‘You got her through it, Chloe,’ Tatiana choked. ‘I’ll never forget that day I arrived and heard her laugh—you did that.’
‘Mel helped me as much as I did her. Did you see the information sheet she put together for me on make-up techniques?’ she asked, placing the photo back on the shelf. In doing so she accidentally nudged the one next to it and straightened it, admiring the frame; it was an antique one, the ebony wood delicately carved and rather beautiful.
Chloe was admiring the craftsmanship, running her fingers across the smooth indentations, when her glance drifted across the photo it held. Her mouth tugged into a smile; with a white-knuckle ride in the background, a younger Eugenie smiled back at her, complete with braces, from under the peak of a baseball cap with the logo of an adventure park emblazoned on it.
The jeans-clad man crouched down beside her in the shot was wearing the same cap, and he was... Chloe’s smile vanished like smoke as brutal stinging reality hit her like a slap across the face. Pale as paper now, she stared at the male in the picture, wearing jeans, a tee shirt, and a teasing, carefree expression on his handsome face, a face that bore no signs of a tortured soul. There were no shadows that she felt the need to banish; he was just a regular guy...well, only if the regular guy in question was more handsome than any man had a right to be with a body that an Olympic swimmer might dream of possessing.
She stood like a statue staring at the photo she held in a hand that quickly developed a visible tremor—the tremor penetrating past the skin level and moving deep inside her.
By sheer force of will she released the breath she was holding in her lungs, but not the avalanche of questions whirring in dizzying succession through her brain. She felt as though a dozen people were inside her shouting so loudly she couldn’t make out the individual questions.
Obviously it couldn’t be him but, equally obviously, it was! The man in the photos was the same man who she had spent a never-to-be-forgotten night of lust with. If all learning experiences were as brutal as that one had been, it would not be worth getting out of bed in the morning—happily they weren’t and she had moved on.
But that didn’t mean she’d forgotten any of it. Forgotten the feelings of emotional hurt and humiliation that had made her physically sick the next morning when she’d realised he’d slipped away during the night. And the worst part was, she had no one to blame but herself. Because she had been the one who had followed her instincts when she’d approached him in that bar, telling herself that what she was doing was somehow meant to be... If they had been handing out awards for naivety and general stupidity that night, she would have walked away with an armful of prizes!
She’d wondered if his name really was Nik. It seemed utterly incredible to her now that she’d ever thought it part of the romantic fantasy element of their night together that she hadn’t even known his full name! Time had stripped away the romantic gloss and revealed it for what it truly was—a cheap and tacky one-night stand, even if the sex had been utterly incredible.
Keeping her voice carefully casual, she half turned to Tatiana, as yet unable to tear her eyes from the snapshot. ‘How old was Eugenie in this one?’
Tatiana came across and looked at the photo of her daughter and she gave a nostalgic sigh. ‘Oh, that was taken on her tenth birthday, although just five minutes afterwards she was throwing up. Nik let her eat a bag of doughnuts then took her on some white-knuckle ride.’
Chloe’s own knuckles were bone white where her hand was pressed to her chest. Her poor heart was vibrating against her ribcage, her insides were quivering as she told herself sternly to get a grip, not to mention a sense of proportion. It was only a photo after all, and he was old history.
Note to self, she castigated herself, the next time you decide to make love, don’t do it with a complete stranger! No, Chloe, let’s be grown up and honest here—it wasn’t making love, it was havingsex.
It hadn’t been until she’d accepted that particular fact and realised that what they had shared that night had had absolutely nothing to do with a spiritual connection but everything to do with blind lust that she had been able to move on.
Move on—really? So why was she shaking?
She put the photo down carefully and smoothed her hands down over the fabric of her jumpsuit. She would not let that man do this to her again; she was not that silly naive girl any longer.
It had been a painful learning experience, but once her pride had stopped stinging and she had stopped feeling basically stupid she’d understood that while empty sex with anonymous strangers could obviously be physically satisfying, it probably wasn’t for her. She wasn’t exactly holding out for the love of her life, but she did think maybe a bit of mutual respect might be nice.
‘So that’s your brother Nik,’ she said flatly. Sometimes it seemed as if fate had a very warped sense of humour.
Her eyes skimmed the mantel. The same man, she recognised now, was in several of the photos. It wasn’t just the time difference that made him look younger, it was the absence of the cynicism and dangerous darkness she had sensed in him that night they’d had sex. What had happened to the man in these photos to turn him into the one she’d met only a few years later?
She dug her teeth into her plump lower lip as she squared her shoulders. Nik Latsis, her Nik—it was so weird to finally be able to put a full name to the man who had introduced her to sex and the fact it really was the only thing that some men were interested in. Well, his name was actually pretty irrelevant and she couldn’t care less what had happened to turn him into such a cold bastard.
Not that she wasn’t totally prepared to take her fair share of the blame. After all, ‘naive closet romantic meets utter bastard’—it was never going to end well, was it? But she was not that person any more.
‘I forgot, you haven’t met Nik...have you?’ Tatiana asked.
The truth or a lie?
Chloe settled for somewhere in the middle. ‘He does look a little familiar...’
It’s the clothes that threw me.
She brought her lashes down in a concealing sooty curtain and fanned her hot cheeks with a hand, causing the bangles she wore around her wrist to jingle. ‘I think summer might finally have arrived,’ she commented, ignoring the house’s perfect air-conditioning system.
‘You might have seen him on the television, perhaps?’
‘Television?’ A puzzled frown drew Chloe’s brows together above her small straight nose. ‘I don’t think so...’ Then it clicked; Tatiana wasn’t talking about the present day but her brother’s previous life. ‘Oh, when you said he was a journalist I thought you meant he was in print...’
His sister nodded. ‘He started out in print journalism but Nik was a war correspondent, and he was on the telly quite a lot actually. He won awards.’ Tatiana’s pride in her brother’s achievements was as obvious as her distress as she enlarged. ‘He spent the last two years of his journalistic career embedded with the military, in the worst war zones you can imagine. Nik has always been the sort of person who doesn’t do half measures.’
He had certainly been no half-measure lover or, for that matter, halfway callous!