Innocent in the Ivory Tower

‘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.