“You’ve got a book to write, and you can do that, as planned,” she protested. “It’s all right for you. What will I do?”
“I did not plan on writing a book,” said Mischa. “I planned on making love to you. And I have not finished yet. You will have enough to occupy you, my Lady. And when the snow clears we will go into St. David’s and get married.”
She drew a finger down his cheek, and his mouth turned into her palm. “Liar,” she accused, laughing. Mischa caught her hand and held it to his lips, and she closed her eyes. “How could you plan to be making love to me when you didn’t know I’d be here?”
He chuckled deep in his throat. “Did you not guess that Helen would let me know your plans? She called me in Paris as soon as she hung up with you.”
“What?”
“I have been waiting since that night at my apartment to get you alone for long enough to make you listen to me. Helen and Richard kept me informed of your movements so that—”
“And what were you doing in Paris?”
“Trying to think of a way to kidnap you and take you there,” he said, “and staying away from the constant temptation to make late visits to your flat.”
He stroked her hair tenderly, and she could feel his touch as though her hair were alive with nerves. She closed her eyes as he bent to her lips, and for a long moment in the bright kitchen there was silence, broken after a moment by the high whistling of the kettle.
Over a leisurely breakfast, Laddy was at last able to say something she knew had to be said. “I’m sorry about that stuff I was writing, Mischa. I had no idea—and I do mean it never once occurred to me that I would be playing into the Kremlin’s hands. When Richard told me, I was appalled by my own ignorance.”
“It was not so serious as I pretended to myself, and to Richard,” Mischa said. He took a sip of coffee and set the cup down, smiling at her. “I was looking for betrayal in you, and those pieces gave me the excuse I needed to believe it and be angry and convinced I was right. For awhile.”
“When did you stop believing it?”
“The night I came to your flat. You talked about being in league with Pavel Snegov—and suddenly everything fell into place in my mind.”
Silence. Laddy picked up the new jar of marmalade and concentrated on trying to open it. “What everything is that?” she asked, looking anywhere but at him. He took the jar from her, and under his broad palm she heard the snap of air invading the vacuum.
“You will learn to have more faith in me,” he said, and waited till she met his gaze. “I saw what a fool I was being, Lady. I knew that there was no connection between you and Pavel Snegov and never would be, that you never had and never would betray me. But even if you did, I knew that I would always love you more than life—and if you led me to hell, what reason was there not to go?”
The blood drained from her head, leaving her shaky and faint, and she gazed at him, her heart so open and vulnerable she was frightened. “Do you really love me like that?” she whispered.
“Do you not know it?” Mischa asked.
“No...I...I...no.”
He set down his coffee cup and stood to pull her up from her chair. “What did you think?” he asked, almost angrily, his eyes searching her face. She gazed up at him, not able to answer, and with a muttered exclamation he pulled her to his chest and wrapped his arms tight. “But what could you think, after taking such hurt from me?”
He breathed shakily. “My love, do you not understand that when I told you to tell Snegov that there was one thing in the world with which I could be destroyed, I was speaking of you?”
There was a deep and utter silence as she absorbed it, and then he sought her lips in a kiss.
“But you laughed that night—” she broke off.
“I laughed because I understood myself. I did not know then how deep your pain was. I thought you were only angry. I thought you would write another article about me and I would make love to you and teach you that your anger came from love.”
He kissed her again and let her go, and she sat down and shakily sipped her coffee.
“And the next article was a friendly story about the royalties.” Mischa grimaced and shook his head. “Until you told me that you wrote it to anger me, I believed you had given in. That you really did not want to see me again. I decided to show you the apartment and tell you not to write about it and see what you did then. But this was unnecessary—the friendly article, too, was meant to anger me.
“My relief, Lady! I was sure that I could make you remember you loved me. But then you showed me how much I had hurt you, and I knew that if by some miracle I could teach you to love me again, it would not be then. I knew I had to wait for the right time.... “
“What sort of right time?”
“When I could get you alone for a few days.”
“So when I asked Helen for the cottage, I gave you the perfect opportunity?”
“No, not perfect—I was not sure whether our history here would make you remember love or pain. But I could not wait for another chance.” He smiled a slow smile.
“But what if when I saw you I ran away?” Laddy said. “How could you know there would be a snowstorm to keep me here?”
Mischa stood again and pulled her to her feet. “Snow or no snow, you would not have got away from me easily.”
“I don’t see how you could have stopped me.”
Mischa laughed, his teeth white against his face.
“I could have incapacitated your car, for one,” he said.
“I could still have gone to stay at Mairi Davies’s,” she pointed out.
He said softly, “I would have gone to bring you back, Lady. And you would have come with me if I had to carry you kicking through the streets. I did not want to wait any longer.”
“Mmm,” Laddy murmured lovingly into his throat, and he led her into the sitting room to the sofa that had been restored to its position in front of the fire.
“Why did we put the bed away, I wonder?” Mischa asked musingly. “That was short-sighted.”
She laughed and put her arms around his neck. “I love you, Mischa,” she said urgently. “Oh, I love you so much!”
