But a man had to know his own limits. Dorian didn’t know if he could hide his emotions tonight, if he could act happy around Sabrina.
And if I can’t be happy around her, I have no right to be there. This is her moment, not mine.
‘Room service.’
A knock on the door brought him back to reality. The service at The Peninsula really was excellent. Dorian had only ordered the bourbon a couple of minutes ago and already someone was at his door.
‘Coming.’
Kicking off his shoes and dropping his crumpled jacket on the bed, he shuffled across the room. ‘That was quick. I …’
He caught his breath.
Leaning against the doorframe, her beautiful body curved like a Greek statue and her head tilted shyly to one side, Sabrina looked more perfect than she did in his dreams.
‘Can I come in?’
‘No.’
She frowned. ‘No? It was kind of a rhetorical question. Why not?’
‘Because,’ Dorian looked at his watch, ‘it’s only eleven fifteen. You should be at the Governor’s Ball, enjoying yourself.’
Sabrina shrugged. ‘So should you.’
Dorian shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. ‘I wasn’t in the party mood.’
‘Anyway, I did enjoy myself. You should have seen Chrissie’s face when Harry Greene stuck his tongue down Carey Esposito’s throat on the dance floor.’
‘No!’ Dorian gasped. ‘Really? Jeez. I feel bad for her.’
‘Why?’ Sabrina pushed past him into the bedroom. ‘She treated you like shit.’ But she hadn’t come here to talk about Chrissie Rasmirez. Kicking off her own shoes, she hitched up her dress and stepped out onto the balcony. Not knowing what else to do, Dorian followed her.
‘You know,’ said Sabrina wistfully. ‘When I saw Viorel’s empty chair tonight, I felt sad.’
‘I know,’ said Dorian, automatically. ‘I understand.’ But inside, his heart sank.
Oh God. She wants to talk about Hudson. She’s gonna start crying and telling me how she’ll never get over him, and I’ll have to stand here and listen and comfort her.
‘I felt sad because it was over.’
‘That’s normal, sweetheart,’ said Dorian. ‘These things take time.’
‘No.’ Sabrina spun around to face him. ‘You don’t understand. I felt sad because it was over, and I realized that what we had wasn’t love after all. It never had been.’ Unsure as to how to respond to this, or whether he’d even heard her correctly, Dorian said nothing. ‘Oh, it was obsession and need and a lot of other things,’ Sabrina went on. ‘Attraction, I guess. But it wasn’t love. Guess who I saw tonight?’
The abrupt change in subject threw Dorian off guard. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Tarik Tyler.’
‘Ooo.’ Dorian looked anxious. ‘How’d that go?’
‘Actually,’ said Sabrina, her sombre expression evaporating suddenly as she broke into a dazzling, full-faced smile, ‘it was very enlightening. He made me see something I should have seen a long time ago.’ Leaning forward, she put both hands on Dorian’s cheeks, gently cupping his face, and kissed him full on the lips.
Dorian tried not to respond, telling himself sternly all the reasons why he shouldn’t. Sabrina was drunk. She was confused about Viorel. She was high on the night’s events and not thinking clearly. Unfortunately, neither his lips nor his groin seemed to want to listen to reason. It was like telling the wave not to hit the shore or the moon not to rise. Pulling her so close, he kissed her back with such passion and force that Sabrina had to reach out for the balcony rail for support.
‘I love you,’ he said helplessly, when at last they broke for air.
‘That’s a coincidence,’ grinned Sabrina. ‘I love you too.’
Scooping her up into his arms, Dorian walked back into the bedroom, laying her down on the bed. Slowly, desperate to savour every second of the miracle, he pulled himself up on his elbows till his face was above hers. Peeling down the red silk of her dress, he pressed his lips to the smooth skin just above her breasts and closed his eyes, breathing in the scent of her, the glory and the magic. When he looked up, his eyes met hers, and he knew for certain that he would never, ever let her go again.
‘So, does the offer still stand?’ she whispered.
‘Offer? What offer?’
‘You know. The one you made at the hospital. The “till death do us part” one.’
Harry Greene was welcome to his little gold statuette. In fact, he was welcome to every Oscar and every box-office record in the world. Dorian had just won the only prize that mattered. ‘Oh yes,’ he told Sabrina softly. ‘That offer definitely still stands.’
