‘Lemonade,’ she said now, offering a tall glass. ‘I always make my own in the summer. How was Glyndebourne?’
‘Fine.’ Lisa was up to politeness, but that was about all. ‘Thank you.’
Tatiana sat down beside her companionably and crossed her legs in a double lotus that a woman half her age would have envied.
‘Did Nicki do reasonable escort duty?’
Lisa gave a choke of bitter laughter. ‘Beyond the call of duty.’
‘Ah.’ Tatiana digested this. ‘He can be a bit overpowering,’ she said on a questioning note.
Lisa did not respond to that at all.
‘Of course, he always knows exactly what he wants,’ pursued Tatiana chattily. She watched Lisa from under her eyelids. ‘He said he was going to study animals when he was five. The family could not understand it. They wanted him to manage the vineyard. But he never wavered.’
Lisa shivered. It only confirmed what she had already concluded, but it was chilling. The man was single-minded. As she had proved conclusively. She had challenged him again and again. And how he had responded to her challenge!
Tatiana said, as if she were talking to herself, ‘This family legend started: Nicki was serious, his brother was not. Of course they were very different. Vladi was always surrounded by girls.’ She sent Lisa a quick look. ‘Nicki isn’t like that. He’s very discriminating.’
Lisa looked at her with irony. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that he doesn’t get any girl that he wants?’
Tatiana had to admit that he did. ‘But he respects you,’ she added earnestly.
‘I wind him up,’ Lisa said flatly. It hurt to admit, but somehow it seemed important to say it aloud. ‘I don’t mean to. But there must be something about me that—’ She broke off.
‘Brings out the beast in him,’ nodded Tatiana. She did not sound surprised.
Lisa flinched. It was much too close to the truth.
‘Whatever it is, it’s hell,’ she said sharply. ‘I suppose he’s used to a different sort of girl—’
Lisa was clever, and street-smart, and she had learned a lot in the past six years. But the girls who came when Nikolai Ivanov crooked his finger were in a different class. They would be confident, well travelled: sophisticated to their well-bred bones.
‘The sort of girls who wait for men to order their meals in restaurants,’ she concluded, with feeling.
Tatiana was confused. ‘What?’
Lisa shook her head. ‘Forget it.’ She got up. ‘Thank you for the lemonade.’
She walked away, leaving it half drunk. Tatiana had to be content.
For the next few weeks Lisa avoided all contact with her landlady. Tatiana was quite short with Nikolai when he called from France.
And then fate took a hand.
Hurrying out of a class at the dance studio, Tatiana slipped on a newly washed floor and broke a small bone in her foot. She informed the doctor that she could not walk, must convalesce at her family home in France, and could not fly out there alone in her state of health at her age. And gave him Lisa’s number at work.
Lisa dug in her bag to find the telephone number Nikolai Ivanov had given her. But when she rang it a very upper-class voice said that he was not available. It did, however, offer to pass on a message.
And Lisa received the telephone call she had been dreading that August evening.
‘Lisa? You wanted to talk to me?’ Nikolai sounded amazed.
His incredulity was understandable. She had refused his calls and sent back his letters unopened. He was not to be blamed if he couldn’t believe that she had at last got in touch of her own volition.
The sound of his voice made Lisa start to tremble, as if he were in the room. Furious with herself, she gave him the facts. Her tone was so unemotional it bordered on the insulting.
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
Eventually he said, ‘What did you tell her about us?’
Lisa’s heart squeezed in pain. ‘That it was not a success,’ she said curtly.
This time the silence was even longer.
‘I see.’
But she noticed that he didn’t contradict her.
Eventually he said slowly, ‘If you can bring her out here, I will send a car to meet you at Toulouse. You needn’t worry about being forced to be pleasant to me. Tatiana will stay with my grandparents at the château. I have my own house. We needn’t even see each other.’
‘Oh.’
Lisa was nonplussed. Whatever she had expected the next time she talked to Nikolai—and her imagination had conjured up everything from reproaches to a full declaration of love—it was not this businesslike focus on the issues.
