Wildfire

by Susan Lewis

  Clicking off the line to Ramon, Max threw the phone back onto the car seat and walked slowly towards her. ‘He’s on his way,’ he said.

  Rhiannon’s eyes darkened with pain as she turned abruptly away.

  ‘Hey, come on, don’t let’s say goodbye like this,’ he said softly.

  ‘Why not?’ she choked. ‘What difference does it make? No! Don’t touch me. We go no further, remember?’ She spun round to face him. ‘You know, you’re right,’ she said bitterly, ‘we weren’t any more than a good fuck and there are plenty more of them to be had in this life. And to be honest with you, Max, you really didn’t need to take the time to explain anything tonight, because to me it couldn’t have mattered less.’

  Ignoring the hurt in his eyes, she walked past him and around to the other side of the pond. Sitting down on the walled edge, she wrapped her arms around herself as though to tell him not to come close again, then fighting back the tears she counted the minutes to Ramon’s arrival.

  Six days later Max was lying on his bed at the Malibu mansion staring sightlessly up at the ceiling as he held Galina in his arms. The curtains were open, allowing the moonlight to cover their bodies in a soft, silvery glow. Galina’s head was resting on his shoulder, she had one arm wrapped tightly about his neck and one leg over his two. As she sobbed and shivered, he absently stroked her hair and felt her tears falling on to his chest. He was wearing his undershorts now, but he’d put them on only a few minutes ago. Galina was naked, but that wasn’t the way she had come to him. Her clothes lay scattered about the room, torn and bloody, like discarded remnants of her dignity.

  Hearing her swallow, he tightened his hold on her and kissed the top of her head. She turned her face into his chest and he held her as she continued to cry. Minute after minute ticked by, until eventually she lifted her head and rolled on to her back. He put a hand out for hers and taking it she bunched it under her chin.

  Her nose was still blocked with tears and her throat sounded raw and constricted as she said, ‘Did you tell her about Carolyn?’

  ‘No.’

  Galina’s eyes moved back to the middle distance. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Why are you thanking me?’

  ‘For everything you’ve done for me.’

  Max was silent.

  ‘You don’t have to do it, you know.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it any more,’ he said as she sat up and turned to face him. Taking his hand, she placed it over her breast. For a while she kept his hand covered as if, without the support of hers, his would fall away. Then replacing his hand on his chest, she turned to sit on the edge of the bed.

  She looked so vulnerable in the moonlight, so childlike and defenceless, that without thinking he began to stroke her back. She let him for a while, then getting to her feet she walked towards the door. When she reached it she stopped and he could hear the breath labouring in her chest as she tried not to sob.

  Before she could get out of the door he was there, behind her, pulling her back into his arms. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, it doesn’t matter,’ she said as he led her back to the bed.

  ‘But it does,’ he whispered.

  Her eyes moved uncertainly between his. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  He smiled and touching his fingers to her cheek he said, ‘Start loving you the way I should?’

  Laughing and sobbing, she put her arms around his neck and hugged him. ‘Do you think you can?’ she said.

  He looked around at the small dark piles of her clothing and running his hands down over her waist he felt her flinch as he touched a bruise. ‘Yes,’ he said, holding her to him, ‘just as long as we do it my way.’

  Chapter 22

  BEING BACK IN London was like returning home before the welcome party was ready. Not that Rhiannon had been expecting a party, but coming back early to no commitments, no messages, virtually no mail and no Lizzy was like waking up to a void in time, a pause in life’s process, a kind of twilight zone in passing. On the other hand it meant that the facing of harsh and depressing realities, like the looming horror of the music quiz and a day-to-day existence without Lizzy and Check It Out, could remain on hold for a while, giving her the chance to deal with the frozen chaos inside her.

  There had been no one to meet her at Heathrow, so she’d taken a taxi in from the airport, travelling slowly through the drizzling, cloying rain to Kensington where the street lamps were flickering in the early evening gloom and the sound of running feet splashed through the puddled streets. She’d felt so remote as she’d tried to make some sense of her life, of why all this was happening to her.

