by Penny Jordan
From somewhere she found the courage to look at him, her eyes smoky with the intensity of her emotions.
‘Marry you? Marry a man who doesn’t love me? A man who feels he has to marry me out of a sense of duty? A man who doesn’t respect or even like me and who certainly doesn’t love me? A man who thinks I kept my virginity to use as a bargaining tool for exactly the kind of marriage he’s offering me? A marriage into which he feels trapped by his honour whilst refusing me the right to my own sense of honour? No.’
No? Laura was turning him down? The feelings of despair and pain that filled him far outweighed any logical outrage he might be feeling. Only now, when she had turned him down and rejected him, was Vasilii able to admit to himself exactly how much he wanted her as his wife.
‘There could be a child,’ he reminded her. ‘My child.’
‘My child!’ Laura defied him. A child … Vasilii’s child. She hadn’t even got as far as thinking about that, but of course he was right. Vasilii’s child growing inside her. Vasilii’s child to cherish and love. The feeling that surged through her told her how much she actually hoped that it might be. But if there was to be a child then that gave her even more reason not to marry him.
‘If there is a child then I will deal with that situation,’ she told him fiercely. ‘I won’t allow my child to be brought up within the kind of marriage that ours would be, Vasilii, with its parents neither loving nor respecting one another, with the place where the heart of a family should be cold and empty of all those things that a child needs so much.’
Someone was knocking on their bedroom door. Glad of an excuse not to continue their conversation, in case Vasilii continued to pressure her and she became weak enough to give in, Laura went to open it.
The major-domo was standing outside.
‘Your car is waiting for you,’ he told her.
Laura nodded her head and thanked him
It was time for them to leave, and with Wu Ying accompanying them to the airport thankfully there would not be any further opportunity for Vasilii to try and break her down, to compel her to agree to a marriage that she knew would destroy her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IN HIS service apartment Vasilii looked unseeingly at the letters stacked neatly on his desk. By rights he should be going through them—just as he should be lodging the contract he had brought back with his lawyers.
Laura’s response to his proposal had stunned him. Stunned him and filled him with a fierce pride in her and an even greater respect for her, as well as increasing his determination to make her his wife, Vasilii admitted. He’d realised, listening to her, that he didn’t just love her, he admired her and—despite what she thought—liked her as well.
He had to see her, make her see sense. Surely she would never be able to hold out against the lure of the benefits—the love and the security—that together they could give their child? Like him, she knew the pain of growing up without both parents. She wouldn’t want that for their child any more than he did himself. Like him, she’d fight for that not to happen. He’d need an excuse before she’d let him into her apartment, though. Her bonus cheque. That should do it. Her bonus cheque and …
The exclusive international jewellers he contacted were immediately understanding and obliging. Within half an hour of telephoning them Vasilii was in possession of several sample engagement rings and some unset diamonds.
Having let the courier who had delivered them out of the apartment, he was just looking at the stones in their velvet padded box when the door to his office opened and his half-sister Alena walked in.
‘You’re back!’ she exclaimed delightedly. ‘Kiryl has a business meeting in the hotel lobby, so I thought I’d come up here and just check that everything’s okay.’
Her gaze dropped to the diamonds.
‘Those are engagement rings,’ she accused him.
‘Yes,’ Vasilii acknowledged.
Her eyes widening with excitement she demanded, ‘You’re getting engaged? Vasilii, who is she?’
‘Laura Westcotte,’ Vasilii answered her.
Laura Westcotte. A guilty flush immediately stained Alena’s face. She bit her bottom lip and then gave a small shrug. ‘This is so silly. I’m a married woman now, but I still sometimes feel like a naughty schoolgirl around you, Vasilii. She will have told you, of course, that what I said about her going off to New York instead of standing in for her aunt and keeping an eye on me wasn’t true. I was too much of a coward to tell you at the time. I was delighted when I learned that she’d already left for New York because it meant that I could have some real freedom. It was easy to let you work yourself up into a fury over her supposed selfishness in refusing to help her aunt out. Oh, dear. Is she very cross with me? I do hope not. I remember her from school, of course, and I always admired her. She was so brilliantly clever, and kind—and now she’s going to be my sister-in-law.’
Laura hadn’t behaved irresponsibly towards his half-sister. He had misjudged her—and badly. Normally Vasilii hated the mere thought of being wrong-footed. So why, instead of feeling chagrined, was he actually feeling delighted that he now had another reason to seek Laura out?—that reason being the delivery of an apology. Did he really need to ask himself?
If Alena was surprised when he abruptly announced that he had to go out thankfully she didn’t say so, or ask him any questions, or seek to delay him. But then Alena knew what it was to be passionately in love.
It would have been easier, faster, to take the tube to that part of London where Laura lived—but Vasilii had chosen to drive himself instead. After he had persuaded Laura to accept his proposal then he wanted to take her out to dinner. He wanted to show her the love and the esteem he genuinely felt for her. And then he wanted to take her to bed—if she would allow him to—and show her all over again just what his feelings for her really were. She might not love him yet, but she would love their child. And through that child surely she could come to love him, its father?
