Innocent in the Ivory Tower (15 page)

Something hard and fast lodged in Maisy’s chest.

‘But Alexei’s always been the smart one. He knew he’d end up getting swept into some serious violence if he didn’t find
something legit. That’s when he got the boys organised with the boats. He started up a boat-hire business when he was fifteen on Lake Ladoga. It gave all four of them their start. None of them have done too badly.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ was all Maisy could murmur.

‘Just don’t tell Alexei I spilled. It would cause all sorts of problems between him and Valery. Leo’s death has hit them all hard, but Alexei hardest. They were the closest, those two. I always got the impression Alexei looked after Leo, but Leo gave Aloyshia the emotional support he needed and didn’t get elsewhere.’

Aloyshia.
Maisy flinched at the casual affection in that name. Years. He had known these people for years. They were his blood and his bone, his family. These were the people he confided in.

He had told her nothing. But then, she hadn’t asked.

‘Now, before we both start crying, how is little Kostya? I’m dying to see him. Whenever we saw Anais and Leo he was never with them. I suspect he was at home with you.’

‘Yes, I looked after Kostya for two years.’ Maisy didn’t see the point of evading the truth.

‘Which is how you and Alexei met. You’re very young to have been raising a child. I got the impression Anais didn’t spend very much time at home.’

Maisy had no intention of defaming her friend, but Ivanka seemed to understand this and laid a warm hand on hers.

‘Leo chose a highly strung racehorse and wondered why she didn’t turn into a brood mare when he got her in the stable. They’re Valery’s words, not mine. I’m a brood mare, Maisy, and happy to be one. I’ve got two boys of my own—Nicky and Sasha—you’ll meet them tonight. You, on the other hand, seem more like a filly to me, which makes it hard to imagine how you manage a two-year-old boy. Actually, I don’t know how you manage the thirty-year-old one.’

‘I don’t. Not very well,’ Maisy confessed. She was finding Ivanka very easy to talk to.

‘Tell me how you and Alexei met.’

‘He attacked me in the Kulikovs’ kitchen.’

‘Okay—so far, so not Alexei.’ Ivanka laughed. ‘Do tell, Maisy.’

So Maisy started at the beginning, picking her way through the rubble of the past few weeks, explaining about Anais and looking after Kostya, and the outrageous way Alexei had stormed into the house.

‘That’s Alexei—never does things by halves,’ was all Ivanka said.

Maisy edited out herself in a towel, him throwing her up against the door, and moved on to coming to Ravello. ‘And then I fell in love with him,’ she said simply. It was the first time she had said it aloud, and the fact that it wasn’t to Alexei, that it could never be to Alexei, opened the floodgates.

She cried. For herself, but mainly for the little boy who had been abandoned by his mother and left to fend for himself. Ivanka stroked her head throughout, until a strange sort of peace invaded Maisy’s body. And with it the nausea rose. She just made it to the bathroom in time.

And that was where Alexei found her.

‘She’s drunk.’

Alexei sounded incredulous, and in the old days—the days before today—Maisy would have laughed. But she was too busy being gloriously ill into a mercifully pristine toilet bowl.

Ivanka said something in Russian. Something that silenced Alexei. And in the silence Maisy slid onto her bottom, shutting her eyes against the suddenly clear certainty that she had disgraced herself.

The problem with nausea was that now it had passed she felt a reprieve—enough to realise how appalling her situation was. She awkwardly got to her feet, flushing the toilet and refusing to look at Alexei as she struggled to the sink, filling a glass with cold water and rinsing out her mouth. The mirror wasn’t kind: she looked white, her fancy hairstyle beginning
to come apart. The robe gaped open and she sashed it tightly, her eyes going anxiously to his.

Alexei’s whole body told the story of how angry he was with her. His arms just hung at his sides, and he was tense and frozen to the spot.

Ivanka was gone. Wise woman, thought Maisy, drawing her arms about her waist. She needed a hug, and Alexei wasn’t going to provide it.

It was hard to feel sorry for him when he was towering over her, all two hundred pounds of Russian machismo, judging her.

‘Are you all right?’

He was
very
angry, she recognized. His accent was so thick she had to concentrate to understand him.

She nodded. ‘Ivanka helped me. She’s very kind.’

