He thought of home rarely; he did not allow himself to. Yet, from a safer distance, he found he could examine his past.
He thought of Daniil and he told himself he was right to have forced him to leave the orphanage. All he could hope was that his twin was doing well.
And he thought of Sev. Yes, a nerd, but he had good brains and Roman hoped that the new school he had attended had helped refine him.
Then he thought of Nikolai and there was a hollow, empty space that ached.
Bleak.
There was bleakness there and then he tried not to think of Anya.
‘Suis-moi,’ he said again to Dario and two of the men ahead started to sing to rally him, and others joined in.
And his past had not slipped away; instead it had drawn in closer and had been right there with him that long-ago day.
He looked at Anya.
‘One day, we were hiking and the men started singing. I found myself changing, in my head, the words of a song, to your name...’
‘Tell me the song.’ Anya asked.
‘It is a song of the legion.’
‘Tell me the name.’
‘“Monica.”’
‘Tell me the words.’
He would not.
Their meals were served and Anya looked longingly at his dish. The fragrance was amazing and her mouth watered.
‘Give me a small piece,’ Anya said.
He sliced off a small piece as asked—it was the nicest piece from the middle. He slathered it with the sauce and then held out the fork and she ate from it and closed her eyes in bliss at the taste.
‘Is it hard?’ Roman asked, because he was curious about her also. ‘To deny yourself all the things you love?’
‘It is necessary. I want to stay at the top,’ she said, ‘and that requires discipline.’
‘How much longer do you think you will dance for?’
She was suddenly defensive. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’m just curious.’
‘I hope that I have another decade in me at the very least.’
She took a drink of water. The conversation was tipping them into the future she knew.
‘What if you wanted to have a baby?’
Anya gave him a scornful look.
‘Libby retired to have Nadia,’ Roman said.
‘No, she didn’t,’ Anya refuted. ‘Libby retired because her career was over and then she had a baby.’ She blew out a breath. ‘What is it with men? They expect women to give up their careers and be barefoot and pregnant—’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Anya,’ he said. ‘The last place I want you in is the kitchen. I’ve had enough of watching you stir stew in your apron to last me a lifetime. And,’ he added, ‘I’ve seen your feet. They are not my top fantasy!’
He made her smile, albeit reluctantly.
‘Well, I’m not going to retire. Libby might have, and Rachel too, but I shall be dancing well into my forties, I hope. I didn’t hit my peak just to give it away.’
And she didn’t know how to tell him that she couldn’t have babies so she attempted to change the subject. ‘How did it go when you caught up with the others?’
Roman, just as he had when Nikolai had swiftly changed the subject, also noticed it when Anya did. He didn’t comment, though, he just answered her question.
‘Most of it went okay. It was nice to hear what they have been up to. It didn’t go well with Daniil, though,’ he admitted. ‘He has this thought in his head that if he hadn’t been adopted we would still have been okay. He is wrong. I lived it, Anya, he did not. Teenage years were hell there and, even if it wasn’t to a happy home that he went, at least he got out before that.’
‘He doesn’t like that you made the decision for him. In the same way I don’t like that you chose to end us without discussion.’
‘Come on,’ Roman said, and called for the bill. ‘We are starting to fight and I don’t want a fight that doesn’t end in bed.’
They chose to walk home, although they went the long way to avoid the square where she had seen him and Celeste kiss.
Back home, he wished her good night.
‘I don’t want to go to bed.’
‘Fine,’ Roman said, ‘but I do.’
He kissed her in the entrance hall.
A deep kiss, a sensual kiss, but not a teasing one.
He kept his word.
There would be no reward till they could talk properly.
It felt, as she lay in bed alone, unnecessarily cruel.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL,’ Roman said by way of greeting the next morning.
‘Nor me.’
He could see the shadows under her eyes and he knew his return had caused them.
There was a selection of herbal teas for her to choose from but Anya chose hot chocolate in the hope it might settle her stomach as she felt a little sick with nerves, wondering how the reception would be when she went to rehearsals.
The berries did not appeal this morning and the thought of yoghurt made her feel queasy.
Roman said nothing as she selected a croissant.
‘I’m not looking forward to today,’ she admitted.
Yet usually she did.
Usually she woke and rushed to dance.
It troubled her that she had pressed Snooze on her phone and that she felt so tired.
Dance was consuming and so too was Roman. She was honestly scared that there wasn’t room for both and that was further put to question when she arrived at the studio.
Until the theatre was available they would rehearse there.
It wasn’t ideal and, of course, there was no dressing- room she could hide in.
Instead she had to ride out the uncomfortable vibes. It was a bitchy, vain world at the best of times.
