Untouched by His Diamonds

He took in her wide, worried eyes, the heat mounting her cheeks. What had amused him, and then felt a little too much like real intimacy, now changed colour again. The urge not to embarrass her made him keep talking. About selling mechanical parts on the black market, about a failed attempt to set up a trading company, about the gym training prize fighters he’d owned, which he’d almost lost when the trading company went bust but had ended up becoming his way out and up.

‘Why did you get interested in the fight game?’ she asked.

‘Started in the army—fighting for money. I graduated to organising matches. It’s not a lenient sport, kisa. It’s better to be behind the scenes.’

Instinctively Clementine reached up and gently touched the bridge of his nose. ‘Is that how you broke it?’

‘Twice. It happened a long time ago. I don’t even remember the pain.’

She stroked his chest. ‘I don’t like the idea of you being hit.’

‘I’m a tough guy, kisa.’

‘What about your family? What did they think about you being involved in the sport? What about your mother?’

‘My mother died when I was nineteen.’ He spoke quietly, calmly, as if reciting facts. ‘She took pills.’

Clementine lifted her head, her forehead pleated with concern.

‘We’ll never know if it was suicide. Possibly. Probably. Don’t look so dire, Clementine, it was a long time ago.’

‘Your mother?’ she said softly, stroking him.

‘Let me tell you something about mothers, kisa. Mine married young. My father was an engineer—idealistic, probably bi-polar.’ He slanted her a curious look, unable to believe he was telling her all this. She had stopped stroking him and her eyes were pinned to his. ‘My parents loved one another with an intensity that didn’t allow any air into the relationship or any light into our family life. It was two performances of Turandot daily.’

Clementine stayed silent, trying to form a picture of what his childhood must have been like. He stretched, as if the telling of the tale was cramping his muscles.

‘Papa stepped in front of a car one afternoon when I was ten, and everything changed. Mama remarried a couple of years later. My stepfather and I didn’t see eye-to-eye and I was shipped off to military school. Before you feel sorry for me, kisa, it was the best place for me. I rarely saw my mother and sister after that. My stepfather made a fortune out of the fall of communism and promptly lost it—put a bullet in his head. Mama wasn’t far behind him. So you see—an opera in four acts.’

Clementine was silent for a moment, and then laid her head on his shoulder.

‘Yes, you are,’ she said softly.

‘I’m what?’ he enquired in a rough voice.

‘A tough guy.’ They were quiet together for a long time, and then she confessed, ‘I don’t want to go back to the city.’

It was the closest she had come to voicing how uncomfortable she was feeling, living in a hotel suite with him.

‘Room Service beginning to pall, Clementine?’

He was teasing her, but there was something else in his voice. A sadness. Perhaps a leftover from his revelations, or maybe he was just over the whole impress-the-girl routine.

‘It’s a bit impersonal, isn’t it? I hadn’t realised until we came here. Being in this house is more like real life.’

Serge suddenly felt uncomfortable, and it wasn’t a familiar sensation for him. Impersonal wasn’t working here for him either, in this house with the ocean pounding at their doorstep. He’d brought her here to talk terms, make definite the parameters of their future relationship, but the girl lying in his arms didn’t fit those terms. He’d just shared more with her than he’d shared with all the other women he’d ever known combined.

He heard himself saying, ‘How about we take on some more real life?’

She looked up. The light in her eyes smote him.

‘I’m taking you back to my townhouse, Clementine. I think the whole hotel scenario has worn thin, no?’

He had a home in the city. Yet they had been staying in a hotel for a week.

For a moment Clementine’s whole world tipped, and everything that had come before took on a new, harsher light. Her stomach just dropped away. ‘I see,’ she said softly.

‘Don’t see too much, Clementine,’ he said quietly, and she nodded—which was about all she could do.

It wasn’t personal that he had chosen a hotel to get to know her, to make love to her, she thought with a savage desperation to make this all right again, to make it nothing like Joe Carnegie, to make it all romantic and hopeful again.