She said, ‘I am very busy. I don’t really have the time.’
‘It need only take a weekend.’
If he had sounded as if he cared, even the slightest bit, she would have refused. But he didn’t. He sounded as if they had never laid in each other’s arms; as if he had never claimed that they were not strangers; as if they would never touch again.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Lisa. ‘We’ll get the last plane out of Heathrow on Friday.’
She banged the telephone down with a frustration that she was completely unable to account for.
The turrets of the château shone like thimbles in the high summer sun. The silver river wound through gently sloping fields where the vines were dark pleats in the green lushness.
Riding slowly up along the river path, Nikolai looked at the picture without seeing it. He would see her tomorrow. Tomorrow. And then what?
‘I’ll know soon,’ he promised himself aloud.
The bay horse’s ear twitched. He patted its neck absently.
The trouble was that Lisa was going to take one look at life here in St Aubain and hate it. It had all the things that made her jumpy and insecure: an exquisite little lodge all to himself, a seventeenth-century château, with its antiques, its library, its well-stocked stables and its inspired cuisine, and this landscape, arguably the most beautiful in France.
No, Nikolai thought ruefully. Another woman might be seduced by the beauties of his ancestral home. Lisa was going to hate it. And yet the temptation to lure her into falling in love with it was too great to resist.
So he planned his strategy quite carefully. She was going to come out here thinking that he didn’t care one way or another whether he saw her at all. And when she arrived—well, he was not going to crowd her, Nikolai promised himself. This time he would be measured and sensitive. He would show her that he was prepared to share her burdens, had already found a way to help her sister. Above all he was not going to let the demands of his hot blood stampede him out of control again.
‘Another plan,’ he said aloud.
And wouldn’t Lisa just hate that, if she found out? Well, hate it or not, he was desperate. So the plan had better work.
Tatiana was affronted to find that Nikolai did not meet them in person at the airport. He had appointed the village taxi driver to collect them instead. Tatiana quizzed him briskly, and ended up so angry that she forgot the wheelchair that had been provided. Instead, she limped out to the car at an Olympic pace.
‘Nikolai won’t be there because he’s working and they’ve got people staying,’ she flung at Lisa as soon as they were settled in the car. ‘You’d think they’d realise that I’m convalescent. I need my rest. But, no. Véronique Repiquet and her new husband are down from Paris for the week.’
Lisa digested the fact that Nikolai, just as he had promised, was not at the château. She was relieved. It would have been impossible, having to be polite to him—as if they had never made wild love on his bedroom floor. This diplomatic absence of his was much the best solution from every point of view. Wasn’t it?
Tatiana brooded, muttering. Lisa became aware of the cause of her displeasure.
‘Don’t you like—er—Véronique?’
Tatiana gave a grand shrug. ‘She’s stupid.’
But when they got to the château it became quickly obvious what her objection to Véronique was. It had nothing to do with the woman’s IQ.
‘She and Nikolai were an item, weren’t they?’ asked Lisa quietly as she helped Tatiana up to her room.
Lisa had been surprised at the genuine warmth of the Ivanovs’ welcome. Of course they were grateful to her for helping Tatiana on her journey. But there had seemed to be more to it than that, especially when Countess Ivanova had hugged her as if she were a long-lost daughter.
Only Véronique had held aloof. And Lisa suspected she knew the reason. So she’d challenged Tatiana with it.
‘Maybe once,’ Tatiana admitted reluctantly.
She plumped down on the edge of the bed. Lisa took her sticks.
‘Was he upset when she got married?’ she asked airily, propping them up in the corner.
‘Who knows what upsets Nikolai?’ snapped Tatiana.
And, refusing all further offers of help, she took herself to bed in a huff.
Lisa did not fancy spending the rest of the evening in the drawing room, listening to Véronique point out obliquely that there was no room for Lisa Romaine in the world of the Ivanovs and the Repiquets. So she went to her room and tried to rest.
