The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit) (20 page)

‘They were set of four paper knives made for the tsar’s daughters by Fabergé. You’ve heard of Fabergé?’

Four
knives? Letting out the breath she’d been holding in, she nodded.

‘My great-grandfather acquired them after Revolution,’ he said, pointing to a silver-framed sepia photo of an Edwardian family, husband and wife with four daughters and a son. It took Helen a moment to realise she was looking at the last of the Romanovs. ‘They’ve always been in my family.’

She ignored the fact that ‘acquired’ likely meant that her great-great-grandfather stole the knives in the chaos after the tsar’s abdication. Her mind was reeling from this new information. ‘You said there were four. What happened to the other two?’

‘They were your father’s. When he died, they became your mother’s.’ He eyed her curiously. ‘I’m surprised you don’t know this.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Eh?’

‘Who was around to tell me?’

‘Poor princess,’ he said and put his arm around her shoulder.

She freed herself as tactfully as she could without being rude. His touch still left her emotionless. ‘That’s the thing, you see. I’m not poor at all.’

The look on his face told her differently, and while the irony struck her that an opportunistic wheeler-dealer like Arseni could see that money wasn’t everything, it also made her uncomfortable that he could read her mind so well even though he hardly knew her. ‘Perhaps we’d better get back to the party,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘But remember, my door is always open to family.’

Family.

‘Thank you.’

Back in the crowded drawing room the head waiter announced that dinner was served, and the guests milled into the dining room, a large rectangular room with French windows overlooking the garden. The windows were curtain-less but indoor bamboos served as natural screening. Another set of dazzling chandeliers lit a long table covered in crisp white linen and decked with flowers, crystal wine glasses, fine bone china and enough silver to make a dent in the national reserves.

Helen found her seat and was just about to pull in her chair when a familiar voice – a
very
familiar voice – said, ‘Here, let me do that for you.’

Chapter Fourteen

‘Jason?’ Helen swung around in surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’

He shrugged and sat down beside her. ‘Well, it would seem I’m your dinner partner.’

‘That’s just crap!’

‘That I’m your dinner partner? I’m so sorry. Here I was, hoping that we might—’ He spread his hands wide with a mock hang-dog expression.

Helen elbowed him in the side. ‘Pack it in. You know what I mean. When I left, you looked like you were settling in for the evening. And now here you are, dressed—’

She took in his dinner jacket, crisp white shirt and slicked-back hair. She’d noticed several times how good he looked in jeans, but in a suit he was the embodiment of success and power, and she experienced an odd constriction in her chest. She’d always had a suspicion he was completely out of her league. Now she knew for sure.

‘—well, all smartened up. How did you get here so quickly? And who invited you?’

‘I have a fairy godmother.’

‘Oh, please!’

A waiter interrupted them with a basket of bread rolls. Helen shook her head. Bread was one of those food stuffs her medication transformed into the taste equivalent of wood chippings. Jason accepted one and broke it into smaller bits, making a frightful mess on his side plate and the white table cloth.

Helen watched him out of the corner of her eye. Only a person used to going to this sort of party wouldn’t worry about his table manners. The thought put her on her guard.

‘My father sent a car for me,’ he said finally.

‘Why?’

‘So I could join him. He likes me to accompany him to business dinners because Mum can’t leave the dogs, or so she says. I usually say no thanks.’

‘Your
father
is here? Which one is he?’

Jason bent his head towards someone further up the table and continued to munch on his bread roll. Helen knew who he meant before she turned to look – she’d felt his gaze on her ever since she came in the dining room.

‘That’s him over there. Salt ’n pepper hair, sharp suit.’ As if acknowledging the description, Jason’s father held up his glass in a silent salute. Again Helen met the cold stare and gave a little involuntary shudder.

‘Yes, he has that effect on people,’ said Jason.

‘You said he was just a self-made business man.’

‘Let’s not beat about the bush. He’s a crook.’

‘I don’t think he likes me,’ she said.

