Untouched by His Diamonds (20 page)

‘Clementine, it’s not over.’ His voice was husky, and some part of her snatched hold of that as proof he wasn’t as unaffected as he pretended to be.

‘No,’ she said, forcing the cheer into her voice. But it fell flat. ‘I just don’t like talking about it. Can we change the subject?’

‘We’re driving back to Paris in an hour or so. There’s no rush,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought you’d like to go out to Versailles. I think Marie Antoinette probably appeals to you, Clementine.’

She closed her eyes. He knew her so well. Yet not well enough to know she was in love with him. If he knew that, surely he wouldn’t be so cruel. Surely he would lie to her. For a little longer.

Well, she was going to lie to herself. She was going to pretend she could be with a man who wasn’t ever going to love her, if all he could give her was ‘a great deal’.

To mean ‘a great deal’ to someone was something. Wasn’t it?

She knew then what she had to do. Book a flight home. It was over.

Serge was angry. He didn’t think he’d ever been so angry in his life. It was that cold, settled anger that could sit in your gut for days, weeks, months. It kept him silent on the drive back up to Paris. He had a pretty good idea what was keeping Clementine silent. What had he expected? She was going to chatter and sing silly songs and trade barley sugar kisses with him as she had on the way down? He’d lost that girl for good. In an act of necessary sabotage.

Yes, his anger was of the settled kind, and it wasn’t going to shift, but he could feel it growing exponentially as he navigated the pretty Paris streets in the sports car and Clementine started talking about how clean Paris was compared to
London. When she had exhausted that topic she moved on to that international conundrum the weather.

‘I’d like to have some time on my own,’ she told him in a
faux
-sweet tone as the valet took care of the car. ‘Do you mind if I go up to the suite alone?’

It was about then the anger burst.
‘Da,’
he said, ‘I do mind.’

She gave him a look that could incinerate and stalked ahead of him through the hotel. He didn’t hurry. The anger felt good, it felt justified, and it had nothing to do with Clementine.

She had closed the door on the bedroom and thrown herself on the bed. He kicked the door open.

‘Get out,’ she said shifting her legs off the bed.

‘I sleep here too,
kisa
.’

‘I told you to get out.’ When he didn’t shift she said, ‘Do you know what’s wrong with you, Serge?’

‘Go ahead—inform me.’

‘You’re a male chauvinist pig. You live in another century, and it’s not the last one.’

He slanted her a dark look. ‘
Da, kisa
. You know, I had a sixteenth-century ancestor who kept fifteen wives—a couple for each day of the week. He had no trouble keeping them in line, but I guess he just hadn’t met you.’

Somewhere in there was a compliment, she thought uneasily, but it got lost in the concept of fifteen wives and the way he was looking at her. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be on the bed. She felt entirely too vulnerable to him.

She knew he could overwhelm her in moments—not with his expertise, although that was considerable, but with his sheer maleness, and feeling as vulnerable as she was she didn’t know how she was going to cope.

She knew she could say no and Serge would stop. But no wasn’t coming, and all of a sudden the only thing that was going to work was skin on skin.

All Serge knew as he came over her on the bed was that
desire crashed through him, stronger than he had ever felt it. He was driven to possess her and he would.

His father had been this way with his mother. Scenes on scenes. Crashing doors, shouting, dramatic gestures. As a child it had been terrifying. As an adult man he had been fleeing his father’s legacy—a great passion destroyed in the blink of an eye.

And right now he just didn’t know what it all meant any more.

He needed the sweet hot centre of her body, how it felt driving inside her, the oblivion of reaching release, of knowing nothing but pleasure with this woman who was driving him to such extremes.

Yet as he settled on top of her and began to kiss her the kissing grew slower, deeper, prolonging this time they had together. It wasn’t out of control, it wasn’t frenzied, and he knew then what he had been fighting.

Not Clementine. Not his past.

Himself.

What he was capable of and the fear he wouldn’t be capable of it at all.

