The Millionaire Affair

‘Did he suggest you say thank you in the traditional way?’

‘What?’ Lisa looked blank for a moment. Then she understood. ‘Oh, no. He wouldn’t dare make a pass at me.’

Looking at her pugnacious chin, Tatiana could believe it.

‘So what did he do, then?’

‘He gave me a lecture on my style. Style! I made half the portfolio’s profits last quarter and he complains about my style!’

Tatiana was disappointed. She liked more passion in her drama. ‘What is wrong with your style?’

Lisa listed the points on her fingers. ‘Wrong address. Wrong clothes. Wrong friends.’

Tatiana began to see that this was a satisfactory drama after all.

‘He thinks you are not good enough for him,’ she deduced. She was indignant.

‘In bucketfuls,’ agreed Lisa. A shadow crossed her face. ‘And he’s not the first,’ she added, almost to herself.

Tatiana didn’t notice. She was thinking. ‘Do you want to rent or buy?’

‘Well, I’m renting at the moment—’

‘Because you could always have the garden flat in my house. As long as you aren’t determined to buy.’

‘—but I don’t want to have to go through—’ Lisa realised what Tatiana had said. ‘What?’

Tatiana repeated it obligingly.

Lisa shook her head, stunned. ‘I didn’t know—I mean I didn’t realise—I wasn’t fishing…’ she said, acutely embarrassed.

Tatiana was amused. ‘I know you weren’t. Why should you? You don’t know where I live, or that I have a flat to let.’

‘No,’ agreed Lisa, still slightly dazed.

‘Well, I have. Just round the corner from here.’ She paused impressively. ‘Stanley Crescent.’

‘Oh,’ said Lisa.

Tatiana waited expectantly. It was clear that something more was required. Lisa had no idea what. She felt helpless.

Seeing her confusion, Tatiana smiled. ‘It’s a very good address.’

‘Is it? I mean—I’m sure it is.’ Lisa was floundering. She said desperately, ‘I just don’t know much about this part of London.’

‘Secret gardens,’ said Tatiana in thrilling tones.

‘Sorry?’

‘When you walk through Notting Hill all you see are these great white terraces on both sides of the street, right?’

‘Right,’ said Lisa, puzzled.

‘Well, what you don’t know is that behind several terraces there are huge communal gardens. Big as a park, some of them. Mature trees, rose gardens, the lot. It’s like having a share of a house in the country.’

She waved her hands expressively. Quite suddenly, Lisa could see green vistas, trees in spring leaf, birds building nests, space. She gave a sigh of unconscious longing.

‘Like gardens, do you?’ said Tatiana, pleased.

‘Never had one. Don’t know,’ said Lisa.

But her dreaming eyes told a different story. Tatiana took a decision.

‘Move in on Monday.’

Lisa did.

It was a blustery day that blew the cherry blossom off the trees in a snowstorm of petals. Fortunately she didn’t have much to move. She installed her boxes in the sitting room of Tatiana’s garden flat, paid the movers and took a cab to work. She was at her desk by eleven.

She was greeted by a teasing cheer.

‘Hey, hey, half a day’s work today?’ said Rob, her second in command.

‘I moved house,’ Lisa answered briefly. She settled behind her desk and tapped in her access code.

Rob’s eyebrows climbed. Lisa had told him, raging, about her lecture from Sam on Friday afternoon.

‘You don’t hang about, do you?’

She was scrolling through the position pages on the screen but she looked up at that. Her wicked grin flashed.

‘No sooner the word than the deed, me.’

‘Sam will be impressed.’

Lisa chuckled naughtily. ‘I know. But I can’t help that.’

‘I bet he checks up,’ Rob mused. ‘Just to make sure you’ve got a proper up-market place this time.’

Her laughter died. ‘He wouldn’t dare.’

‘Want to bet?’

‘If he does,’ said Lisa with grim satisfaction, ‘he’s in for a surprise.’

For Lisa, too, the move turned out to have its surprises. For one thing she had the greatest difficulty in getting Tatiana to name a figure for the rent. Her new landlady had escorted her enthusiastically through the house—stuffed with an eclectic collection of furniture, ferns and objets d’art—the garden—as green and private as Lisa had imagined—and the local shops—everything from a late-night grocer’s to a bookshop which sold nothing except books about food and even smelled like a good kitchen. There was no doubt that Tatiana was delighted to welcome her. But she clearly thought anything to do with money was low and wouldn’t be pinned down on it.