Laura sat down on the small sofa in her sitting room, but then got up again and started to pace the floor. Since arriving home she’d found she couldn’t settle—couldn’t relax—couldn’t do anything other than go over and over Vasilii’s proposal to her.
He had tried to restart his argument again on the plane, but Laura had told him that she didn’t want to talk about it any more and to her relief he had respected that. To her relief? But wasn’t it true that a tiny, treacherous, weak and vulnerable part of her had actually wanted him to break down her opposition?
In an attempt to distract herself from her turbulent thoughts, Laura dragged her unopened suitcases in from the hallway and began unpacking, removing her own clothes and other belongings. The rest—her working wardrobe—was going back to Vasilii. Now that she would be working in London she was hardly likely to need it. She placed her mother’s jewellery box on the coffee table and beside it the small open box containing her three earrings. When she left Vasilii’s employ she would send him back the earring he had had made for her. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to bear to keep it.
But what if there was a child—a daughter? Wouldn’t that solitary earring be something of her father’s that could be a precious keepsake for her?
She’d just finished unpacking when the doorbell rang. Laura went to answer it, wondering who on earth it could be. She certainly wasn’t expecting anyone.
And she most certainly was not expecting the person that it was—the person striding formidably into her home and filling the small enclosed space of her tiny hallway.
Vasilii.
‘I need to talk to you,’ he told her promptly.
‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ Laura defied him. ‘Unless what you want to talk to me about is work.’
Vasilii managed a dismissive shrug as he reached past Laura to push open the door to her sitting room.
‘I’ve brought you your bonus cheque. Of course if you don’t want it …’
How much she wished that s
he could deny that she did, but amongst the letters waiting for her return had been one from her aunt’s sheltered accommodation, stating that the monthly fees for her room were going up.
‘I’ve also brought you an apology, which I hope you will accept. My half-sister has just informed me that, far from refusing to standing in for your aunt, you were never asked to do so. I misjudged you—I apologise.’
Vindicated. But that vindication didn’t bring any sense of satisfaction, Laura recognised.
Vasilii was reaching into his jacket pocket, from which he removed an envelope and then a dark leather box.
‘This is your bonus cheque,’ he told her. ‘And this …’ he tapped the box ‘ … this is a selection of engagement rings and stones, one of which I want you to choose for your engagement ring, Laura.’
‘I can’t marry you.’
‘Yes, you can. John—your mentor—I know you had hoped … But I am wealthier by far than he will ever be, Laura.’
‘Money? Do you think that matters to me? What I want from marriage is a man who loves me and whom I love in return. That is the only wealth I desire, Vasilii. And you are still misjudging me. When I told you that John was no more than a very good and kind friend to me that was the truth. It remains the truth.’
Vasilii had opened the leather box, and the flash of the diamonds within it was making her blink. Quickly she turned away from them.
‘Diamonds don’t tempt me, Vasilii.’
‘Then what would?’
Was that really a husky note of pleading in his voice? It couldn’t be. She had to be imagining it.
The real answer to his question was, of course, him—his love, his emotional need for her and commitment to her.
‘You could never give me what I most want,’ she told him truthfully.
‘I may already have given you my child.’
‘And I have said that if you have then I will take on the full responsibility for that child.’
‘I won’t let you.’
‘You can’t stop me.’
They were glaring at one another now—two adversaries again.
Desperate to put some distance between them, Laura moved away from him—and then wondered what Vasilii was staring at with such frowning intent as he looked past her. Turning her head, she saw the open box containing the three earrings. Instinctively she snatched up the box. She could have scored points off him and even humiliated him a little by letting him know she knew he had gone to the trouble of having a new earring made for her—an act of real emotional weakness from a man who prided himself on not having any emotions at all—but stupidly, because she loved him, she wanted to protect him.
‘There are three earrings in that box,’ Vasilii told her.
Laura’s heart turned over inside her chest. She hadn’t been quite quick enough and he had seen the earrings.
‘Yes,’ she was forced to agree.
He was looking at her, watching her. Waiting … Waiting for an explanation she did not want to give him—for his pride’s sake. She knew he would hate being revealed as a man who was capable of what he would see as the weakness of compassion—especially to her. Whilst for her what he would see as vulnerability within himself only made her love him all the more.
She took a deep breath. ‘The three are the one I was wearing, the one that fell off into the neck of my dress on the plane and the one you told me your pilot had been handed when the plane was cleaned. I didn’t say anything earlier because … because I didn’t think I could find the words to tell you how grateful I was—am—to you for your kindness and … and how much it meant—means—to me that you would be so thoughtful.’ There—she had done it. She had let him see something of what she felt. And for his sake, not her own.