True love—deep and abiding. As if a grand passion in all its wrenching glory was all he could have and he might mistake that for the other kind. The real stuff. But the other side of that coin held by a fearful boy was a yearning for both—to love exaltedly and to love simply and truly.

Clementine’s lashes fluttered down, all the resistance going out of her. The pink colour spread across her chest, up into her face, mounting her cheeks. He tugged her hair gently free of its tie and then he had his fingers spread in the silky weight, and her hands were softly caressing his neck, down over his shoulders, his back, as tantalising as a feather. She kissed him as if it nourished her. She clung and she said his name.

He slid down her body and pleasured her with his mouth until she was trembling, and he kept going until she peaked. Then he positioned himself and stretched her, filled her, rocking into her with gentle, slow strokes until she was murmuring incoherently and locking her thighs around him. The feel of her breasts rising and falling between them, the sweet tickle of her breath on his neck, was almost too good.

‘So beautiful, Clementine,’ he whispered, unable not to gaze his fill of her. ‘The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.’

Her eyes spilled over with tears. He gently pressed his mouth to each eyelid, catching them with his tongue.

‘Sweet Clementine,’ his mouth murmured against her skin, his movements increasing in tempo.

She lifted her hips, took him deeply into her, threw her head back and made a sobbing sound as her internal muscles tightened around him. He gave way with a deeply satisfied groan, the pleasure hurtling through his body at force. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more from her. Twice more he took her as the evening wore on, absorbing the heat of her body, the scent of her skin, the clash of his body giving way to the sweet clutch of hers. Until he had her limp and quiet, breathing softly beside him.

Clementine released a ragged breath and wondered why, after the most intense sexual experience of her life, she couldn’t get enough breath in her lungs. She sucked in as much air as she could and turned her head, ate up the sight of him, eyes shut, chest labouring as he caught his breath, the sheen of sweat lightly glossing his skin. He had been so generous, so passionate, so much everything she wanted. Except he didn’t love her, and he wasn’t going to love her.

She had been wrong all along. He had never seen her as anything different from the women who had preceded her and would probably come after her. She wasn’t going to mistake
his tenderness, his gentleness in the act of sex, for feelings he didn’t have for her.

He rolled over, and suddenly those dragon-green eyes were enmeshed with hers. Despair gripped her. In a moment she would lose herself again in wanting this to be real. But it wasn’t. Tears she couldn’t repress filled her eyes, spilled over, made a mess of her face.

Serge cursed and drew her in against him. His arms were tight around her, but instead of comfort it only reminded her of what she had lost.

‘Don’t cry, sweet Clementine, don’t cry,’ he murmured.

Except those words didn’t mean anything, did they? Nothing was going to change, and one day—sooner rather than later—it would all be over and her heart would be smashed to smithereens.

‘Tell me what’s wrong?’

‘I don’t want it to end,’ she wept, unable to hide her true feelings any more.

His Tartar blood turned his expression wild and fierce as he caught her face between his hands. ‘It’s not ending. Listen to me, Clementine, nothing is over.’

For an endless moment Clementine held herself in the bright circle of his assurance, the words
But you don’t love me
dying on her lips, because her next words,
And I love you—so very much
, would tear this moment apart.

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell him how much she felt when there was nothing in him to answer it. Instead she let him draw her close into his arms and listened as he began to croon to her in Russian, his hand moving in circles on her bare back. Gradually her crying fit subsided and she lay still and broken.

She lay there for a long time, until by his deep even breathing she was sure he was asleep. It wasn’t even nine o’clock,
but it felt much later to Clementine. It felt like an endless day that was never going to be over.

She had faced up to this when she was a seventeen-year-old girl, knowing the only way free of the emotions tearing her apart was to go out into the world on her own and make a new life.

She was a twenty-six-year-old woman now, and it should be easier. Except it wasn’t. The pain was tearing her up like the claws of a wild animal and she couldn’t stop it. And the longer she lay here in this bed the harder it was going to be to get up and force herself to go.

