Читать книгу Modern Romance October 2015 Books 1-4 - Эбби Грин, Annie West - Страница 21

CHAPTER TWELVE

DAMN HER.

Just damn her.

Dimitri glowered. He would not... He would not be emotionally blackmailed.

He studied the antique bowl containing the grouping of bonsai trees which adorned the polished desk of his London office—an exquisite planting of seven Foemina Junipers, which had been created by a Japanese master. It had taken a lot for Dimitri to persuade the man to sell it, because he had needed convincing that the trees would be properly cared for and kept in the right conditions. It had occurred to Dimitri at the time that the plants’ welfare had been of far greater concern to the master than the astronomical price tag which accompanied it.

Usually, just staring at the priceless piece of horticulture brought him some kind of peace, but not today. He studied the bowl. The idea that something as enormous as a tree could be clipped and contained into a size small enough to keep on a man’s desk had always appealed to his dark sense of humour. But he realised that he also enjoyed the element of control essential for successful bonsai care. Conditions needed to be monitored daily, with nothing left to chance. Any sign of rampant growth needed to be ruthlessly cut away. It was man controlling nature. And it was a representation of how he liked to live his life.

Until now.

Now he was discovering that not everything could be controlled. With a heavy sigh he sat back in his chair and thought about Erin. She had meant it when she’d turned down his proposal of marriage. He couldn’t quite believe it at first, but she had. There had been no wavering or sign she might be softening—not during the flight back from Moscow or the journey at the other end, when he’d dropped her and Leo off at the café.

She had made him feel...

What?

He swallowed. She had made him feel powerless. For the first time in a long time, he had come up against someone who would not be moulded to his formidable will, no matter how many enticements he offered her.

He had tried telling himself she was right. Much better that he had as much contact with his son without risking the messy emotional fallout of sharing his life with another person. He’d returned from Russia determined to seek his pleasure elsewhere and had flicked through the stack of invitations which were waiting for him.

But all he could think about was a pair of green eyes and a woman who only smiled when she wanted to.

He thought about the things she’d said and his eyes focused on the Foemina Junipers again. Had she been trying to tell him that the conditions essential for maintaining a successful marriage needed to be right, just as with the bonsai? Just as you couldn’t grow a tiny tree in barren soil, neither could a relationship flourish properly without love and care and commitment? Was that what she had meant?

Damn her.

He waited two days for her to change her mind and come running and he waited in vain. His days seemed drawn-out and tedious and the nights were even worse. He hadn’t slept this badly since the time he’d cut out vodka. Saturday morning dawned and, after a largely sleepless night, he drove himself round to the café, where he sat outside the citrus-decked exterior in his big car—half expecting Erin to come storming out and demand to know what he was doing there. Or perhaps send Leo out to talk to him, because wouldn’t that have been an easy way to break the stand-off which had sprung up between them?

But nobody came. He could see her sister behind the counter—her eyes big behind her owl-like spectacles—but she didn’t wave at him to come in.

He got out of the car and locked it, his heart pounding as he pushed open the café door. It was warm and crowded with customers, with mothers and fathers and little children as well as a couple wearing party clothes who didn’t appear to have been to bed. Several people looked up as the jangling bell announced his arrival, and stayed looking.

Walking straight over to the counter, he smiled at the woman who stood there, drying coffee cups.

‘It’s Tara, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m Dimitri.’

‘I know who you are,’ she said flatly. ‘And Leo’s at Saturday morning football, I’m afraid.’

‘It isn’t Leo I’ve come to see. It’s Erin.’

There was a slight pause as she looked around before lowering her voice, as if she didn’t want to put her livelihood at risk by engaging in some kind of showdown with the tall man who had just walked into her café.

‘Erin doesn’t want to see you.’

‘Well, I’m not leaving here until she does. So perhaps you’d like to pour me a cup of coffee and I’ll wait over there while you tell her that? Black, no sugar, please.’

Tara’s mouth opened and closed, before she disappeared into the back behind some sort of curtain and Dimitri walked over to a table near the window and sat down. A woman who was sitting on her own at a nearby table smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. He didn’t feel like smiling—least of all to some bottle blonde who might as well have had the word ‘available’ tattooed across her forehead.

A shadow fell over the table and he looked up to see Erin standing there. Over her jeans and sweater, she was wearing an apron which emphasised her tiny waist—but she didn’t look great. In fact, she looked terrible. Her face was pale and her green eyes were dark and shadowed.

‘Perhaps you’d like to drag your attention away from that woman for a moment,’ she said tightly, ‘and tell me what you’re doing here?’

‘You haven’t brought my coffee.’

‘You’re not getting any coffee.’ Pulling out the chair opposite him, she sat down and leaned across the table and began speaking in a low voice. ‘Look, you’re welcome to come and see Leo any time you want—I already told you that—but you really have to give me some warning before you do. I can’t just have you turning up here out of the blue like this.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why not. Because it’s too...disturbing. We have to try to learn to be...’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t know. If not exactly friends, then certainly two parents who can interact amicably with each other.’