She had just about adjusted to Tatiana’s pictures and art deco furniture. When she and Nikolai had made love, she had forgotten the antiques of his borrowed surroundings. But at the château the culture shock was total.
Lisa had been assigned a turret room. The floor was made of polished boards that creaked. There was a huge stone fireplace, filled with a great copper bowl of roses and trailing honeysuckle. And she had a four-poster bed.
She had taken one look at the huge tapestry-hung structure and blenched. It was not a bed in which anyone had ever expected to sleep alone. And somewhere out on the estate, as the Ivanovs had made perfectly clear, was the man in whose arms she had slept exquisitely.
‘Damn and blast,’ said Lisa, with concentrated fury. She went to bed, pulled sheets that smelled of lavender over her face, and concentrated hard on running through last month’s movements in the Dow Jones index. It was a mantra that always sent her to sleep. But she had never tried it before surrounded by antique shadows, in darkness scented with beeswax polish and roses. Or with the awareness that she was in her lover’s family home.
Or the certain knowledge, in every nerve and muscle and blood cell, that he was close. Somewhere.
It took several hours to get to sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
LISA was late finding her way downstairs for breakfast. The formal rooms were empty, their priceless furniture and coordinating fabrics gleaming like a picture in an interior decorator’s portfolio. Lisa told herself she was not intimidated and went through them, following her nose after the scent of warm croissants.
In the end she found herself in a stone-flagged kitchen. Two smiling women tried to talk to her, found she could not understand a word of French, and took her by the hand. Beaming, they led her to the swimming pool.
And Nikolai stood up to greet her.
Lisa stopped dead.
He had been swimming. Often, by the look of him, but recently enough to have left gleaming drops on his chest and darkened his hair to black. He was much browner than she remembered. My lover, she thought in shock. It was pure instinct, and it shook her to the core.
Lisa’s heart seemed to swell until she couldn’t breathe. She had known he was close. She had known it last night. And here he was.
She couldn’t think of a thing to say.
‘Hello, Lisa.’ He was grave.
The women gave him a rapid debriefing. He nodded and they left.
‘They’ve kept some rolls hot for you and they’ll make some more coffee,’ he translated. ‘All right?’
‘Thank you.’ It sounded strangled.
She skirted him and sat down at a table under a wall covered with brilliant bougainvillaea.
‘I—er—thought you were away.’ Her voice was high with tension.
‘Working,’ Nikolai corrected. He sounded completely at his ease. He sat down and gave her an unshadowed smile. ‘I’ve been in the fields since six. So I get the rest of the day off.’
‘I didn’t know you were a farmer.’
He doubled the wattage of his smile. Lisa felt her skin tingle with it. He’s doing that deliberately, she thought with dawning indignation.
‘But you don’t know very much about me at all.’
‘I thought we were never going to be strangers again,’ she flashed.
The moment she said it Lisa realised how unwise it was. It brought back in vivid detail the sensations of that unforgettable night. She felt her colour rise helplessly. She looked away.
‘So did I,’ Nikolai said softly. ‘So did I.’
In spite of the brilliant sun, she shivered. There was no point, she thought, in trying to avoid this. Nikolai was going to say exactly what he wanted when he felt like it. So either she spent the next two days ducking and weaving to avoid the subject or she turned and faced it now. She took a deep breath and said harshly, ‘I told you once—sexual attraction can be a powerful drug. The only good thing about it is it wears off.’
‘Does it?’
That, thought Lisa, was typical. And to think that she had warned him that she didn’t play fair. When he was capable of sitting there wearing next to nothing and looking at her as if he remembered every little sensitive spot on her body. And sounding as if he cared.
‘Yes,’ she said shortly. She turned her face away.
One of the women came back with a tray. She chatted freely to Nikolai as she set the wooden table. Lisa watched. The tablecloth was lace-edged, starched and clearly an heirloom; the coffee pot was silver; the porcelain bowl for Lisa’s coffee was so fine it was transparent. Lisa surveyed these collectors’ items and realised that Nikolai didn’t even notice them.
