A Prize Beyond Jewels

‘You didn’t?’ Nina gasped. ‘But all these years I’ve thought—believed— We never spoke of it openly, but I always assumed...?’

Dmitri gave a rueful shake of his head. ‘It would seem they had the same intention in regard to me. They did not wish to have anyone left alive who could identify them.’ His jaw tightened. ‘They rammed my car on the way to that meeting, attempted to drive my car off the road. Instead it was their own car which bore the brunt of the impact.’ His mouth tightened. ‘Two of the men were killed instantly, the third died a year later, as a result of the injuries he had received.’ Dmitri made the statement evenly, unemotionally, and with no apology for what he had intended.

As far as Rafe was concerned no apology was necessary. Dmitri had done what he felt he had to do. What most men would have done in the same situation.

What Rafe would have wanted to do given those same circumstances.

‘I think,’ Rafe spoke slowly, ‘that if I had known you then, Dmitri, young as I was, that I would have wanted to help you in your search for the kidnappers.’

Nina felt so grateful to Rafe at that moment, for not judging, for not condemning her father for what he had intended, that she could have kissed him!

She wanted to kiss him anyway. Had been longing, aching, to do exactly that since the moment she had entered his office half an hour earlier.

Just as she had longed to go to Rafe on Saturday night, despite the things her father had told her. She had needed Rafe then, had been desperate to feel his arms about her, to lose herself in their lovemaking rather than dwell on those lost years with her mother.

But she had known instinctively that it was the wrong thing to do.

Knew that if Rafe ever learned the details of the conversation she’d had with her father he would feel she had been using him that night, rather than what was true—that she had just ached to be with him, to be held by him that night. Because she loved him.

‘You are an impressive young man, Raphael D’Angelo.’ Dmitri spoke appreciatively.

Rafe raised dark brows. ‘I happen to think your daughter is the impressive one.’ He looked at Nina with open admiration. ‘All these years she’s secretly wondered if you killed those men that night, and yet she’s held her own counsel, never speaking of it to anyone.’

‘Yes.’ Dmitri’s pride glowed in his eyes for his daughter.

Nina winced. ‘Maybe if I’d spoken to my father about it before now I wouldn’t have been left secretly wondering. I feel so ashamed now, for thinking what I did, Papa. I’m sorry. I really believed—thought that...’

‘It was only fate that decreed it otherwise, maya doch,’ her father soothed gently. ‘I left our apartment that night with every intention of ridding the world of those three men.’

‘But you didn’t do it.’ She clasped her father’s hands tightly in hers as that truth finally sank in completely, Nina feeling as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. ‘You didn’t do it, Papa!’ And that weight lifted even higher as she realised what that knowledge meant to her own life, and the freedom, the choices it now gave her.

‘No, I did not,’ he conceded gruffly. ‘Because as I drove to the meeting point that night I realised that I could not do it. Because of you, Nina.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Much as I wished to rid the world of such vermin as those men, I would then have had to pay for my crime, and so left you completely alone. And that I could not do, maya doch. I could not leave you without both your mother and your father.’

Tears blurred Nina’s vision as she wept silently.

Tears for the deep love her father felt for her, and which she returned.

Tears of joy because she now knew her suspicions all these years, regarding who had been responsible for her father’s accident, and the deaths of those three men, had been wrong.

Tears for the freedom that knowledge now gave her in her own life, allowing her to give her heart, her love, to the man she was already so deeply in love with.

It didn’t matter that Rafe would never return that love; it was enough that Nina could now allow herself, was finally free, to be with him for as long as he wanted her.

If he still wanted her?

Rafe felt a jolt in his chest as Nina turned to smile at him. A smile of such sweet, unadulterated joy that he had to blink as it made his own eyes sting with emotion.

But there was still one question Dmitri had left unanswered.

‘Why now, Dmitri?’ he prompted huskily as he turned to look at the other man. ‘Why did you decide now was the right time to tell Nina the truth about her mother?’