‘Look,’ said Lisa, turning up at Tatiana’s door one evening with a bottle of expensive Rioja, some information from the local estate agent and an expression of determination, ‘this can’t go on. You need a contract and so do I.’

She threw down a printed document onto a walnut sofa table which gleamed softly under an art deco lamp.

‘That’s a standard form. I’ve signed it but run it past your solicitor before you sign.’ Something in Tatiana’s expression gave her pause. ‘You have got a solicitor?’

‘The family has,’ said Tatiana, without enthusiasm.

‘Fine. Call him tomorrow. The one thing that I haven’t put in is the amount of rent. Now, the agent gave me a range for one-bedroomed flats in this area.’ A handful of leaflets joined the contract. ‘Pick one.’

Tatiana wrinkled her nose disdainfully. ‘When I was your age, girls did not admit that they knew money existed. It was men’s business.’

Lisa was not deflected from her purpose, but she grinned.

‘Don’t wriggle. I’m not leaving until I’ve given you a cheque.’

Tatiana picked up one of the estate agent’s pages and looked at it with distaste. ‘That’s far too much. Anyway, that one’s got a separate entrance.’

Lisa had come prepared. ‘All right. There are monthly rentals for nine flats there. I’ve worked out the average.’ She magicked a slip of paper out of her jeans pocket.

Tatiana took it gingerly. Lisa laughed. She had seen her look at a snail on the garden path with much the same shrinking distaste.

‘Talk to your solicitor, or I’m moving out. And that would be a pity. This is a lovely place.’

The May evening was dark. From Tatiana’s first-floor window the shadowed sweep of trees and lawns looked like a magic landscape. Lisa sank into a 1920s chaise longue under the window and sighed with pleasure.

‘Wonderful,’ she said exuberantly. ‘I’ve never known anywhere like it.

Tatiana’s eyes were warm. ‘I’m glad.’ She opened the wine and poured them each a glass. ‘My family bought the house for me years ago. They thought if I could not, after all, make my living dancing, then at least I could rent out rooms.’

Lisa accepted the glass of ruby wine. ‘And did you?’

‘I’ve done both. Dancing is a hard life. Especially when you begin to age. These days I direct, but it was tough in my forties.’ Tatiana frowned. ‘My family still do an annual check-up, though.’

Lisa sipped wine, amused. ‘Who’s brave enough to do that?’

Tatiana sniffed. ‘Well, this year it will probably be my nephew, Nikolai. Couldn’t be more unsuitable. The last time I saw him he was wearing a beard and khaki camouflage gear. Still,’ she added grudgingly, ‘that was on television.’

‘What a glamorous family.’

‘Nikolai isn’t glamorous,’ corrected Tatiana. She had standards in the matter of glamour. ‘He’s an explorer. Writes books on the behaviour of primates.’

Lisa’s eyes danced. ‘A bit of a wild man, then?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ said his fond aunt. ‘Not a wild bone in his body. He’s always completely in control of himself.’

‘But?’ prompted Lisa, hearing the reservation in her voice.

‘He wants to control everyone else as well,’ announced Tatiana. ‘And then thinks you should be delighted that he has bothered to give you so much of his attention. Men.’

Lisa had no men in her family, but she had been battling her way through a man’s world ever since she first went to work for Napier Kraus. She could only sympathise.

‘Still,’ said Tatiana brightening, ‘he came over just before Christmas, so I should have another six months before he starts trying to interfere again.’

She was wrong.

Nikolai Ivanov was as reluctant to involve himself in his great-aunt’s affairs as she was to let him.

‘Oh, not London again,’ he told his grandfather.

They were walking up from the stables to the back of the château, gleaming like gold in the spring sunshine. The gentle slopes of the Tarn valley scrolled away like a medieval painting towards the river. The vine-clad landscape hadn’t changed since his ancestor had commissioned a picture of his home in the eighteenth century. It still hung in the gallery.

‘I hate London.’ Nikolai looked at the unchanging prospect and said with feeling, ‘Who’d be in a dirty, noisy city when they could be here?’

His grandfather smiled. ‘I thought London was where everyone wanted to be these days,’ he said mischievously. ‘I suspect Véronique Repiquet would have preferred to have her wedding there. She told me London was cool.’