And this wasn’t the best of times.
Change was not welcome and Anya removing herself from the hotel was seen as a threat.
She tried to prove it was not, and gave rehearsals her best, but she was tired and a little distracted. By five, when she was ready to go home, Mika insisted they walk through it again.
The choreographer agreed.
When at seven the rest headed out for dinner, Anya and Mika walked through it again.
‘What the hell is going on, Anya?’ the choreographer asked when she forgot one of her routines. ‘Stop thinking of going home to your lover and concentrate on your steps.’
She was being punished, Anya knew. She was being tested on where her loyalties lay and they lay with dance when she was here.
Right now, though, she was hungry, but was nervous about saying so. She wanted dinner and a bath and to go to bed.
But she danced instead.
They danced till ten and she made her way home exhausted and very close to tears and she got a little lost. Unwittingly she found herself in the square where she had seen Celeste and Roman kiss.
It remained an agony.
She took the elevator to his apartment and wanted to fall into his arms but there was no Roman waiting.
No response when she called out.
She pushed his bedroom door open and, no, he was not there.
He was never there when she really needed him.
And then she wandered some more and pushed open a room, more beautiful than any she had ever seen.
It was a nursery.
Lemon wallpaper dressed the walls and the silk drapes were cream. A silver antique cot was in the centre and it hurt too much to go in so she hastily closed the door.
The next room was an equal torture.
Pretty in pink, the child’s bed was dressed in satin and roses, and Anya was in tears as she stepp
ed out.
She could hear the elevator and tried to stop crying but she couldn’t.
‘Anya?’ Roman said, and went to take her in his arms, but she pushed him back.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Josie’s granddaughter is sick. My driver is on vacation, as is half of Paris at this time, so I drove them to the airport myself.’ He had never had to offer such explanations, but he did. ‘That’s not why you’re crying, though.’
It wasn’t.
It was the wretched couple of days at work; it was the memory of Roman and Celeste and, worse, just so raw right now, the babies that could never fill these rooms.
She didn’t know how to tell him.
She simply couldn’t bring herself to.
Her eating, or rather lack of it, had been such an issue with them all those years ago.
She thought of their row on the night he had caught her vomiting.
It was by her own doing that she hadn’t had periods.
There hadn’t been one for more than a year.
‘Come here,’ he said, and took her in his arms. ‘We can talk about it. Whatever it is, surely we can talk?’
‘We can’t,’ she sobbed, and she kissed him instead.
She wanted the oblivion that she found his bed.
And Roman could fight it no more and wanted the same thing.
But even the silken kiss he delivered could not banish the memory of what she had seen that terrible day in the square.
Oh, she tried.
She kissed him back hard but it would not erase that image. There were tears streaming down her cheeks, wetting their kiss, and he tasted them, yet still it could not erase the pain.
Her body was a heated mix of desire and rage and confusion and Anya pulled back.
‘You’re not helping. I need to go back to the hotel.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do. I’m behind with my dance. I need to give it my full focus and I just can’t when I’m with you.’
‘Anya—’ he started, and she could not bear the voice of reason when her emotions were all over the place so she stopped him.
‘If you really care for me, you will let me leave,’ Anya said. ‘We don’t work together, Roman. I can’t focus on my craft when I am with you. Surely we should know that by now.’
He packed her things but as his car pulled up at the hotel he caught her hand as she went to get out.
‘You’re wrong,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ Anya said. ‘Don’t call me.’
‘I shan’t.’
‘Don’t come here.’
‘I won’t.’
She felt as if the safety ropes had been cut.
Roman always meant what he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHE WAS FORGIVEN for her brief absence when they all met in the foyer the following morning and her colleagues greeted her warmly when they found out she had moved back to the hotel.
Anya, though, could not forgive them.
Always she gave her dance her all, and she was angry at her troupe for their doubt in her, and it showed in each rehearsal.
Nothing was working.
Her body, usually fluid and flexible, felt brittle and like hardening wax.
‘It will come together when we get to the theatre,’ the choreographer reassured her.
And Anya held onto that as she suffered through frustrating days when her body refused to yield, and she ached through lonely nights.
She always gave her dance everything, yet she felt now as if she had nothing to give.
Always she had danced for Roman.
For the solider she grieved for or to the memory of them.
Now it felt as if she had removed herself from her source.
How she wept for him and loathed that he had let her go back to the hotel without a fight.
He had.
Unlike Anya, Roman was patient.
He set about the renovations.
His dream was not a gym in memory of his brother. Instead mirrors were put in and a barre ran the length of the wall. The floors were polished.
He avoided walking near the hotel or the theatre as he did not want to upset her.
He knew, though, when the dance company had moved there, because there was a small piece on the news.
