by Lucy Ellis
He looked down at her. ‘Do you remember the resort my company’s building on Mt Elbrus? It needs a road and there’s been some difficulty with permission.’
‘Oh?’
‘People aren’t happy about it.’
‘The local people seem relatively friendly.’
‘The road traverses traditional grazing land. Nothing new gets built without clan approval.’
‘And you need clan approval for the road?’
‘Smart girl.’
‘How will you get it?’
‘That’s where you come in.’
‘You want me to help?’
And that was when Khaled knew he was going to hurt her.
‘The day I brought you here I’d received a phone call that morning, letting me know the clan elders were willing to talk.’
She kept wiping the blade, nodding as he spoke.
‘A few weeks before that I spoke to the head man here. He wanted to know why I didn’t have a home here, why I wasn’t married, where my children were—’
Gigi looked up with interest.
‘And he told me if I respected their customs they would see it my way.’
She gave a nervous laugh. ‘So when do I meet your wife and children?’
‘It’s you, Gigi. You’re the custom I’ve respected.’
She went very still.
‘The Moscow papers were reporting that I’d stolen you off the stage in Paris. The elders approved. I was given this meeting.’
A sudden gust of wind scythed the grass around them and the towel over Gigi’s shoulder flapped away.
She didn’t move an inch.
‘You brought me here to win permission for your road?’ Her voice sounded very small, hollow.
‘I brought you here because I wanted to be with you,’ he said with passionate conviction because he knew now it was true, only to add slowly, ‘and because it was politic for the road.’
Gigi stared past him.
‘I had no idea this was going to be the result.’ His voice was slightly hoarse as emotions he didn’t recognise began to push up through his body.
‘But once it was, you went ahead and did it anyway? Without asking me?’
‘I didn’t think it mattered that much, Gigi.’
Her eyes shot to his.
‘I was wrong to do it.’ He made a gesture towards taking hold of her but she backed away. ‘I should never have brought you here.’
But Gigi wasn’t listening. She was running.
She ran up the slope, the breath coming short and sharp from her lungs. She would have kept running if she’d had a choice, but there was nowhere to go.
She was stuck—in a strange, wild country with a stranger, wilder man.
Whom she was in love with.
* * *
She had waited on the hillside until she’d seen Khaled leave before she returned. It was only when she was inside, packing her few belongings, that her hand began to sting and she unfisted it to discover a nasty red welt across her palm from where she’d tightly held on to the razor.
She’d been so worried about cutting him, but in the end he’d been the one with the blade to her throat. She’d just been blinded by her own feelings and what she’d thought were the genuine feelings of the man sitting before her to notice.
He’d been the one to draw her blood.
* * *
Khaled had gone no further than halfway down to the village when he knew he couldn’t do it.
He shut off the engine and sat in the truck, looking down at the flat roofs and winding roads of the mountain pass where he’d been raised.
If he went down to that community hall there would be some macho posturing, the scratching of pens, and then he would get the signatures he needed. But for the rest of his life he would see Gigi’s trust being shattered in front of him.
He’d have to find another way.
He started the engine, turned the truck and tore back up the hill.
He didn’t know what he wanted with Gigi, but he knew it wasn’t this.
Which was when he swung out of the truck and looked up.
The top of the tower caught the late-afternoon sun.
Unease settled on him.
He looked across the yard and his belly went cold.
The Jeep was gone.
* * *
Khaled’s head was pounding. His stepfather had used the claim of love as his weapon of choice. He’d used it like a gun, and like any weapon it made a man weak, prey to the worst of his nature when things went wrong. As a grown man Khaled only carried a rifle when he went hunting, a situation in which he had a purpose, and he never fired without the knowledge of every available variable. He did not inflict needless suffering on an animal. Everything he did in life had a moral centre and was a choice.
He’d told himself he was not his stepfather.
He didn’t deal in cruelty, and nor did he fashion weapons to turn upon others or himself.
He made the right choices.
Only then Gigi had come along. Gigi had burrowed under his skin. Nothing with Gigi had ever felt like a choice. It was inexplicable to him—this feeling—because it had never happened to him before.
He had no idea what to do about that.
And as he strode through Nalchik’s airport, knocking over a plastic chair that got in his way, cutting through security as he forced his way into the passenger lounge, he was aware that he wasn’t entirely in control any more.
* * *
Gigi was huddled in her oversized cardigan in the airport lounge, staring out at the blinking lights of a plane that wouldn’t take off.
An hour. She wasn’t sure how she would get through the wait so she took it minute by minute.
If she’d felt vulnerable alone in that tower of Balkar stone in the gorge, it was nothing to how she felt now—the only woman as far as she could see, with no luggage, no money, just her passport and the ticket Lulu had organised for her.
