Tall, Dark & Distant (15 page)

Georgia scurried out of the car park, and back towards the apartment. She could feel the jungle curry churning in her gut, threatening to reappear on the boardwalk. Was it possible she was allergic to chillies? Maybe. But Georgia suspected that mostly she was allergic to men.

Early the next morning, Nik discussed snow conditions with his friends as they rode the gondola at Aspen. There had been some early dumps and the slopes already had a good covering, but the runs were surprisingly quiet. The recent economic downturn across most of the world meant pretty much only Russians, Brazilians and Australians could still afford to ski in Aspen. Nik’s friends didn’t strictly fall into any of those categories – but Nik was paying.

Galen, a minor European royal, had gladly accepted Nik’s invitation to Aspen to get away from his disgrace in his home country. He’d just faced court for kicking a photographer and got slapped with a hefty fine.

‘That sucks, man,’ Zed commiserated. ‘The paparazzi deserves a good kicking.’

Nik laughed at that, not necessarily because he agreed (although he did hate the paparazzi), but because Zed – the moderately talented son of an English rock star – was on a good behaviour bond for
punching
a photographer. The unlucky snapper had needed twenty stitches and a new camera after Zed had finished with him.

‘Hey, did you hear about You-Know-Who?’ Antonia said, eyes shining with gossip. ‘She spent her entire year’s trust fund allowance at Chanel – by March. Her daddy was so mad he made her go out and get a job!’ She laughed gleefully at the story. Antonia had once been the daughter of a wealthy English aristocrat but thanks to a family scandal, the money was gone. She didn’t even have a trust fund anymore.

Nik laughed along with everyone else. You-Know-Who was his ex. She had a proper name during the year that they dated, but no-one used it anymore. Not around Nik, anyway. Even her pseudonym made him edgy. It had a Voldemort ring to it that wasn’t entirely inappropriate. Nik was still recovering from the fake pregnancy she had staged to pin him down in the dying days of their relationship. The fictitious termination that followed was also pretty difficult to get over. But it was the massive payout to keep the whole story out of the tabloids that was the final straw. That was when his father had stepped in. It was no wonder he sent Nik to Australia and told him to stay away from girls, Nik thought bitterly. Hopefully he wouldn’t hear about Nik’s skiing trip, or, more importantly, his reason for going.

Nik fiddled with a jewellery box in his jacket pocket as the gondola rose. It didn’t make sense to carry Georgia’s Christmas present, a diamond tennis bracelet from Tiffany’s, zipped in his ski jacket. It was hardly going to be much use to him on the mountain. He didn’t even know why he’d brought it – he couldn’t give it to anyone else because her initials were engraved on it. GLK.
Georgia Louise King
. As his thumb found the engraving, her beautiful face came back to him. He remembered how crushed it looked when he’d told her the truth.

He had screwed things up, all right – just like he knew he would.

Nik couldn’t blame Georgia for being angry with him. He was mad at himself. He had pushed Georgia away – not because his father had told him to steer clear of girls, but because he didn’t know any other way to behave. Sabotage was something he did really well. He had been so busy trying
not
to get involved with Georgia to notice that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Nik realised as he thought it over that Georgia was the first person he’d ever met who liked him
less
when she found out he was a Morozov. She was completely different from every other girl he knew.

He’d only realised that somewhere over the Pacific. It was amazing how clear things could become at 26,000 feet. But by then it was about two weeks too late. He’d had plenty of chances to tell Georgia the truth about his family. He could have told her over dinner. He had actually tried, and then failed. And he definitely should have said something before the waterfall episode. Just thinking about that now turned him on.

If he’d thought it through, things might have turned out differently. But that was the problem. He hadn’t thought at all. He never did.

As the doors to the gondola opened at the top of the mountain, Nik tried to put Georgia out of his mind. He let his friends go ahead and then snapped on his skis. He took in a deep lungful of mountain air. Then, following his nose, he slipped across the trampled snow, over the back of the mountain. Where his friends turned left, he went right, gliding alone into an unspoiled valley.

He breathed in the scent of pines and the smell of fresh, untouched snow. His nose never disappointed him. His eyes deceived him regularly, but he could always trust his nose. An acute sense of smell was one of the only benefits – if you could call it that – of spending three days blindfolded when he was nine.

He drew another deep breath of cold air to erase the old memories. Nothing could beat the mountains on a clear winter day – the pines weighed down with snow, the sun reflecting off the white peaks. Out here, he could forget everything. Well, that was usually the way it worked. But for some reason, today he couldn’t get Georgia out of his mind. And as he sped down the mountain, her words followed him.

With lies you may get ahead in the world – but you can never go back.