He nodded, his eyes not leaving her face. ‘But I thought we were friends, Erin. More than friends. Don’t you know that I’m closer to you than I’ve ever been to anyone else?’

‘I don’t want to hear this—’

‘And let me tell you something else,’ he interrupted. ‘Something I’ve never told you before. Something which happened when you came round to my apartment, to tell me about the baby.’

‘You mean when I found you hungover, with the naked woman and the porn films?’

‘And you looked down your nose at me,’ he said slowly. ‘Just like you’re trying to do now, only this time you aren’t making such a good job of it. But back then you didn’t like what you saw and you told me so in no uncertain terms. You told me a lot of home truths that day, Erin. You blasted me and my lifestyle and left me feeling dazed. Because nobody had ever spoken to me like that before. And then you handed in your notice and walked away.’

‘I don’t understand what this has to do with anything,’ she said. ‘We already know this.’

‘But you don’t know what I did next,’ he said. ‘At first I tried to convince myself I was glad you’d gone and that you had no right to judge me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the things you’d said. And the more I thought about them, the more I realised they were true. You left me feeling bad about myself and I had to ask myself what I was intending to do about it. So I went away and cleaned up my act. I quit the booze and the gambling and the women.’ He saw her face and shrugged. ‘Well, maybe not all the women, but I started to be more discriminating about it. And I got off that merry-go-round of self-destruction you’d highlighted so accurately.’ He leaned across the table towards her. ‘You were the catalyst which made me examine my life and turn it around. So I owe you, Erin. I owe you big-time.’

‘Thanks very much. And if you want my congratulations, then you have them—but I still don’t see why you’re bringing all this up now.’

‘Don’t you? Though why should you when I’ve only just realised myself? When it’s taken me all this time to admit what’s been staring me in the face for so long. That you’ve had a profound and lasting influence on me.’ He waited for a minute and then drew a deep breath. ‘That I love you—and I don’t want to spend my life without you in it.’

She didn’t answer, not at first—just nodded her head. ‘Dimitri,’ she said at last, sounding as if she was trying desperately to keep her voice from breaking. ‘Listen to me. I’m not going to change my mind about marrying you—so please don’t say things you don’t mean.’

‘But I do mean it. Every word I speak straight from here.’ And he placed his hand over his heart.

‘Will you stop it?’ she hissed. ‘Everybody’s looking at us.’

‘I don’t care.’ He took her left hand between his palms and thought how cold her fingers felt. How stiff her body language was as she sat there facing him. ‘Just tell me that it’s not too late,’ he said. ‘Tell me that you still love me—as you did that night in Russia. Tell me that you’ll marry me and spend the rest of your life with me.’

Erin was aware that pretty much everyone in the café knew what was happening. Even if they couldn’t hear—and Dimitri was making no attempt whatsoever to lower his voice—then it was now glaringly obvious, because he was digging into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulling out a small box.

He flipped open the lid and she could see the dazzle as the light caught the glittering band of diamonds in the centre of which was one enormous and flawless stone, and from behind the counter she heard Tara gasp.

‘I have had this ring fashioned from the very finest diamonds in my mine,’ he said. ‘But if it’s too big or too flashy, we can get you something else. We could buy you something antique and special in Moscow or Paris, if that’s what you’d prefer. I’d just like you to wear it in the meantime, because I want to see it on your finger. Because ironically, despite having run all my life from matrimony, I have now become its greatest advocate. That is...’ he stared at her ‘...if you’ll agree to marry me?’

Erin saw the flicker of uncertainty in his eyes—so brief that she might have imagined it—and somehow it made her love him even more. Dimitri uncertain? Whoever would have thought it? It was something as impossible to imagine as him making such a public and romantic proposal in an East End café. She had tried to stop loving him, but somehow it just wouldn’t work and now she had accepted that it was never going to. He was complicated, there was no doubt about that. He was brilliant at some things but not so good at others. Feelings and emotion, mainly...those were the things he liked to hide away—at least until now. But now she understood why. And didn’t he need her love just as badly as she wanted to give it? ‘Oh, Dimitri,’ she whispered. ‘Of course I’ll marry you. I—’

But her words were drowned out by his laugh of pleasure as he rose to his feet and walked round to her side of the table, where he lifted her to her feet. He stared into her face for what seemed like a long time before he started to kiss her, and all the customers—except for the blonde—burst into a spontaneous round of clapping and cheering.

In the commotion, the ring fell to the ground and remained missing until Leo and his friends came back from football later that morning, crawling around on their hands and knees until it was located underneath the skirting board. They were rewarded with ice cream and cola and the promise of a trip to watch Chelsea play, and Erin overheard Leo saying to his best friend, ‘That’s my daddy.’

She blinked a little at that, because she didn’t actually remember telling him that. And that was when it all became real and tears of happiness began to slide down her cheeks.