The Millionaire Affair

by Sophie Weston

  Quite suddenly the occasion stopped being a burden.

  It still had its sticky moments, of course. Strolling beside the lake while Monika Haraldsen probed delicately into her relationship with Nikolai Ivanov was one. Not having provided one of the book sized programmes for her guests was another.

  Nikolai dealt with that. He disappeared and returned with four before she had finished apologising.

  But the worst, by far, was at the end of the supper interval. The food had been delicious, the wine perfect. The twilight had fallen to a cool delight. All around them there was muted laughter. Leif was taking a photograph of the house. Monika and Nikolai were chatting about the opera.

  And suddenly Lisa felt someone looking at her. Not looking, staring. She looked up. Far away, across the green lawn, a man was standing on the edge of a knot of people, his eyes fixed on her. She frowned. He was too far away to recognise—all the men looked vaguely alike in their uniform of dinner jackets—but there was something familiar about him all the same.

  When he saw her looking he turned to his party, very deliberately put down the glass he was holding, and came over. As he made his way round picnickers and people strolling to savour the scents of evening, Lisa saw who it was. Her skin seemed to freeze on her bones.

  ‘Lee! I thought it was you.’

  Nikolai interrupted his conversation with Monika and stood up courteously.

  ‘Hello, Terry,’ said Lisa through frozen lips.

  ‘Hi, doll. Long time no see.’

  He bent and kissed her without hesitation. She turned her head away, so that the kiss landed somewhere in the area of her ear. She too stood up.

  ‘May I introduce Terry Long? He was with Napier Kraus for a while. Terry, Mrs Haraldsen, Count Ivanov.’

  And I even introduced them the right way round, thought Lisa with mild hysteria. Tatiana would have been proud of me.

  It was a shame that she didn’t have the energy to feel pleased with herself for that minor special achievement. But Lisa was beyond it. She was feeling as if she had walked into a wall.

  Terry didn’t help. He didn’t actually say anything crude, but his amused disbelief when she introduced Nikolai said it all. And he put his arm round her waist as if he had the right to.

  Lisa moved away. But not before Nikolai had registered the movement. His reaction was quite unreadable, but she still hated him seeing Terry’s gesture of ritual possession.

  ‘Lee and I haven’t seen each other in a long time,’ Terry told the others expansively. He looked her up and down, his eyes lingering on her bared shoulder. ‘You’ve come a long way, doll.’

  Lisa held herself together with fierce concentration. Her flesh shrank from his knowledgeable eyes. How could I ever have trusted this creep? she thought. She was frozen with humiliation. She couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  Again, it was Nikolai who saved the situation. He offered Terry a drink, changed the subject, and kept it changed until someone came to announce the three-minute warning. In the flurry of packing up the basket and folding the chairs Lisa somehow managed to blank Terry out of her consciousness.

  It didn’t last, of course. As soon as they were settled in the darkened auditorium she was alone with her emotions. The music was wild and dark. Years of dammed-up misery and shame surged through her in response. As poor, guilt-ridden Katya drove herself to death, Lisa found tears welling uncontrollably.

  Her head was so thick with them that she could hardly breathe. A breath emerged as a snuffle. She cringed with embarrassment.

  A hand nudged hers. Looking down, she saw Nikolai pushing a white handkerchief under her fingers. She swallowed and took it. She couldn’t look at him.

  Afterwards it was not mentioned.

  ‘Let’s have a coffee,’ he said. ‘They serve it at the bar, and otherwise we’ll just have to sit for ages in the queue to get out of the car park.’

  He managed it all, chatting with the Haraldsens so cheerfully that they didn’t even notice that Lisa was suddenly withdrawn. She made enough of an effort to say a proper goodbye when they left, and to go with him to collect the remains of the picnic.

  ‘It’s so dark,’ she said, as they plunged out of the light of the auditorium complex into the trees.

  Nikolai produced a pencil torch from his pocket. ‘Sorted.’

  ‘Very efficient.’ It was easier to sound normal under cover of darkness.