Alexei said something under his breath.

‘How much did you drink?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t drink.’ He sounded almost helpless.

Maisy met his eyes in the mirror. ‘I didn’t do a lot of things until today,’ she muttered, leaning into the sink.

‘Where’s your dress? Why are you undressed?’ He framed the question roughly.

‘I spilt champagne on it. Ivanka took it to soak.’ She took a shuddery breath. ‘I think a man was here and saw me. When I didn’t have any clothes on.’

‘I heard about it.’ The last scrap of colour left Maisy’s face. He made a European gesture with his hands. ‘Don’t look like that,’ he said urgently. ‘I’ve taken care of it.’

‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.

‘Everyone’s gone. I’ve emptied the boat.’

‘Oh.’
Oh.

Alexei shifted on his feet. He wasn’t angry with her, Maisy registered. Something else was going on.

He had emptied the boat. Because of her. Was he taking care of her?

‘Did he speak to you? Touch you?’

Maisy shook her head. ‘I shut myself in here. I didn’t leave the door open even a crack.’

His expression altered. He took a step towards her.
Why isn’t he holding me
? her nerves were shrieking.

‘I don’t regret that,’ he said in a driven undertone. ‘I refuse to regret London, but I’m sorry if I made you feel manhandled.’

Manhandled? Maisy wrapped her arms around her waist again, knowing someone had to hold her. ‘It didn’t feel that way,’ she answered honestly, wondering why they were back to talking about London again, and then another wave of nausea crashed over her and with a moan she zeroed in on the toilet bowl.

‘Go away,’ she got out, before she began retching on an empty stomach. She felt Alexei’s hands on her shoulders, hovering. ‘The glamour of being your mistress,’ she mumbled, wiping her wet mouth with the back of her hand and not caring. She slumped on the floor, head and shoulders down. She didn’t want to see anything like disgust on his face.

To her astonishment, Alexei hunkered down beside her, his face close to hers, his eyes haunted, his features stark in the pallor of his strained face. In a moment of blinding clarity Maisy realised he had looked this way all day, only it was worse now. He was
suffering
, and all she had done all day was worry about herself, her feelings, her misery.

And now she knew his.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, smoothing her hand over his jaw instinctively. ‘I’m here.’

But it wasn’t the right thing to say. He flinched, then covered it by offering her his hand. When she didn’t take it he scooped her up as if she were a little doll. Maisy didn’t even bother to fight him. She was feeling all sorts of empty. He might as well carry her shell wherever he wanted to put it.

‘You’re not well. You need to lie down.’ It was not an instruction or even a declaration. He was just speaking aloud. He wasn’t having conversations with her any more. He hadn’t
been all day. His brief fracture in the bathroom had healed over. There was no sign he even cared about her any more.

‘I want to get off this boat,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I want to go home.’

He laid her on the bed, speared a hand through his hair, looking out of the window at the smooth blue water. It was late afternoon—that lazy, warm time in early summer. He didn’t even see it. He felt cold. He’d felt cold all day. Sixtieth-parallel-cold—the kind of chill you only got in a St Petersburg winter.

Seventeenth of May. He always spent this day on this boat, surrounded by people. Well, the people had gone, and there was only Maisy, looking so pale and wounded, and struggling with him over inanities. She didn’t have a clue. He’d dragged her around all day but he hadn’t actually absorbed anything she had said or done or asked of him.

But he wasn’t going to forget how he’d felt when one of his male guests, the son of shipping magnate Aristotle Kouris, had made the mistake of telling Stiva that ‘Ranaevsky’s mistress’ was cavorting naked in one of the staterooms. The fear had torn through him. If Valery hadn’t been there he would have killed Kouris. But first he’d had to get to Maisy. Valery had called a halt to proceedings and he had bulleted down here, to find Maisy in bed all right, but not being attacked, being comforted by Ivanka, who had given him an old-fashioned look he didn’t want to analyse right now.

And she was drunk and sick and vulnerable. And ashamed. He felt her shame like a palpable thing. It was about all that he
was
feeling.

He had to tell her, he realised. He had to say something. At least it might give both of them a reprieve.

‘Maisy, I’m a bit toxic at the moment. You need to give me a wide berth. Can you do that?’

