Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  “Mischa,” she breathed, and he said, roughly, “Lady,” for in his deep, full-voweled accent her name was changed.

  And she looked into his dark face and thought she could feel her heart break. Mischa Busnetsky touched a tear from her cheek with a gentle finger and smiled down at her.

  “The world is not as we would make it,” he said quietly.

  She saw her father coming towards them over Mischa Busnetsky’s shoulder, and her heart was chill. She looked up at him while her father helped her into her coat, and she saw in Mischa’s eyes that she looked at him for the last time, and it was a pain worse than dying. He caught her hand and their fingers clung, as though through a barred gate—a gate that would never be unlocked.

  Holding her hand, Mischa saw Laddy and her father to the door and then down the ill-lighted hallway to the top of the stairs. Her father started down, but with a foot on the first step, Laddy turned and gazed in anguish at the man looming so darkly above her.

  “I love you,” she whispered, her stomach hollow and knotted with pain. Mischa Busnetsky breathed as though he had been struck and silently bent to bury his mouth in her trembling palm.

  The sound of a stifled cough several floors below travelled clearly in the silence. The secret shadow, their watchdog, waiting in the warmth for his quarry to reappear.

  Mischa raised his head and caught her gaze. “Not as we would make it,” he repeated, and he smiled at her as he might have smiled at his own death.

  She would not protest at what could not be changed. Smiling back at him in salute and farewell Laddy took her hand from his and turned and walked slowly down the stairs to her waiting father.

  The next day the art exhibition was closed by the secret police.

  A month later Mischa Busnetsky was in prison again, for “possession of anti-Soviet propaganda.”

  Chapter 3

  Laddy gazed unseeingly at the newspaper that had slipped off her lap and lay on the floor beside the hem of her dress. The heavy burgundy silk was a deeper hue than the red velvet from eight years ago, as though the colour had mellowed and aged. Laddy shook her head to clear it.

  Her memories had not mellowed and aged. She had locked them away, long ago, and now when she took off the lock, she might have expected them to have less immediacy, less power—but no. Eight long years had passed, but when she thought of Mischa Busnetsky she might have seen his face yesterday.

  Laddy bit her lip and dropped her forehead into her hand. That he should have been released today, of all days! That she should be sitting here tonight, of all nights, remembering the scene that had destroyed her, remembering the man whose face came between her and every man who wanted her!

  In eight long years, John Bentinck was the only man who had kissed her without her tasting betrayal on his lips—betrayal not of Mischa Busnetsky, but of her own knowledge of what love should be.

  Tonight, after two months of gentle courtship, he was going to tell her he loved her—and Laddy had allowed those memories out, and what were her chances now of being made to forget them, by John?

  The doorbell had rung three times before it filtered through to her conscious mind. With a smothered gasp, Laddy jumped up, hurled the paper with Mischa Busnetsky’s picture onto the counter and ran down the hall to the door.

  At the sight of the handsome golden-haired man on her doorstep, Laddy resolutely pushed her memories down. “Hello,” she smiled, and John Bentinck smiled at her in a way that turned her heart over, and she willed him to have the power to make her forget.

  “Hello, yourself!” he said, his deep northern voice warm and his smile broadening in appreciation as he looked at her.

  John had joined the staff of the Herald two months ago as a news photographer, coming from a small paper up north, and Laddy had liked him the moment she saw him.

  He was a very good photographer, she had discovered during the assignments they had covered together, with a sensitive eye for the unusual in a scene.

  He was twenty-seven, and he lived for the moment when one good picture was picked up by the wire services and used in newspapers around the world, and his name was made.

  Laddy knew it would happen; she had confidence in him. And she was nearly sure she could love him.

  “Well!” John exclaimed. “You are something, aren’t you? Come here!” He drew her to him slowly, smilingly, and kissed her, and she wanted to be in love with him.

  She reached her arms up around his neck; in response, his kiss became more ardent. “Well, well, well, my love,” he said when they drew apart. He touched her chin with a forefinger and smiled down at her.

  Her heart racing pleasantly, she hung up his coat and led him down the softly lighted hallway to the kitchen, where he sniffed appreciatively before looking around. “Very nice,” he murmured, as his glance fell on the table. He smiled again. “I do hope,” he said, “that the kitchen is where you feed your special friends.”

  Laddy laughed. John could always make her laugh.

  “But of course.”

  “It’s not where you feed the men you’re keeping at bay?” he pressed with mock worry.

  “I don’t feed the men I’m keeping at bay at all,” she responded gravely.

  He smiled mock-roguishly. “You have just made a very damaging admission.”

  Laddy laughed again as the truth of this struck her. “And you,” she said accusingly, “tricked me into it!”

  They laughed together. They laughed all through the meal that was, in spite of the kitchen background, intimate, with the soft lamp lighting the table and the plants around the darkened window creating a cosy world for them. Laddy almost succeeded in banishing any other thought than that John was with her and that she liked him.

  “That was really something,” John said, as he finished the last bite and pushed his plate away. “I can see why you don’t feed the men you’re keeping at bay.”

