‘My comrade was worse, though,’ Roman said, and her hand remained on his shoulder, feeling the muscle and the ridges of the scars. ‘I tried to keep him conscious.’
And he told her how Dario had spoken of the stock market and the rules to which he had been unable to adhere.
‘I could, though,’ he said. And he told her about his rehabilitation in Provence. ‘I was going to come out of the legion after five years, but they were good to me there and when my contract came around again I felt it right to serve for another five years.’
He told her how he had started to make his money, and then she believed that it was all his own.
‘Your comrade?’
‘Dario,’ Roman said. ‘He is still in the legion.’
‘Do you keep in touch with him?’
‘I do,’ he said.
He turned off the light, gave her a brief kiss on the lips and then left. She lay in the dark, and slept. A sleep so deep that when she awoke Anya took a moment to realise where she was.
The previous night’s events felt like a dream.
She went into her bag for her phone to find out the time, but remembered that Mika had it. She went into the bathroom and freshened up.
Did she dress for breakfast?
Was it even breakfast time?
She pulled on her robe and hurried out. She had class at eight and then rehearsals.
‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ Josie called out.
‘Bonjour, madame,’ Anya called back, and then wandered out to the balcony where Roman sat, reading the newspaper.
Actually, he lounged in a chair.
He was wearing only black jeans and he hadn’t shaved and when he looked up and gave her a smile, Anya had to fight not to go and sit on his lap and kiss him.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
‘It is almost seven, I was going to get you up then,’ Roman said as she took a seat at the breakfast table. There were flowers in a vase and baguettes and pastries and a large silver jug, presumably coffee.
‘How did you sleep?’ Anya asked him.
‘I always sleep well,’ he told her. ‘So you don’t have to ask. If that changes I’ll let you know. What about you?’
‘I never sleep well,’ she answered. ‘But I did in the end. My room’s beautiful. You didn’t choose the furnishings, I take it?’
Roman shook his head. ‘The apartment came as it was, even the staff! That was one of the most appealing things about it. I would have had no idea how to decorate it.’
‘Well, it’s perfect,’ Anya said, and reached for the coffee pot to fill her cup, and then frowned when delectable hot chocolate poured out.
‘I would like green tea,’ she said, cross with him for the temptation.
‘Sure,’ Roman said, and went to call out to Josie, but she was already there, bringing out some yoghurt and fresh berries, which she added to the collection of food on the table as Roman put in Anya’s order.
‘It might be a while,’ Roman said when Josie left. ‘She will have to go to the shop to get some.’
‘Oolong tea, then, or just—’
‘Do I look like a man who keeps a herbal tea collection?’ Roman interrupted.
‘I’m sure you’ve had other lovers ask for green tea,’ she sneered.
‘I don’t bring women here,’ Roman said. ‘There are hotels for all that.’
And he both hurt her with the knowledge that, yes, there were women, and comforted her that he never bought them here, and yet here she was.
‘Tell Josie not to bother,’ she grumbled, and shot him a look as she poured hot chocolate. ‘Are you trying to fatten me up again?’
‘Anya,’ Roman said calmly, ‘I asked Josie to provide an alternative breakfast for you.’ He sliced open a baguette and slathered it with butter. ‘I drank black tea in the orphanage and then black coffee in the legion—’ he left out the years they could not speak of ‘—and then, that morning, when I found Josie in my kitchen, she brought out the same breakfast as she did for me today. She gets up early and goes to the bakery and she buys fresh bread and pastries and then comes back and makes the hot chocolate. I like it. That’s it. My choice of breakfast has nothing to do with you. You shall have a full herbal tea selection by the time you get back from dance.’
‘I might be back late. I have to work hard these next weeks,’ Anya said as she reached for berries and yoghurt but she did have hot chocolate.
‘Come back whenever it suits,’ he said to the newspaper but then he looked up. ‘Just come back.’
‘We’ve never had breakfast together,’ she said.
‘No,’ he agreed, and put down his paper and looked at her. ‘We cannot linger, though, you don’t want to be late.’
Maybe they had changed.
In their two weeks together they would make love in the morning and Anya would forget the time and arrive late for class. Afterwards, when usually she would stay late and rehearse further, she would race back to his.
Her mother had once been at the stage door and had demanded that she come home and had chased her. Anya had outrun her, just for another night in Roman’s arms.
‘I won’t get in the way of your dance again,’ he said.
He had learnt his lesson.
After the disastrous meal and the row afterwards, the audition hadn’t gone well. Anya hadn’t made the corps and Katya had sought him out and come into the gym where he’d been training for his next fight. Anya had talent, she had told him. Anya had been doing well until he had arrived back on the scene.
