Untouched by His Diamonds (12 page)

She noticed no one sat down beside her. There was nothing friendly about any of these guys, but she suspected it wasn’t personal. Her attention drifted back to Serge. He was talking in a low voice to Mick Forster, and they were both riveted to the sparring.

Then Mick said something, and it all happened at once. The blows made real contact. Clementine flinched as the men’s bodies collided. She averted her eyes but the sounds kept coming—fist connecting with bone.

‘Clementine, would you like to wait in the outer office?’ Serge was bending over her, blocking her view of the ring.

She nodded, didn’t argue. She felt embarrassed—and vaguely guilty.

‘What in the hell did you bring
her
here for?’ said Mick when Serge returned.

Serge felt an uncharacteristic surge of irritation with the older man. ‘My private life isn’t your business, Mick.’

‘She’s a distraction. You need to get your eyeline above her rack and back into the game, boy. A political move against this organisation and stadiums are going to close like mouse traps around the country.’

Serge’s expression remained bland as he said quietly, but with lethal emphasis, ‘If you refer to Clementine’s rack again all conversations are over, Mick—you got it?’

Mick Forster rolled back on his heels. ‘Well, well …’ was all he said. Then, in a lower voice, ‘Do you think she’s up to holding your hand and being photographed at a few charity events?’

Five minutes later Serge emerged. Clementine stood up. ‘Are you done?’

‘We’re moving,
kisa
.’

It wasn’t the same as being done, but he swept her along
and seated in the car she said softly, ‘I’m sorry. You were right. I shouldn’t have come.’

Unexpectedly he pulled her in against him, pressing a kiss to her surprised lips—a gesture of comfort. ‘No, you shouldn’t have come—but that was my fault.’

‘Who was he? The fighter?’

‘Jared Scott. We’re signing him.’

‘Is that good?’

‘I’m counting on it,
kisa
. We’re throwing a lot of backing behind him.’

‘How does it work? What generates the money besides ticket sales?’

‘Gambling,’ Serge said flatly. ‘That’s all it was initially. But the organisation reached sponsorship size about five years ago. When the boys go into the ring in two weeks’ time here in New York they’ll be covered in logos.’

‘There’s a match coming up?’

‘We call them events. Don’t even ask,
kisa
.’

Clementine looked away. After her performance in the gym she didn’t feel she
could
ask.

He didn’t know why, but he felt the urge to reassure her. He’d been struggling with it since she’d sat on that bed wrapped in a towel and looking lost. But his instinct for self-preservation made him hold off. He didn’t want to set up that sort of dynamic in their relationship. But this he could do.

His hand squeezed her thigh and she looked up. ‘It’s pretty daunting for a woman to walk into that environment. You did fine.’

It was disconcerting to realise he had read her thoughts. Yet she was beginning to anticipate his. ‘Am I going to see anything of you during the day?’

‘You know why I needed to come back to New York,
kisa
. It’s a busy time of year for me.’ Serge endeavoured to keep his tone reasonable. He’d known this question was coming.
He got it from every woman he dated. They all wanted time he didn’t have to give.

‘It’s just we’ve only got a week.’

Another predictable response from a woman who was proving anything but. It should have relaxed him. This should be familiar ground. This wasn’t: ‘How about you stay on after the end of the week?’

‘Stay on?’

‘After last night and today, Clementine, I’d be certifiably insane to let you go.’

‘Oh.’ He meant the sex. She was getting the picture.

He noticed she reflexively reached to tug on the locket that wasn’t there.

‘You’re not interested?’ He asked the perfunctory question, but of course she was.

‘I have a job, Serge,’ she said, her voice firmer than before. ‘It was a bit of a cheek taking a week. I don’t know if I could manage another.’

‘Then quit.’

The nonchalance of a billionaire. Did he really think it was that easy for her? Or was it just a case of her job not meaning much to him?

‘I can’t just quit my job. It’s a career, and it’s important to me,’ she spluttered. ‘Besides which I’ve got a flat and a life to finance—not to mention it would look pretty dodgy on my CV.’