  ‘Never underestimate an explorer,’ he said solemnly.

  As if to prove his point he gathered up the basket and the picnic furniture, disposing them about his body as if he were a human mule. Lisa found that all she was carrying was a wine cooler and the torch.

  ‘You really have done this before, haven’t you?’ she said, trying to sound impressed.

  How long can I keep this up? she thought wretchedly.

  ‘Never quite like this.’ Was it her imagination or did he sound unwontedly serious?

  They went back through the orchard, Lisa leading with the torch. She walked through the unclipped grasses carefully. But not carefully enough. Eventually she turned her slim heel. The beam swung wildly. She staggered.

  And Nikolai caught her to his side.

  His arm was hot under the black cloth of his jacket. She could feel his blood racing. If she let her head fall back it would fall against his shoulder, and if she looked up… Lisa’s imagination went into free association. Her breath stopped in her throat at the images it was coming up with.

  ‘H-how did you do that?’ she said distractedly. ‘You were carrying so much. What have you done with it?’

  Nikolai sounded oddly shaken. ‘Quick reflexes. I threw the chairs away.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She was breathing again, but too fast. All around them the sounds of a summer night rippled and eddied. Her imagination carried on motoring.

  Lisa thought, I’m waiting for him to kiss me! I don’t believe this! He’s weighed down like a porter and I expect him to kiss me?

  She pulled herself together. ‘I hope you didn’t crush any of the orchids.’ It was a poor attempt at lightness but it was all she could manage.

  She removed herself from his sustaining arm. Then she took off her shoes, hung them from one hand and picked up the chairs. Nikolai did not protest. She had a feeling he was as shaken by his reflex reaction as she was.

  They went back to the car in silence.

  The silence continued until they were on the outskirts of London. It had been raining, and sodium lights were reflected back from puddles in the road. The dark cityscape was tinged with a strange other-worldliness.

  ‘It looks as if we’re driving through a wormhole,’ said Lisa involuntarily.

  Nikolai sent her a quick look.

  ‘You’re a science fiction addict, right?’

  She was immediately on the defensive. ‘I suppose you think that’s very silly.’

  ‘Why should I think any such thing?’

  ‘Well—you’re a real scientist, aren’t you?’

  ‘And all scientific theories are fiction until someone comes up with the evidence,’ Nikolai said calmly. ‘I can’t afford to despise anyone for liking science fiction, believe me. They’re the people who sponsor expeditions.’

  ‘Do you need sponsors, then? I thought—’

  ‘You thought I was very rich,’ Nikolai said with an edge to his voice. ‘You thought I gathered up a few chums and went hunting in the jungle like some Victorian dilettante.’

  ‘No,’ said Lisa, taken aback by his vehemence.

  ‘My research is not a hobby. I earn my living from it. Oh, on paper the family is rich, sure. On paper we’re no doubt millionaires. That’s the family, mind. Not me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  He took no notice of her small protest. ‘But most of the wealth is in land and houses and paintings and furniture. If I don’t want to eat the furniture, I need to keep on working. And that means fieldwork and writing papers and lecturing.’ He sounded furious.
‘Not something to be sneered at, even by someone who thinks wealth is the most important thing in the world.’

  Lisa raised her voice. ‘OK. OK. I’m sorry I leaped to conclusions. I didn’t mean to sneer at your work, all right?’ After a moment she added in a mutter, ‘And I don’t think wealth is the most important thing in the world.’

  They were approaching traffic lights. They were the only car in the silent street. He narrowed his eyes at the lights and said quietly, ‘Then how come you do the work you do?’

  Lisa’s chin came up. She almost didn’t answer him. But there was something about the darkness of the car, the emptiness of the streets, the silence, that made intimacy somehow inescapable.

  After a moment she said with difficulty, ‘I told you once—people on the edge of survival talk a lot about money.’

  There was a complicated silence. Then Nikolai said, ‘On the edge of survival? You?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a fat cat now,’ Lisa said drily. ‘It was different when I was growing up.’

  He waited. But she didn’t say any more.