  “Thank you for those kind words,” Laddy said wryly. John blinked, then a rueful smile spread over his face.

  “That does it,” he said. “I am going to get my mother to teach me how to compliment a lady!”

  When she had poured their coffee, John said, “Let’s move out somewhere more comfortable.” Laddy followed him into the sitting room with her coffee cup in her hand and sat down obediently beside him on the sofa where he patted it with his free hand.

  “Remember I told you I had something to tell you?” he said, when he had put one arm around her and pulled her closer. He felt her nod against his side. “Well—” he said, leaning forward to set his cup and saucer down on the small table in front of them and turning to face her “—I’ve got my holiday time. I had to fight Richard for it, but I got it.”

  He paused significantly. “Starting two weeks Monday.”

  “That’s when mine are,” said Laddy, in surprise.

  “I know,” John said smiling. “I do know. You said you wanted to get some work done on the house. Instead, how would you—” he bent and kissed her lightly on the lips “—how would you like to come to Lanzarote with me?”

  Laddy jerked her head from his chest and blinked up into his slightly apprehensive eyes.

  “Lanzarote?” she repeated stupidly, taken completely by surprise.

  “Warm sun, golden sand, sunsets, soft nights and sea,” John said softly. “And me.”

  And him. The man she wanted to love, the man she had thought—hoped?—was going to tell her tonight that he was in love with her.

  Laddy breathed deeply and sighed.

  “I would have to think about that,” she said.

  She wanted to say yes. She wanted to forget Mischa Busnetsky and the effect he had had on her. She wanted to forget her useless dreams and take what was offered her, wanted to fall in love with warm, safe John Bentinck and be loved by him. But....

  “Are you thinking about it?” he asked from above her head, his voice resonating in his chest under her ear and breaking into her confused thoughts.

  �
��Oh, yes,” she said, smiling as she lay in the comfortable curve of his arm.

  “And what’s the result?” he pressed. She could hear that he was smiling as he said it, and underneath the smile, she could hear—hurt. He had expected her to say yes immediately.

  She knew with a sudden painful clarity that if she said no she would lose him.

  In the two months of their almost platonic relationship, he had never pushed, never demanded anything of her. He had kissed her good-night, he had sometimes held her as he was holding her now—but when she drew back he had never pushed. She had never even seen impatience in his eyes. It was as though he understood that private pain, as though he knew that the way to help her was never to demand more than she could volunteer.

  She did not want to lose him.

  Lanzarote, she thought, conjuring up in her thoughts a vision of what was being offered her. She was sitting with her head on John’s shoulder, his arm around her, her arm around his chest. She felt physically comfortable with him. She felt warm and close and... loved. Suppose they were lying on a warm beach in this posture, her cheek resting on his naked, sea-damp chest; suppose she knew that when they got up they would be returning to a shared hotel room?

  She absently, nervously stroked his chest, and he ran his free hand up her arm to her shoulder and then, tilting her head back, he bent to kiss her.

  A gentle frisson of passion touched her spine, and she welcomed it, and surely it would grow?

  “Why?” she queried softly when he lifted his head.

  “Why?” John repeated in surprise.

  “Why did you work so hard to get your holidays? Why are you asking me to go with you?”

  “My sweet, modest woman, because I adore you—” he kissed her lightly “—and love you—” another kiss “—and I fancy you like mad,” he said. He wrapped both arms around her and held her tightly to him. “Come with me, love,” he whispered.

  “I have to—” she began, and he interrupted in an urgent tone,

  “Don’t think, Laddy. Don’t think!” He began to kiss her, mounting urgency in his hands and his mouth, as though a tight rein he had held on himself had suddenly broken.

  His urgency fanned the pale spark of her passion, so that she did not resist, and he kissed her throat and eyes and then her mouth again—

  The phone rang.

  John swore, lifting his mouth from hers. “Let it ring,” he said thickly, as she struggled out of his arms.

  “I can’t!” said Laddy. “It’s probably Harry!” And suddenly the thought that she might be seeing, talking to Mischa Busnetsky tomorrow made her stomach turn over. She was almost afraid.

  She ran to the kitchen to the phone.

  “Hello, dear girl,” Harry Waller’s voice said in her ear. “Were you busy?”

  “No,” Laddy replied. “What’s the word?”

  “Ten o’clock in the morning at Heathrow,” he said, and added other details. “Have a good time with it,” he was mocking her a little as he hung up.

  Laddy turned back to the sitting room, but the phone rang again. This time it was Richard Snapes, the pictures editor, and he asked for John.

  “Yes, he’s here,” she said, surprised. “What made you think of trying me?”

  “Only the fact that he left me your number as where he’d be tonight,” Richard’s dry voice responded.

  Laddy turned to the doorway to call John. “It’s Richard,” she said. She watched him curiously as he came down the hallway towards her and crossed to the phone. “Tonight,” Richard had said. Well, tonight was an ambiguous word. It could mean merely the evening—or it could mean all night.