‘He doesn’t like anyone. I wouldn’t take it personally.’

The starter arrived, a fancy concoction of seafood in a fragile basket of pastry encircled by a white sauce which had been artistically swirled into a pattern on the over-large plate. Pretty, but her appetite had vanished. She picked at the food, managing only a few bites, and then rearranged it artfully on her plate so it looked as if she’d at least tried to eat it.

‘So if you don’t normally accept his open-invitation to these things, why are you here tonight?’

Jason put his fork down, touched his napkin to his lips, and turned to face her. ‘Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Not really.’

He smiled. ‘You.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I knew you’d be here, and I thought it might be nice to spend some time together.’

A diversionary tactic. She wasn’t going to fall for it. At the same time she couldn’t help feeling just a little bit tempted to believe him. ‘But how did you know I was going to be
here
and not at some other dinner party?’ she insisted.

‘I called my dad. He confirmed your name was on the guest list.’

That sounded plausible enough, but it didn’t explain why, the moment she’d met the eyes of the man who’d then turned out be Jason’s father, she’d had a nasty feeling he knew exactly who she was.

‘Did he say anything else about me?’ she asked.

‘No, why would he?’

‘No reason.’

Jason took a sip of his wine. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’

Plenty, she thought. ‘And what would that be?’

‘Why
you
are here? The kind of people my father rubs shoulders with don’t usually bother to socialise with lowly assistants.’

The waiter cleared their plates away, and the interruption gave Helen a chance to think about her answer. Could she trust him? As soon as the thought entered her mind, she realised that this wasn’t a case of whether she could trust him or not. She’d done nothing wrong – not yet anyway – and her connection to Arseni was just that, a connection. It was more a case of whether she dared to open up about herself to him, to anyone.

She had to learn to do that. To expose herself a bit more, and to hell with the risks. Take a chance.

‘I only met him recently,’ she began, ‘but as it happens, the host is my uncle. Arseni Stephanov.’

Jason stared at her as he mentally connected the dots.
Stephanov, Stephens.
Here was the link between Helen and the woman called Mimi in the newspaper clippings, whom both Helen and the host were somehow related to. It wasn’t a quantum leap, and it made total sense. If you wanted to start a new life while keeping a part of your identity, choosing a name close to your own was a reasonable compromise.

What he didn’t quite get was why she was here at all, if the point of changing her name had been to distance herself from her family in the first place. With the kind of money on display, this guy could obviously pull strings all over town, could probably get her any high-flying job she wanted, yet she chose to work in a really lowly one.

It was almost as if she’d deliberately disassociated herself. Like Jason did from his own father. Maybe they had more in common than he’d thought.

‘That might explain why my father doesn’t like you,’ he joked.

‘Why? Like I said, I’ve only just met him and—’

‘And you’ve only just moved into my house,’ Jason pointed out. ‘I have a confession to make. When I asked about the guest list, my father wanted to know why I was interested in you, and I had to explain that you lived in the house. He wasn’t too happy about that.’ Derek must have worked it out. Or spied on him and the others in the house. Or both. Always one step ahead of his wayward son.

‘What do my family connections and living in your house have to do with each other?’

‘He probably sees you as a bad influence on me. Turning away from moneyed family is a sore point for him.’

She turned her head and looked down the length of the table at Derek, who was deep in conversation with the lady on his right.

Jason knew better. He sensed his father’s awareness and knew Derek’s apparent concentration on his dinner partner was a cover for studying everyone around him, including his own son.

When Jason had first entered the crowded reception room earlier, he had spied his father across the room talking to someone whom he took to be a business contact. A woman, attractive, well-to-do, but too old to be one of his father’s lovers. It didn’t appear to be a pleasant conversation, and in the end the woman left as if she’d heard enough.

Derek Moody hadn’t looked in his son’s direction, but something about his body language, a slight shift in his posture perhaps, told Jason his father knew he’d arrived. Most children would have welcomed this sort of awareness in their parent; for Jason it felt as if an invisible net had been cast around him. Involuntarily, he’d taken a step back and accepted a glass of champagne from a waiter.