That hurt. It was a Russian proverb – just one of the many texts Georgia had sent while he had been away. They’d started peacefully enough with a request to talk, but got progressively more angry, when he didn’t respond, and included a tirade about the virtues of honesty and integrity in relationships. She had put things so eloquently he was actually grudgingly impressed rather than angry at her insults. But it was the Russian proverb that sealed things for him. He knew he was not welcome back in Noosa, and he was pretty sure that Georgia wouldn’t appreciate a Christmas present in the mail, either. He thought of the bracelet in his pocket – at least it gave him something to remember her by. It was a false memento, as she’d never actually worn the bracelet, but it was better than nothing.

‘I can’t get hurt if no-one gets near me,’ he mumbled to himself.

So why, he wondered, was he aching like hell?

‘There you are,’ said Galen, strolling into a quiet bar at the bottom of the mountain with Antonia and Zed later that afternoon. Nik was alone at the bar, swigging down a beer.

‘We’ve been looking all over for you,’ Zed said, sitting on a stool beside him. ‘Don’t you answer your phone anymore?’

‘No,’ replied Nik.

‘Don’t be a grouch,’ Antonia said, trying to wave away his bad mood. ‘We want to go to Vegas.’

‘Okay,’ Nik said. ‘I think I’ll stay here. I’m enjoying the mountain.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Galen said. ‘We can’t go anywhere without you.’

It was a fair comment. Nik was the only one with a jet. And even if his friends could scrape together the airfare to Las Vegas, they’d definitely have no money for the tables. There was no point going to Vegas with an empty wallet.

‘Maybe we should stay here,’ Nik said. ‘Bet you’d look good on that mechanical bull.’

Antonia looked around the room and groaned. ‘Oh my god, you’re turning into a hillbilly.’ She gave him a hug. ‘Well, I guess we’ll head back to the chalet. Have fun on your lonesome.’

Nik watched his friends walk towards the door, willing himself to remain seated, trying to enjoy his beer, making himself stay strong. But his legs seemed to get up of their own accord.

‘Hold on,’ he called, swilling the last of his beer. ‘I’m coming.’

‘Yippee!’ Antonia shouted from the doorway, doing a little cowgirl dance. She finished by tossing her imaginary hat into the air.

The barman caught Nik’s eye as he left. ‘You take care, now, y’hear? Don’t go puttin’ the ranch on black.’

Nik laughed. If only the barman knew just how much money he could afford to lose. And anyway, he was more of a puttin’-the-ranch-on
-red
man.

Sometime the next morning, or possibly afternoon (so hard to tell the time in Vegas, and they had crossed too many timezones to keep track), Nik and his friends stumbled out of the Bellagio. Nik was down close to $300,000, due to some unbelievably bad luck on the blackjack table and a smidge of good luck at poker, which had spurred him on to have one last splash on the roulette table. Roulette had ultimately left him a good deal poorer and missing a shoe. He had a vivid recollection of losing his money, but due to the large amount of champagne he had consumed afterwards, he had no idea how he had lost his footwear.

Nik looked at his surviving shoe. It was Gucci. But it was no use without a partner, so he tossed it in the fountain.

‘It didn’t deserve that,’ Antonia said to Nik, as the shoe bobbed across the fountain. She leant over the side of the fountain to assess the progress of the shoe. ‘It’s trying to swim,’ she said, even though it clearly wasn’t. She pulled off a stiletto and tossed it towards Nik’s shoe. ‘Jimmy will save you!’

But her Jimmy Choo, as she might have expected in a less inebriated state, sank to the bottom without a trace.

‘I’ve got it!’ Zed shouted, hurling a size 12 red trainer at the problem.

‘No, I have!’ Galen added, throwing in a belt.

About a minute later, Nik and his friends were standing by the fountain in their underwear and socks, cheering on a green silk dress, which was the only piece of apparel still floating. About thirty seconds after that, security arrived and Nik and his friends were handed Bellagio robes (that Nik was later charged for) and escorted off the premises.

On the Strip, Nik was not only uncomfortable – because by that time the temperature had dropped to nothing – but he was also embarrassed, because by then he’d started to sober up.

He could suddenly see very clearly that he needed to change. But he would definitely need help.

‘I think you did the right thing,’ Ella said, as the girls sat on the beach eating ice-creams on Boxing Day. Almost a week had passed since Nik had disappeared. ‘You can’t build a relationship on lies.’

Georgia nodded. She knew that Ella was right. But the past week had been one long, sickening emotional roller-coaster and she couldn’t get rid of the gnawing, empty feeling that it had left in her belly. She’d tried filling the emptiness with food, she tried fixing it with running, but it was still keeping her awake at night. She still didn’t understand what had gone wrong.