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‘I know,’ she said.
‘Sensible girl.’ Wordlessly, he pushed her coffee towards her. And a glass of champagne.
With shaky fingers Eve took the glass, and drank from it.
‘You’d do better with me, cherie. You wouldn’t weep in the morning.’
Lightly, he brushed her bare arm with his fingers. Then he started to tell her another gossipy anecdote.
She tried to smile.
It wasn’t possible.
Alexei walked back to the bar. His gait was very controlled, his face expressionless. Beneath the mask of his face, emotions roiled like dark waters. He’d been insane, all right, but he’d got his sanity back now. Forced it back. Eve Hawkwood could resume her attentions to her original target.
Was she sleeping with Roflet already? Or was she holding out until Roflet père rode to her father’s rescue?
No, don’t think about Pierre Roflet enjoying Eve Hawkwood. The woman he’d wanted was not her. It was an illusion, a fantasy that did not exist. A mirage.
‘M’sieu?’
The barman was hovering attentively. Alexei gave his order.
‘Vodka,’ he instructed tersely.
The barman nodded, and turned to pour the drink. He placed it in front of Alexei and watched him knock it back, then replace the glass on the surface of the bar. Silently, he refilled it.
Alexei reached for it, let his fingers curl around the cool edge of the glass, but he did not drink it. Already the first one was burning down his throat. Deadening his senses.
‘Russe?’
The husky voice at his side was female. He turned his head.
There was a woman sitting on the barstool, nursing a glass of champagne. Young. No more than twenty, perhaps. Low-cut dress with a high hem. A lot of make-up.
Good-looking.
Expensive-looking.
Available-looking.
Alexei’s eyes narrowed slightly. Assessingly.
Then he answered her.
As he did so, he saw surprise—and wariness—flicker in her eyes. Then it was gone. Instead, she laid a hand with red-lacquered nails on his sleeve. She smiled.
Invitingly.
It took Alexei only a handful of minutes to persuade her to come up to his suite with him.
Eve watched him walk out of the nightclub. He was difficult to miss. The woman on his arm had the highest heels possible, and was swaying provocatively in her tight-cut dress that moulded over her bottom, skimming high across her thighs. Her long dark hair waved extravagantly down her back.
Her hand, with its long red nails, curled around Alexei Constantin’s forearm with blatant possession.
Eve’s hand curled tightly around the stem of her champagne flute. As if to break it.
How many more illusions could she stand seeing destroyed?
Yet one more, it seemed.
Pierre was looking where she watched, her eyes wide and stricken.
‘Definitely not a good idea, cherie,’ he murmured.
She tore her eyes away. She looked down into her champagne glass.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘You’re right. Not a good idea.’ Her voice was strained.
She made herself look up, look across at Pierre. He gave a little grimace, half-sympathy, half-warning.
‘And a health risk.’ He nodded in the direction that Alexei Constantin was walking off in. ‘The girl is a hooker.’
Eve stared.
Pierre gave a light shrug. ‘I know—they shouldn’t let them in here. But they—or their pimps—bribe the staff. And she is one, cherie, believe me. She offered me her services when I was getting your drink while you were dancing.’ He made another slight grimace. ‘She is no doubt most expensive. But then, price is not a problem for Alexei Constantin.’
Eve hardly heard him. The sound of the final shattering of her last illusion drowned him out.
For one last, despairing second she felt herself try to fight against what she was seeing, but she was crushed down. Crushed by the damning reality of who and what the man was.
No one worth wanting. No one worth dreaming over.
Bleakly, she lifted her champagne glass to her lips.
CHAPTER THREE
ALONG the line of the sea’s edge, to the south, there was still the glimmer of light. Eve stood at the yacht’s rail in the cooling air, looking out to sea, not wanting to see the garish brightness of the shore.
Not wanting to think about the ordeal ahead.
Alexei Constantin was coming to dine with her father. And she would have to do her duty as her father’s hostess, be gracious and polite, ensure that the conversation flowed smoothly, that the staff performed to the standard her father required, ensure the evening went well.