And then he’d seen where his father’s attention had shifted to. Helen, half-hidden by a large house-plant, as much out of place in this joint as he was.

Sitting next to her now, the devil took hold of him, and as he felt his father watching without actually watching, he leaned closer to Helen and blew gently at the base of her neck.

Make what you will of that, you old goat.

Helen gasped. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting your attention.’

‘What for?’

‘Because I’ve thought of one other reason my father doesn’t like you.’

‘Yeah, what?’

Jason took a hearty swig of his wine glass. Dutch courage, he thought.
Boy, do I need it.
‘Because
I
like you,’ he said.

She stared at him, in that inscrutable way of hers he’d come to respect.

‘Why should it bother him that
you
like me?’

He couldn’t back down now. She’d never trust him if he did, and it had become important to him that she should. Not only that, but she had an uncanny ability to see right into his soul. If he fobbed her off with banalities, she’d know he was lying.

So, he decided to tell her something he’d never told anyone other than Lucy and Trevor.

‘There was a girl once,’ he began. ‘Like you in many ways, blonde and tanned. And very different in others. I was twenty-three, got her pregnant, and wanted to marry her. Do the right thing, you know.’

Helen nodded.

‘But my dad didn’t think she was good enough for me, so he paid her off and she chose to have an abortion. I suppose a part of me still grieves for the loss of that baby. A life that … could have been. Silly, really.’

She regarded him silently, and he turned away from those beautiful, all-seeing eyes. Swigging from his wine again, he suddenly felt a little woozy. She must think him a right tosser.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Gently she prized the wine glass from his fingers and put it back on the table. ‘That you had to go through something like that. No one ever thinks about what it might be like for the man. But why should it be any different?’

‘Thanks.’

Briefly he put his hand over hers, touched by her understanding. Then again, why shouldn’t she be? Helen came across as far more mature than many girls her age and had what he could only describe as an intact core self, despite the tough times she must have been through. Her words to him showed that, simplistic though they were, and he wanted to safeguard it.

‘You’d better stay out of his way, though,’ he said.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Like you need to tell me that.’

Helen experienced a shiver of unease. She remembered Letitia’s reaction to Jason’s father earlier; she clearly wasn’t the only one who wished to avoid him.

Jason had no need to worry on that score. She’d do everything she could to stay away from this man.

Their main course arrived, whole quail served with tiny new potatoes and stir fried vegetables arranged in a narrow stack, again encircled by gravy in a beautiful pattern. The combination of seeing the small bird along with the hard lump of uncertainty in her stomach made Helen lose the rest of her appetite.

‘What I want to know is, if Stephanov is your uncle, and you have access to all this’—he made a gesture indicating the opulent dining room—‘why do you choose to live in squalor?’

That question she could answer. ‘It makes me feel at home. Why do you?’

Jason responded with a frown, then he attacked his dinner with savage stabs of his fork and didn’t say anything else on the subject.

Something had changed. It was subtle, but it was there. He’d said he liked her, and she’d felt it too, it wasn’t just words, but it still wasn’t clear what he wanted from her, or if he wanted anything at all.

Instincts had made her hold back, and she’d been proven right: she would have to be extremely careful if she was to walk this continued tightrope between her life in the house and outside it.

When dinner was finally over, she told her uncle she was tired and left. It had started to drizzle, and she stopped at the top of the steps to breathe in the London air, that not completely unpleasant mixture of wet tarmac and traffic fumes.

Although she’d tried to push the thought aside, something about Jason’s father interested her, in the same way a large spider might. Clearly he did business with her uncle, but his connection to her aunt she could only guess at. Perhaps he was a customer of the auction house. She had seen for herself how her wheeler-dealer uncle liked to invest some of his money in art and collectibles, and it seemed a safe bet that Jason’s father, who was of a similar ilk, liked to do the same.