The sound of the doorbell interrupted her painful thoughts and she put down the watering can, wiping her hands on the front of her jeans as she went to answer it. Maybe it was one of the neighbours—or Emma paying another ‘surprise’ visit, which was nothing but a thinly disguised attempt to get Zara to eat more.
But it wasn’t Emma who stood there—nor one of the neighbours. Instead, Zara’s heart missed a beat as she saw Nikolai Komarov filling most of the tiny doorframe.
Little spots danced in front of her eyes as the ice-blue eyes and angled features blazed into her line of vision. He was dressed very casually, in jeans and a T-shirt. She had done precious little else other than think of him in the days since they’d been apart, but the reality of seeing him again took her breath away and her heart was hammering so hard that she felt quite dizzy.
‘Hello, Zara,’ he said.
‘Nikolai.’ The word seemed to stick in her throat, like a fishbone—but she swallowed down her nerves. ‘This is a surprise.’
‘Is it?’ His eyes glittered her a question. ‘Didn’t you think you’d see me again?’
‘I’m not sure what I thought.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of…of course.’
He stepped over the threshold and followed her into the sitting room. He hadn’t been here since that night when he’d stormed in to find out why she’d ripped his cheque into a thousand tiny pieces. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. He had come here that night, blazing with sexual desire and a determination to carry her off to make wild and passionate love to her. And she had resisted, he recalled wryly as he remembered her refusal to go home with him. It seemed that one way or another she had always been resisting him all along. And hadn’t that refusal to bend to his will been one of the things which had made her so irresistible to him, even though it had infuriated the hell out of him?
‘Would you …?’ Zara was feeling nervous and aching with longing, which she hid behind a careful smile. Be polite, she told herself. Even if you’re destined to be nothing but ex-lovers, at least you can be civilised about it. ‘Like a drink? ‘
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Not the orange liqueur?’
‘Actually, there’s white wine in the fridge. Or I’ve got some home-made lemonade, if you’d prefer. We could drink it in the garden.’
He shrugged. ‘Why not?’
Stepping outside into the little yard, he took in the scene before him. He had judged her humble house by the quality of the nearby dwellings but out here he found an unexpected oasis of green. Vegetables and soft fruits sprouted prolifically and the scarlet gleam of tomatoes hung heavy on the thick-stemmed plants. In a way it reminded him of Russia, where people used to cultivate every spare centimetre of land in order to grow food. In the midst of all this tangled green was a small wrought-iron table and a couple of chairs and he sat down on one.
The tinkling of ice announced her appearance and Nikolai watched as she carried the tray into the garden, creating a bizarre, snapshot image of rural life in the heart of the city. For the first time he could imagine her as the agricultural student she’d once been—with her long legs encased in mud-dusted denim and her thick hair piled up on top of her head. Tendrils of it fell down untidily about her flushed cheeks and he realised she wasn’t wearing a scrap of make-up. For the first time, it occurred to him that maybe the reason Zara hadn’t leapt on the chance to wear the silk and jewels he’d offered her was because that image wasn’t really her. That it was more than a stubborn refusal to be bought or controlled by a man—but a sense of not wanting to submerge her own identity in his.
She leaned over to pour him some lemonade and he could see a trickle of sweat meandering down her neck, towards her breasts. He wanted to lick it off and he wanted to tell her that he’d never drunk home-made lemonade before. He shook his head very slightly as he accepted a glass from her. Was he losing his mind—or simply light-headed from the beat of the sun and the hard ache in his groin?
‘So.’ Zara pulled out the other chair and sat facing him. This was weird. More than weird. She’d always comforted herself with the thought that Nikolai would never have been comfortable if their lives had ever overlapped, but the irony was that at that moment he looked as if he had been born to sit in her tiny garden. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, his dark gold hair was all ruffled and there was a terrible tearing pain in her heart as she realised how much she wanted to go up and sit on his lap and kiss him. But he didn’t look remotely in the mood for kissing and his guarded expression made a thousand questions crowd into her mind. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because I took your advice.’
‘You took my advice?’ she repeated slowly.
He acknowledged her surprise. If it came as a shock to her, it had come as an even greater one to him. If anyone had told him that he would have given her words careful consideration—even while part of him had kicked against it—he’d never have believed them. But he had. ‘I thought about what you said about laying ghosts to rest.’ There was a pause. ‘And realised that I needed to find out what happened to my mother.’
Zara stared at him—but could read no hint of what he had found in the enigmatic gleam of his eyes. ‘And did you?’
‘I did.’ In the distance, he heard a woman shout to someone that dinner was ready and he thought about all the different ways that people lived their lives. He thought about his mother and about what he had discovered.
‘She started out working in a salad-packing factory when she first came to England,’ he said slowly. ‘Which was the only job she could get. It was soulless work—long hours on a low wage—but it was still more than she could ever have earned in Moscow. Like her, the other women working there were all immigrants and they lived in cramped caravans on site. Sometimes they would travel to the nearby town on a Saturday for a night out—and it was there that she met a man.’ There was a pause before he spoke again. ‘He was older than her and enormously rich—and completely captivated by her beauty. She told him her story and he was touched that she was trying to make a better life for her little boy who was so far away. So he gave her extra money to send to me in Moscow.’
He met Zara’s eyes and shrugged in answer to her unspoken question. ‘By this time she was sleeping with him, yes—though from what I understand, it was a genuine love-match between the two of them. But it wasn’t until he saw the size of her miserable bed in the damp caravan that he announced that he was buying them a house and taking her away from her life there.’
‘You mean, she married him?’
There was another pause and this time she saw his mouth twist.
‘That was never an option since her lover was already married,’ he said heavily. ‘And he told her from the outset that he had no intention of leaving his wife and children. In fact, the family home was in the very next town and he rarely spent a night with my mother.’
Now Zara was confused. ‘So why did she stay? And why didn’t she send the money to you? ‘
‘She stayed because she was torn. She loved him, and the money was too good to turn her back on. She thought it would provide my life with a kick-start. And she did send me money—a great deal of it, in fact. The problem was that it never actually reached me.’ His fists clenched; unclenched—the knuckles making a cracking sound as they whitened against his knees. ‘My aunt and her partner siphoned off every ruble which came to the apartment and then drank most of it away. Worse than t