Innocent in the Ivory Tower

What mattered was that during the day she was her own woman. She had already established a small circle of friends through Kostya’s activities and her own work here in the shop. She went out to the cinema, she shopped, she met other people for coffee. It was simple and restrained, but it suited her. That lifestyle of limos and hotels and personal shoppers had never sat well with her. This was on her own terms, and if it didn’t include Alexei it wasn’t through any lack of trying. She’d told him what she wanted from him. It was becoming eminently clear he couldn’t give it to her.

She turned to make room at the table for Alice, and almost tripped. Standing in the doorway was not slender, elfin-faced Alice but six and a half feet of Russian male—the same male she had been alternately longing for and cursing over for four long weeks. He was wearing simple and expensively tailored dark trousers and a white shirt open at the throat, and he looked every inch of what he was: a ruthless, sophisticated guy. So out of place amongst the lace and frou-frou of a ladies’ hat shop it was almost humorous.

Almost.

Alexei noted the wide eyes, the pink cheeks, the shock, and took immediate advantage.

No sense in wasting time.

He had known Maisy had garnered herself a job virtually the minute she’d walked back in the door of Lantern Square. He knew she was rarely home, that she took Kostya with her here to the shop when he wasn’t in the crèche, or on play dates to various addresses over London. She preferred the bus to expensive cabs, and she went to the cinema most Thursday nights.

The millinery shop was within walking distance of the house and Alexei had come on foot, turning over the bare facts of Maisy’s existence since she’d vanished from his sight.

It all sounded completely ordinary, and he knew Maisy must love it.

But this he hadn’t expected. The small, elegant shopfront, the tinkle of bells as he entered, the subtle fragrance in the air that reminded him of daisies and blue skies. He was rendered overgrown and slightly clumsy in this rarefied atmosphere, and he wondered with a smile if any man had dared step inside.

According to his report Maisy worked here on Thursday afternoons until four. He could hear somebody moving around at the rear of the shop and he strode across the shiny black and white parquet, sidling around the counter, noting the lack of security cameras or any security devices at all. He frowned.

She was standing with her back to him, head slightly bent. From the top of her bright head down to the elegant pale blue sheath dress, cinched at her small waist and clutching her rounded hips, down the seams of her pale stockings to the pretty French heel of her shoes, she was all lovely lines and femininity.

Then she turned, and those cinnamon eyes flared, and her face happened to him all over again.

But she didn’t do any of the things he might have expected her to. A gasp, a frown, or more preferably throwing herself into his arms. She simply stood there, slender arms at her sides, bright titian ringlets framing a solemn expression tinged with a little wonder. She didn’t make a move towards him, but nor did she move away.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. She’d been magnificent in those last couple of days they’d had together, lifting the bar on their relationship so high he’d been unable to cross it. Exerting her own will, matching it against his. Few men had the guts for it, but she hadn’t blinked. Then again, those men didn’t burrow up against him in bed and lift soft eyes that turned all his intentions her way.

Yet, unlike every other woman he’d come across, she hadn’t used sex to manipulate him. She’d given him an ultimatum, and she’d stuck by it. He hadn’t known she’d had it in her. All he’d seen was the sweet, artless girl he had fallen in love with on sight. But, damn, he respected her for it. And she’d been right.

‘Alexei.’

‘Hello, Maisy.’

Looking up into the familiar, beautiful lines of his face, she struggled to find the man whose wretched eyes had haunted her dreams for weeks now. He had returned to being the hard-edged, sophisticated guy who had come bursting into her kitchen and changed her life for ever. Except when his eyes rested on her a little smile she recognised tugged on the corner of his lips, and his blue eyes softened on hers with a question.

Alexei Ranaevsky didn’t ask questions. He issued directives.

Everybody knew that. But Maisy knew differently.

It hadn’t been that way between them from the moment he’d seized hold of her arm in that park in Ravello. She remembered how his body had actually been vibrating, and in her ignorance she had thought him angry. It hadn’t been anger, and it had been more than desire for her. He had felt the connection and it had thrown him as much as it had thrown her, and they’d both been tumbling down the long hill of it ever since.