by India Grey
An earthquake, read the rolling titles at the bottom of the screen. In the remote northern territories of Khazakismir. Hundreds feared dead. The authoritative voice of the newsreader painted colour into the bare details of lunchtime in the middle of an ordinary day when an act of God had brought destruction of a more thorough and impersonal kind to people used to bombs and machine guns. An aid organisation already had an established base in the region, he said, and was working on the ground, doing what it could until an international effort could be launched.
Numbly Lily watched, her own grief not diminished by the suffering she saw in front of her, but somehow put into context by larger sorrow. Life was painful. All you could do was find someone to hold onto.
And hope that you didn’t lose them.
When the mobile phone rang beside her she leapt up and seized it immediately, irrationally hoping that it might be Tristan, but the voice on the other end of the line was female. Disappointment hit her like a blow to the stomach, doubling her up as she sank back onto the sofa again, barely focusing on what the woman on the other end of the line was saying. Distractedly she turned the television to mute.
‘Señor Romero?’
‘No, I’m sorry. He’s not here.’
‘But that is his phone, is it not? I am trying to contact him on a matter of urgency.’
With a thud of surprise Lily realised that the phone in her hand was Tristan’s, and that he must have accidentally put it down after he took the call earlier.
‘Yes, this is his phone, but I’m afraid he left—’ she looked at the clock above the fireplace ‘—maybe five or six hours ago.’ Was that all? It felt like days ago that they had sat in the garden in the sunshine with the social worker. ‘I don’t expect him to come back,’ Lily added bleakly.
‘Do you know where he was going?’
She was Spanish, Lily registered. She sounded young and self-possessed and sexy. Not like the kind of person to spend an afternoon huddled on a sofa in the half-darkness, mesmerised by misery.
‘He left because there was some crisis at work. You could try him at the bank,’ she said without thinking, and then regretted it. Why was she helping this woman to get in touch with her husband?
‘No,’ said the voice impatiently. ‘I am calling from the bank. I am Bianca, his secretary. He is not here, and there was no crisis at work until a moment ago. Señora, I need to find him urgently. It is his father—he has had a heart attack and is in hospital. Señora? Are you still there?’
Lily heard her.
She heard, but at that moment she was unable to respond. Letting the phone slide down until she was clutching it to her chest, she stood up in the sad early evening darkness and stared, dumbstruck, at the bright screen in front of her.
A news reporter stood amid the devastation of what was once a village, his face grave, his mouth opening and closing as he spoke to camera, while behind him workers moved rubble with their bare hands.
Tristan.
One of them was Tristan.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LILY'S first thought was that it was someone else. Someone tall and dark, with the same high cheekbones and square jaw, but as she watched he straightened up, raising his arm and issuing directions, sweeping his hand across his face as he glanced into the camera for a moment.
And then he turned away, and the camera cut back to the London studio and Lily realised she had walked over to the television and sunk down to her knees in front of the screen.
She blinked, her eyes stinging, and suddenly remembered that she was still holding the phone.
‘Bianca? Sorry, I’m still here. What did you say?’
‘His father is very ill, señora. They do not know at this stage whether he will survive. I need to inform Señor Romero, but I don’t know where to find him.’
‘It’s all right,’ Lily said faintly. ‘I do.’ She paused. ‘Bianca—I don’t suppose… I mean, would you possibly know how to go about organising some kind of private flight?’
‘Of course.’ Bianca sounded slightly condescending. ‘I do it all the time.’
‘Good. Then get me a flight from London to Khazakismir. I want to leave tonight.’
Too late Tristan spotted the film crew.
He had arrived in the village a little over an hour ago, having spent the flight with the satellite phone continuously jammed up against his ear as he organised for manpower to be deflected from projects in other parts of the world and flown out to Khazakismir, along with medical teams and the first wave of supplies. The most important thing in the immediate aftermath of a disaster was organisation, and Tristan’s utter lack of faith in the Khazakismiri government and army meant it was vital that someone was there to make sure the immediate relief effort was co-ordinated and efficient.
That was what he had been thinking of as he stood in the centre of the village. That, and the fact that Dimitri had just been told by a neighbour of Irina’s that his sister’s lifeless body had been pulled from the chaos that used to be her kitchen a few hours ago. He hadn’t been thinking of the journalists that had miraculously managed to appear on the scene when Nico and countless other of his aid workers were still battling through red tape to get there. But as soon as he looked up into the dark eye of the camera he knew he had slipped up.
Turning away, he wiped the dust from his face and looked around for Dimitri. He knew, in some distant part of his brain, that in the sophisticated game of bluff and counter bluff that he had been playing with the newspapers and the paparazzi for years he had just made a very grave tactical error. One that could just spell his defeat.
The thing was he didn’t care.
Lily barely had time to pack a few things into a bag before Bianca rang back. A plane was ready to leave immediately from London City Airport, she said. Lily was about to protest that it would take her some time to get there when from down below she heard the sound of the doorbell. ‘Bueno,’ Bianca said crisply from Barcelona. ‘There is your car. I have arranged for someone to meet you at the airport in Khazakismir. Have a good flight, and please ask Señor Romero to contact me as soon as possible.’