‘Clementine, I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you.’

She was plucking at her sweater now. Serge watched, fascinated, even as he endeavoured to work out what her problem was and exactly how much it was going to cost him.

‘Two weeks in your bed in exchange for a career I’ve worked very hard for? I don’t think so.’

‘I was thinking of something more open-ended,’ he said,
aware Clementine was about to turn him down flat. And how in the hell he’d opened himself up to be shot down he had no idea. It was Petersburg all over again—standing in that street, feeling like a thug for upsetting Clementine, when all he’d wanted was to see her again. To go on seeing her.

Yet he wasn’t quite able to get the words
I’ll make it worth your while
out of his mouth. He told himself it was because he’d never actually had to say them to a woman. The women he chose to be with understood the unspoken contract: mutually enjoyable sex, a certain lifestyle made available to them, and at the end—and there was always an end, sooner rather than later—a reward in the form of jewellery or something else that softened the edges of what was essentially a sexual contract.

Or an interview in a trashy magazine. But the women who had done that were always the ones with whom he’d had only glancing contact.

Clementine looked at him with those soft grey eyes he remembered from last night.

‘I don’t know, Serge,’ she said with quiet dignity. ‘You haven’t made much of an effort so far.’

Sto?
A dark flush of colour moved over his high cheekbones. His male pride sat up and took notice. Not made much of an effort? What exactly did
that
mean?

‘It’s not as if I saw anything of you today, and after last night that felt…weird.’

‘Weird?’ He repeated the word as if she was speaking in another language. Something about her simple, straightforward manner was riffling through his hard-won masculine detachment.

‘I felt a bit…used,’ she confessed.

He shifted beside her, his eyes narowing. Clementine viewed the change in him warily.

‘What is it you require, Clementine?’

He spoke so formally, his accent thickening attractively on her name.

‘Time. With you.’

She asked for the moon, he thought, challenged all the same.

Diamonds were so much easier.

Yet a wild sort of certainty about how this would play out focussed him on the one thing she seemed to be asking for that he could give her.

Time in his bed. Time with him. Time for both of them.

Clementine wondered what his silence meant. She could read him a little now, but she wasn’t that good.

‘Serge?’

A slow, elemental smile lit up that mouth she had longed to soften with hers the very first time she’d met him.

Never had she felt like this with a man before. From the very start he had lit something inside her. She felt like a woman when she was with him, and not a gauche girl stumbling through life. She didn’t want it to end. She didn’t want to give him up. But she didn’t want to lose her self-respect if he only thought of her as a convenience.

‘I will make time.’ His green eyes had darkened. He reached for her, and suddenly she was wrapped in those muscular arms and being kissed in the way she had dreamt of being woken this morning.

Clementine was up early every morning thereafter for the rest of the week. She made sure of it. It meant she was sleeping lightly and waking often, but come six a.m., when Serge stirred, her eyes were open and she was waiting for him.

She would steal her arms around his neck and hold onto him, talk drowsily about what she had planned for the day: a gallery, a ride downtown, a walk through Central Park. Serge would listen, and gradually she’d eke out a little of what he
would be doing. She gathered he wasn’t used to explaining himself, but he was making a manful effort on her behalf. It was a start.

On the Friday, lack of sleep caught up with her. It was light on her face that woke her, and she surfaced to an empty bed. Her heart sank. Because it told her what she’d been steadily avoiding since that first morning after: this wasn’t the beginning of a relationship, it was a sexual fling.

People had them. She had girlfriends who slept with men for no other purpose than sexual enjoyment. It was a natural part of life. Apparently.

But she didn’t. She had relationship sex—the sort that had a framework of mutual caring and a view to a future together. That both of her relationships had been ended by her, neither truly touching her heart, did not make it any less true. She had gone into them with an innocence, a belief in love, until Joe Carnegie showed her exactly how base the relations between men and women could be.

And that experience haunted her. She hadn’t realised how much until she’d met Serge. It hung over her like Damocles’ sword. She was frightened of giving too much of herself to him, of opening herself up and having Serge reduce it to something sordid.