Here, if she needed it, was a complete illustration of the differences between them. Lisa felt something close to despair. She remembered telling Sam that she and Nikolai inhabited the same planet. How wrong could you be?
The woman poured coffee for her, gave her another nod of shining good will and left. Nikolai strolled over and sat on a stone outcrop of wall, holding a coffee cup of his own.
‘What a civilised man you are,’ Lisa said ironically.
She thought he would laugh, or say something clever in that slow, seductive voice. But he did not. He frowned.
‘A civilised man? You mean I repress my instincts and hide my feelings?’
Lisa blinked. ‘What?’
‘That’s what civilised behaviour is all about. Curbing the wild man within. I know all about it. That is my area of specialisation after all.’
‘I would never have guessed.’
But he hardly noticed her sarcasm.
‘If we weren’t civilised it would be so much easier. I would read your body language. You would read mine. No room for mistakes.’
Lisa clutched her arms round herself and averted her eyes from his bare chest.
‘I thought animals did all sorts of things to deceive the enemy,’ she objected.
Nikolai looked down at her, the hooded eyes nearly black.
‘The enemy, yes. But you and I aren’t enemies.’
She looked at the Sèvres bowl. ‘Aren’t we?’
He went very still. ‘How do I get you to trust me?’ he said, almost to himself.
Lisa looked at him. His powerful shoulders were outlined against the water and, beyond, a high laurel hedge. She wanted to touch him so much it hurt. Unseen, she curled her fingers into her palms and concentrated on the picture before her. The pool glittered in the heat.
She said furiously, as much to herself as to Nikolai, ‘In your dreams.’
She blundered to her feet. Only to find his body blocking hers.
He was as angry as she, but much more in control. ‘You never gave me a fair hearing. You just can’t bring yourself to respect a man,
can you?’
Lisa’s vision blurred, but she was not going to dash away tears in front of him. He had enough to gloat over already.
‘Show me something to respect and I will,’ she spat.
His expression softened. ‘Lisa, why are we—?’
But there were voices beyond the laurel hedge.
‘Damn!’ he said under his breath.
The Ivanovs came into view. Along with Véronique Repiquet in designer muslin that showed off her height and her long model’s legs—and her utter confidence.
‘Oh,’ said Countess Ivanova.
She had seen Nikolai’s expression. She hesitated in the opening of the hedge.
Veronique had no such doubts. She sauntered round the pool. There she let her loose garments fall casually onto the flagstones and stood revealed in the tiniest bikini that Lisa had ever seen. It made her look like a goddess. She fluttered her fingers at Nikolai flirtatiously, ignored Lisa, and dived into the pool.
Count Ivanov bundled over to Lisa like the cavalry charging to the rescue.
‘My dear, you shouldn’t be out here in this sun without a hat. Let me take you inside and find one.’
He led her away before Nikolai had time to protest.
‘And maybe you would like to see round the house?’ he suggested as soon as they were indoors.
Lisa could only thank him. She meant it.
He was, she found, enthusiastic, but far from blind to his ancestors’ faults.
‘The Ivanovs always thought they were very grand, but they were terrible time-servers,’ he told her, standing in front of a portrait of a large man in unconvincing military uniform. ‘Feodor. Lost all his money and married a dressmaker.’ He pulled a face at his ancestor. ‘I assume she made the uniform from a pattern out of a storybook. Mind you, careful marriages were the secret of survival. Lots of foreign sons-in-law, in case the Tsars turned nasty. Which they did, regularly.’
He moved on down the gallery, nodding at an eighteenth-century landscape, all filigree leaves in front of a sunlit palace. Lisa peered at it. The perspective was a bit wobbly, but the painted house looked remarkably like a smaller version of the château.
‘Take this place,’ said the Count, confirming her suspicions. ‘My ancestor was out of favour at Court. So he married off one daughter to a general of Napoleon’s. And, just to make sure, another one went to a marquis of the ancien régime. That brought the château into the family.’
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