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He swiped at her nose before wrapping his legs around her and pulling her so she leant back against him.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You’re asking my permission?’ He was certain she was going to ask about his sterility. As if there was anything to be discussed. It was a fact of life—a fact of his life—something he’d long ago accepted. Just as he’d accepted it prevented him from having the future he’d always craved.
‘It was something you said before about you and your father building Plushenko’s between you. I always thought it was a really old firm, like Fabergé.’
‘That was clever marketing—we wanted people to believe that.’ He breathed in a sigh of relief as he realised it wasn’t the subject he’d thought she was going to broach. At that moment, wrapped around Emily, he was as close to peace as he’d ever been.
He couldn’t regret making love to her again. He would never regret it. For now, all he wanted was to hold onto it for a little longer.
As he inhaled, he captured the scent of her hair. Even with her swim in the pool and the spray of the waterfall he could still catch the faint scent of the light, fruity shampoo she favoured.
‘In a way, you can thank my leukaemia for the founding of Plushenko’s,’ he said. ‘I had to undergo five years of chemotherapy and steroids and a host of other medicines. To keep me alive cost money. The only way to afford it was for Andrei—the man I called Papa—to work all the hours he could. At the time he was earning minimal wages as a jewellery maker for a middle-of-the-road Russian jeweller. He started to produce his own bespoke pieces, working every spare hour in the workshop he built at the back of our house. Those pieces paid for my medications and, unwittingly, formed the basis of the company known today as Plushenko’s.’
‘He sounds like an amazing man.’
‘He was,’ Pascha agreed.
‘Do you think all the attention Andrei paid you, and all the hours he spent working to earn money for your treatment, made Marat jealous?’ she asked.
He breathed her in deeply. ‘I don’t remember Marat ever liking me.’ Knowing how much Marat loathed his very existence had done nothing to stop Pascha’s idolisation of him. For years he’d wanted nothing more than Marat’s acceptance. A part of him still longed for it.
‘Have you thought of trying again with him?’ she said. ‘I know you said you offered to buy Plushenko’s a number of years ago, but you were probably both feeling raw; it was so soon after your father had died. Maybe time has mellowed him.’
‘I can’t take the risk.’
‘Why not?’
Because if it blows up in my face I will lose the chance to save Andrei’s legacy. And if I lose that I will never be able to convince my mother how sorry I am.’
‘Are you still estranged from her too?’
He nodded. ‘I sought her out after Andrei’s funeral. I apologised for our estrangement. I told her about the island I’d bought in her name but she didn’t want to know.’ She’d rejected him, just like Pascha had rejected her.
‘Words aren’t always enough,’ she said softly. ‘It’s our actions that prove our love.’
‘Is that why you went out of your way, at your own risk and with a real possibility of arrest, to help your father?’ he said with more acid than he would have liked. ‘Is that why you’ve given up your home and sacrificed your job, so he has living proof of how much you love him?’
She froze in his arms. When she next spoke, her words were measured but had a definite catch to them. ‘The one thing I know with any certainty is that our time on this earth is limited. And you know it too.’
She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to.
They’d both lost people who’d meant the world to them.
But Emily’s situation was different and not just because she’d been secure in her mother’s love. Emily had never wounded someone she loved so badly that forgiveness was only an elusive dream. And, if she ever did wound someone she loved to that extent, she would be forgiven without having to prove her worth. Whatever darkness resided in her father’s head, he did love her. She wasn’t inherently unlovable. She didn’t have something missing like he did. The blood that ran through the Richardson clan’s veins tied them together, made them a part of each other.
He shared his mother’s blood but still she couldn’t forgive him.
With a start he realised it had been almost three years since he’d asked her forgiveness at Andrei’s funeral.