  Though Lizzy was the one Rhiannon wanted to see, it gave her something of a lift to receive so many calls from other friends as they gradually discovered she was back. She went out a lot, occasionally to shop or to meet up with a friend, but mainly to walk. She spent hours roaming around London, drinking in the familiarity of the city she had long thought of as home, watching the speeding, angry traffic, gazing up at the neutral sky and feeling the rain plaster itself softly to her face. She’d never taken the time really to look at London before and wasn’t entirely sure why she was doing it now, except it felt like a ritual that had to be gone through. There was a kind of peacefulness in her observation, a comfort to be drawn from the anonymity of the crowds. Whilst walking, watching, listening and assimilating, she could remove herself from the centre of her own world and become absorbed in things that, should she choose, need never touch her.

  How she felt deep down inside differed from day to day, but in the bleakest, most panic-filled moments, when loneliness billowed out of the darkness like a huge, smothering black shadow, she used her love of London to remind herself she was safe. There was nowhere else in the world she wanted to be, even though, in her heart, she knew she no longer belonged. Or was it simply that she didn’t want to belong? That she couldn’t find the spirit to pick up the threads of her life and sew them into a future she so desperately didn’t want?

  Perhaps if Max were to call, she’d be handling this better. She hadn’t expected him to call, except now that he hadn’t she realized she’d been desperately hoping he would. She relived the two nights they had spent together over and over in her mind, taking comfort from the words he had spoken and hurting herself with the terrible need to hear more. The longing for him was so raw in her heart that it moved through her body like a soldering seal of pain. It held her together, but it was destroying her too. She had only to envisage his face to feel herself falling apart, had only to remember his touch to know that she couldn’t bear never to feel it again. Putting this distance between them had only heightened the despair and intensified the need. She had hoped that coming back to England would help her to gain a better perspective on her feelings, even a mistrust of her instincts, that would ultimately enable her to put it behind her. Instead she felt more confused and disorientated than ever; more desperate to be with him and more terrified she never would be. Sometimes the urgency was so consuming that no amount of tears, no pleading with God or pacing the floor, could soothe it. She felt trapped inside her emotions; imprisoned by a need that could never be fulfilled.

  She remembered how impossible she had found it to let go of Oliver, so was she doing the same now with Max? Was she allowing herself to become obsessed with a man she barely even knew? She didn’t know why she would do that, but obsessions, by the very nature of what they were, didn’t stand up to reason. Nor did they take account of the dispassionate analysis she forced herself through to try to make herself accept that it simply wasn’t possible to love someone this much when, in every way but one, he was little more than a stranger.

  But he didn’t feel like a stranger. What he felt like was a connection with herself, an understanding of her own existence. She loved him in a way she had never loved before and would never love again. She knew that as certainly as she knew that she would ne
ver, no matter how hard she tried, be able to put her feelings into words simple enough for anyone who hadn’t experienced this kind of love to understand.

  But she tried. Two weeks after they had said goodbye, she tried to voice her thoughts and her feelings aloud in the desperate hope that the confusion and the pain would somehow dilute in the telling.

  Jolene was quiet for some time after she told him, his soft brown eyes gazing at nothing as he held his wineglass against his chin and considered her dilemma. His dark, handsome features shimmered like liquid in the candlelight, his cropped, frizzy hair made a hazy outline to his head, while his hooped ear-rings swayed from the several holes in his ears. He was wearing Armani jeans, black high-heeled ankle boots and a silver polo neck sweater – the long, silvery blonde wig he generally wore was spilling from the bag at his feet. Missing Lizzy the way she was, it hadn’t been hard for her to open up to Jolene, in fact it had been all too easy. Whether it had been wise, though, she was starting to doubt, for she had never confided in him like this before.

