A Bride for Kolovsky (14 page)

S
HE
could do this, Lavinia told herself.

Lavinia paced the city streets, high heels clicking, and she didn't care.

Kevin wanted money, a significant amount of money, and she knew where she could get it. She just had to work out how.

There was the Kolovsky boutique—the place every woman wanted to be—and she stared in at the window and saw the silk and the opals. And then she saw her reflection, and it would have been so easy to rest her head on the window and just weep, but if she started she would never stop. Instead she swept into the store and selected a Kolovsky wrap—one of the last designs of the founder, Ivan Kolovsky, spun in golds and reds and ambers, in the same thread as the dress she had worn that night she had first kissed Zakahr. The staff knew her, of course, but they blinked a little when she told them to charge it to Zakahr Belenki.

‘And this, too,' Lavinia informed them, grabbing a
ko
a
slip dress. And then she saw another wrap, a turquoise one, filled with silvers and greens like a peacock on display, and she knew who would love this one.
Ignoring Alannah's incessant questions and requests for a signature, Lavinia left—and ground the gears in her car all the way to the hospital.

‘Here.' She wrapped it round Nina's shoulders. ‘Ivan designed this one.' She smoothed the silk around her friend's shoulders and tried to comfort her. But she wouldn't stop crying, wouldn't stop wailing.

‘He's called a press conference for tomorrow. It's over,' Nina sobbed. ‘Tomorrow it is all over.'

‘Stop it,' Lavinia said, because it was too much like her own mother.

‘He hasn't been in to see me. He'll never forgive me. Riminic won't come to see me.' Round and round on the same pointless loop. ‘He's never going to forgive me.'

‘Perhaps not!' Lavinia was cross, but she was kind. ‘Maybe he'll never forgive you, Nina. But you know what? You can forgive yourself. You did a terrible, awful thing—but that's not all you are. You've done many good things, too—look how you helped me. You gave me a good job, you helped me with Rachael, with so many things.'

‘I want my son.'

‘You
have
your son!' Lavinia said. ‘Whether he forgives you, or loves you, still you have your son…' But there was no reaching her, and the doctor moved in with medication. Lavinia shooed him off. ‘You want more Valium, Nina? Or why not have a drink, like my mum did? Or you can get up, get washed…'

‘It hurts,' Nina insisted, thumping at her chest, and Lavinia couldn't do it any more.

‘Life
hurts,' Lavinia said. ‘But you can't just give in.
Sometimes you do what you have to at the time, and then work out how to forgive yourself afterwards.'

And so, now, must she.

 

For the first time in almost a week Zakahr shaved. He stood with a towel around his hips and tried somehow to shave and not fully look at himself in the mirror.

His suit was chosen for the morning, his speech written, his case packed. Soon it would be over.

And then came a frantic knocking at his door.

‘Yes?'

Zakahr stood back as a mini-torpedo swept into his suite.

‘I've changed my mind.' She was breathless, could not look at him, but she was determined. ‘That offer.'

‘What offer?'

‘For money.'

‘Lavinia…' he sounded bored ‘…you told me very clearly that money was the last thing you wanted.'

‘I've changed my mind.' There was a frantic air to her, an urgency as she rained his face with kisses.

‘Lavinia…'

Zakahr peeled her off him. He did not want to deal with this. He did not want to deal with
her
, Lavinia, the person who made him sway, this woman who clouded his judgment. So he pushed her away with words.

‘I might have known you'd revert to type.'

‘I'm my mother's daughter.'

‘Just go.'

She could not. She would not.

So she did it—she pulled off her dress to reveal the
ko
a
slip beneath. She was shaking, and ashamed, but worse—far worse—he remained unmoved.

‘Here.' He strode across the room to his desk, pulled out a cheque. ‘For the other night. Now, get out.'

And she had what she wanted, there in her hand, but it wasn't enough. It could never be enough—and it had nothing to do with money. She was kissing him again, pressing her lips on his unwilling mouth. He turned his face away.

‘Is it money you want, Lavinia, or sex?' He wanted
her
, not what she was doing. He remembered her abhorrence at the idea and tried to save her from herself. Pulling at her wrists, he pushed her away from his body. For even as he rejected her she would surely be able to feel he was lying.

Both
, she almost sobbed. But that wasn't the entire answer. There was a third—an addition that she could not bring herself to admit.

She didn't want him to go, yet somehow had to accept there was nothing here for him to stay for.

He had taken her heart—he might just as well have had the butler pack it amongst his shirts—and the fire died in her.

‘What do you want, Lavinia?'

‘Not this,' Lavinia admitted, and she stared at the cheque and then handed it to him. ‘Thank you.'

‘For what.'

‘For not letting me…' She screwed her eyes closed. ‘Please—just take it.'

He didn't.

‘I don't want to make money this way—and the stupid
thing is you're the only man I could have tried to… I'm so ashamed.'

‘You didn't do anything.'

‘Not for that…' When still he wouldn't take the cheque she screwed it up in her hands. ‘I promised myself I'd do anything it took to get Rachael, but in the end…'

‘You don't need that money,' Zakahr said—which was great, coming from a billionaire.

She picked up her dress, and it was an almost impossible task to get out with dignity. But as she stepped into her shoes, rejected and broke, Lavinia was the one who could look him in the eye.

‘I thought I wanted you…' She shook her head. ‘But I don't. I want a family for Rachael—I want cousins and grandparents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles for her. I want everything for her that I never had, and everything you so readily could.'

