It had been a month of torture, as she started calling it.
Because while she had been crying herself to sleep every night, Dmitri, it seemed, was taking the media and the world by storm.
It had begun when she had heard that the huge charity event organized by Anya Ivanova, the model he had helped, had sported his custom-designed Bugatti bike.
The next week had been an expose about his yacht, which apparently was currently being bought by a Russian oil billionaire. And the most shocking thing of all was when a courier had arrived at her doorstep one evening, following a call from Dmitri’s executive assistant, to pick up the diamond set he had gifted her and she had never worn.
Then came another lengthy phone call with his lawyer about setting up steps for her to pay off her debt to him. Something she had insisted on.
What was he doing? she wondered, going half-mad. Was he moving? Desperate to understand what he was up to, she spent countless hours trawling luxury real estate websites to see if he had put Giannis’s beautiful estate also up for sale.
But not once had she heard anything from him, even indirectly through Leah, whom she saw regularly.
Had he decided that he had had an easy escape?
Then came her first client, a lifesaver in so many ways.
In the first week of the photo shoot as the new face of a small Italian shoe company, she had learned what a stressful, hardworking slog it was. Especially if it was something you fell into as an escape from throwing yourself at the man who didn’t love you.
Her first shoot with the photographer, apparently a Spanish genius called Eduardo de Cervantes, had been the worst. Eduardo possessed no polish like Gaspard had, whatever monster he was in his personal life, kept losing his temper when she couldn’t get a pose or expression right, and at the end of the longest three hours of her life, had called the whole shoot utterly useless and walked away, spewing curses in Spanish.
If she had been the type to burst into tears, that moment had been it. But somehow, or maybe because her heart felt as if it was already encased in ice, she had made it through it without turning into a puddle.
They had finally had a breakthrough on the third day when he had once again snarled at her about not having a sensuous bone in her body and she, smarting about the one thing she was good at, had grabbed his hand, marched him over to the next floor where she had heard they had been shooting a firemen-themed calendar, had then proceeded to show her particular talent with a pole.
It had been quite the glorious thing to see Eduardo’s jaw hit his chest. And the transformation in his demeanor and her response to it had been thrilling. Suddenly, it was as if he knew what to say to her, how to tease her into a pose, how to make her pout, and she’d eased into the rapport they’d suddenly had going, put her trust in him.
She wasn’t exactly an overnight sensation but still her success had given her a new kind of confidence.
After those first two weeks, November passed in a haze as her initial contract with the shoe company got extended to cover Europe and North American markets, and then a fashion magazine invited her to do their Christmas runway show.
She didn’t miss the irony of the fact that, once again, it was her genes that had enabled her entry into the fashion world. Not that it was without hard work.
The money began to flow in. Not huge chunks, not enough to cover her humongous debt to Dmitri, but enough to give her a new insight into life, enough to make her appreciate life and all the exciting opportunities it held. Enough to tell her that her heart wasn’t in modeling and that it was only a way to give herself a cushion, and that she didn’t want to live this life he had given her back doing something she didn’t absolutely, gloriously enjoy.
Which in turn brought her back to Dmitri and how much she enjoyed doing anything with him.
Somehow she had thought she would feel better once she was self-sufficient. Maybe even hoped that the magic of being in love with him would dim with distance and independence.
If so, she was apparently as foolish as Andrew.
Some days, all she could manage was to come home to the flat, wash her makeup and the day’s shoot off herself, drink her smoothie and fall into bed. As if waiting to strike her at a weak moment, the grief and pain came then.
She thought of laughing, smiling Andrew who had loved her so much and yet given in to his weakness, of how she had made excuses for him because she had thought he had never had a break. She thought of her mother, who had had two loving, affectionate children, and yet had chosen to lose herself in drink.
But Dmitri, who had suffered so much worse, had not only made it, but had also looked out for them. It didn’t matter that he’d had help in the form of Giannis and Stavros. It was he who had made something of himself, made himself more than the product of his father’s abuse and violence.