It was a far cry from the way she’d come here, wrapped in the luxury of Khaled’s world, trusting as a lemming heading for the proverbial cliff.
She drew her knees up to her chin, thankful for the denim keeping her legs warm.
She glanced around and caught the gaze of two men sitting nearby. They hadn’t been nearby five minutes ago. They’d shifted closer.
Gigi told herself not to be paranoid, but she wrapped her arms a little tighter around her knees.
She was perfectly safe.
An announcement was made in Russian.
Would she even know when her plane was going to take off?
She buried her face against her knees.
Heavy footsteps came ominously close and then stopped. Forcing herself to take a look, she lifted her head slowly.
Khaled was standing over her, in jacket and jeans, twice the size of the men who had been eyeing her up.
He was a wall no one was coming through.
That must be why relief was pounding through her. Now Khaled was here nothing bad would happen to her.
Even as the thought formed a fatal crack appeared in her logic.
Khaled was the bad thing.
‘Gigi,’ he said, and the urge to leap out of her seat and fling herself into his arms was almost overwhelming.
But she couldn’t—not any more.
He was a liar. He’d lied to her. He’d used her. He cared only about his business interests. What had he said to her about the cabaret? I’ll replace you. He’d only keep her in the role as long as she made it pay.
She held her ground.
‘I’ve been out of my mind,’ he said. ‘I came home and found the Jeep gone. Then I got a call from the French Embassy, ask
ing me to report to their consulate in Moscow tomorrow concerning my activities with an Irish national currently resident in France. That would be you, Gigi.’
He seemed angry, but it was anger held in restraint, and Gigi was also getting something else from him. A fierce sort of bewilderment. Crazily, a part of her wanted to take his hand and hold on.
It was what she’d been doing for the last couple of weeks.
But that wasn’t possible any more.
She was so tired and cold, and just worn out from thinking in circles—no wonder she was fantasising like this...she just didn’t know what to do.
‘Lulu,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I rang her for my ticket. Her stepfather—’
‘Is a French government official—so I have learned. So now I must take you home and restore you to your friends.’
‘No, that’s not what I want,’ she began, leaping up. ‘I can go home on my own two feet. I don’t need you organising things for me any more.’
‘But it is what I want.’
‘What you want?’ Gigi could barely look at him she was so angry. ‘That’s all it is to you—what you want. What about me? What I want?’
‘You got what you wanted, Gigi. L’Oiseau Bleu.’
If he’d punched her she couldn’t have been more winded.
But suddenly she could look him in the eye. And she lifted her chin—because she’d learned in the hard school of Carlos Valente that you didn’t stop taking the knocks until you couldn’t get up any more.
‘You knew I was falling in love with you. You can’t have been blind to it. You used my feelings against me, for your own ends, and the joke is I would have helped you had you just asked me. You didn’t. You chose instead to make a fool of me.’
‘You don’t love me, Gigi. Love is just another word for fear.’
‘You think I’m afraid? You think I’m—what?—hiding behind the cabaret?’
‘You won’t try out for the Lido, Gigi, and as far as I’m aware that’s the most prestigious joint in town. Why is that?’
‘Because I’m loyal!’ she hollered. ‘Something you seem to have missed!’
‘Loyal? You’re scared.’
‘No.’
She was shaking her head vigorously but she knew he could see she was weakening. She was backing away now. He’d almost pushed her backwards entirely.
He gave her another shove.
‘And you’re lying to yourself. This has always been about what I could do for you.’
‘No.’
‘Prove it,’ he said. ‘Make the choice. Me or the job.’
* * *
Suddenly Gigi wanted him to be that billionaire bastard he’d been written about as being.
But she knew better. She knew so much more about him. She knew enough that she could feel her legs almost breaking under her with the weight of what he was doing to her.
Because if he cared for her he wouldn’t put her love to a test.
She hadn’t asked him to love her. She hadn’t asked anything of him.
She looked at him sadly and shook her head.
‘I want the job,’ she said, swallowing hard on the fierce craving pushing up her throat, and she saw the flash of hard satisfaction cross his face and knew at last that what her instincts had been warning her of was true.
‘Because there is no choice,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘You haven’t given me a choice.’
As she turned away he tried to take her bag from her. For a moment she was thrown, almost thought he was going to stop her.
She wished in that moment that he would. A terrible, terrible wish.
But then she saw that he only wanted to hand it to his bodyguard, who had been hovering there the whole time.
She’d been so upset she hadn’t even noticed.
‘Grisha is flying with you to Moscow. End of discussion.’
She didn’t argue because what was the point? He was always going to win.
And suddenly it was as if she was twelve years old again, and finally able to do that double somersault.
Carlos would be so proud of her—he’d have to love her. Or so she’d thought.
‘My daughter,’ he’d kept saying. ‘My daughter is going to be the star attraction in this show.’