‘You sabotage her dance,’ Katya had spat at him, and it was then she had told Roman that he was a burden to the system and that no family would want him in theirs. ‘You bring her down to your low level. Now I have to comfort her as she cries. All the work she has put in, all the agony she went through and now she has not made the corps. I wish, how I wish, for Anya’s sake, that you had never existed.’
His passport had arrived that very day and Roman had packed up his things and left to join the foreign legion.
No, he would not sabotage her dance again.
‘I need to go,’ Anya said.
‘Of course.’
She went into her room and packed her dance bag and pulled on three-quarter tights and a leotard. Over that she put on a tube skirt and a wrapround cardigan.
She arrived at eight, but that was late by her standards.
And Mika’s.
‘Where were you?’ he said as barre work commenced. He was working behind her. ‘We waited in the foyer for you and then had Reception ring up to your room but there was no answer.’
‘I’m not going to be staying at the hotel.’
She could feel his disapproval behind her and the same thing from Lula, who was working in front of her.
Even if Anya wasn’t close friends with anyone, they were a close group. They were on tour together and often dined and went out together.
Change was frowned upon.
For Anya the class went beautifully. The whole day did. Her floor work went well, even as she and Mika walked through the second part of The Firebird, she was confident, and felt energised, just at the thought that tonight she would see Roman.
‘Tonight,’ the choreographer said once they were packing up their bags, ‘we thought we might go to the open-air cinema at the Vilette Park.’
‘I can’t make it tonight,’ Anya said.
She did not have to give an excuse or a reason, yet as she headed for Roman’s she felt as if she should have, for she’d almost heard the silent disapproval from the group as she’d pulled back from them.
Anya tried not to think about it and as she stepped out of the elevator it took a moment to realise that she was alone in his home.
There
was no answer when she called out Roman’s name. No Bonjour returned when she said it out loud.
Anya wandered around.
She looked out at the Seine from the lounge, where the drapes had been drawn last night. Then she walked down the hallway and past grand doors.
One she opened and saw there a huge wooden floored area. Unlike the rest of the house, it was very modern and Anya guessed this would be his gym.
Like Daniil’s.
She turned when she heard the elevator and then Roman stepped out.
He was wearing a suit and carrying a laptop bag and it felt like a tiny glimpse of him coming home to her.
‘I went to look at an apartment,’ he said by way of explaining where he had come from.
‘Was it as nice as this?’
‘Nowhere is as nice as this,’ he said.
He came and joined her and they walked into the room.
‘It is like the room at Daniil’s,’ Anya said. ‘You two are so similar, even though you have been apart. Maybe you could put a boxing ring in here...’ She guessed at his dream. ‘One day you and he can fight again, but fairly this time.’
‘Maybe,’ Roman said. ‘How was class?’
‘It was very good.’ Anya nodded. ‘Well, they are not happy with me, I think, but my dancing went well.’
‘Why aren’t they happy with you?’ He frowned.
‘Because I am not staying at the hotel, or joining them tonight.’
‘You can go out with them tonight.’
‘No.’ Anya shook her head. ‘Even if you weren’t around I wouldn’t have gone. It is the open-air cinema and last time I went I got bitten.’
She was so careful with her skin. Roman remembered her telling him to take care where he kissed her because their first time had left her bruised.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I thought we might go out for dinner tonight.’
She wanted to see if things really could be different this time.
Roman nodded.
He needed to know too.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHE WORE A simple black dress and did her make-up carefully.
He looked so elegant in a suit and her stomach was in knots as they were driven through twilit streets but he told the driver they would walk home. He took her to a rooftop restaurant and, as they were led to a sumptuous table that overlooked the Seine, Roman requested somewhere more private instead.
They were seated in a plush velvet booth that muted the sound from fellow diners. He moved the silver candelabrum aside and she liked it that he did. They stared at each other and the candlelight darkened the shadows beneath his cheekbones; she fought with her hand not to reach out to touch his face.
Her heart was fluttering in her chest. She felt that seat belts should be provided, for it was as if she were on a roller-coaster, and she ought to be strapped in.
She felt as if they were on their way to something. Something real, and very beautiful.
And she was scared to hope.
The menu was amazing, but her lazy days spent daydreaming of Roman rather than practising meant that she was careful as she chose.
‘The asparagus and orange rind,’ she said, and braced herself for him to comment, to point out that it was their first meal out in more than a decade, but he said nothing and simply ordered for himself.
Roman then spoke with the sommelier but she shook her head as he translated for her. ‘I’ll just have water.’ Not just that she couldn’t afford to indulge, she did not want her guard lowered an inch.
Last night, on seeing his injuries, she had wept so hard and she would not allow herself to do that again.
He did not like the sommelier’s suggestion to accompany his côte de veau foyot and asked for his preferred wine instead. Anya watched as he conversed with ease.
‘What are you having to eat?’ she asked.
‘Veal, with Parmesan and white wine sauce.’
