Rose yanked herself away from the precipice. ‘Good. Excellent.’ She backed up on her heels.
She did the sensible thing, the only thing she could under the circumstances: she whirled around and stalked away.
* * *
Plato didn’t move a muscle. Up until the moment Rose had walked into the bar he’d convinced himself that offering up the Wolves players en masse was going to be enough, staying on in Toronto until Sunday would be enough. Nothing was going to shift the selfish desire to go to her, to make her understand, to beg her…
And then she had walked into the bar.
For days he’d been unable to shake from his mind what had happened in Moscow. He’d taken her to that club to put a bit of space between them, to get his head on straight, to show her who he really was, to remind himself.
Da, the space. Other men looking at her, approaching her, trying to touch her had made him wild. He had barely been able to concentrate on anything other than keeping that space between them to a bare minimum. By the time they’d hit the dance floor he’d been unable to keep his hands off her.
He couldn’t believe he’d dragged her into a backroom at the club, pushed her up against the wall and fallen on her like an animal. But it hadn’t been mindless. Nor had it been about This is who I am, and Look at how I’m treating you any more. It had been This is what you mean to me. I need to show you what you mean to me. As if what was pulsing between them had been starved and needed to be fed. But he hadn’t understood then what it was…
The tabloids were full of his exploits—wildly exaggerated—and despite what he’d tried to convince Rose he didn’t touch those women who hung around the clubs any more than he did the women who followed the team. From the start he’d always had an eye to his sexual health, and then there was basic male ego—who wanted to be with a woman who was interested only in your money or fame? But he’d wanted her to think that, hadn’t he? He’d wanted to show her the worst, let her see what she was getting into…
Why he wasn’t worth it.
Worthless. The worthless, illegitimate spawn of a worthless, promiscuous daughter.
That was when he’d known. When he’d been driving back from the airport—because he certainly hadn’t let her go alone. He’d tailed her taxi to Domodedova, watched her from a distance until she’d vanished through check-in, and then he’d sat in the car and told himself to man up. To get over it. To understand he’d done the right thing, the only thing…
He’d left the apartment without security, so he’d driven away—not back to the apartment, but around the ring roads that encircled the city. Possibly one of the most dangerous things a man in his position could do.
But hadn’t he been doing that all his life? Risking everything because deep down he didn’t think he was worth it?
And he had known then why he had driven Rose away.
His entire life had been lived in opposition to the low expectations held for him. He’d built a financial empire, connections, a new family in the form of the Wolves, in spite of what his family, his town, sheer poverty had laid out as his future. Yet when it came to allowing a woman into his life he didn’t have a clue. After all, the women who should have loved him hadn’t considered him worth a skerrick of affection. Deep down he actually believed there must be a kernel of truth in those curses laid on him by a half-mad old woman long dead.
It was a stunning realisation to face and he’d been carrying it around for twenty-eight years. He hadn’t seen it until Rose had forced him to face it. He’d spent the last decade pursuing empty sexual encounters and then he’d found Rose, with her open heart and soul. When he’d first gazed into her eyes he’d mistaken those feelings between them and her openness to him as a simple sexual connection, because it was the only currency between men and women he understood. But he knew better now.
Rose had been offering him a way into her heart, and he’d thrown it back in her face.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘ROSE, you’ve lost weight, dear,’ said Mrs Padalecki as Rose approached her front door, lugging the little suitcase she’d been beetling around with in her car all day.
‘Have I?’ She raised a smile.
‘You look so thin about the face.’
‘I’ve been off my food,’ said Rose, truthfully enough. ‘I’m sure I’ll put it all back on over Christmas.’
She didn’t want to stop and chat. She wanted to shut the door and be alone, as she hadn’t been since she’d fled Plato’s Moscow apartment three days ago. But Mrs Padalecki reached out across the low fence and Rose stepped towards her, taking her frail hand.
‘How was Moscow? You weren’t gone very long.’
‘Wintry,’ said Rose, ‘and a bit overwhelming.’
Rita nodded as if she understood. ‘He’s not with you, then, that young man of yours? The foreign one?’
‘Oh, no.’ Rose affected a light laugh. ‘No, I won’t be seeing him any more.’
Rita’s shrewd eyes moved over her face. ‘That’s a shame, Rose, he seemed—different.’
He was different all right.