind the talk, especially as she put her head around the door and watched Nik reading to Fleur. Her daughter was leaning against him on the sofa and had her thumb tucked inside her mouth and was deep inside the Wild Wood. Nik’s dark velvet voice lent an exotic charm to the story Sybella knew herself off by heart from listening to his grandfather.
These Voronov men had somehow colonised her daughter’s life, and for the better. Nik had made an effort to be around and was currently running his empire with a small staff and a state-of-the-art computer system he had set up at the Hall. Some evenings he could be found pacing i
nto the night across her living room as he argued in a mixture of Russian and English via video conference with various boardrooms around the world. If Fleur wandered in he would break off to help her with some puzzle she had or answer her questions. She was a good girl and knew not to interrupt when people were on the phone, but it gave Sybella enormous satisfaction Nik didn’t view her comings and goings in her own home as an interruption to his work.
After dinner, when Fleur had been put to bed and the house locked up and Nik had done his usual round of phone calls and she’d gone over the invoicing for the refurbishment of the gatehouse, they bumped into each other in the bathroom.
Nik was shaving, and she just wanted to be with him as well as wash her face.
She shimmied in between him and the basin. He grinned and she wriggled her bottom teasingly as she wrung the warm face cloth to clean off the remains of her make-up.
‘Can you ever see yourself getting married again?’
The question took her off guard.
‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ she said truthfully.
She couldn’t help noticing what a good pair they made in the mirror. Because she was tall most men looked her in the eye, but Nik’s height and strong frame made her curvy body shape fit him, and she saw what he’d been showing her in bed: that they were a perfect physical match.
She preened a little.
‘You didn’t like being married?’ He drew the razor along his jaw.
‘If that’s a question about Simon wrapped up with a bow, I did like being married. I guess I felt safe for the first time in my life.’
Nik stilled and met her eyes in the glass. ‘You didn’t feel safe before that?’
‘I felt alone,’ she confessed. ‘For so long it was just me, and then Simon picked me up and carted me off to his life in the village with his parents and his sister, and their neighbours and friends accepted me just because I was his wife. It was an amazing time for me. And then, a few months later, he had the accident.’
Nik wrapped an arm around her. He didn’t mouth any pointless platitudes.
‘Can I tell you something?’ she asked.
He looked down into her eyes and Sybella knew she was about to take a jump into the unknown. She hadn’t told anyone this.
‘I cried for Simon, of course I did, but I remember at the funeral thinking, I’ll have to leave now. I’ll have to leave the village. And somehow that felt worse, that felt like the bigger loss.’
It was an enormous admission and Sybella waited to feel guilty, only she didn’t.
‘Makes sense. It sounds like when you married Simon, you married the life you needed.’
‘Yes, I suppose I did.’ She relaxed against him, relieved he understood.
‘Of course, thanks to Fleur I never did have to leave Edbury.’
Nik towelled his freshly shaven face and switched out the light.
‘When did you find out you were pregnant?’
He followed her across the hallway to her room. The house was quiet but for the usual creaks and groans of age. Fleur’s door at the end of the hall was ajar and Sybella could see the red glow of her nightlight.
‘The day after the funeral. Meg needed a tampon on the day, and it occurred to me I’d been carrying that little box around in my purse for several weeks. So I did a chemist test and then I went to my doctor and my life changed. Again.’
She climbed into her new bed and he stretched out beside her. ‘That’s the thing about life—it’s constantly surprising you.’
He put out the light and pulled her into his arms.
‘I guess the long and the short of it is I got married young because I was alone in the world, but I’m not alone any more. I have a daughter, I have in-laws, I have a whole village.’
‘And you have me,’ he said, and her body began to hum as he slid his hands over her bare skin and found all the places that made her squirm and gasp and sigh.
She woke some hours later, hot and disturbed after a dream. She couldn’t remember the contents, but a kind of anxiousness was knotting her chest and presently she got out of bed and quietly crept downstairs. She took her coat off the coat-rack and, wrapped up in it, stepped out of the back door and into her garden. It was the place where she did her thinking.
Spring would be here soon but it was still bitterly cold at night and she’d only stuffed her feet into her old slippers.
The sky over the Indian ocean had been so high and far-reaching. Here at home the sky was hugger mugger with the low hills, but that sense of snugness and enclosure made her feel safe.
‘What are you doing out here by yourself?’