She went to open the door. She knew she often said the wrong thing, but sometimes she couldn't stop herself, and now it was building and fizzing and welling inside her, and she probably wouldn't have said it if the damn door hadn't stuck.

‘So you were abandoned?' Lavinia finally wrenched the door open, turned around and stuck her chin out to him. ‘Boo-hoo—get over it.'

And, in high stilettos and a
ko
a
slip, she marched right out of his life.

I
T WAS
his longest night.

He drove first to the hospital, sitting outside, knowing it was too late to go in. Then he drove to Iosef's home and watched the lights flick on and off—even heard the baby crying at midnight in the dark, silent street and saw the light flick on again. Then to Annika—a sister he had hardly spoken to. He sat outside the sprawling farm she shared with her husband Ross, listening to the horses and the peace and wishing it might come to his soul.

It could.

Well, according to Lavinia.

She'd taken thirty-six years of history, challenged a lifelong dream and told him he could do it.

‘You don't need money.'

He'd leant on her doorbell till she answered, still in the
ko
a
slip, nursing a tub of ice cream and a glass of wine. Somehow, he could tell she had not been crying.

‘I had already arranged a lawyer for you. He will contact you.'

‘He rang before,' Lavinia said, and taking that phone
call had felt a whole lot different from taking money. ‘He seems to think I have a good chance.'

‘You have
every
chance,' Zakahr said.

He walked into her house and it was the first time he had felt at home.

There were her stolen goods all over the sofa, and a make-up bag on the coffee table, and a woman who somehow reached him.

‘How am I supposed to forgive her? How can I stay…?'

‘You choose to.' She smiled at him, but it was a tired one. ‘She was fifteen,' Lavinia said, pouring him a glass of wine. She had listened to Nina's grief for so long now she knew her story by heart. ‘She was scared and pregnant and they hid it from everyone. She was poor, his family would have been angry, and Ivan told her they could not keep you.'

She didn't elaborate on that part—they both knew the consequences.

‘For years they were apart. Ivan had a fling with a cleaner—that was Levander's mother—then he met your mother again. She was nineteen then, and soon pregnant with twins. His family still objected to the marriage—she was beneath him, they said. She tried very hard to show them she was better, and she did not see how they would accept her if they knew there had already been a child. You would have been four.'

She tried to picture him at four, but it didn't make her smile.

‘There was a chance to flee Russia. She was heavily pregnant, and Levander's mother came to the door,
begging that they take him. Nina did not want Levander if she could not have her own son.'

He looked at Lavinia and her eyes were clear, her words very definite.

‘I'm sorry.'

And she was. It wasn't her fault, it had nothing to do with her, but sorry she was as she told him his history.

‘How did you forgive
your
mother?'

‘I don't know that I actually did—I just gave up trying to change her. Can you forgive Nina?' Lavinia asked—because now she'd stopped being angry she knew it was a big ask.

‘She really helped you?' Zakahr answered in question.

‘They all have.' Lavinia nodded. ‘They've been like a family.' She thought for a moment, because again she'd probably said the wrong thing. ‘Not a lovey-dovey family—we fight all the time…'

‘A real family, I guess.'

Zakahr closed his eyes. He would wear every scar on his back easier knowing that Nina had in some way been there for her.

‘I love you,' he said. And he'd never thought he'd say it—and neither had Lavinia—and now to hear it, to know it, to feel it, for once she was lost for words. He could not gauge her silence, but if he had to make it clearer then he would. ‘I'm crazy about you. So crazy all I can think of is you. So crazy I would give up a lifetime's revenge to have you.'

And then she climbed on his knee and kissed him—a bold kiss, a loving kiss, a Lavinia kiss, that started on
his mouth and then moved across his cheeks and over his eyebrows. Her thin fingers roamed his hair. He knew this was a for ever he had never—not once—let himself glimpse. He could be himself. The past wasn't something he ran from or something that ate him up with a need to avenge. The past could just
be
, and that meant he now had a future.

It was a kiss that was both passionate and loving—a kiss that was both urgent and patient. She felt the exhaustion as his past left him, and the hope as the future greeted him, and it was a different kiss too, for Lavinia.

She tasted his tongue, and the lips that were designed for her. She wasn't unsure and she wasn't shy and she knew with him she was revered.

She straddled him and kissed him as his hands caressed her body through the silk. He kissed her breasts through the fabric his father had created, and then his mouth moved lower still, and she felt him, warm through the fabric. He kissed her stomach and slid the fabric up over her hips. She knelt on him till it was her flesh his lips were touching, and he kissed her stomach deeply as her fingers pressed in his hair. It was a kiss that told her his babies would grow there.

She slid down his zipper and lowered herself onto him, and it was third time lucky for Lavinia, because this time
she
got to love
him
.

She got to kiss him as he came deep within her. She got to kiss him as her body learnt how readily available true passion was. Because it was fast and intense and incredibly beautiful—a lot like life.

‘Marry me,' he said because he wanted her for
ever. He kissed her again, and then asked her again. ‘Marry me.'

‘On one condition.'

She whispered it into his ear.

He'd have agreed to anything—just not that.

He closed his eyes, because it was impossible, but how could he ever say no to her? He was still within her, and he could never deny her. And then he opened them, and saw that Lavinia was absolutely and completely serious in her ‘one condition'.

Hesitantly he agreed. Tonight could only be for ever if he would do this for her. Then this love would be for keeps.

Everyone would just have to wait till the wedding to find out.