Bought: For His Convenience or Pleasure?. Maggie Cox
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and the centre. Add to that this recent bout of television work, and she’d be lucky to grab a moment she could call her own…let alone have a holiday!
But her disappointment about not being able to look forward to a break paled into insignificance when Ellie thought about meeting up with Nikolai again. Her stomach lurched. It was unlikely she’d be able to swallow even a morsel of food all evening, confronted with his glowering accusing face across the table! He had looked even more frighteningly fit and intimidating then she’d remembered, and Ellie knew he had meant every word of that threat he’d left her with earlier… There would be were consequences for what he saw as her cold-hearted desertion…
‘I took the liberty of getting us a table where we would have privacy.’
I’ll bet you did! Ellie thought nervously as she sat in the padded velvet chair the smartly suited maître d’ had pulled out for her. Tucked away in the most secluded corner of the hotel’s elegant dining room, with its artistic silk panelling on the walls and its brass chandeliers fashioned in intricate Celtic knotwork hanging from the ceiling, they would have privacy in plenty.
In more ways than one their location couldn’t be faulted. Their position overlooked a charming stone patio with a plethora of terracotta tubs filled with still abundant trailing pink and white blossoms, glinting in the pale light of late summer evening. It was breathtakingly pretty. The blooms surrounded a pretty fountain commanded by a modern sculpture.
Reluctantly withdrawing her admiring gaze from the appealing view, Ellie attempted to focus on the wine list the waiter had left them to peruse. Absently stroking the fine white linen napkin that had been draped on her lap, she fought hard against another intense desire to flee. And again she knew she would do no such thing. Whatever the consequences Nikolai intended, she would stay and face them.
If nothing else, Ellie was desperate to see Arina again. She was, after all, the closest link she had to her much loved sister, and now that her father’s health was cause for concern she longed for the chance to somehow make amends and be part of her niece’s life again. Ellie also wanted Nikolai to know that she wasn’t about to follow the same escapist route she’d taken five years ago.
‘Are you happy for me to select the wine?’ he asked, civil-voiced and Ellie glanced back at him in surprise, not trusting the polite veneer.
‘Go ahead,’ she replied. ‘I’m certainly no expert!’
‘Maybe not with wine,’ Nikolai commented smoothly. ‘But clearly you have become an expert in psychology.’
‘I may have got the necessary qualifications, but it takes a lifetime to be really expert at anything. And even then I’ll still be learning! I mostly think of myself as an enabler…somebody who can help a person in trouble take the next step towards healing and hopefully give them some useful tools to help themselves.’
‘Your humility is commendable…although your current high profile in the media is somewhat at odds with that, wouldn’t you say?’
Having expected his derision at some point, Ellie wasn’t disappointed now. Her whole body tensed. ‘I’m not interested in having any sort of media profile, for your information! It only happened that I appeared on television because a local reporter where I worked got wind of a case I’d worked on and the client’s father was well known.’
Nikolai named the politician concerned, with his trademark ice-cool equanimity, and Ellie grimaced. She might have known he would have all the information he needed at his fingertips.
‘I have that reporter to thank for helping me locate you, so I cannot regret his interest!’ he continued, with a faint ironic lift at the edges of his disturbingly sensuous mouth. ‘A bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild will fit the bill perfectly to celebrate our timely little reunion, I think. The wine was named after a French politician, so perhaps it is fitting, yes?’
Knowing very little about wine, but silently concerned that it sounded frighteningly expensive, whatever it was, Ellie stayed mute.
‘You need not look so overwhelmed!’ her companion remarked in mock amusement. ‘Naturally I will insist on footing the bill, so do not fret. The cost makes no difference to me. I have already expended too much time, money and concern over your whereabouts over the years as it is! I am only relieved that in the end my searching was not in vain! Tell me…why Scotland? Who did you know there? My informants certainly did not discover any extended family in that location, or anywhere else in the UK!’
His comments made Ellie revisit afresh the gravity of the horrific event that had changed her life for ever, and the devastation she had undoubtedly left behind her. As well as that came the disturbing realisation that Nikolai had not resumed his life in the way she’d hoped he would, forgetting all about her. For long moments she struggled to give voice to her racing thoughts.
‘I don’t know why. It’s just a place like any other…a place where nobody knew us…where we could make a fresh start. My father was worried about me. That was why he took me away,’ she finally explained.
‘What was he worried about? That I would hold you in some way responsible for what happened to my brother despite the verdict reached by the courts?’
The cold slash of Nikolai’s chilling voice immobilised Ellie in her seat. Nervously she met the burning blue of his fiercely focused gaze, and it was like glancing into a frosted lake in deep midwinter.
‘Well, he was right!’ he spat out, laying down the wine list just as the soft-footed waiter returned to take their order.
Ordering the wine in a calmly controlled tone that was miraculously devoid of the rage he had just expressed, he told the man to give them a few extra minutes so that they could deliberate over the menu.
In the ensuing stomach-churning silence Ellie stared hard at the printed words in front of her in the leather-bound book, but they might have been written in Sanskrit for all the sense they made to her distracted gaze.
‘Have you decided?’ her stern-faced companion asked after less than a minute, the question sounding more like an impatient demand.
‘A Caesar salad will be fine,’ Ellie answered, hardly caring what she ate.
At a nod from Nikolai, another waiter peeled away from a nearby table and took their order. When they were alone again, Ellie set the menu aside and reached for the jug of water that was on the table, offering it to Nikolai first. He responded with a curt nod.
The barely contained animosity he emitted locked every muscle in her body with fear. Any threats this man made would not be empty ones, she knew. He had both the means and the will to make her suffer. As if she had not suffered enough—and in ways he probably couldn’t even begin to imagine…
‘How is—how is Arina?’ Finally plucking up the courage to enquire about the one thing she was desperate to know most of all, Ellie knew her voice was barely above a whisper.
Nikolai’s frozen glance did not thaw for even a second. ‘Do you not think you relinquished the right to know that five years ago?’
‘I never stopped caring about her…no matter what you might think!’
‘But you obviously did not care enough, or you would not have deserted her like you did!’
‘I didn’t mean to just leave her like that. You make it sound like it was a pre-meditated decision, and it wasn’t! I was hurt and traumatised from the accident, and for the first time in my life I let my father take charge and look after me. Was that so terrible? If you had seemed less closed-off and unapproachable, I would have talked to you about it… But—’
‘What?’
‘I knew you were hurting badly yourself…emotionally, I mean. You’d lost your brother…why wouldn’t you be? I know what a loss like that is like. The last thing I expected was that you would want me to stay on and take care of Arina. How could we possibly coexist under the same roof when it