  They were crossing Albert Bridge. The swathes of its suspension cables were picked out with lights like drops of pearls. It looked like a fairy bridge over the black ribbon of the river.

  ‘So what was it like when you were growing up?’ he prompted at last.

  Maybe because she was so tired, Lisa had the illusion that they were travelling in a capsule, out of time and space. It felt as if it didn’t matter what she told him. The journey would go on for ever and she would never have to face tomorrow.

  So she told him what she had never told anyone, not even Terry.

  ‘When I was growing up there was nothing,’ she said dreamily. ‘No money. No settled home. Just a series of rented rooms wherever Mother could find them. No friends, because we kept moving on. Not much education for the same reason. Maybe that was why—’ She stopped abruptly.

  Nikolai was very still. ‘Why…?’ he prompted at last.

  Lisa gave a long sigh. ‘Why Kit has such a tough time with life.’

  ‘Who is Kit?’ His voice was very soft.

  As if she were a wild animal he didn’t want to alarm, Lisa thought. She smiled. In the warm cocoon of the car, as the silent street slid past the window, she had almost forgotten what it was like to be alarmed.

  ‘Kit is my younger sister. She was diagnosed anorexic when she was thirteen. She’s twenty now. They say she’s over the worst of it. We keep hoping.’

  Nikolai nodded, as if he knew something about the condition. ‘She slips back?’

  ‘Every time she gets an emotional knock. Never as bad as the first time.’ Lisa sighed, then said with that strange, disembodied honesty, ‘In fact, sometimes I wonder if my mother is imagining it. But then Kit runs away from something she’s afraid of and it all seems to start again.’

  ‘I have a friend who works with recovering anorexics. It can be tough on the families.’ He sent her a quick look. ‘How do your other family members react to her behaviour?’

  ‘I told you—that is the family. Kit, me and Mum.’

  Nikolai was gentle. ‘Your father is dead?’

  Lisa shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t think so. He pushed off when I was a baby. We survived.’

  He said blankly, ‘But—support? Money, if nothing else? Haven’t you tried to contact him?’

  ‘You think a man should have come along and sorted us out.’ Lisa was too amused to be offended. ‘Fat chance.’ She listened to what she had said and then shook her head, dissatisfied. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t want a man sorting out my life for me. Maybe my mother would have liked some input when we were kids. But these days it’s not necessary. I can support the family.’

  He was stunned.

  Just to make sure he understood, she added, ‘I’m independent, and I like it that way.’

  She sent him a little challenging look from under her lashes. He was frowning.

  ‘Do you?’ he said heavily.

  She was flippant. ‘The only way for a modern girl to live. Means you’re not answerable to anyone.’

  They were driving north, through smarter and smarter streets.

  ‘Trees and gardens,’ she said suddenly. ‘You can always tell where the rich live. Wide streets, plenty of trees, and the houses have gardens.’

  His voice was harsh. ‘Is that why you moved in on Tatiana? So you could live the rich life, with a garden?’

  Lisa went very still.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He sounded strained. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t part of today’s bargain, was it?’

  ‘Today’s bargain?’

  They were going up Notting Hill. In the light from the streetlamps Lisa could see a muscle working in his jaw. He swung the car off the main street as if it were a personal enemy.

  ‘The standard sexual deal. You look beautiful. I take care of you.’ Nikolai’s tone was husky.

  Lisa said, ‘It wasn’t like that…’

  ‘And when it’s over we both say a graceful thank you and goodnight.’

  He parked the car and killed the headlights. At once the interior of the car was very dark. He seemed amazingly close. The illusion of the capsule disappeared. He was too close, too warm, his breathing too loud.

  Lisa moistened suddenly dry lips. ‘G-goodnight.’

  It sounded horrifyingly tremulous, she thought in disgust. And after she had been claiming her independence so proudly. He would have every right to think that she didn’t know her own mind. Or, worse, that she had been putting it on for some devious feminine reason.

  He turned and looked at her. ‘Or maybe we don’t.’

