One Kiss in... Moscow: Kholodov's Last Mistress / The Man She Shouldn't Crave / Strangers When We Meet

She nodded, even though her insides felt leaden, weighed down with sorrow. ‘People change.’

‘Why did you change? What happened?’ He paused, his mouth twisting before resuming its familiar flat line. ‘Was it my fault?’

‘Your fault?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘No … although our—our evening together probably started it. I was so naive, I realise that now, and when I saw you with—with Varya—’

‘It wasn’t what it looked like.’

‘Really?’ Hannah raised her eyebrows, not understanding why Sergei felt the need to rewrite their history now. ‘You certainly went to some lengths to convince me it was just what it looked like then. I remember how insistent I was that you weren’t being truthful, that you—you—’

‘Were a better man than I thought?’ Sergei finished softly, and Hannah blinked.

‘Why are you bringing this all up now?’

‘Because you changed me, Hannah. In a different way than I changed you.’

‘It wasn’t all about you,’ Hannah said quickly. ‘All right, your—your rejection hurt. Obviously. But other things happened.’

‘Like what?’

She shrugged. ‘I came back to New York and I felt pretty low. I rushed into a relationship—and it wasn’t so great.’ She shrugged again, not wanting to tell him about Matthew, about the humiliation and heartache. How dirty and used it had all made her feel. By the darkening of his features she didn’t think Sergei wanted to hear. ‘And—and the shop had been struggling for so long,’ she continued, ‘and I really wanted to try to make a success of it, for my parents’ sake. But …’ She pressed her lips together, reluctant to reveal any more.

‘But?’ Sergei prompted softly.

‘I started going through their things—I’d been putting it off since my mom died, but I figured it was time—anyway,’ she continued hurriedly, wanting to get through it all, ‘I found out some things. They weren’t really honest with me.’ She folded her arms, stared at the floor. ‘I thought my mother was giving me a choice, to come back from college and help out, but I found some paperwork and I saw that she’d had me withdrawn even before she telephoned me. She’d already decided I wasn’t coming back for the second semester, but she pretended it was my decision.’ The realisation had felt like a betrayal, and it had made her angry. Uselessly so, for how could you stay angry with someone who was dead?

‘Maybe,’ Sergei said quietly, ‘she thought she was being kind. She wanted you to feel like you had more control—’

‘But it was a lie,’ Hannah cut him off. ‘And there were other things. Other lies. Credit card bills I didn’t know about until after her death. I thought she’d hidden them away because of her dementia and didn’t realise what she was doing. But they went back farther than I thought.’ She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘I think both my parents were hiding from me how badly the shop had been doing because they wanted me to take it on.’

‘Obviously it was important to them.’ ‘More important than me.’ She sighed. ‘I sound like a child having a tantrum, I know.’

‘It never feels good to have your illusions ripped away.’ ‘And that’s what they were,’ Hannah agreed. ‘Illusions.’ ‘Perhaps your parents were just trying to protect you.’ ‘Who’s the optimist now?’ Hannah shook her head. ‘No, they were trying to trap me. Trap me into staying and running their stupid little shop when they couldn’t any longer because it meant more to them than I ever did.’ The words tumbled out of her, savage and surprising. Until that moment she hadn’t realised she had them inside her. She felt her lips tremble, her body shake.

The words sounded so ugly, and yet she meant them. And she never would have said them or even thought them if that first evening with Sergei hadn’t started her thinking.

Doubting. Yet she could hardly blame him for her parents’ actions, or for the disaster of her relationship with Matthew, or her own blind naiveté.

‘Come here.’

‘What—?’

‘Come here,’ Sergei said again, gently, and then before she could move he came towards her, enfolding her in his arms. Hannah resisted at first, because Sergei had never hugged her before. Not as gently as this. An embrace of comfort, of compassion. Her throat closed up and her eyes welled yet again with tears and this time she did not blink them away. She let them slide down her face as she laid her cheek against Sergei’s shoulder and breathed in the scent of his aftershave, the scent that was just him. She wept for all the loss she had felt over the years: the loss of her parents, and the loss of herself, or at least the self she had been. Standing there in the circle of his arms, she felt both safe and cared for, and it made her realise she hadn’t felt like that in a long, long time.

‘It can’t have been easy,’ Sergei said after a moment, his hands stroking her back, ‘to have carried all that alone.’

‘I wasn’t completely alone,’ Hannah protested, her voice muffled against his shoulder. ‘I do have some friends, you know—’

‘But you didn’t want to burden them with your problems, because they had enough of their own.’

She thought of Ashley, still struggling to make a new life for herself in California, and Lisa, so anxious about her husband’s job situation. ‘Sort of, I suppose. How did you—?’

‘I know you,’ Sergei told her.

She didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, because the thought that Sergei knew her at all sent hope spinning dizzily through her once more and she was afraid of hope, afraid of the following disappointment. This was Sergei. Sergei Kholodov, the coldest, most cynical man she’d ever encountered. The man who was now holding her so gently.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sniffing and stepping away from him. He let her go. ‘I’ve probably ruined your jacket.’

‘Dry-cleaning does wonders.’

‘Right.’ She tried to smile, but it wobbled and threatened to slide right off her face. She didn’t know what to do with what she’d revealed, what Sergei now knew. She hadn’t meant to say all that; she’d been trying not even to think it for years.

Sergei sighed and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry you went through all this. If I hadn’t—’

‘Don’t blame yourself, Sergei,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Honestly, people have dealt with far worse. And it’s all part of growing up, isn’t it?’ She tried to inject a lightness into her voice, a lightness she didn’t feel. ‘And at least now I’m no longer annoyingly optimistic.’

‘Well, actually,’ he told her with a tiny smile, ‘your annoying optimism is what changed me. Made me hope—for better things. Believe that not all people are as selfish and disappointing as I thought they were.’

Hannah stared at him in disbelief. This she had not expected. ‘And did it work?’

His smile turned wry, maybe even sad. ‘I’m trying, Hannah.’

‘Trying to do what?’

‘To believe.’ He took a step towards her, closing the space she’d just created between them. ‘That’s why I was so angry tonight. I didn’t—I don’t want you just to be my mistress. I’ll admit that’s how I’ve treated women. Dolls to keep at a distance, to enjoy and even use and then—discard.’ Hannah flinched at the stark brutality of his words. He nodded in acknowledgement. ‘I know. It’s not pretty, is it?’

‘At least you’re admitting it now.’

‘But you’re different. At least, I’m different when I’m with you. I can be … when I let myself.’

He was speaking words she had, on some level, longed to hear, yet Hannah still stayed sceptical. Suspicious. Maybe she had become too cynical, or maybe she just wanted to protect herself. ‘So I’m the first woman you’ve met that you didn’t want to treat like a whore?’

Now Sergei flinched. ‘That’s not completely fair.’

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