How could the evening go well? How could it be anything other than a horrible nightmarish ordeal?
Her hands tightened over the rail. She had spent the previous night tossing and turning in bed, bitter and hopeless and angry with herself—and all day she had dreaded the coming dinner. How could she cope with seeing again the man she had made such a fool of herself over? Engaging in some idealised moonlit tryst, a fleeting kiss, then making her swift flight from the scene of her stupidity? The man who had turned out to be the predator slowly circling her father? A man who, whether he was Alexei Constantin or not, saw nothing wrong in dancing with her one moment, then picking up a prostitute in the space of a handful of minutes and taking her off for some expensive, professionally serviced sex?
But she was going to have to cope with it, she knew. If she tried to pretend she was feeling ill, the repercussions from her father would be severe. Financially punitive. It was the way he controlled her. Threatening to hold back money.
She could not risk that. Not when her father’s money was so desperately needed. And for that reason she steeled herself for the ordeal ahead. Her mother had taught her well, because it was how she got through her own life. Her mother’s stringent drilling would get her through the evening.
As for her frail, pathetic fantasy—that was dead. Quite dead.
What was the saying in English? thought Alexei, as he started to eat the elaborately prepared food placed in front of him. Take a long spoon when you sup with the devil?
Well, he was supping with the devil tonight, all right. His own personal devil.
But as of tomorrow morning, when the news of AC International’s Australian acquisition was made official—giving the coup de grâce to Hawkwood’s failing fight to remain independent—his devil would finally be exorcised.
The years of calculating, planning, executing, would be over.
Justice would finally be served on Giles Hawkwood.
Oh, it would not be the killing blow, he knew, but he would not need to finish him off. Others would do that. Enemies even more ruthless than he. Serving Hawkwood with the justice he so thoroughly deserved.
But now, while the man did not yet realise his time was up, Alexei could watch him—coldly and silently—behaving as if there were still time to escape, time to do a face-saving deal that would allow him to emerge from this takeover bid with advantage.
Not that he was raising the subject now. No. Now, as Giles Hawkwood entertained his nemesis, the subject was quite different. It was art. The topic had been picked by Eve Hawkwood.
Alexei rested veiled eyes on her, forcing himself to do so. He wished to God she were not here. Her presence was a distraction, diluting and disturbing his focus on Hawkwood’s coming annihilation. Though he’d known she would be at this travesty of a dinner, the reality of seeing her again was worse than he had expected. In the last twenty-four hours he’d ruthlessly refused to let himself think about her.
Yet the first sight of her as he’d walked into the stateroom had made a mockery of his resolution. It had been like a punch to the solar plexus.
It still was. But now he was slamming down hard on his reaction to her. He had to. It was essential. Essential to be able merely to look at her with his eyes veiled, betraying none of the turbulent thoughts within. Refusing to allow her to use her skills on him.
And she was, as she had been the day before, very skilful indeed.
She was wearing cream tonight, another simple column of fine layers of fabric, caught at each shoulder with a pearled clasp. It was a demure design, and yet the impulse that filled him, instantly and insistently, was not a response to the demure design. It was a response that made him want to stride across to her, slide his hands down her bare arms and draw her towards him as he had done last night, in the moonlight, by the sea’s edge…
He hauled his mind back from memory and desire.
She was not that woman. That woman was a mirage.
She was Eve Hawkwood, a woman prepared to engage in sex with men chosen for her by her father, for his own financial advantage—and hers.
Not that one would guess it. It was not her cool, untouchable appearance, but her whole manner and demeanour. She sat, poised and graceful, her crystal-cut tones moving effortlessly, smoothly, from one innocuous topic to another as she played the dutiful role of attentive dinner party hostess. Making not one reference, by sign or by word, to what had happened not twenty-four hours ago, when he had kissed her in the moonlight.
It was as if it had never happened.
But then, of course—his mouth twisted briefly—what he had thought had happened, had not. All that had really taken place was that Eve Hawkwood had, whether opportunistically or calculatedly, tried out her wiles on him.