  The silence was charged. Lisa couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  The quiet streets were darker here. She couldn’t make a guess at his expression. She could barely make out his outline.

  And then he moved, and, whether by accident or design, his hand brushed against her bare arm.

  Lisa gave a strangled choke. It was the same uncontrollable sound that had betrayed her in the auditorium. She felt Nikolai relax in the darkness.

  ‘We’re here,’ he said softly.

  As if she were in a dream, Lisa let him help her out of the car, and, with his arm round her, lead her into the block of flats where he was staying. The night air was cool where her skin was exposed. She didn’t feel it. She only felt the heat of his hand in the small of her back, burning through the material like a brand.

  She thought, This has been waiting for us since the day we met.

  He didn’t say anything, not even when they went inside and he put on the low lamps. The room was too full of old furniture, and it seemed as if books and papers covered every surface. Beyond the lamps Lisa saw walls covered with pictures. She’d not noticed so much detail on her first visit to his flat. Her heart contracted with despair. More pictures. More antiques. More wealth.

  ‘We are so different,’ she said.

  ‘I’m a man. You’re a woman. That’s usually considered a good start.’

  Lisa didn’t smile. She knew there had been a time when she’d considered men a joke, but at this moment she couldn’t even remember what it had felt like. She was shaking.

  She didn’t want him to sense it. She moved away from him and stared blindly at the contents of a break front bookcase.

  ‘This is not the sort of thing I normally do.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ There was a smile in his voice.

  Lisa was beyond smiling. She fixed her eyes on a leather-bound volume of Browning’s poems.

  ‘Sex with a stranger,’ she said bitterly.

  He watched her for a moment, silent.

  ‘Hardly a stranger.’

  ‘You don’t listen, do you? I told you today. You don’t know me very well. In fact you don’t know me at all.’

  Nikolai didn’t answer. Or not with words.

  He came up behind her. She could see his shadow in the glass of the bookcase. He bent his head and Lisa tensed. But he did
n’t kiss her. Instead he moved his cheek, as if he were caressing the air above her bare shoulder. Or smelling her skin. Lisa’s body clenched in pure lust.

  ‘Do you want to go home?’

  This was her chance. This was where she said yes, it was a mistake, she had changed her mind. This was where she escaped.

  ‘No,’ said Lisa.

  With his hands on her, Lisa could no longer disguise from him how deeply she was trembling. She braced herself for mockery. Once again he was proving his point. Only far, far more devastatingly than he had in the club.

  But he did not mock. Instead he set his mouth against the side of her throat. No teasing the air this time; it was a real kiss. Lisa felt his tongue against her skin and gave a shivery moan. She flung herself round in his arms, quickly, hungrily.

  Through the dress, his hands were like fire on her hips. He clamped her to him so she felt the force of his arousal. And the hot response of her own. She made a small, needy sound that startled her. But not Nikolai. Utterly in control, he bent his head and explored the tender places at the base of her throat, her earlobes, her eyelids. It was a deliberate torment. Lisa’s flesh ached.

  She could bear no more. She caught his head and held it for her kiss, as clumsy as if she were a teenager on her first date. And then he gave her the mastery she hadn’t known she wanted. His tongue probed her mouth ruthlessly.

  She couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe. She just pressed herself to him blindly.

  He raised his head and said huskily, ‘We’ll be more comfortable in the bedroom.’

  In a fevered dream Lisa felt herself picked up and put on the bed. He was unzipping the sophisticated dress in a practised movement.

  She thought, He has done this before. It chilled her for a moment. But then he plucked the glittering stuff over her head and threw it. Lisa gasped. She glimpsed it behind his shoulders, a bolt of phosphorescence against the dark.

  Then his mouth found her breast and her eyes lost focus altogether. Her nipples rose, wanton. Every muscle in her body tautened in anticipation. She could only cling to him, trembling with the helplessness of her need.

  Nikolai made a low sound in his throat. Of pleasure? Triumph? Lisa did not know. Both, perhaps? Lust? No doubt at all about that. And it was mutual.