Nikolai raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Véronique would! I, however, am thirty-six years old. I don’t chase fads any more.’

‘You seem to manage to have a pretty good time when you get there, however,’ Pauli said drily.

Nikolai did not pretend to misunderstand him. ‘Oops,’ he said, wincing.

More than one celebrity-watch magazine had published photographs of Nikolai at last year’s fashionable Christmas parties in London. He had been with a different woman in each picture, as his grandmother had pointed out acidly to her husband at the time. Pauli had just said it was nice to see that Nicki was getting over his brother’s death and enjoying himself again.

He had tactfully not told his wife about the picture which had fallen out of one of Nikolai’s Christmas cards last year. It had shown what looked like a student party in a cellar. The Countess would have been horrified by the sight of her grandson jamming at the piano, having discarded most of his clothes. Pauli, however, was more realistic, and even, as Nikolai knew, faintly envious.

‘There must be friends you would like to look up,’ Pauli pointed out now innocently. There had been a number of lively-looking girls in that picture.

Nikolai was dry. ‘Which particular friend did you have in mind?’

But his grandfather shook his head. ‘Matchmaking is your grandmother’s department, not mine,’ he said decisively. ‘All I want is to make sure that Tatiana isn’t being—er—unwise.’

‘My great-aunt Tatiana,’ said Nikolai, who had spent several strenuous hours with her and her accountant in December, and was not anxious to repeat the experience, ‘is a self-willed old woman. She has been barking for years. I should think it is a cast-iron certainty that she is being unwise.’

Pauli did not bother to deny it. ‘But you’re fond of her,’ he pointed out. ‘You wouldn’t want anyone to take advantage of her.’

Their eyes met in total mutual comprehension. Nikolai curbed his frustration.

‘You should have been in public relations,’ he said at last bitterly. ‘Or politics. All right, Pauli. I’ll go to London and check on Tatiana. What’s the story?’

Lisa did not see much of Tatiana over the next few weeks. She was busy all day; and in the evenings, proving to herself as much as her old friends that she had not left them behind with her move, she went out clubbing.

Which was why, when the doorbell rang at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, Lisa was still in bed.

‘No,’ she groaned. She pulled the pillow over her head, blocking both ears. ‘Go away.’

But it rang again, insistently. Lisa gave up. Blearily she swung her legs out of bed and felt for a robe. Failing to find one, she pulled last night’s coat round her instead.

As the bell rang for the third time she trod heavily up the stairs, muttering.

‘What is it? Don’t you know it’s Sunday?’ she growled as she flung the door open.

Nikolai Ivanov blinked. There was not much that shook him. He had a cool and generally well-justified confidence that there was nothing he had not seen before. But Lisa was a new phenomenon, even to a man of his experience.

He took an involuntary step backwards, his eyes widening in stunned silence. He would have said that he had seen all the weirder life forms, but he had never before encountered Lisa Romaine after a heavy night’s clubbing. Getting back at five in the morning she had, quite literally, taken off her clothes and tumbled into bed. As a result her hair was still full of last night’s rainbow colours, though some of the spikes had been flattened in sleep. She was also sporting panda shadows round her eyes from unstable mascara. To say nothing of her pugnacious expression.

Nikolai stared in appalled fascination. And found he could think of nothing to say.

‘Well?’ demanded Lisa.

The man on the doorstop was so tall it hurt her neck to look up at him. Squinting into the morning sun, Lisa made out high, haughty cheekbones and deep brown eyes under lazy lids. It was an arrogant face. And spectacularly handsome.

‘What do you want?’ she said, thoroughly put out.

Lisa did not like handsome men. She had learned the hard way that they tended to be more in love with themselves than any woman who happened to cross their path. It had soured her.

The handsome stranger scrutinised her for several unnerving seconds. It did nothing to mollify her.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

Lisa gave him an evil look.

‘I’m the householder. I was fast asleep.’

He looked taken aback. Then, as if in spite of himself, he looked her up and down in one comprehensive survey. His mouth twitched.

‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ he murmured.

Lisa did not like being laughed at. She ran her hand through the residual spikes and glared.

‘Either tell me what you want or go away.’

‘Well, I did want to see the householder,’ Nikolai admitted.