She thought she knew him—he was sweet and generous and attentive—but waking up alone now, as she had on that first morning, brought it back to her. How they had met, where they were now—in a swish hotel, with him continuing on with his working life, her life on hiatus.

Sitting up, she looked dismally around the room.

She never got over the luxury. But it felt empty without him, and worse, it made her feel uneasy. After all, it wasn’t as if they actually had a proper relationship.

The half-open door came wide and Serge wandered in with
two coffee mugs, his eyes settling on her. ‘You’re awake,
dushka
.’

‘Serge.’ She couldn’t hide her pleasure at seeing him.

‘Cover yourself up, or I won’t be responsible for my actions. And we have to move. I’m taking you to the Hamptons for the weekend.’

‘Now?’

His gaze settled on her naked body. ‘You’re purposefully making this difficult.
Da
—now.’

Clementine leapt out of bed and ran for the door.

Serge watched her bottom wobble tantalisingly out of view. He liked waking up in the morning with Clementine warm and sweet, draped across him, and he wasn’t about to pretend even to himself that he didn’t; he even got a kick out of phoning her during the day and hearing that breathless ‘Serge’, as if she couldn’t believe he had called her and would drop everything to fly to his side. Which she never did. Not Miss Independent. For all her demonstrative shows of affection he had a sense of her hovering like a butterfly, not quite sure of her perch. The analogy was apt—delicate, whimsical, difficult to hold. Her elusiveness remained, despite the week they had spent together.

It probably explained her hold over him.

It was clearer to him than ever that being a girl on call to a rich man was not a scenario Clementine truly understood. He was beginning to suspect he was her first foray into this world. If her wide-eyed reaction to the penthouse suite hadn’t told him that, her refusal to wear the diamond necklace confirmed it.

He was beginning to suspect she had no idea what any of this was about—and that made two of them.

The helicopter ride out was thrilling. The view of the city below was like a movie. As they came in over the Atlantic
coast Clementine leaned down to take in the curling breakers on the beach below.

‘You have no fear,
kisa
,’ Serge shouted above the roar of the rotorblade.

‘I have a few, Slugger—just not of heights,’ she sang back. ‘Tell me that is
not
where we’re staying?’

A beautiful large white house, set down beside dunes falling away to the beach.

On the helipad he took her hand in a casual gesture and led her towards the house. ‘Welcome home, Clementine.’

‘You live here?’

‘I’m thinking about buying it. I’m leasing at the moment.’

‘What about St Petersburg?’

‘Winter. When I can.’

For the first time she realised it made sense for him to have a base in the US. It hadn’t occurred to her before. His business interests in the main were here. He wouldn’t be living out of hotels.

He was just living in a hotel with her.

Unease slid through her but she pushed it aside. She was here now. He’d brought her here now.

‘Can you take me on a tour of the house?’

He gave her that flashing grin that told her he enjoyed surprising her.

‘It will be my pleasure,’ he said, with a note of formality that shouldn’t have surprised her. He’d pulled out this traditional Russian male several times since she’d been with him and it always got to her.

It made her trust him a little more—made her want things from him she couldn’t have.

Which was dangerous thinking. Just looking around this huge, airy house she couldn’t help but be conscious of the gulf between them. He took this level of luxury for granted. She wondered what he would say if he saw her shared flat,
with its two bedrooms and a showerhead over the bathtub? Picturing Serge in her tiny bolthole brought a wry smile to her lips. Picturing him in her bath made her laugh out loud, and he angled her a curious but amused look.

‘What is funny,
kisa
?’

‘I was thinking—what’s a middle-class girl from Melbourne doing in a Russian billionaire’s summer house in East Hampton?’ she replied cheekily.

‘Enjoying the amenities,’ he shot back. ‘It’s all at your disposal, Clementine. The tennis court, pool, games room, theatre, and of course the Atlantic Ocean.’

They had reached the other end of the house and stepped out onto the deck, extending like the prow of a ship out towards the grassy dunes and the Atlantic beyond. The sea breeze lifted Clementine’s hair and wrapped it around her neck.