So this was Tristan’s world, thought Lily numbly as the small, luxurious Citation jet launched itself upwards into the dark night. A world where you could go wherever you wanted to go at a moment’s notice, where there were rafts of people to make the arrangements for you and pick you up and drop you off. But no one for you to talk to. No one you could confide in.
Below her London lay in a glittering sprawl, and Lily felt as if a band were tightening around her chest as the lights grew smaller and fainter in the spreading pool of blackness. She was leaving behind everything that was familiar and hurtling out into the unknown. She hadn’t really had time to think about what she was doing and had acted purely on instinct. Looking down, she noticed with a thud of dismay that she was still wearing the flower-sprigged skirt and thin shirt that seemed to belong to another lifetime.
The smiling steward appeared beside her and reeled off a long list of the drinks and snacks on offer, as if Lily were flying off on some indulgent holiday. It had been a long time since the tea and biscuits with Miss Squires, and she wasn’t sure when she would get the chance to eat again, so she asked for coffee and a club sandwich that she really didn’t want and picked up the evening paper that had been left on the table.
The front page was dominated by pictures of the earthquake. Buildings leant at drunken angles next to those that had completely collapsed, leaving only wires and steel joists sticking up into the dusty air like fractured bones. Lily’s sandwich went untouched as her eyes skimmed the columns of print.
Tristan’s name leapt out at her, almost as if it had been printed in foot high letters and highlighted in neon rather than mentioned in a narrow sidebar under a small heading. ‘Playboy shows his serious side. Full story pages 6-7.’
Lily’s hands were shaking so much she could hardly turn the pages.
It was a double page spread. The h
eadline that stretched across both pages was THE PARTY’S OVER FOR EUROPE’S BAD-BOY BILLIONAIRE and beneath it was a row of photographs showing Tristan with his arm around a variety of beauties at parties and in nightclubs. ‘Never the same girl twice!’ said the caption under neath. The photo in the centre was bigger, and showed him sitting alone in the back of a car.
Lily’s heart stopped.
The picture had clearly been taken with a long-lens camera through a blacked out window. Tristan’s head was tipped back against the headrest, his eyes were closed, but the flash of the camera had clearly picked up the tears glistening on his cheeks. The caption beneath read: ‘Suffering: A clearly devastated Tristan Romero de Losada Montalvo leaves the hospital where his wife was taken after miscarrying their child earlier this year.’
The smiling steward appeared at her side. ‘Is there anything you’d like, Mrs Romero?’
Oh, God, thought Lily. Where to start to answer that question?
How about my husband’s forgiveness?
Tristan sat on a hard wooden pew in the village church, his head tipped back against the wall.
His eyes were closed but he wasn’t asleep. He wouldn’t let himself sleep because, although every muscle and every cell in his body screamed with exhaustion, he knew he had to stay awake and keep holding onto the baby in his arms. Behind his closed eyelids the events of the night before replayed themselves in a constant, tightening loop, so that repeatedly he relived the moment when he had heard the baby crying, then the frantic, adrenaline-fuelled desperation to try to reach it and the feeling of suffocation when he’d finally crawled into the tiny gap between the collapsed roof joist and the rubble of bricks and plaster that had once been the walls to Irina’s house.
And that was the part where the film kept stalling, like a tape getting stuck and then jerking backwards. He could see the baby—see her small foot in its dirty pink sleepsuit, kicking and flexing, but as he reached out his hand, ramming his shoulder into the narrow space between the roof beam and a slab of wall, it seemed always to slip through his fingers…
He came to with a cry, his arms tightening reflexively around the bundle in his arms, his eyes flying open and widening in horror as he looked down at the empty blanket clutched to his chest…
‘It’s OK. Tristan, it’s all right. She’s safe, look—she’s here.’
Lily.
It was Lily, standing over him and cradling the sleeping baby in her arms.
Tristan dropped his head into his hands, rubbing his fingers hard into eyes that still felt as if they were full of grit. He wasn’t sure any more if he was asleep or awake. Was this just another scene in his disjointed series of dreams?
He heard the quiet whisper of her skirt as she sat down beside him. The skirt she had been wearing in the garden when the social worker came, he thought randomly; was it a day or a month or a lifetime ago? And then he caught a breath of her clean milk and almonds fragrance and he knew that she was really there.
Slowly he lifted his head and straight ened up, feeling his muscles protest at every movement. Lily said nothing, but she took his hand in her free one, and they just sat like that for a while, his rough, grit-encrusted fingers entwined with her cool, pale, clean ones, her head leaning very lightly against his shoulder, listening to the sound of the baby’s breathing.
‘Why did you come?’ he said at last. His voice was rusty and his throat ached from shouting last night. Shouting in structions to Nico, and Dimitri and hundreds of others who were engaged in the same race against time to free those trapped in the rubble.
She sighed softly and shifted just a little on the pew, so that she was facing him more, her grey eyes serious. ‘Bianca called. Your father had a heart attack yesterday. A serious one. They don’t think he’ll survive.’
Tristan exhaled heavily, tipping his head back again as despair came down like the night. Not for Juan Carlos, but because he had thought, for a moment, that Lily had come because she wanted him. Because she loved him.
