‘It’s good to take a break from real life, yes?’ he said, his chest rumbling against her back.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. Only later would she wonder if this was only that for him, a break from real life? When it felt all too real to her. But she quieted that thought because, after all, it was only a long weekend away.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SYBELLA CAME DOWN the stairs into the galley of the boat, her long bare legs appearing first and then her body clad in a black bikini, a diaphanous shirt unbuttoned and billowing around her. With her hair pulled back in a ponytail she looked happy and carefree and about twenty.
Lust licked along his veins, but it was mingled with something more lasting, something that went along with seeing her so light-hearted, simply enjoying herself and it had a corresponding effect on his spirit. He felt satisfied. Da, satisfied. He had her at last.
‘Nik, who is this woman?’
It was then he noticed the magazine she was carrying and wondered which old girlfriend she’d stumbled onto, but then he saw the photograph of the eighteenth-century villa on the lake and he knew.
As she came closer she held out the magazine. ‘It’s got a feature on a Galina Voronov, a Russian socialite with fashion connections and a very nice villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. All very lah-de-dah. She apparently tried to sue you but that failed. You rate two lines, by the way, neither of them informative. Is she a relative?’
Nik ignored the magazine in favour of sliding one hand over her hip as he brought her in against him, the other expertly turning over pancakes in the skillet.
‘Who taught you to do that?’ she asked, distracted by his unexpected dexterity in the kitchen.
‘Baba, my grandmother. We made blini all the time. She made her own jam from her orchard and I would stuff myself on them.’
They had a twenty-person staff on the forty-metre yacht and their meals were sublime, but for their last day of four blissful days together on the boat Nik had sent their staff ashore and they were completely on their own.
He was making her breakfast. It was bliss.
‘I can imagine you as a boy, always getting into trouble because you wanted everything your own way.’
‘I might have wanted it but Deda made sure I was kept in check,’ he said, but he was smiling as he upended the crepes onto a plate with the rest.
‘What about your brother? It can’t have been easy for your grandmother with two boys.’
Nik’s smile vanished. ‘My brother wasn’t there.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Sasha was living with his mother.’
‘They split the two of you up?’
Nik looked grim. ‘No, my stepmother split us up. At Alex’s funeral she took Sasha by the hand and put him in a car and they drove away and I didn’t see him again for ten years.’
Sybella was effectively silenced by that image.
‘My reputation rises and falls on those blinis,’ Nik said, as if he hadn’t just dropped a bombshell. ‘Why don’t you take them out and I’ll bring the coffee? Leave the magazine.’
Sybella put the old magazine down on the bench and put a hand on Nik’s arm but he gave her a firm smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Off you go,’ he said.
When he reappeared with a tray, coffees and some condiments she knew he wasn’t going to say any more, and it was clear this was a painful subject for him, as well it should be. She didn’t want to pry, but suddenly she knew this terrible thing about his boyhood.
‘I’m so sorry that happened to you, Nik,’ she said as he set the tray down. ‘Your grandfather would talk about you as a boy, but not Sasha. I didn’t make a connection.’
‘Why should you?’
Nik settled down opposite her at the table, all masculine grace in shorts and an open shirt, the brown hair on his body glinting gold after four days in the hot sun. Sybella thought she would never get tired of looking at him.
He sighed, rubbing his unshaven jaw. ‘Deda and Baba both tried every legal means possible to bring Sasha home but it was like hitting a brick wall. It took Galina going into rehab for Deda to get custody.’
‘Galina? The woman in the magazine, who tried to sue you?’