Extricating herself as carefully as possible, she silently dressed, packed her suitcase with her old clothes, and sat down to write Serge a note on hotel stationery.

She didn’t know what to say and in the end she simply wrote her name—
Clementine
. One name to add to his many. She put the note on the bedside table, pinned it down with the red jewellery case, and took a last look at his sleeping form. His beautiful male face looked so peaceful—as if he’d let go of something that had been hurting him and now all she saw was a kind of relief.

One day I will feel that way too, she told herself.

‘I
will
get over you Serge Marinov,’ she whispered.

But the force of her emotions threatened to overwhelm her again, because something told her she never would. Not completely.

She had to protect herself. It was time to go.

T
HE
bright lights in the main terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport seared Clementine’s sensitive vision, and she made a stop at a chemist and bought a pair of cheap sunglasses, an eye-pack for the flight and some aspirin.

As she crossed the concourse she found herself looking around for him. As she queued, as she waited, even as she went through Security she kept half expecting to hear that dark Russian voice, to turn around and tangle in his eyes again. But what good would it do anyway? He didn’t love her. He wasn’t going to love her. The past weeks had been a fantasy. She had been right in that little shop when she had first seen him—a Cossack out of a historical epic. Ridiculous, hopelessly romantic, it didn’t stand up to the light of day. He wasn’t going to chase her. Not any more.

It was truly over. It was time to get on with her life.

As she bumped along the aisle to her seat in cattle class her thoughts flashed back to the private jet, and it brought home to her just how unreal her time with Serge had been.

In less than two hours she would be on her adopted home soil and life would begin again—more or less as it had been when she’d left months before. She remembered how she had felt back in St Petersburg when she’d thought she had lost him, the little lecture she had given herself about putting her
experience with Joe Carnegie behind her once and for all, getting on with her life in a proactive fashion.

But now she was finding it hard to picture her flat, had forgotten Joe Carnegie, and couldn’t fathom how she was going to drag herself through the next few days, let alone get a grasp on her dreams and ambitions once more. Because she had allowed herself to dream with Serge and those plans now lay in ruins.

One step at a time, her weary mind acknowledged.

As her head touched the back of her seat she closed her eyes. The noise in the plane ceased to touch her as the emotional strain took its toll and she slept.

It was five o’clock in the morning when Clementine emerged from the airport with her luggage. She wondered how she was going to get a taxi—briefly considered phoning Luke until she realised the hour. People jostled her as she ground to a halt on the concourse, but she had a suitcase, a piece of hand luggage and a shoulder bag to deal with and only two arms. She fumbled in her handbag for her purse and the money for a coffee. She needed to take a breath before she gathered herself together and thought about getting home.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw her suitcase lifted and swung out of her line of vision. She gave a cry of, ‘Hey!’ before her gaze ran up six and a half feet of muscle-honed male in jeans and a jacket and a blue T-shirt she remembered that brought out the intense green of his eyes. Her shock turned to heart-stuttering confusion. Then he hauled her hand luggage under his arm and took off.

‘Serge!’

For a moment shock held her immobile as he strode off. With her belongings.

‘Serge!’ She took off after him. ‘Wait! What are you doing?’

She dodged and weaved through the wave of people coming in the other direction, but she was hardly going to lose him. He stood head and shoulders above the crowd, and he wasn’t in a hurry. It was just the length of those long, purposeful strides.

‘Stop!
Stop!
’ she shrieked, no longer caring what anybody thought of her. He’d come for her. She threw herself at his back the precise moment he ground to a halt and landed smack against those big shoulders, her hands going up to steady herself.

He dumped all her luggage and turned around, his expression so fierce she took a backward step.

‘Da,’
he said fiercely. ‘It’s good you have to chase
me
for a bit. How does it feel, Clementine, being the one on the hop? Isn’t that one of your Australian expressions?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said unthinkingly, still coming to terms with his presence. ‘How did you get here?’ It was the least important question that came to mind, but her brain seemed to have short-circuited.