by Lucy Ellis
He heard himself saying, ‘How about we take on some more real life?’
She looked up. The light in her eyes smote him.
‘I’m taking you back to my townhouse, Clementine. I think the whole hotel scenario has worn thin, no?’
He had a home in the city. Yet they had been staying in a hotel for a week.
For a moment Clementine’s whole world tipped, and everything that had come before took on a new, harsher light. Her stomach just dropped away. ‘I see,’ she said softly.
‘Don’t see too much, Clementine,’ he said quietly, and she nodded—which was about all she could do.
It wasn’t personal that he had chosen a hotel to get to know her, to make love to her, she thought with a savage desperation to make this all right again, to make it nothing like Joe Carnegie, to make it all romantic and hopeful again.
But nor was it personal that he had now decided to let her into his life, she acknowledged painfully. It was just a choice he was making—probably for his own comfort. She moved fast after that, making an excuse that she needed the bathroom and locking herself inside, running the bath water strong and hard to block out the sound of her tears.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE drive back into the city gave Clementine a chance to process events as she watched the scenery zip by and surreptitiously observed Serge, who was very quiet. He liked to drive. She had seen that in St Petersburg. They had no room for their luggage, of course. That was coming separately. Clementine had only her handbag, which she jumbled through now, trying to find some of the barley sugar she always carried around with her.
Serge glanced at the objects beginning to clutter her lap.
‘What have you got in there? Buried treasure?’
‘Very funny.’ Giving up on her surreptitious hunt, she just shook her bag’s contents out over her lap. Ticket stubs, a pen, bits of paper, a tissue—all dropped out, fluttered down. She found the barley sugar. And Luke’s two condoms.
‘Going prepared, Clementine?’
She flushed and began stuffing everything back into her carry-all. Then was annoyed with herself for being embarrassed.
‘Luke gave them to me back in Petersburg—for my date with you, if you must know. As if you were going to get lucky on our first date.’ She couldn’t resist adding, ‘You had to fly me to a fancy hotel across the world for that.’
Serge was glad he was doing a low speed and that the car was a fluid machine to guide, because her words had him veering towards the centre of the road.
He glanced at Clementine. ‘Put your hand in my pocket.’
‘Serge!’
‘Go on. I won’t bite.’
Rolling her eyes, but curious, she reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved a small box. She opened it.
‘My locket!’
‘I had it repaired.’
She hadn’t looked at it since she’d slipped it into a drawer beside the bed. Serge clearly had.
Dipping her head to clasp it around her throat, she experienced a wave of affection that she felt awkward about expressing. Not now that she had a much clearer-eyed view on their relationship.
‘Don’t tell me it’s a memento from an old boyfriend,’ he said in a gravelly voice.
‘I bought it for myself when I turned eighteen.’ She held up her wrist. ‘I got this watch for myself when I signed up with Verado.’
Serge frowned. ‘You purchased these yourself?’
‘Why not?’ she said defensively. ‘Someone once told me if you don’t have people in your life to mark important occasions you need to do it for yourself.’ She manufactured a grin. ‘Which for me is just an excuse to shop.’
No one to mark important occasions. It shouldn’t bother him but it did.
‘Clementine, a beautiful woman should not be buying herself jewellery.’
She gave him a bright, dismissive smile. ‘Men are always buying me gifts, Serge, I just choose not to accept them.’
His knuckles rose to prominence on the wheel. He didn’t want to hear about other men. But he got the message. Loud and clear. She was thinking about the diamond necklace. He wished he’d never given her the damn thing. Given? He’d left it for her to find with a note. Thanks for your services. He didn’t allow himself to look back, but this was one incident he wished he could go back and change.
Yet she hadn’t confronted him over it in so many words. He knew exactly where it was. In the bedside table, on his side of the bed, untouched. As far as a statement went it was pretty loud.
‘You haven’t talked about your family,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘I assume you have them? Parents?’
Clementine looked at him sharply. He gave her a reassuring smile and her defensiveness wobbled. She nodded slowly.
‘Happy childhood?’ he pressed, not sure where he was going with this but feeling a bit like a drowning man grasping at sticks.
‘Not really.’ She suddenly became fascinated with her hands, examining her nails as she talked. ‘They divorced when I was five.’
‘Brought up by your mother?’
‘I was handballed between them—Mum in Melbourne, Dad in Geneva. He’s a journo—war correspondent. Always chasing something, whether it’s a conflict, a story, a woman.’ She shrugged her shoulders, dealing privately with the mixture of anger and grief she always felt when speaking about her parents. ‘Mum remarried. I’ve got three stepsisters but I don’t really know them. I left home at seventeen and I haven’t been back.’
Serge frowned. ‘Seventeen is young for a girl to be out on her own.’
‘It is, but I managed.’
It explained a lot. Her independence, her ability to take him on, but also that vulnerability that had been worrying him.
‘So you don’t miss your family?’ He didn’t know why he was pursuing this, only he found he needed to know more about this side of her life, and until now she had never spoken about it.