Viorel stared out of the grimy taxi window at the bleak, frosted landscape and wondered how long he would be able to live here before topping himself.
A week? A month?
How the hell had Tish stuck it out here for six years?
His flight had landed in Budapest, Hungary, a few hours earlier and he had just crossed the border into Romania, chauffeured by a man with quite the worst body-odour problem Viorel had ever encountered, in a car whose windows, he soon discovered to his dismay, didn’t open. Nose pressed to the filthy glass, Vio tried to distract himself from the stench by focusing on the ‘scenery’.
Man, what a shit hole.
This was a far cry from the Romania of Dorian Rasmirez’s Schloss, the verdant paradise of the Carpathian Mountains, the romantic home of vampires and noble princes. The Bihor region was flat and desolate, its muddy, single-lane roads stretching ahead endlessly through a featureless landscape, punctuated only by dilapidated gypsy tenements, grandly termed ‘villages’ but actually little more than rancid slums. Every ten miles or so they passed lay-bys at the side of the road where lorry drivers could stop and rest. At each of these rest stops, prostitutes shivered in cheap faux-leather miniskirts, hoping to sell themselves to one of the truckers for a few leu, or in some cases a couple of shots of vodka. Alcoholism was everywhere here, in the ruddy faces of the indigent Roma men, in the bloated bodies of the women, in the birth defects of their hopelessly impoverished children who lined the streets like so much litter, unwanted, filthy and ignored.
I could have been one of those children
, thought Vio with a shudder.
I
was
one of those children.
As much as he resented her coldness as a mother, he was grateful to Martha Hudson for removing him, physically, from this nightmarish, hopeless place.
Now it was his turn to do the rescuing.
While the world speculated about the demise of his romance with Sabrina Leon and his motives for shunning the Oscars’ red carpet, the truth was that Viorel hadn’t given the Academy Awards a thought. Ever since he’d received Abel’s phone call, a week ago now, his mind, heart and soul had been here, in Romania. It had taken him seven days to get here – he had some urgent business to attend to in England first – but now, at last, he was here in body too. He knew what he had to do. But would he succeed? He thought about Tish, how stubborn she was, how infuriatingly self-righteous, how unwilling to listen to reason; he wasn’t sure.
‘How much longer?’ he asked the driver, pointing at his watch. He was answered with a shrug so lethargic it might not even have been a shrug. Moments later, a large herd of cows ambled onto the road, followed by an arthritic-looking herdsman in a smock who could have walked straight out of the Middle Ages.
Viorel sighed. It was going to be a long day.
Tish Crewe had also had a long day. First, the heating had packed up yet again at Curcubeu, and she’d been forced to empty the charity’s bank account to install a new boiler. Carl and the other foreign volunteers would be willing to forgo their salaries for a month or two to cover the cost, but the local Romanian workers needed their pay-cheques. As of today, Tish had no idea how she was going to pay them. Then she’d been called by Abel’s teacher and told to come and pick him up early. Apparently, he’d been appallingly badly behaved all morning, quite uncharacteristically for him, and had ended up destroying another child’s workbook and pouring ink into the loo cisterns.
‘It’s classic attention-seeking,’ said his teacher, ‘but I’m afraid we really can’t tolerate that sort of acting up at school. You’ll have to come and get him.’
Tish quizzed Abi in the car all the way home, but, again uncharacteristically, he decided to plead the fifth, remaining silent or monosyllabic for the entire twenty-minute journey. For a child who usually only drew breath once an hour, this was disconcerting.
When at last she made it home, Tish found a note from Lydia, Abel’s grumpy but indispensable nanny, announcing that she could no longer tolerate Tish’s erratic hours and had left; followed by an answerphone message from her mother, whom Tish had been trying and failing to reach all week, in which Vivianna said cheerfully that she had no idea where Jago was, nor did she have any details of the sale of Loxley Hall, but that she was relieved ‘poor JJ’ had sold ‘that depressing old pile’.
‘He needed a fresh start, darling. I’m sure you can understand that.’
As usual, Vivianna left no number.
‘Abi, what are you
doing
?’ Tish asked crossly. Abel’s dinosaur picture had strayed off the paper and indelible green ink was oozing all over the kitchen table. ‘What’s the matter with you today?’
‘Nothing.’ Abel smiled, glancing over at the door for the third time in as many minutes. He really was acting very strangely today. After all the playing up at school, Tish had expected to find him in an angry or sullen mood, but instead he seemed to be an odd mixture of happy and distracted.