He should, of course, have demanded Tatiana immediately. But now the shock had worn off he found he was intrigued by this apparition. In her bare feet she came no higher than his chest. Yet she seemed quite unconscious of being at any sort of disadvantage. She might be half asleep, but she was still definitely punching her weight, he thought. He admired that.

Lisa folded her arms with exaggerated patience. It was a mistake because it made her coat gape. That revealed, if Nikolai had not already guessed it, that she was wearing nothing underneath.

He did not pretend that he hadn’t noticed. His eyes widened and he stared openly. And if he did not actually laugh aloud, he did not try to disguise his amusement.

What he did disguise—at least Nikolai hoped so—was his sudden rush of pleasure at the sight. It was unexpected, unwelcome and deeply primitive. That intrigued him, too. He was in no rush to demand Tatiana until he had explored this feeling further.

Lisa seemed oblivious. ‘You want to see me? You’re seeing me,’ she pointed out. ‘So—?’

Nikolai let his eyes drift down. ‘I am indeed,’ he agreed, in suave appreciation.

Lisa was used to being teased. You did not survive in the dealing room if you let it bother you. Normally she ignored it. Now, after a quick look down, she clutched the coat together more securely over her breasts.

‘What do you want?’ she yelled, losing patience.

‘I want to see the lady who owns this place,’ he said more sharply.

Now that he’d had time to reflect on more than that distracting cleavage, Nikolai’s amusement was abating abruptly. Where was Tatiana? Why did this gamine not mention her? Could it be that Pauli was right and his aunt had gone mad and signed over her home to some unknown waif off the street? Nikolai had been certain his grandfather was panicking unnecessarily. Now, for the first time, he wasn’t sure.

Lisa saw the suspicion darken his eyes. It made him look like a tiger, watchful and dangerous. It contrasted oddly with his beautifully cut City suit. Somehow it just made him seem all the more powerful. And who the hell wore suits on a Sunday, anyway?

Then she remembered: Rob had warned her that Sam would make sure the bank checked up on the suitability of her new address. Surely he had just been winding her up? Surely it couldn’t be true? But, with his suit and tie on a Sunday morning, what else did this man resemble but a banker at work? In fact, now she looked, she saw he even had a briefcase.

She said defiantly, ‘I live here. Lisa Romaine, as it no doubt says in your dossier. Do you want a signature, or will you now go away and leave me in peace?’

The tiger’s eyes narrowed to slits.

‘And what has happened to Madame Lepatkina?’

Whatever Lisa had expected it was not that. In the act of closing the door, she hesitated.

‘Tatiana?’ she said, bewildered. How did her employers know about Tatiana?

‘Well, at least you admit she exists,’ the man said grimly.

He shouldered his way past her into the hall and shut the door behind him. In the narrow hall he seemed even taller. She wished she were wearing heels. Or shoes. Or anything. She huddled the coat round her.

Nikolai saw her sudden uncertainty and pressed home his advantage.

‘Now, let’s start again. Where is Tatiana?’

Lisa shrugged. Then remembered and grabbed the coat tight again.

‘I haven’t a clue. Why didn’t you try knocking?’

He was disconcerted. ‘There is only one bell,’ he said, after a tiny pause.

‘I know,’ she said nastily. ‘Mine. If you want to talk to Tatiana you use the knocker. Big black thing? Gargoyle’s face? You can’t miss it.’

She made to open the door on him again, but one look at him barring the way changed her mind. In spite of the suit he gave the impression of being solidly muscled. She frowned, swung round and thumped on Tatiana’s door. There was no answer.

Lisa looked at her big Mickey Mouse watch. ‘I suppose she might have gone shopping,’ she said uncertainly.

‘On a Sunday?’

She looked at him with dislike. ‘This is cosmopolitan Notting Hill. You can shop any day you like.’

‘And any time you like as well,’ he pointed out. ‘So why would Tatiana go shopping at the exact hour she knew I was coming to see her?’

Lisa seized the opportunity to look him up and down, in just the same way as he had done.

‘You might just have answered your own question,’ she drawled with deliberate insolence.

He was clearly disconcerted. Not used to people being less than delighted to see him. Lisa thought sourly. The thought rang a faint bell in her head.

She didn’t have time to pursue it. The man was knocking at the door to Tatiana’s part of the house. There was no answer. He looked back at Lisa, all the way down that haughty nose.

‘Do you have a key to Tatiana’s place?’

‘No,’ said Lisa.