“Thank God,” he said huskily, his mouth hovering over hers. “I love you, Lady. I was afraid I would never hear you say that again. When I discovered that my real freedom was your love, only to learn that I had lost you—”
He held her tightly to him, and she had never been safer than she was in this moment. She raised her lips to him like a hungry supplicant.
“Mischa,” she moaned, as he kissed her.
He drew back his head a little to say, “I like to taste my name on your lips. Say it again.”
“Mischa. I love you, Mischa, Mischa...” she chanted, until his possessive mouth made her mute.
The End
Excerpt from Fire in the Wind
by
Alexandra Sellers
Prologue
He couldn’t have said exactly how he knew her, from such a distance. It wasn’t really by the colour of her hair, though he had thought it unique then and knew it nearly unique now: in the long intervening years there had been few women in his life with hair that shade, though for a long time he had actively sought them out. Nor was the spark of recognition entirely touched off by that somehow distinctive line of her back, which he had known so briefly in those distant days that suddenly, now, seemed sharper that the memory of yesterday.
It was her attitude of intense interest, he pinpointed it suddenly—the angle of her head, cocked just that way when she was listening to someone; and although he was behind her he knew with an almost disconcerting clarity just how the half smile and the dark, slightly narrowed gaze would give her face a look of passionate inquiry that could keep a man talking for hours.
The man’s own eyes narrowed then, and he smiled a slightly crooked smile, as though the muscles on one side of his face did not respond as easily to the dictates of his nerves as those
on the other side. It gave him a faintly cynical look—but then, he was a cynical man.
He was also rather cruel emotionally, or so he had been told. His eyes narrowed even more and the smile became more satirical. Perhaps he was cruel. He had been told by women that he took pleasure in the emotional hurt he caused them, but that wasn’t true: mostly he had been indifferent to it.
He was not indifferent now, however. He gazed at the gracefully curving back across the room and felt the deep slow thud of anticipation begin in his brain and his stomach.
This heart he was going to enjoy breaking.
Chapter One
“You surprise me,” the man who told her he had arranged the show said with a smile. “Most New Yorkers—especially in the fashion industry!—seem to think that Montreal and Toronto are the only cities in Canada.”
“Do they?” asked Vanessa. “There was a time when I thought Vancouver was going to be my home. I nearly emigrated here.”
Gary Smeaton blinked at her. He was young, and seemed almost too self-effacing to have sold Vancouver to the trade organisation as a location for the fall show. But then—Vanessa glanced around the moderately crowded room where manufacturers, models, buyers and designers were talking and drinking and introducing themselves—perhaps Canadians were, as a nation, more low-key than she was used to. This introductory cocktail evening was certainly proceeding quietly enough, without any of the hoopla, the wheeling and ealing, the loud voices that she was used to.
“Oh?” His voice called her back. “So you must know the city well? I had the impression this was your first visit.” He looked hurt: he had just been telling her about certain attractions in the city that she must not miss. Some of them she had heard of before, a long time ago, from Jace. Funny how memory could be so tricky—let you forget the name of a person you’d met yesterday, but remember names like Grouse Moutnain, Stanley Park, Gastown, and Galiano Island—places you’d only dreamed of seeing—for nearly ten years.
“It is my first visit,” Vanessa said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been to Canada.”
She had got here at last, if not in the way she had imagined, nine and a half years ago. She had come on business, on the strength of her own talents, and the knowledge gave her a quiet satisfaction that was stronger than the bittersweet memory. Vanessa sipped her drink and smiled at Gary’s faint bewilderment. “Haven’t you ever fallen in love with a place you’ve never seen?”
He laughed. “Really?” he queried. “You fell in love with Vancouver way over there in New York? How did you happen to do that, or is it a long story?”
Her face slowly lost its smile. It’s a short story, she was thinking. I fell in love with a man who told me to dream of Vancouver, and I’ve never been able to stop. And that’s all there is.
She had let a silence fall between them, and she realized that Gary was watching her with an air of puzzled interest. Vanessa forced herself to smile.
“Yes, it’s a long story,” she agreed. “Tell me what it’s like to organize a week-long trade fashion show.”
He finished off his drink and looked around absently for a place to set his glass. “I didn’t actually organize the show,” he said. There was nowhere to set the glass, so he continued to hold it. “I work for Concorp, the company that owns this hotel. Concorp also owns a ladies’ wear manufacturing company, Designwear. My boss, who owns Concorp, never misses a trick. I started working three years ago on bringing this trade show to Vancouver and to this hotel. That’s really all I did.”
“Your boss sounds like—” Vanessa broke off when Gary coughed significantly and interrupted her with,
“Hi Jake. What do you think?” She turned, and the man behind her was so close they were almost touching, so he must have heard what she said. Vanessa’s cheeks pinkened, though all she had been going to say was, “Your boss sounds like a pretty smart businessman.”
“Looks good, Gary,” the man was saying in a deep voice, but when she looked up his dark eyes were on her.