She had dragged her legs off the bed, the robe had come open, and she was struggling to make herself decent. In a far off part of his brain the rueful thought occurred that despite everything she was still shy about her body, still modest … And
without warning it all played out in his head. London. He had been thinking about it all afternoon.

London.

She had never invited him in. He had invaded her privacy, overridden her modesty and
taken
her. Snatched and grabbed and
manhandled
her. Just like every man who had come trudging through that one-room apartment, hitched up his mother’s dress and done his business. Then left money on the kitchen table. Money for her drink and her clothes and her drug habit. If it hadn’t been for the neighbours he would have starved.

Maisy moistened her dry lips. ‘For how long do you want me to keep away from you?’

‘Just today. Give me the rest of today.’ His voice was deep and black and lost.

She bent her head. There was nothing more to say.

Except an image of a small boy with brilliant blue eyes seared her mind’s eye and she lifted her head.

‘No,’ she said.

Maisy stood up, her eyes never leaving his.

‘No,’ she repeated.

He actually looked panicked. Cool, oh-so-sure-of-himself Alexei Ranaevsky looked panicked. She stepped towards him and he backed up as if she was armed and dangerous. Maisy stopped.

‘Ivanka told me about the orphanage.’

Something flickered behind those magnetic eyes, then closed down and Maisy found herself looking into obsidian. She swallowed, watching Alexei’s familiar features harden with every passing second, his cheekbones more pronounced, his Tartar heritage never more obvious as his eyes narrowed on her.

‘Ivanka had no business doing that.’ His voice was hard.

‘Maybe not, but you’d never have told me. Alexei, you were seven years old!’

He didn’t even flinch.

She couldn’t bear the bleakness in his eyes.

‘What’s the significance of today?’

He continued to look through her and Maisy felt her resolve slipping. But she had to try. Knowing even as she closed the distance between them and slid her arms around his waist that he would push her away, she did it anyway, feeling him stiffen in her arms.

But he didn’t push her away. He didn’t shift an inch. She tightened her arms around him and pressed her cheek against his chest. She could feel his heart beating. Thudding.

‘May seventeenth is my birthday.’

A simple statement, but one Maisy felt soul-deep.
This
was what he did for his birthday.
This
was how he celebrated. Nobody even knew.

‘I wish you’d told me,’ was finally all she could think to say.

‘It’s just another day, Maisy.’

‘But it brings back the past for you.’

It was the wrong thing to say. He took her by the elbows, physically setting her back from him.

‘Listen, I know you mean well,
dushka
, but I don’t need this.’

‘This? Confiding in me?’

‘Sympathy.’ He gave her a crooked smile. ‘I’m a big boy, Maisy.’

Yes, the little boy she wanted to comfort was all grown up. This was the result.

‘Your sympathy is misplaced,’ he said with finality. Then he turned away. ‘I’ll have some clothes sent down to you.’

‘I’m not offering you sympathy,’ she asserted shakily. ‘Don’t go like this, Alexei. Why won’t you let me in?’

But part of her already knew why. She had never
really
been part of his inner circle to begin with.

‘Maisy—’ His big shoulders dropped and he swung around, a familiar rueful smile tugging at his mouth as if he was finding it difficult to be assertive with her.

It was then she recognised something that had been staring her in the face for a long time now if only she’d had the
eyes to see it. She was the only person he did this for. Waited, listened, smiled. With everyone else it was clipped or cool or
über
sophisticated. The facade. With her he was like this … gentler, more human. She conjured up the Alexei she had first come up against in Lantern Square, hard as nails, taking no prisoners. Certainly not listening to her.

Well, he listened to her now. He’d been listening to her for weeks. She just hadn’t been asking the right questions.

‘Sometimes I feel I know next to nothing about you,’ she admitted. ‘Those men, Valery and Stiva, they’re your family, aren’t they? You must love them very much. And Leo—you must miss him.’ She swallowed hard, took a deep breath and plunged in. ‘But I’m here.’ She paused to let that sink into his thick skull, then tunnelled on. ‘I met Tara Mills this afternoon. I had this silly idea all your ex-girlfriends were perfect goddesses, but Tara was just … cold and angry. Boy, is she angry with you.’

‘I didn’t invite her, Maisy. She came with Dimitri Kouris.’