His mouth tightened. He looked very determined. The inner bell rang louder.

She said grudgingly, ‘I could go up through the garden and see if she’s there.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, that’s an idea. All right.’

“‘Thank you very much, Miss Romaine”,’ Lisa muttered.

He did not appear to hear.

Lisa thumped her way bad-temperedly down the stairs. She was sure nothing had happened to Tatiana. She had met her in the hall last night, off to attend a ballet recital, looking stupendously glamorous and about half her age. She had probably just gone out to avoid this pestilential stranger. What was more, Lisa didn’t blame her.

She turned round to shout as much up to him, and found he was close on her heels.

‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, swaying backwards in shock.

He caught the lapels of her coat and steadied her.

And that was another shock. The backs of his fingers brushed against the softness of her upper breasts. It was only a touch, but it felt as if he had branded her. Lisa heard her own intake of breath. In the narrow space of the staircase it sounded as loud as a warning siren.

‘Whoa,’ she said, shaken.

Nikolai was shaken too. But his control was better than hers. And his recovery time was not affected by a series of late nights.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, his expression enigmatic.

‘You startled me,’ she muttered. ‘I didn’t expect you to come with me.’

‘I could hardly leave you to climb into Tatiana’s on your own.’

‘Climb in?’ said Lisa, startled.

‘If necessary.’

She glared at him for a frustrated moment. Then shrugged and led the way downstairs.

Her small kitchen diner stretched the width of the house. Tall French windows gave on to the garden. Lisa waved a hand at them.

‘Help yourself. Security key’s on the table. I’ll get some clothes on.’

He acknowledged that with the merest flicker of the opaque brown eyes. But Lisa could sense his amusement as if he had laughed out loud. Suddenly she realised what it must be like to blush. She whisked into her bedroom and closed the door between them with a decisive bang.

She returned in three minutes, in grubby jeans and a cropped shirt. She had stuffed her feet into deck shoes and tied a scarf round her hair, but she hadn’t done anything about the ravages of last night’s make-up. To tell the truth, Lisa had forgotten it. But to the man awaiting her it looked like a deliberate statement that she didn’t care how he saw her.

Once again he felt that unexpected, unwanted kick of interest. Crazy, he told himself.

‘Well?’ said Lisa.

He had opened her French windows. An ironwork spiral staircase went up from the garden to Tatiana’s balcony. There was a tray of seedlings and a watering can on the stair. He indicated them with a gesture.

‘Well, if she’s in the garden, of course she didn’t hear us,’ said Lisa, disgusted. She thought about what she had just said. She didn’t like the way she had coupled them together like that. ‘You,’ she corrected herself. ‘Of course she didn’t hear you.’ She raised her voice to the volume that could cut through the buzz of a hundred-man dealing room. ‘Tatiana! Where are you?’

Nikolai winced. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to go and look? It is Sunday morning, after all. Some people are probably still sleeping. Or—’

Or in bed making love. He did not say it. But Lisa’s eyes flew to his in shocked and instant comprehension.

And this time she did blush. She couldn’t help it. Disbelieving, she pressed her hands to her face and felt the heat there. She could never remember blushing in her life before.

And the man laughed. He looked her up and down with those cat’s eyes, suddenly lazily appreciative, and he laughed.

‘Oh, find her yourself,’ snarled Lisa.

She whipped back into her flat and banged the door.

CHAPTER TWO

NIKOLAI cornered his aunt under a silver birch and came swiftly to the point.

‘Who is she?’

Tatiana looked at her great-nephew in surprise. Nikolai could be very irritating. But he was usually much too laid-back to lose his temper in her experience. Now he was looking positively grim.

‘You sound just like your Uncle Dmitri. In fact in that ridiculous suit you even look like him.’

They both knew it was not a compliment. Dmitri Ivanov was a merchant banker in New York. Tatiana thought Dmitri was a pompous ass and frequently said so at family reunions.

Nikolai waved the irrelevance aside impatiently.

‘Who is she?’

Tatiana sighed and put down her trowel. She had been enjoying her gardening. ‘Who is who?’

‘The fierce person in the basement.’

In the middle of stripping off her gloves, Tatiana stopped, arrested. ‘Lisa? My tenant Lisa? She’s not fierce.’

Nikolai grimaced. ‘She is if you get her out of bed before she’s ready,’ he said with feeling. ‘She nearly bit my head off.’