“H-hello,” Vanessa said softly, disconcerted to find him starting at her like that, like someone who saw something he wanted and didn’t care who knew it. He was a dark man, with thick black hair curling slightly down over his forehead, and skin bronzed with tan. He was tallish—just over six feet, she thought—and of a lean muscularity more like a tennis player or a rodeo rider than a weightlifter.
He exuded power. He did not need the pretty curvaceous blonde clinging to his arm as a symbol of his influence, not this man. Nor, Vanessa was suddenly thinking, as a sign of his sexual power. Or perhaps men didn’t pick up on the strong masculine tension in him, a tension that was attracting her and making her wary all at once.
“Hello,” Jake returned in a deep, rich voice that was sending her more than just a message of greeting.
“Vanessa Standish, meet Jake—”
“And Louisa,” Jake said at the same time.
Louisa looked a vapid little beauty, but she was not slow where her own interests lay, and her greenish eyes told Vanessa in no uncertain terms that she knew what effect Jake’s nearness was having on Vanessa, and Vanessa could just forget it.
Vanessa wanted to laugh. It had been a long time since a woman had challenged her as openly as this, but she had no desire whatsoever to poach on Louisa’s preserves. She wasn’t interested in any week-long affair. She tried to communicate this with an open smile, but Louisa’s face remained closed and hard and unconvinced.
“We’ve met, haven’t we?” Vanessa asked then, and she was close enough to Jake to sense the odd fact that he tensed when she spoke. “Aren’t you modelling with us—TopMarx?”
“Oh! Oh yes,” said Louisa coolly, her eyes running almost insolently over Vanessa’s face.
Vanessa was a striking woman. Her high, broad forehead tapered to a firm jawline and delicate chin; her nose was narrow, her face fine-boned, her mouth full and beautifully cut. Her brown eyes and thick lashes were arresting against her pale skin and russet hair, darkening when she was interested, like a black hole in space, seeming to absorb everything.
But Louisa was looking at her as though she couldn’t quite remember ever having seen her before. The meeting had been brief, and Tom and Martita had done all the talking to the three local models they had hired, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Louisa hadn’t recognized her. But as Louisa turned deliberately to Jake then, drawing his attention and Gary’s back to herself with a soft comment, the message she was sending Vanessa was much stronger than mere non-recognition. You are an outsider here, she was saying. You are not important enough to remember.
Neither of the two men was excluding her, though, and Vanessa stayed. The three-way conversation allowed her to study the man Louisa was being so possessive about. Jake had a lean narrow face, with thick eyebrows, dark eyes, and a prominent nose. His mouth was wide and well-cut, with a slightly crooked smile that would have been charming were it not for the look in his hooded eyes. He was impatient, and he didn’t mind letting it show. There was something he wanted, and he wasn’t getting it, and Vanessa tilted her head curiously and watched to see what it was and how Jake would go about getting it.
Suddenly, it seemed to her, because she hadn’t been attending to the conversation, Gary was moving off in the direction of the bar with Louisa on his arm. Vanessa looked blankly after them, and caught a look of such venomous anger from Louisa that she gasped.
Then, realizing, she went still, turning slowly to gaze up into Jake’s dark face.
It was there in his eyes. What he wanted was her.
Silence fell between them.
“How do you like Vancouver?” he asked her finally, but there was another conversation going on behind his eyes, and Vanessa was abruptly nervous.
“It’s very beautiful,” she said, though she hadn’t seen much of it yet, just a vision of mountains and ocean from the air this afternoon, and what she could see out of the taxi window.
“Your first trip?” he asked.
“Yes, how did you know?”
Jake shrugged. “It seemed likely,” he said, lifting his arm to drink from the glass he was holding.
“Did it?” she asked curiously. “Why?”
She remembered what Gary had said about east coast Americans not being familiar with Vancouver and wondered if that was the reason.
“I think,” Jake said meaningly, “I’d have known if you’d come before.”
She breathed. “My goodness, and they told me Canadians weren’t aggressive,” she said lightly, fighting the little inward flutter his words had caused. She had never been laid siege to quite like this. “You think we were destined to become acquainted?”
In the act of raising his glass for a drink he paused, and looked at her for a long, long moment. Then, astoundingly, he threw back his head and laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do. Let’s get acquainted, Vanessa.”
He finished off the liquid in his glass and glanced at the nearly empty one she was holding. He slid an arm around her back and they began to move across the room towards the bar.
“Tell me,” he said, “why is a woman like you wasting her time in the modelling game?”
“The modelling game?” Vanessa repeated, almost choking on her indignation. “I’m not in the modelling game, I’m a designer, a fashion designer!” She wondered if this was what had made him think he could make such an obvious play for her. “Do I look like a model?”
She was slim and tall, and her russet hair was a shining asset, but her face was not a model’s face. It had a great deal too much character to be able to take on the bland self-effacement of a woman whose brain is less important than her beauty and whose beauty is less important that the garment she is wearing. Jake looked at her, taking in the details of her gold-flecked dark eyes, her hollow cheeks and wide, full mouth with an interest that disturbed her.
“No,” he said after a moment. “You’re far too beautiful to be a model.”
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