They looked at one another.
Vasilii exhaled the tension from his chest. Laura’s honesty demanded that he was equally honest in return. And wasn’t it the truth that now, knowing of his love for her, he wanted to tell her why he had done what he had done? He wanted her to know that his action had been motivated by his feelings for her, even if at the time he would have sworn that it wasn’t either true or possible.
‘I could see how much the earrings meant to you because they’d been your mother’s.’ He paused. Even now, knowing that he loved her, knowing that he could trust her with whatever he might say to her, he was struggling. A lifetime of denying his feelings, rejecting them and rejecting everything they meant, had seen to that.
‘I do know how that feels,’ Vasilii continued. ‘The last time I saw my mother she was wearing a pair of gold earrings. Gold filigree hoops—a traditional pair that came from her family’s tribe.’
This was so hard for him. Laura could see that. Her heart ached with love for him. She suspected that he was trying to express the feelings of pain and loss he had carried inside him for a very long time. She could sense that pain buried deep inside him, like a sharp sliver of glass that still hurt. She longed to go to him and hold him, comfort him, but a deep inbuilt female wisdom urged her to just wait and listen.
‘I remember watching her put them on.’ Vasilii’s words came slowly and with difficulty, as though just speaking them was a tremendous effort of will. ‘She was going out to dinner, with some friends. My father was away and I didn’t want her to go. That was the night she was kidnapped. When her body was found the earrings were missing. They were never recovered. I swore after my mother’s death that I would never allow myself to become dependent on someone’s love—on someone being there for me ever again—because losing that love, losing that person hurt too much.’
So that was the root cause of his determination to push people away from him. A child’s pain—not an adult man’s cruelty.
He had been seven years old—a child, a little boy—desperately longing for the mother he had lost: a boy who had grown up afraid to love again because of that pain.
‘Oh, Vasilii.’ Without meaning to do so Laura stepped towards him, her heart pierced with the sadness she felt at his obvious pain.
But Vasilii stepped back from her, so that the hand she had extended to touch him met only empty air. Automatically, feeling rejected, Laura stepped back herself—and bumped into the coffee table. It was a bad habit she seemed to have developed around Vasilii, she acknowledged, and she turned round just in time to see her precious jewellery box sliding towards the edge of the table.
They both moved together, but Vasilii was faster. As he gathered up the box his thumb somehow pressed the spring that opened the secret drawer as he gripped it.
‘I’ll take it.’ Swiftly Laura reached for the box, trying not to panic. Why, oh, why had she not thrown away that incriminating photograph?
She was holding out her hands for the box. She had even dared to brave the private space Vasilii liked to keep around himself by stepping into it. And for once he hadn’t reacted by stepping back from her. Because he was staring down into the open drawer. Because he was removing the two halves of her photograph—his photograph. Because he was patching them together and looking at them. And now he was looking at her with one eyebrow raised questioningly.
There was no escape. Laura knew that.
‘I took it from my bedroom window at school. You’d just dropped off your sister.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘I was the orphaned niece of the school’s matron—a charity case, given education at the school because of my aunt’s position. And because of that position she could never be seen to favour or indulge me, so my life tended to be rather lonely. I didn’t have the kind of moneyed family background that would have enabled me to fit in with the other girls—school trips, visiting one another’s homes, that kind of thing. When I saw the loving way you were with your sister, I felt so envious of her. She had parents who loved her. She had a protective brother whom she clearly adored, who was prepared to spoil and indulge her by driving her to school in his obviously new and very glamorous car. I don’t know why I took that photograph, except that for me what I saw represented
something I could never have.’
That at least was true, Laura recognised.
She couldn’t tell from the way Vasilii was looking at her whether or not he had accepted her explanation or what he was thinking about it. Was he pitying her? Feeling compassion for her? Contempt for her …?
However, when he began to speak, his opening words were such a shock that they caused her own thoughts to spin dizzily and fearfully out of control—because what he was saying was nothing like what she had imagined he would say.
‘I was right when I stated that there must have been a reason why you remained a virgin,’ he said slowly, and then stopped. He was having trouble controlling not just the delivery and the pace of what he knew would be the most important words he would ever say in the whole of his life, he was also having trouble in controlling the breath he needed to say them.
The reality was that he didn’t want to waste time in speech. What he wanted to do was to take Laura in his arms and hold her and kiss her until she admitted to him that she loved him. Vasilii knew now that she did—or at least that she felt enough for him to be able to tenderly cherish that existing flame of pure emotion into a love for him that he knew could be encouraged to burn within her for the rest of their shared lives.
‘This photograph …’ he continued.
But Laura shook her head to stop him. He was getting too close to where she was so very vulnerable. Far too close—and it was too painful.
‘I was right when I said that you’d had a hidden agenda for keeping your virginity,’ he repeated. ‘For maybe a woman who had fallen in love very young, given her heart to a man she could not have, might remain a virgin.’