  At last his eyes came up to hers and taking a deep, troubled breath, he said, ‘You’re right, it is hard to understand the way you’re feeling when you hardly know the man, so you’re going to have to ask yourself, Rhiannon, is it really him you want, or is it just a payback for Galina and what she did to you?’

  Rhiannon’s head drew back in surprise. ‘Have I ever struck you as being that petty before?’ she bit back.

  Jolene held up a hand. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of it; we all are. She stole the man you were going to marry, ergo, it would be perfectly understandable if you wanted to do the same to her.’

  ‘You can’t honestly believe that all I’m feeling now is cheated of revenge?’ she cried.

  Jolene’s eyebrows went up. ‘As a matter of fact, no, I don’t think that’s all you’re feeling,’ he confessed, ‘but I had to ask and frankly, it would be a hell of a lot easier on you if that was all, because if what you’re telling me is true, then what’s going on inside you now is nothing short of hell.’

  His words cut deep into her heart. Her gaunt freckled face showed her suffering, her eyes were lost in dark shadows and her normally lively hair was twisted into a single careless plait. In the past she’d always believed she had the strength to get through anything, that somehow she could face whatever life threw at her, deal with it and move on, but these past few months had proved how shamingly wrong she had been. She no longer knew in which direction she should move, or how to go about picking up the pieces of her life, for the trauma of what had happened with Oliver, the loss of her job and now the consuming need she felt for Max, were all undermining her courage and confidence in a way that was frightening her even more than she was prepared to admit. Yet she knew in her heart that were it not for Max she would be coping; that were it not for the persistent feeling inside her that she must wait, that it wasn’t all over for them yet, she wouldn’t be allowing her life to remain on hold like this.

  As her eyes came back to Jolene’s she at last registered the unspoken message in what he had just said and feeling the pull on her conscience she said, ‘You sound as though you’ve been there.’

  He nodded and rolling his glass along his jaw he said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been there. It’s a long story, one I’ll save for another day, but I know what it’s like to feel the way you’re feeling now and I can’t put it into words either. All I know is it’s the best and the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my life.’

  Rhiannon swallowed and waited for the pain to ease in her heart. ‘Do you ever see him now?’ she asked.

  Jolene shook his head. ‘Never,’ he answered. ‘He’s married, got a couple of kids, good job, public figure, all the usual crap.’ He sighed, then after taking a sip of wine he said, ‘Am I allowed to ask, if Mr Romanov feels the same way about you as you do about him, then why did he marry someone else?’

  ‘He had his reasons,’ Rhiannon answered.

  Jolene eyed her carefully. ‘Do you believe those reasons?’ he said.

  Rhiannon nodded. Then looking down at her glass she said, ‘At least I believed them when he told me; I’m not so sure now. I mean, I suppose it’s hard to make myself believe anything right now.’

  ‘Especially that any straight man in his right mind could resist a babe like Galina Casimir?’

  Rhiannon smiled weakly. ‘He spent his honeymoon night with me,’ she reminded him.

  Jolene nodded. ‘Which makes him the prize bastard of all time,’ he pronounced flatly.

  Rhiannon’s eyes widened.

  ‘Well, how would you feel if he did it to you?’

  Rhiannon was silent.

  ‘Look,’ Jolene said gently, ‘if the man’s capable of doing something like that, if he can stand up there and swear before God and Dolly Parton to love, honour and screw for the rest of his life a woman who’s more beautiful than sin, while you’re standing there watching him and big-time available, then you’re going to have to face it, Rhiannon, he doesn’t feel the same way about you as you do about him. I know he said he did, but most guys don’t find things like that hard to say. And I know you’re not going to want to hear this, but you don’t have to look any further than your own fuck-up of a marriage, if you can call it a marriage, to know how capable a man is of lying, or at least avoiding the truth.’

  ‘I thought you said you knew how I felt,’ Rhiannon responded, trying to keep the edge from her voice.