‘You came all the way here to tell me that?’
‘I thought you might want to see him, before he died,’ she said quietly. She was rocking the baby very gently, almost imper ceptibly, in an instinctive maternal rhythm as old as time. ‘I wanted you to have that chance, before it’s too late.’
‘I’m afraid it’s been a wasted journey,’ he snapped. ‘Juan Carlos can go to the corner of hell he reserved for himself years ago without any kind of goodbye from me.’ He looked up, frowning as a thought suddenly struck him. ‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual way wives know where their husbands are,’ she said with gentle irony. ‘There was a report about the earthquake on the news and I saw you in the background.’
He gave a ragged laugh. ‘That’s it, then. Game over. The press will no doubt pick it up and then—’
‘They’re onto it already. Does it matter?’
‘Yes,’ he said very wearily. ‘I don’t know; probably.’
She had been looking down at the child in her arms, but now she lifted her head and looked at him, and the intensity in her beautiful eyes made his sore throat close. ‘Why?’ she said fiercely. ‘Because now everyone will know that Tristan Romero has a heart? That behind the cold façade of the womanising billionaire businessman there’s actually a man who cares about people?’
He leaned back in the hard pew, trying to ease the ache in his back and his arms and his shoulders and his heart. ‘Is there?’ he said cynically. ‘Or is that just a new image, a fresh angle that they’ll use to sell papers?’
‘I think you care,’ she said huskily.
‘OK,’ he admitted, on a heavy outward breath, ‘I care. Dios, Lily, I care so much…but what’s the point when I can’t help the people I care about? I let you down yesterday, by saying too much. I ruined it for you. My toxic past just keeps coming back to poison your life, doesn’t it?’
She got to her feet while he was speaking and stood in front of him, shifting the baby easily up onto her shoulder, cupping the downy hair that was still matted with grit and dust in her hand. Her face was creased with anguish. ‘Tristan, that doesn’t matter,’ she said and her voice was low and urgent. ‘None of that matters. I should never, never have put you through that, but at least it made me realise that the most important thing—’
Just then the door at the back of the church burst open and the tranquillity was momentarily disturbed by the sound of heavy feet hurrying across the tiled floor. People sitting quietly in the pews praying or huddled in little groups giving comfort to each other looked round.
‘Señor Romero!’
Quickly Lily slipped out of the pew and went towards Dimitri, taking his hand. His face was wet with tears.
‘Dimitri, what is it?’
‘Oh, Marquesa,’ he sobbed, ‘they have found Andrei!’
Tristan had got to his feet and was standing perfectly still, his face white and tense beneath the streaks of dirt. Agony shot through Lily as an image of him standing by the window in the hospital suddenly flashed into her head, and she recognised the same desperate attempt to maintain emotional control. How could she have been stupid enough to think he didn’t care?
‘Is he alive?’ Tristan said tersely.
‘Yes. Dehydrated. He is on drip in health centre, but he will be all right soon.’ Dimitri’s expression of tentative joy wavered again as he glanced at the baby against Lily’s chest. ‘How is Emilia?
‘She’s fine,’ Lily soothed. ‘Sleeping peacefully. She’s so beautiful, Dimitri.’
Dimitri looked down at the floor and shuffled his feet in helpless misery. ‘Yes. Just like Irina when she was small.’ His voice broke. ‘They have no one now.’
‘Dimitri, they have you,’ Lily said softly, and she held out the sleeping baby to him. Clumsily he took her into his arms and held her awkwardly, but his hands just seemed too big to manage the fragile bundle and the expression on his fleshy, implacable face was one of pained be
wilderment.
‘I cannot care for them,’ he said hope lessly. ‘Khazakismiri men not brought up to look after babies. I not know how to start now, after so many years without a wife and family. If I was younger perhaps…’ He thrust the baby back to Lily almost imploringly. ‘But you could care for them, Marquesa. You and Señor Romero—’
‘It’s out of the question.’
Tristan leapt to his feet and he pushed past Lily, walking a little distance away before swinging round to face them both. Beneath the grime his face was pale and taut with fury. ‘There are legal procedures. It’s not simple.’
‘Sorry, Señor.’ Dimitri looked stricken. ‘Sorry. I should not have asked. It is a miracle that they are safe, but now I worry about what will happen to them…’
Lily laid a hand on Dimitri’s arm. ‘It’s perfectly natural that you’re worried, but try not to think about that now. It’s too early to make any plans for the twins’ future yet, but of course I’ll take care of them for the time being, for as long as it takes to sort something out.’ Dimitri’s face broke into a relieved smile. ‘On one condition,’ she added.
‘Marquesa…?’
‘That you go and get something to eat and some rest.’
After Dimitri had gone, Lily carefully laid Emilia down in the makeshift bed someone had provided for her and went to where Tristan was standing, leaning with his back against a wall by the altar, his eyes closed. The old stone church had withstood the earthquake, but the stained glass window above his head was broken, and coloured shards of glass crunched beneath Lily’s feet as she went towards him. Her heart was hammering, a sickening drumbeat of quiet dread.