Mika and Anya were being interviewed and, of course, he watched.
‘Are you excited to be back in Paris?’
‘I am thrilled,’ Anya answered through a translator. ‘I have such fond memories of the last time I was here.’
And she smiled, and so too did Roman, for he could taste the vinegar in her smile from here and knew that it was aimed at him.
‘How are rehearsals going?’
It was Mika who answered, again through a translator. ‘We have a full dress rehearsal tomorrow.’
‘The chemistry when you two perform—’ the interviewer started, but Roman flicked off the television.
He did not want to know.
And yet they had to face these things so he turned the television back on and got the end of Mika’s response to the question.
‘To dance,’ Mika said, ‘is to love. Without love you cannot dance.’
Mika was right, it would seem, for without love Anya could not dance.
She hated that she could not speak of Celeste and she loathed her own jealousy.
She felt flushed in the face with the hurt of it all and cross, most of all, with herself.
She loved him so much.
She was teary and fragile as they prepared for full dress rehearsal on the day before opening night. Anya raised her arm as her costume was done up and she remembered Roman carefully pulling the zip down.
It would not do up by a fraction.
But that fraction had the costume manager tutting. Really she had only put on a couple of pounds but it meant that her costume would have to be let out.
She was scolded for the weight gain. She sat in the dressing-room on the edge of tears and took out her phone and again resisted calling him.
Instead she looked up a song.
A song from the French foreign legion named ‘Monica’, or ‘La Monique’, and as it played she read the translation.
The lyrics were so beautiful that tears spilled from her eyes as she found out that Roman had thought of her all along.
She needed him, more than she ever had, and the temptation was too much. With the phone in her hand and those words on the screen, she called him. As he answered, just hearing his voice pulled her back to the vortex of them and Anya let out a sob, hung up and turned off her phone.
She needed to focus for her performance tomorrow and whenever they were together they argued.
The costume manager came in with the spare costume as it was a little larger to allow for seams being taken in or let out. It didn’t add to her confidence as she dressed.
She stood at the edge of the stage and waited to go on, but this afternoon she felt wooden.
For this rehearsal they would not dance properly. It was too exhausting and that energy would be saved for the audience. They would walk through all the steps and do some jetés, though not at peak, and Mika would perform some lifts on her.
The whole rehearsal from start to finish went terribly.
It was the worst final rehearsal that Anya had ever had. She did not feel light in Mika’s arms and it would seem the trust in each other was gone.
Once she leapt and Mika mistimed things but as he caught her he could not correct and, embarrassed by his own clumsy performance, he put her down.
‘Christmas must be coming early,’ Mika said nastily, and she could hear a few sniggers as he continued. ‘Because
Firebird is getting fat.’
The rest of the rehearsal was just as hellish, and when it ended, the choreographer did not offer the platitude of it all coming together for opening night.
Instead she was in a huddle with the director and Anya felt sick, for she knew she wasn’t the only one with doubts about her suitability for tomorrow night.
She could feel the panic starting to build. Tomorrow was opening night and not one single rehearsal had gone well.
She went to try on her altered costume before heading back to the hotel, but as she stepped in she saw Lula, her understudy, trying the firebird costume on.
She was, Anya was sure, about to be cut.
She fled to her dressing-room and usually she would shower and change but instead she just wiped off her make-up and dressed.
And then, as she left, she picked up all her useless, stupid trinkets and stuffed them into her bag.
They weren’t working.
Nothing worked without Roman.
She didn’t know what to do. She held it in and left without saying goodbye as she often did, but as Anya pushed open the exit door she could hold it in no more and she started to sob.
But there, waiting for her, was Roman and she fell into his arms and wept into his chest as he told her that it would all be okay.
Roman, having answered her call and heard her small sob, had rung straight back but Anya, being Anya, had turned off her phone.
He did not want to disrupt the rehearsal and so he had waited outside.
‘I’m going to lose the part...’
‘You’re not.’
‘I am.’
‘Anya, you’re not.’
‘You don’t know that. I can’t dance, I’ve been rehearsing over and over and I can’t do it and I’ve just seen Lula, my understudy, trying on Firebird—’
‘Today was dress rehearsal?’ Roman checked, and Anya nodded into his chest. ‘Doesn’t everyone try on their costumes today?’
‘Yes, but Mika and I are fighting. He said...’ She closed her eyes. She was too humiliated to repeat what Mika had said.
Roman closed his eyes too. Of course she and Mika were fighting. He could hardly stand to hear about their rows, or Mika’s reaction to Roman’s arrival.
He would listen, though, if it made things easier for her.
Return of the Untamed Billionaire Page 11