‘Not much to miss,’ she replied briefly, looking down. ‘I was still at school when I left home. I ended up working a slew of menial jobs during the day, did school at night. I wasn’t getting anywhere so I made the decision to do what so many other people my age were doing and try London. I don’t regret making the move. I always felt like there were opportunities out there in the world for me, and I want to take them whilst I’m young enough to enjoy them.’
Clementine suddenly wished this conversation had never started up. Talking about her parents always stirred up painful memories. A childhood where nothing was certain, all power in the hands of two adults who seemed to be nothing more than overgrown toddlers careening out of control on dodgem cars, herself alone and unprotected between them, had given her a strong need to protect herself.
At twenty-five she knew her past was beginning to take a toll. Professionally she was fine, but her personal life had never really got off the ground and now it was dead in the water.
Until this man.
Don’t see too much, Clementine.
No, she wouldn’t. But he wanted to be reassured she wasn’t jumping the gun. That she could be the girl he wanted. The no-strings girl. But could she be that girl or was the price too high?
It was time to protect herself again.
She gripped her knees, and the gesture wasn’t lost on him. ‘Serge, can I be frank?’
He actually looked taken aback and she almost smiled. Were there worse words you could say to a man? It always prefaced something they would rather not know.
She smiled thinly. Lucky you, Serge, you’re going to get exactly what you want to hear.
‘I’m not naive,’ she continued. ‘I know you live for your work. Relationships are way down on your agenda. I also know that you want to keep me out of that part of your life—you want to keep your distance. I get that you chose to take me to a hotel rather than your townhouse.’
He looked as if he wanted to say something, but she got in there fast.
‘You’re telling me not to get serious about a
ny of this. I get it. I understand all you’re offering is an opportunity, not a long-term relationship.’ She affected a casual shrug. ‘It’s okay. I’m cool with that. That’s what I want too.’ Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Serge stilled.
This should be his moment of relief. Instead it hit him like a sucker punch.
‘An opportunity?’ he said slowly, turning the phrase over like a rock and observing all the nasty things crawling out.
For the first time in over a week he was reminded of the girl he’d first met in St Petersburg. The girl he’d imagined had several guys on the go, working her advantages. From their first night together the notion had been rendered laughable. For all her innate sensuality Clementine was not a practised lover. In fact she had given the impression of being swept away by her feelings. It was a big part of why being with her felt so different.
Up until a moment ago he would have discounted her claim. Yet now knowing a little about her past put a slant on his perspective. She was clearly tougher than she looked. This was a woman who had survived on her own since she was a teenager. She didn’t need his protection. She didn’t need coddling. She was telling him exactly what he should be celebrating hearing.
‘So my finding a job makes sense, don’t you think?’ He looked over at her. She flashed a bright, brittle smile. Nyet, nothing made sense.
The next day Clementine spent her time alone, making the rounds of several fashion labels before one bit. Her CV now had Verado’s name as a calling card. All her hard work in St Petersburg had paid off. The fashion label Annelli were launching a campaign over Christmas, to brand their jeans with an up-and-coming young Hollywood actress. If she was interested in joining their team they had a job for her.
The work was in New York City. There wouldn’t be a problem with her visa. It was all lining up. Yet she hesitated to take the job.
In a cab uptown she thought about what all this meant.
She wanted a lot more from Serge than she suspected he ever intended to give her. You didn’t take a girl to a hotel when you had a perfectly good home across town. He had never meant this to be anything more than a no-strings fling and in the Hamptons, desperate to hold onto her dignity, she’d dismissed the depth of her feelings and given him his ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card.
Because she did have feelings for him—and she wasn’t going to deny them to herself even as she hid them from him. And the longer they were together the deeper those feelings were growing. She so desperately didn’t want to be his good-time girl. She knew the impression she had given him in St Petersburg. She had hoped he knew her better now. But a week of heady lovemaking and not much else had left her teetering on the suspicion that this was always going to be a sexual affair for Serge and little else, and his luxury lifestyle only confirmed it. Why would he want more when his looks and money could bring in beautiful women from all over the world?
He had invited her into his home now, prodded her inner voice. It was something.
But it wasn’t an invitation into his life, which was clearly taken up with his business.
Which was why she hesitated to take the Annelli job. Whatever he said about her not working for him, it grew more and more appealing the longer she thought about it. Being with Serge was going to mean lots of late-night dropins on gyms and plenty of travel, given the far-flung nature of the sport in Europe and the States. To be in his life she needed to be in his business. She could prove to him she was much more than a warm body in his bed and that she could play with the big boys too. Maybe that was a way forward for them?
But the overarching issue was the need to keep her independence, and that meant finding an apartment of her own. Being safe meant being independent. She’d learned that lesson the hard way with her parents, and had it reinforced by her experience with Joe Carnegie. Never again would a man consider he owned her simply because of the financial disparity between them.
She hopped out of the taxi on East 64th and jogged across the road towards the line of 1920s townhouses.
