Her phone buzzed on the cabinet next to her bed. Instantly she was on alert. What if it was Nikolai? With a slight tremor in her hands she reached for it and, as she looked at the text from her sister, she knew the day was going from bad to worse. Even with the limited words of the text Emma could sense Jess’s distress, but it was the final word which really propelled her into motion:
I need you, Em, come now. Please.
* * *
Finally the overnight train arrived in Perm and Emma made her way straight to the ballet school. The tearful conversation she’d had with Jess during that long journey was still fresh in her mind, which at least had given her little time to think of the night spent with Nikolai and how it had drastically changed things, how he’d rejected her.
‘I’ve missed you so much, Em,’ Jess said, dragging her mind back from thoughts of the tall, dark-haired Russian who had lured the woman she’d always wanted to be out of the shadows.
‘Is that what this is all about?’ Emma kept her tone light but, for the first time ever, felt constrained by looking after her sister. If she hadn’t had to rush and get a train ticket sorted, she might have seen Nikolai again. She’d at least wanted to try and explain, especially after the intimacies they’d shared. All she knew was that he’d checked out.
‘You’ve been so far away and it’s been months since I’ve seen you. I guess I couldn’t stand the thought of you being so close.’
‘Not exactly close.’ Emma forced herself to forget her problems and laughed, pulling her sister into a hug, unable to be irritated by the intrusion into her life at the worst possible moment. ‘It was a very long train journey from Vladimir. It took me all night.’
‘I hope I didn’t spoil anything for you,’ said Jess, looking a little subdued suddenly, and Emma wondered if there was more to this.
‘There wasn’t anything to spoil.’ Nikolai had already done that, accusing her of all but seducing the story out of him. Well, she’d show him. Nothing he’d said to her in his room would find its way into her article, although it did go some way to explaining his shock at seeing his family home again.
‘That’s all right, then,’ began Jess, sounding brighter already. ‘I only have the rest of today off class, then it’s back to it.’
‘Then we need to do something really good.’
Later that night, lying alone in a different hotel room, having spent the entire day with Jess, Emma’s doubts crept back in. She remembered Nikolai standing at the window, the light shadowing his body, and wished she could turn back time. The only thing she wanted to change was the doubt on his face, the worry in his eyes.
Several times this evening she’d wanted to call him, wanted to reassure him that all he’d told her about his childhood would stay with her. She knew what it was to feel unloved and out of place. Was that why he’d gone to great lengths to put off the meeting with his grandmother? Was there another side to the story? Had she been fooled by his heart-wrenching admission of his past?
She had spent time on the train drafting out what she wanted to write and none of it would include the torture of the man who’d shown her what being loved could be like, even for a few brief hours. If she told him that, would he believe her? She relived the moment he’d accused her of seducing him for information and knew he would never believe her.
Tomorrow she would be taking the train back to Moscow and from there a flight home to London. There wouldn’t be an opportunity to see him; maybe fate was trying to tell her that what she’d shared with Nikolai that night was nothing more than a moment out of time.
NIKOLAI STOOD AT a window of his apartment, looking at, but not seeing, Central Park bathed in spring sunshine. All he could think about was Emma. It had been almost two months since that night but the only communication had been from World in Photographs, thanking him, although he was yet to see a copy of what Emma had submitted. That, however, was the least of his worries.
He’d replayed their night together many times in his mind and, once the anger that she’d slept with him to get her story had cooled, a new worry grew from an inkling of doubt. The more he thought of it, the more his gut was telling him they might have had an accident after she’d coaxed him back to bed...the hurried and last-minute use of the condom playing heavily on his mind.
As he stood looking out of the window early that morning, he kept telling himself that no news from Emma was good, that their night of passion hadn’t had the consequences he’d dreaded despite the ever-increasing doubt in his mind.
It had been many weeks since he’d marched from the hotel room and braced the snow to cool his mind and body with a walk. When he’d returned to the room, Emma had gone, and that had told him all he needed to know: he’d been used. The only good thing to come out of the night was that he hadn’t had to face his grandmother.
Angry that he’d put himself in such a position, he’d checked out and headed straight back to New York, but he hadn’t stopped thinking about Emma. She had haunted his every waking hour and made sleep almost impossible. Something had happened to him that night, maybe even from the first moment he’d met her. She had changed him, made him think of things he couldn’t have.
He’d done what he always did where emotions were concerned and avoided them. He still couldn’t believe he’d almost told her all about his childhood. Those hours spent in bed with her must have muddled his mind. It should have just been a night of passion to divert her from the horrible truth of who he really was, but he’d almost told her exactly what he’d wanted to remain a secret.
He’d gone to Vladimir and confronted the ghosts of his past in order to save his mother the heartache of seeing her story all over the newspapers, exactly where it would end up once it was published by World in Photographs. What he’d found in Vladimir with Emma was something different.
Yes, he had been guilty of wanting to distract her from the truth, but somewhere along the way things had changed. She’d reached into the cold darkness of his heart and unlocked emotions he’d thought impossible to feel. Even the woman he’d once proposed to had failed to do that, but Emma had been different.
‘What the hell were you thinking?’ He snarled angrily at himself. One of the only times he’d let a woman close and she’d cheated him, used him for her own gain. He’d even begun to question if Emma was as innocent as she’d claimed. Had that too been part of the plan—to make him think he was the first man she’d ever slept with—in order to get the real story?
The fact that she’d run out on him only added fuel to the fire. Not only that, there hadn’t been a word from her since that night when he’d stood there and looked at her, clutching the sheet against her. He’d had had to fight hard not to pull the damn thing from her and get back into bed. His body had been on fire with need for her and, despite having spent all night having sex, he’d allowed the anger he felt at himself for being used to have precedence. It had been a far more reliable emotion to feel, one which had propelled him from the hotel room without a backward glance.
Driven by that anger, he’d left quickly, tossing her a card as an afterthought. Or was it because even then, deep down, he knew things might have gone wrong? If their night together did have consequences, then he knew he would face up to them and be the father he’d always longed for in place of the cruel man who had filled his childhood with fear.
The fact that he knew what he would do didn’t make Emma’s silence any easier. It irritated him. Did it mean she wasn’t pregnant? That the condom failure about which he’d since convinced himself hadn’t had any drastic consequences?
He looked at his watch. Ten in the morning here meant late afternoon in London. He could ring her. It would be easy enough to get her number through World in Photographs, but what would he say?