Nik wore a pair of boxer shorts, but if he was cold he didn’t show it. His physical similarity to one of those more-than-life-size male sculptures the Italians liked to make in the Renaissance was all too obvious.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
He didn’t ask her why she’d decided to come out into the vegetable patch.
‘Do you want to be by yourself?’ His deep voice was pitched low.
There was something about the way he was standing there, not coming any closer, that sent a shiver hightailing down Sybella’s spine.
‘No, I don’t. I don’t want to be by myself.’
Before she could move his arms were closing around her from behind and she was washed with the feeling of security and rightness the dream had upended. She’d already begun to take this feeling for granted with Nik.
It was so dangerous. He could hurt her and she didn’t know if she’d get over it.
But, Mrs Muir be damned. She couldn’t go through her life wondering what might have happened if she hadn’t let him in. The idea of keeping her heart locked up and on a high shelf held no appeal.
Sybella knew she’d remember this when she was old and grey and had great-grandchildren who would never believe their granny had once given her heart to a Russian billionaire and sailed the Indian Ocean in his boat, a man who had the world at his fingertips but right now wanted only her, Sybella Frances Parminter, and her wide, womanly arse. All at once she began to giggle.
‘What’s so funny?’
She looked up, smiling at him. ‘One day I’ll be telling this story about you and me and standing in a vegetable patch and no one will believe me.’
‘Come inside, then.’ He scooped her up and carried her back into the house and up the creaking stairs and past Fleur’s room with its night light and into the corner bedroom where she had moved in alone, almost six years ago after Simon had died, and spent the first night wide awake, tearless and terrified because of the enormity of facing life alone—that was until her baby had kicked.
Fleur had kicked hard. As if to remind her being alone was no longer her fate.
It was time to stop being afraid and to accept that maybe Nik was her fate too.
*
Nik looked at the clock. He needed to get up but Sybella was lying partially on top of him, her mermaid hair strewn across his chest.
He eyed the low ceiling above them. If he stood up and extended his hand he could flatten his palm on that ceiling. He frowned. Damn this place was small. Built for pygmies. They needed to move.
Which was when he flipped his gaze from ceiling to woman and he grinned. He knew then he could get used to this very quickly. How in the hell had she pulled him around this far in the span of several weeks?
Only Sybella didn’t give him a clue, she continued to rest her angel face in the crook of his shoulder, as if he were more restful for her than a pillow. He shared the sentiment. She was warm and her lavish curves cushioned him perfectly. They complemented one another in more ways than one.
He traced the fine skin beneath the soft arc of her pale lashes and trailed his finger down to the curve of her slightly parted lips. She grew more beautiful to him every day and stirred strong feelings in him he didn’t recognise.
Smitten didn’t even begin to cover it.
He cared about what she thought of him, and at
the moment he had a lot to hide.
It was almost ironic when his phone lit up several minutes later and he palmed it off the bedside table, not surprised to see it was from his assistant.
Pavel worked the mad hours he did.
It was a message about an explosion in the Urals mine.
He left Sybella to sleep because he was accustomed to handling things alone, and only remembered to call her when he was in-flight and she wasn’t answering.
He sent a message.
*
Sybella read the message.
Real life intrudes, accident at mine, no loss of life, I’ll ring tonight.
For the next two days she didn’t hear from him and consequently found herself up at midnight, boiling tea, standing over the sink and wondering how her bed had got to feel so lonely when he’d been sharing it for only a brief time.
Which was when it occurred to her there would probably be some information about the mine accident on the Internet.
She fired up her laptop and sure enough the screen filled with various links connected to Nik’s name, but at the top with an accompanying small image was an article from an infamous British tabloid. Marla puts raunchy moves on Russian oligarch!
Sybella just stood there. For a moment all she could think was, Don’t look…don’t look.
But she was clicking and scrolling and, like Bluebeard’s wife, once seen, she couldn’t forget it.
There was an image of Marla Mendez in tiny black barely there underwear, holding a bottle of champagne. Another of Marla pouring champagne over her breasts, her virtually bared breasts, because the bra was basically there as a frame for the main event. Marla climbing onto some guy’s lap. The fourth image was recognisably of Nik, in profile, sitting on a chair with Marla astride him, looking, well, looking…
It was hard to get past all the naked female flesh and her boyfriend, but Nik didn’t seem to be touching her in any way or engaging with her.
Sybella leaned onto the bench and rested her head in her hands, utterly thrown.
It must have happened before they met.
She had no right to be angry or hurt or reproach him with it.