But when she’d broken her collarbone and hadn’t been able to perform it hadn’t been Carlos who’d sat by her as she lay frightened and tearful in hospital.
The show has to go on.
She’d been all alone. Just as she was now.
She didn’t let herself feel again until the plane was in the air. By that time the aerial silks were cut and she was tumbling, tumbling...all her pretty tricks and turns lost to her now. All she could do was try to fall without breaking any bones.
* * *
Khaled boarded a helicopter and flew back to Moscow that same night.
He stormed into his apartment and the first thing he spotted was her shoe. Her little caramel boot, lying on its side beside his bed. He spent twenty full minutes hunting for its twin.
He never found it, but he did pull out a bottle of rot-gut vodka and proceed to get very, very drunk.
It was easier than facing what he’d done.
He’d seen what love did to people. How it failed you—when his father had died on his mother. How it twisted you—his stepfather’s cruel jealousy. And how it weakened you—his own longing for comfort as a boy which had been beaten and kicked out of him, and then enabled him to make all of the tough decisions that had brought him to where he stood today: bloody but victorious in the Russian business bear pit.
Yes, he thought he had seen what love did to people—until he’d seen what he had done last night.
To Gigi.
To the woman he loved.
Because he did love her. How the hell could he not love her?
Yet even to imagine undoing those knots he’d tied tore at the weft and weave of the life he had put together. He had no idea what his life would look like if he undid them all. He suspected it wouldn’t be pretty.
But Gigi had given him a glimpse of a different life. One which wasn’t his, or hers, but theirs, and he was still under the influence of how strange and utterly beguiling it had looked.
On that last afternoon, as Gigi had run up the slope, her long back straight and her bare legs flashing through the grass, he had tried to imagine...
How it would feel to lose her.
How it would feel not to have her in his life any more.
He hadn’t been able to get it out of his head.
And now he knew how bleak it actually was.
No light—just sounds. Even his Moscow apartment felt empty.
He’d literally built a fortress inside him. It was like the one he had taken Gigi to, but there was no illumination at the top of the tower that was his life. There was no moon and stars to gaze up at from their bed.
There was only fear and paranoia and the sound of his stepfather’s fist banging on the door.
Two years ago Khaled had built up the interior of his real fortress in tandem with an architect and a designer. Made of Balkar stone, it had been standing for eight centuries against the immensity of the mountain. He’d known what he needed—space and light and warmth—two years before he had first laid eyes on Gigi Valente.
Khaled suspected that from the moment he’d looked up and caught his first glimpse of a bright-haired alluring fairy he’d known he’d been laying the ground for her. He’d won her cabaret in a lucky hand of poker. If that wasn’t fate he didn’t know what was.
She’d tumbled into his life and he should have caught her.
* * *
The next morning brought him the mother of all headaches—a sort of drilling in his skull that he endu
red stoically because he deserved every bit of suffering he could visit upon himself.
He showered and shaved and put on a suit.
He had to get her back. But first he needed a plan.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GIGI’S SKIN FELT CLAMMY, her limbs weak, as she stumbled into Arrivals at Orly after several hours in the air.
Probably the flu, she decided dully.
She saw Lulu coming towards her. She looked like a snowman in a white puffy jacket. Only Lulu could look attractive in that much puff. Pink fur framed her face and her dark curls were frothing about merrily. Her smile faded as she took in Gigi’s appearance.
I must look awful, thought Gigi tiredly.
‘Oh, God,’ said Lulu, stopping a few feet in front of her, ‘what have I done?’
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘but can we save it for later?’
Her best friend took charge as only Lulu could, nabbing them a cab immediately as several drivers swarmed Lulu’s barely raised hand.
Gigi laid her head in Lulu’s lap as the taxi took off.
‘Are you sure it’s flu?’ Lulu was asking anxiously.
‘That or travel sickness. Let me sleep, Lu. I feel so tired.’
She stirred some time after they’d hit the stop-start traffic of inner Paris.
As the taxi climbed the hill Gigi wound down the window.
‘Stop here,’ she told the driver.
‘What are you doing?’ Lulu called after her.
Gigi staggered from the cab and made her way to the central strip. She stood there staring up at L’Oiseau Bleu. Sure enough, it was boarded up.
A top-tier architectural restoration firm responsible for many sites around the city had its signage plastered everywhere.
Lulu reached her side and hovered.
‘Don’t hate me, Gigi. I didn’t tell you that part because I wanted you to come home. I know I was wrong. But I was scared something would happen to you.’
When Gigi didn’t answer Lulu sniffled.
‘The rumour is he’s put up fifteen million euros.’
Gigi shook her head.
‘Please forgive me, Gigi.’ Lulu began to sob. ‘I didn’t realise.’