Well, she wasn’t trying them out tonight—not in that way, at any rate. Tonight a different Eve Hawkwood was on show. The society hostess—a role she executed to perfection.
She had already exhausted the flora and fauna, folk customs and natural features of Dalaczia, and had now moved on to art.
‘Do you collect art, Mr Constantin?’ came the polite enquiry, with a slight lift of her eyebrow in his direction as she gracefully forked up a mouthful of sole Veronique.
‘No,’ he replied.
It was almost true. He owned only one work of art—a Dutch still life of flowers. Though small, scarcely more than the size of a computer screen, its tumbling, vibrant blooms painted in exquisite detail so that minute ladybirds were visible on leaves and drops of water gleamed on petals, it was like an icon to him.
Ileana had loved flowers…
For a moment the pain was as harsh as ever.
He could see again, so vividly, so real, the way her dark fall of hair had caught the sunlight as she’d picked a meadow flower and given it to him—the smile on her face the one that was just for him, her special smile…
No—the steel door slammed down, impenetrable to all memory, all pain.
Forcibly, he turned his mind back to where he was now—the present. The past was gone; it would never come back. The present was now. And the future—the future would bring justice. That was all he asked of it.
‘It doesn’t appeal to you, art?’ Eve Hawkwood’s crystal tones came again.
Alexei reached to lift the glass of vintage wine to his mouth.
‘Art is not for private consumption or financial investment,’ he replied tersely.
He watched her raise delicate eyebrows at his assertion.
‘An admirably purist view,’ she responded.
Pure? What did Eve Hawkwood know of pure? Derision curled in Alexei. A sudden desire to pierce her appearance of demure untouchability—so deceptive, so deceiving—possessed him.
‘Besides—’ he looked straight at her ‘—so much art was commissioned as pornography—Louis XV of France liked to see his mistresses naked on canvas for his private pleasure.’
Not a flicker showed in Eve Hawkwood’s eyes at his deliberately provocative remark. She merely maintained an expression of polite but indifferent interest in a guest’s conversation.
‘The decadence of Louis XV’s private life must certainly have been a factor in the growing disillusion with the French monarchy in the eighteenth century,’ she merely observed concurringly, and paused to request some more mineral water from a steward.
‘Talking of nudes, Constantin.’ Giles Hawkwood’s heavy tones suddenly interjected into the pause, as he swivelled his head towards his guest. ‘I’ve got a private film collection of my own I can show you. Every colour and size of girl to suit all tastes—as many as you like at a time, in any combination. I had them filmed to my own specification. Acts like a catalogue—they all work for the same agency, and I fly them in when I want them. The agency gets fresh girls all the time—never delivered a dud yet.’ He leant back heavily in his chair, taking a large mouthful from his glass of wine, from which he’d been drinking freely all evening. ‘Last time they sent me a woman who could do things with her thighs you wouldn’t think physically possible!’ He gave a crack of crude laughter. ‘You should come along some time—I’ll organise something special for you. Something really memorable.’
Another crack of laughter came from him, and he drained his glass, signalling to the steward to refill it. While the man was pouring, Giles Hawkwood looked across at his guest with pouched eyes.
‘You’ll have to tell me what you like, Constantin. I can lay on any type of girl you want—and any equipment and accessories you enjoy. All top quality. Just say the word.’
He started to drink from his refilled glass.
Alexei’s face had stilled. Drained of all expression.
He felt his fists start to curl—felt murderous rage sear through him.
No! He would not soil his hands on Giles Hawkwood. The man was dead meat already—he simply did not know it yet.
Forcibly, with rigid self-control, he made his hands relax. To his left he saw from the edge of his vision that Eve Hawkwood was continuing with her meal. His eyes turned to her. She was cutting a piece of lamb on her plate, and it was as if nothing exceptional had been said at all, as if she were perfectly at ease as the subject of her father’s sexual proclivities arose.
And yet—
There was a rigidity in her jaw that was almost imperceptible, but Alexei could detect it all the same. A momentary glazing of her eyes, as if she were shutting something out of her consciousness.