  Laddy moved into the sitting room. Richard Snapes had expected her to answer the phone. He’d greeted her hello with “Hello, Laddy.” But Richard Snapes would hardly be that familiar with her phone number—or her voice. He was the pictures editor. He organised the assignments of the photographers and had little to do with reporters.

  Which could only mean that John had said, “I’ll be at Laddy Penreith’s tonight, here’s her number.” Of course, he had to leave a number where he could be reached if he was expecting an assignment call to come through, but why had he made a point of saying it was her number? And had he really said “tonight” and not “this evening”?

  So confident of her that he had been broadcasting his success in advance? John, who never pushed her an inch farther than she was prepared to go?

  A few moments ago she had known that he wanted, intended to make love to her. She had sensed a sudden breaking of his restraint, as though for the first time he had lost a control she had not even been aware he was using. But if he had already told Richard that he would be here “tonight,” what did that make it?

  Laddy signed and shook her head. Had she just found another excuse for saying no?

  John came back into the room and walked up to her, putting his arms around her waist. “Now, where were we?” he asked.

  She sank against his chest, but the spark was gone.

  “Was that tomorrow’s assignment?”

  “Yes,” John said. “Airport, ten o’clock.”

  “Yes, me, too,” she said. “I’m glad we’ll be covering it together.” They worked well as a team, and this assignment was important. To her especially.

  He kissed her for that, and then she found herself saying, “You have to go now. I want to be on my toes tomorrow. There’s going to be a crush.”

  John drew back, almost angry. “Aren’t you taking devotion to duty a little too far?” he asked. “It’s not even eleven o’clock.”

  But suddenly she could think of nothing but Mischa Busnetsky, and she was afraid, and that was something she did not understand. She drew away from him, and John looked down into her eyes and saw the fear.

  “All right, Laddy,” he sighed, and she knew that he thought she was afraid of him. “Go to bed—but dream of me.”

  He kissed her again and chatted a little as he took his coat and found his keys—but she didn’t really hear what he was saying. She smiled at him when he smiled at her, laughed a little because he did, and kissed him goodbye before finally closing the door, but she was not present.

  Tomorrow she would see Mischa Busnetsky for the first time in eight years.

  Laddy gazed unseeingly around her comfortable living room and shook her head as if to clear it. But Mischa Busnetsky would not so easily be banished.

  She had thought about him almost constantly in the first years after her last trip with her father. She had written him in prison, letters she could never be sure he would receive, letters Mischa had never answered.

  His memory had stayed strong in her because the promise he had made her, of what her experience of love would be, had been false. She had never felt that drunken joy again; no man’s kiss had shaken her the way the sight of Mischa’s hand caressing the lips of a woman in an oil painting had shaken her.

  She had never understood what had happened to her that night, but she had learned, with a resigned disappointment, that it had been a myth. One day she had realised that that one false memory was in danger of destroying her life. She had resolutely pushed all thought of Mischa Busnetsky from her mind from that day.

  She was appalled at her discovery that the memory had as much power over her now, after years of deliberately repressing it, as it ever had. Because now was not the time to remember private dreams. Her connection now with Mischa Busnetsky was entirely business—publicly, the Herald’s business, privately, her father’s.

  Lewis Penreith had had unfinished business with Mischa when he died three years ago, but Laddy hadn’t known of it then. She hadn’t connected his death with Mischa Busnetsky then.

  Three years ago a hit-and-run driver had killed her father, but no one in the International Council on Freedom and no one close to Laddy had accepted that it was an accident. There were too many governments in the world who would have been interested in stopping Lewis Penreith’s activities, and it was an eventuality th
at her father had prepared her to accept long before.

  She had accepted it, but she was unprepared for the anguish and anger that consumed her. She was unprepared, too, for the consuming need to know why. Why now? But Laddy had just left a smaller paper to join the newsroom of the Herald, and it had been a long time since she had worked closely enough with her father to know what cause might have finally precipitated his murder.

  Only three months ago she had learned what Lewis Penreith’s last mission had been. It was for that reason, and not for any personal one, that she had begged Harry to let her cover Mischa Busnetsky’s arrival in England.

  Laddy stared down at the pile of multi-coloured cushions that she had been adding to the living room one by one over the years, till she’d achieved this air of casual comfort and warmth. There was no way out. She owed it not only to Mischa Busnetsky, but also to her father. She had to see Mischa again no matter how much that thought frightened her.

  Three years ago, shortly after her father’s death, Laddy had come home to a house that had seemed somehow changed. As though...as though someone had been in the house and disturbed only the air. She tried to tell herself that she was imagining it, that the house seemed changed because her father was no longer there—but still she took a weekend to go through his papers to see what there was that someone might have wanted.

  She found no clue. If the house had been searched, either they had found and taken what they wanted, or her father had never had it. His connections were so extensive it was impossible to guess at what might be missing.

  She did not learn the truth for nearly three years.

  She shivered now, remembering the day three months ago when Margaret had rung down to her from the flat upstairs, an odd note in her voice: “Can you come upstairs for a minute, Laddy? Something I think you should see.”