‘Aren’t you feeling well?’
‘I’m feeling fine, Mummy.’
There was a knock on the door. Abel practically leaped out of his seat.
‘Are you expecting someone?’ Tish asked him.
Perhaps it was Lydia coming back with a change of heart?
‘You didn’t invite a friend over without telling Mummy, did you?’
‘Sort of,’ said Abel sheepishly.
Another knock.
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’
Suspiciously, Tish answered the door.
‘May I come in?’
Before Tish could answer, Abel ran across the kitchen and flung himself bodily into Viorel’s arms. ‘I knew it,’ he squealed delightedly, ‘I knew you’d come!’
In dark brown corduroy slacks and a thick fisherman’s sweater, with white snowflakes still melting into his oil-black hair, Viorel looked every bit as stomach-churningly sexy as Tish remembered. Before Tish had time to figure out whether he was real, or a figment of her overwrought imagination, Abel’s eager eyes lit on a gaudily wrapped package poking out from Viorel’s bag. ‘Is that for my mummy?’
‘Er …’ Viorel hesitated.
‘That’s
such
a good idea of you to bring her a present because she actually really does like presents, don’t you Mummy? But if you do her a card she only likes the home-made ones, not the ones people buy in a shop because those kind are a waste of money and if people waste money d’you know what my mum says?’
Viorel grinned. ‘What does she say?’
‘She says, “What a damn fool!” And damn is a swearword so that is actually extremely serious and you should never ever do it. Go on, give the present to her now so she can fall in love with you.’
It was hard to tell who flushed redder, Tish or Viorel.
‘Actually, mate, the present’s for you.’ Putting Abel down, Vio handed him the box. The boy ripped it open in seconds.
‘A dinosaur!’ he yelled joyously. ‘It’s remote-controlled!’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I LOVE it. Look Mum.’ He held it up proudly. ‘A electric, remote-controlled Acrocanthosaurus. I never had anything remote-controlled before that was extinct!’
‘Nor me,’ Tish smiled. ‘What do you say?’
Dropping the dinosaur, Abel hugged Viorel’s legs tightly. ‘Thank you.’ He breathed ecstatically. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, mate,’ said Vio, his voice sounding choked.
Instinctively, Tish winced. What had she done? She should never have allowed Abi to get so attached.
‘Now go and open the box in your bedroom,’ Viorel continued. ‘I need to talk to your mummy.’
‘OK,’ said Abel, adding in a stage whisper as he skipped off, ‘I hope you got her a present too. She’ll definitely like you more with a present.’
Once he’d gone, Tish and Viorel stood and stared at one another, like two actors with stage fright who’d forgotten their lines.
Tish broke the silence first.
‘He’s missed you.’
‘I’ve missed him,’ said Vio.
Tish looked pained. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
It wasn’t the response he’d been hoping for, but Vio figured it was as good a place to start as any.
‘Why not?’
‘Because!’ said Tish exasperatedly. ‘You
know
why.’
Vio cocked his head to one side. ‘Do I?’
Oh, God
, thought Tish helplessly.
Why does he have to be so attractive? It makes it so hard to think.
‘Yes,’ she said, sitting down on the sofa and gesturing for him to sit beside her. ‘You do. Because you coming in and out of his life when the mood suits you isn’t fair on him.’
‘I quite agree.’
‘You’re a movie star,’ Tish went on, ignoring his acquiescence. ‘You live in a totally different world from Abel and me. And of course it’s exciting when you show up out of the blue.’
‘Are you excited?’
Viorel’s deep blue eyes locked onto Tish’s. She felt her stomach turn to jelly.
‘I’m … I’m happy,’ she stammered. ‘Look, we’re talking about Abel, all right, not me. He needs stability, not to continually have his hopes raised and then dashed.’
‘As I said, I agree.’
‘Well stop saying “I agree”!’ said Tish crossly. ‘If you agree, then why on earth are you here?’
‘I’m here to rescue him,’ said Viorel.
Tish instantly bridled. ‘“Rescue him”? From what?’
‘From this,’ said Vio, looking around the freezing, ugly apartment. Above his head a brownish drip fell from a damp patch on the ceiling. Tish opened her mouth to protest, but Viorel cut her off. ‘Stop arguing with me for a minute, woman, and listen.’