Ruthless Russian, Lost Innocence - Shaw Chantelle - Страница 32

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She felt numb with shock. He’d never said a word to her in all the time they had spent together. But of course he did not regard her as one of his closest friends, she thought bitterly. She was just his temporary mistress, and he kept her shut out of his life. Contrary to what Lena thought, she certainly did not have the key to his heart.

‘YOU’RE very quiet tonight. What’s the matter?’ Vadim queried as the Aston Martin sped along the road back to Antibes.

Ella shot him a lightning glance and felt her heart contract at the sight of his hard, classically sculpted features highlighted by the moonlight. ‘I’ve got a headache. I’ll take a couple of migraine tablets when we get back.’ She turned away from him and stared out of the window, wondering why misery had settled like a lead weight in her stomach. What did it matter if he had been married and had had a child? His past had nothing to do with her. But during their time in Antibes she had felt closer to him than she ever had to any other human being, and, fool that she was, she had kidded herself that he was beginning to regard her as more than a convenient sex partner. The discovery that he had deliberately withheld important details about his past made a mockery of her stupid daydream that he would ever want a meaningful relationship with her.

‘I have to make a call to the US,’ he told her when they entered the Villa Corraline, and immediately headed for his study. ‘Why don’t you go up to bed? You look all in.’

As soon as she reached the bedroom, Ella stripped out of her evening dress and took off the diamond necklace. Maybe she was oversensitive, but all evening she’d felt as though the glittering gems had screamed the fact that she was Vadim’s mistress, and she had been aware of speculative glances from various predatory women, clearly wondering how long she would hold on to her position.

Recalling that Vadim had dropped the velvet box that had contained the necklace into his bedside cabinet, she crossed to his side of the bed, opened the drawer and deposited the diamonds. She was about to shut the drawer again when something caught her attention.

The rag-doll was clearly old, and cheaply made. Someone had repaired the stitching on the arms and legs with a slightly darker thread, and some of the stuffing must have escaped because the doll was limp and strangely misshapen. Carefully, Ella took the doll from the drawer. Beneath it were two photographs: one of a woman with a mass of brown hair, holding a baby in her arms, the other depicting a little girl of maybe four or five, with an impish smile and a mop of blonde curls. The photos were not of particularly good quality and were curled at the edges, as if they had been held many times. They could only be of Vadim’s wife and child, she realised, her heart thumping as she stared at them in fascination, unaware of the faint sound of footfall until he materialised in front of her.

Flushing guiltily, she quickly dropped the photographs into her lap. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,’ she mumbled. ‘I was putting the necklace away when I saw the pictures…and I was curious.’ Vadim’s silence was unnerving; the expression on his hard face unreadable, and her hands shook slightly as she handed the doll and photos to him. ‘Cute little girl,’ she commented, striving to sound normal as she got up from the bed.

‘Yes.’ He finally spoke, and gave a faint shrug of his shoulders, his eyes veering from her face to the pictures. ‘They’re friends-in Russia.’

Ella nodded. ‘I see.’ She picked up her robe and headed swiftly for the en suite bathroom. She was not one of Vadim’s closest friends; she was the woman he had sex with. There was no reason why he would confide in her, she reminded herself.

In the bathroom she removed her make-up, washed her face and released the pins from her chignon, pulling the brush through her hair with automatic strokes until she could not put off returning to the bedroom any longer. Thank God she’d made the excuse about having a headache earlier, she thought bleakly. She knew she was being stupid, but she could not bear to make love with Vadim tonight, when his lie about the identities of the woman and child in the photographs emphasised how unimportant she was to him.

He had switched off the lamps so that the room was shadowed; fingers of silvery moonlight were glimmering through the windows. Vadim had stepped outside onto the terrace. She could see him sitting on the garden bench, his shoulders slumped in an air of such utter loneliness that instead of sliding into bed she was drawn towards the open doors, her grey silk gown rustling as she hurried down the steps.

He looked up as she approached, and she caught her breath at the expression of haunted agony on his face.

‘The woman in the photo was my wife,’ he said harshly.

Ella’s eyes flew to the photographs in his hands, and her heart contracted when she saw him stroke his finger lightly over the face of the little girl.

‘And this was my daughter-Klara.’ The silence trembled between them before he added in a tightly controlled voice, ‘They’re both dead.’

He passed his hand over his eyes, and the betraying gesture tore Ella’s heart to shreds. She was stunned to see this powerful man suddenly so vulnerable. She wanted to go to him, hold him, but fear that he would reject her sympathy held her immobile.

‘I’m so sorry.’ She didn’t know what to say, and the words seemed desperately inadequate. When Lena Tarasov had revealed that Vadim had been married, she had been bitterly hurt that he had never spoken about his past to her. But now, as she witnessed his raw pain, she hated herself for having been so childish. He had clearly been devastated by the loss of his wife and daughter, and who could blame him if he found it hard to talk about their deaths?

‘What…what happened?’ she asked huskily.

His throat worked, and his lashes were spiked with moisture when he lifted his head and met her startled gaze. ‘They were killed in an avalanche which hit Irina’s parents’ village,’ he explained harshly. ‘Most of Rumsk was wiped out.’ He stared down at the photos in his hand. ‘My parents-in-law lived on the lower slopes of the mountain, and when hundreds of tons of snow hurtled down the mountainside no one in the house stood a chance. It was three days before the rescue team found Irina, and another two before they reached Klara.’ His voice cracked with emotion. ‘Of course it was too late. When they found Klara she was still holding her doll.’

He picked up the rag-doll and swallowed the constriction in his throat. He could sense Ella’s shock, and knew she was struggling for something to say. But there was nothing to be said. Irina and Klara were gone, and no amount of words would bring them back.

Ella’s throat ached with tears, but she forced herself to speak. ‘When?’ she whispered.

‘Ten years ago.’ His mouth twisted into a grimace. ‘Today would have been Klara’s fifteenth birthday.’ The memories had been agonising today, but he had suppressed his pain in the same way that he always did, and had arranged to socialise with friends to prevent himself from dwelling on the past. But now the evening was over, and he could no longer banish the images in his head of his angelic-faced little girl.

‘I suppose your…wife…’ Ella stumbled slightly over the word ‘…had taken your daughter to visit her parents.’ She fell silent, finding it impossible to imagine how terrible it must have been for Vadim when he’d heard news of the disaster.

Vadim stared silently across the dark garden, reliving those harrowing hours and days when he had joined the search teams and dug through the snow until his shoulder muscles had burned with his frantic efforts to find Klara, so that he could place her body with Irina’s in the mortuary. Even after ten years, the memory of finding his lifeless daughter still ripped his heart out.

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