‘Your French is excellent,’ she commented.
‘I know. Even the French think I am French...’
‘You are,’ Anya responded tartly, alluding to his new identity, but Roman shook his head.
‘When people ask where I’m from the answer is, “Je suis legionnaire.”’
He said it with pride.
‘And you also speak English,’ Anya commented.
‘Not so well. I only started to learn it last year. If I wanted to be able to converse with Daniil and his family...’ His voice trailed off.
‘So it was no accident you got back in touch.’
She was as observant as he.
Roman thought of the time after Celeste had died, and the mounting need to see for himself how his brother was.
And Anya.
‘I didn’t know if I would get in touch, but in case I ever did I wanted to be able to converse...’ He gave a slight eye roll.
‘Tell me?’ Anya said, because, unlike the scars on his back, those tiny facial expressions of his she did still know and could read.
Roman could tell her.
For whatever reason, he found that he could talk to her about his twin, when usually he would remain silent.
‘When I greeted Libby, I congratulated her on the baby and then Daniil came along and asked where I had been. I told him that I had been in Paris and he was annoyed that I was just an hour away. I asked him, in Russian, how he was. He told me that we were to speak in English in front of his wife.’
He looked into her pale green eyes and they narrowed.
‘He’s been in England since he was twelve. There was an assumption, given that I had greeted Libby in English, that I was fluent.’
‘Shishka,’ Anya said as she used Daniil’s nickname that they had teased him with before he’d gone to be with his new family, and it made Roman smile.
‘You should have told him how much effort you went to, just so that you could speak with his family.’
‘Perhaps, but I don’t want to,’ Roman admitted. ‘I just don’t feel close enough to him to go over things yet.’
‘He did try to write to you,’ Anya said. ‘Libby told me that he did. And he has searched for you, but people who join the French Foreign Legion don’t tend to want to be found.’
He stared at the tears that pooled in her eyes and saw the hurt and confusion he had caused.
Only the wine waiter arriving to pour their drinks broke their gaze.
Anya took a sip of her water and breathed.
Then took another sip.
And she was now ready and curious to know.
‘What was it like?’ she asked, but her voice rose in hurt as she asked the next question. ‘When did you apply?’ It upset her that he had been filling out application forms while seeing her. That he had been planning to go, even as they’d made love. ‘Did you hide the forms from me?’
‘There were no forms that I hid,’ Roman said. ‘You don’t apply as such; instead you make your own way there and then you knock on the door,’ he explained, and took a sip of his wine.
‘And that’s it?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘That is just the start of it. All your things are taken from you and you are given a dark uniform and boots and over the next couple of weeks they run many tests on the potential recruits. I was with a real mixed bag of men.’ He let out a low laugh as he recalled them. ‘A couple didn’t even make it through the first day.’
‘But you did,’ Anya said, happier now that he had not hid applying to join from her. ‘What was the training like?’
‘Hard,’ he admitted. ‘You do not get the kepi easily—you have to earn it.’
‘Kepi?’
‘The white cap we wear,’ Roman explained. ‘I have never trained harder in my life and then,
if you get through that part, you are sent to The Farm and the real hard work begins. There are endless hikes, and physical and psychological obstacles to overcome. Then when I passed, when I got my kepi, I applied for the parachute regiment and went to Corsica.’
‘You jumped out of planes?’
‘Many times,’ he said. ‘Then we went on deployments...’
And she asked him something she had been unable to last night and, though she might not like the answer, she was ready to hear it now.
‘Did you ever think of me?’
‘Not at first.’
He was brutally honest, as was his way, but it did not hurt quite as much as it might have because his admission told her that eventually he had thought of her.
‘From the moment you knock at the door, they break you down, they want the strongest of men. You go to The Farm and you train and they break you further. Sometimes you do tasks so mundane that you would go mad if you thought of what you had left behind. Other times you are so exhausted from exertion that there is no time to think. You have to converse in French, and that takes a lot of head space.’
And she listened and imagined him there and was proud that he had done all of those things.
‘You wake up and have coffee and bread and jam but you finish that meal and are still hungry. Then there are the endless hikes, and though only you, yourself, have to make it, you start to encourage each other and you start to change, you become a part of a team. We would march, and we would sing songs...’
Anya laughed at that.
‘I can’t imagine you singing,’ she admitted. He was so deep, so private, so undemonstrative, that she could not imagine this man singing with others.
‘It is a big part of it,’ Roman told her.
And he thought back to that time.
It had been a hike, a long one, and it had been more than testing.
Dario had been falling behind.
‘Suis-moi.’ Roman had told Dario to follow him, to keep up with him, and he had said it in French without thinking.
The night before he had dreamed in French for the first time and he’d felt as if his past was slipping away.
Return of the Untamed Billionaire Page 10