  ‘I know how you feel, yeah. What I don’t know is how he feels. And to be frank, with a track record like his I’m staggered that you allowed yourself to be alone with him, never mind screwed by him. I mean, the guy killed someone, Rhiannon.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Rhiannon cried, jumping to her feet. ‘I expected more of you, Jolene. I . . .’

  ‘No!’ Jolene snapped. ‘What you expected was me to tell you that it’s all going to be all right, that it’ll work out in the end, that of course he loves you, not the creature he married . . . Well, I can’t do that, Rhiannon. He’s the one who has to do that. I can only go on what I know about the man from the press and what you just told me. And none of it looks good. What’s more, if she were here, I know Lizzy would say the same. You haven’t had nearly enough time to get over Oliver, in fact as far as I was aware, just before you went to LA you were thinking about going back to him. That alone should show you what a poor judge you are when it comes to men. The bastard practically bigamized you, or whatever the word is, and you consider going back to him! And now, less than a month later, you’re telling me you’re in love with the man whose wedding you just went to, a man who, by your own admission, screwed you the night of his honeymoon, then very neatly saw to it that you disappeared from the country so’s not to cause him any awkwardness later.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Rhiannon protested. ‘You’re twisting it into something it wasn’t . . .’

  ‘Am I? Or are you?’ Jolene cut in. ‘I know you hate me for saying all this, but I’m voicing your own worst fears and you know it. So face up to them, Rhiannon! It’s the only way you’re going to deal with this and get on with your life. You might be right, he might love you more than any other woman in existence, this might be tearing him apart even more than it is you, but based on what you’ve told me so far I’ve got to tell you that I’ve got a big question mark over that.’

  Rhiannon’s back was turned, her arms were folded as she stared out at the lamplit garden. She couldn’t imagine now what had persuaded her to confide in Jolene when she should have realized before that it just wasn’t possible for him to understand what she was telling him. She wasn’t a part of his world and he wasn’t a part of hers, not in this sense anyway, and she felt now that her confidence had been a betrayal of Max, that somehow she was allowing Jolene to come between them and she wanted it to stop.

  ‘All this stuff about him in the press,’ Jolene went on, ‘it’s got to come from somewhere, Rhiannon. You know that. They don’
t make these things up. OK, they might misunderstand or misconstrue, but they don’t manufacture, especially not where a man like Max Romanov is concerned. So you’ve got to ask yourself why he never takes the press on, why he’s never sued anyone for libel, or got injunctions slapped on stories he must know are about to make headlines. They say he bought his way out of a murder charge and now out of an insider-dealing charge. What next, Rhiannon? Or what more? What more is there that we don’t even know about this man?’

  Rhiannon was thinking of Maurice and all Max had told her. She was thinking of Susan Posner and wondering if she had been a fool not to meet her. She was thinking of Galina and the confusion of her mind. She was thinking of Max and how eagerly she had believed everything he had told her. She thought of his children and how much he loved them. She thought of the hours he had spent with Galina before coming to her in the desert. She thought of the way he had put his hand on her breast that first night; the way he had kissed her, made love to her and held her. She wondered about the things he hadn’t wanted to tell her; then she heard everything Jolene was saying and wished to God that Jolene would leave.

  ‘I know you want to believe in this,’ Jolene said. ‘I wanted to believe in it when it happened to me too. And there are things you can believe, like what a great screw it was, like how special it made you feel at the time, like something as powerful as that doesn’t happen to everyone, ’cos it doesn’t. It’s unique in your life, you’ve never felt it before and you’ll never feel it again. But it belongs to that time, those hours or days you spent together, and that’s right where it’s got to stay. He told you that, just like my guy told me. It didn’t stop me hoping, though, it didn’t stop me telling myself that it was bound to work out in the end, because something as strong as that couldn’t be for nothing. But it doesn’t work out, because it can’t. He’s married, he’s got kids, he’s got commitments, he’s got a whole damned history in which you don’t feature at all – and believe you me, Rhiannon, he’s not going to give any of it up for you, whether he loves you or not.’