Serge’s house had come as a lovely surprise. It was a proper home—eleven rooms over five levels. Ridiculously large for a single man, but what interested Clementine was how unpretentious it was. Completely restored, it had an old-fashioned simplicity that told her a great deal about the man she was living with, and it was oddly comforting.
She fired up the laptop in Serge’s study and called up his website, navigating her way through to the schedule of matches. She knew he would be at the match on Friday night for a couple of hours, which gave her a window of opportunity to see him in action.
He didn’t need to know, and it would help her build up a sense of how to approach him about a job. She booked a ticket on-line and shut the laptop with an uneasy feeling that she had just crossed a line with Serge. If he found out he wouldn’t be happy.
Serge checked his watch and then looked at the screens in the control room. The stadium was filled to capacity, the main event would soon be underway, and he could leave and drive back into town and have a late dinner with Clementine.
He was enjoying their little arrangement. He had never cohabitated with a woman before, would have run a mile if anyone had suggested it to him. Although Clementine was quick to remind him she was effectively on holiday and that once her working visa came through things would naturally change. They weren’t actually living together.
She’d said that to him. We’re not living together, Serge.
As if he needed to know where he stood. As if she was warning him off. It was starting to get on his nerves.
And she kept talking about this apartment idea. He told her there was no hurry, but it didn’t stop her talking about it…
Almost as if thinking about her had conjured her up the small screen in front of him suddenly filled with her face. The wide cheekbones, pointed chin, grey eyes fluttering as she looked around, oblivious to being broadcast on a large screen.
‘Hold that camera,’ he said to the tech in front of him, and leaned in.
The cameras always panned in for a pretty girl, and Clementine with her lovely face, her wealth of hair down over her shoulders, in tight designer jeans and nipped-in jacket was just that. Possession gripped him behind the neck like a vice.
She was out there. Alone.
Serge registered all of this as Alex said something about going down and showing himself in the owners’ box if only to make the media happy.
‘That girl,’ said Serge to his minder. ‘Find out what seat she’s in.’
‘Do you want me to fetch her, boss?’
‘You do not touch her,’ Serge snarled. ‘I’m going down. Phone me through the info.’
Alex caught up with him as he jogged down the maze of corridors.
‘I thought you were seeing some Australian woman.’
‘I am.’
Seat 816 FF. She was up in the gods. He had a detail of security with him as he closed in on her. She had that tight expression on her face he recognised. She wasn’t comfortable with all the noise or the people around her. Good. It might teach her a lesson.
He didn’t expect the look of relief on her face when she saw him—nor did he expect his instant reaction, which was an answering satisfaction. She knew who she belonged to. Then her gaze slid by him to his security, and she frowned and looked back at him uneasily.
He didn’t say a word, merely extracted her from her seat. She looked up into his eyes. ‘Serge, you didn’t need to do this.’
‘You made it necessary with your actions, Clementine.’ His voice was clipped. ‘I’m sure you’ve got an explanation as to what you think you’re doing, but I haven’t got time to hear it.’
He put his arm around her. From a distance it might seem a tender gesture but Clementine knew when she was being frogmarched.
Trying to defuse the situation, she laughed uneasily. ‘Geez, Slugger, what are you going to do? Arrest me or something?’
‘I’m going to put you somewhere safe and you’re g
oing to stay there. I don’t have time to babysit you, Clementine. This isn’t a local gym and a controlled environment.’
Clementine felt a pang as she remembered her embarrassing reaction when he had taken her, on her insistence, to watch the sparring. She had interrupted his working life. His important working life. And she was doing it again—only on a grander scale.
She hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. If he hadn’t come and plucked her out of the crowd she’d still be sitting up there, him none the wiser, nothing disrupted.
It was his problem with her, and she wasn’t going to take the blame.
As they approached the glassed-in owners’ box she hissed, ‘Maybe if you’d just issued an invite instead of shutting me out I wouldn’t have had to buy a ticket.’
‘Kisa, if you ever pull a stunt like this again there won’t be any invites. Anywhere. Period.’
And with that he pushed her in front of a group of strangers and said to the nearest woman, ‘Kim, this is Clementine—Clementine Chevalier, Kim Hart.’ And around they went—introductions, handshakes. Hard men and heeled-up women with big hair. Clementine felt quite demure by comparison. She wondered if anyone else could hear the edge in Serge’s voice or if it was just her own private horror show. Then he plopped her down in a central seat and had someone put a glass of white wine in her hand. And was gone.
Clementine watched him leave, trying not to look too panicked. He would come back for her? What had he meant, no more invites? Had she crossed some sort of relationship line she didn’t know about?
A blonde whose name Clementine had forgotten leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder. ‘So what’s it like being flavour of the month?’
‘Ignore her,’ said another voice to her left, and the woman Serge had introduced as Kim slid into the seat beside her. ‘First event?’
‘Yes, I’m looking forward to it,’ she responded, a little blindsided by Serge’s words and then by the ‘flavour of the month’ comment. Doing her best to shrug it off, she switched on her job brain and queried, ‘So what’s the deal here? How is everyone connected with the Marinov Corporation?’
