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She crinkled her nose but she didn’t look away. Nor did she look disgusted. ‘I’m sorry. That must have been really hard,’ she said quietly.
Again his usual reticence to talk about his past deserted him. ‘It was. It was also cold. And scary.’ The words were out of his mouth before Lukas had time to check them and it made him a little uneasy. Not even Tomaso knew the intricate details of his early life. No one did.
‘Can I ask what happened to your parents?’
It was the softness of her tone and the unwavering compassion behind her gaze that undid him. ‘My mother left me on a train to Moscow.’
‘Oh, that’s terrible. She must have been heartbroken.’
It took Lukas a minute to realise that of course she would think it hadn’t been deliberate and he nearly laughed. ‘It was deliberate, Eleanore. She meant to—how do you say?—ditch me.’
‘But...’ Her brow furrowed as if such a concept was completely alien to her and perhaps it was. He was fast learning that far from being a shallow heiress she was a woman who felt things deeply. Which gave him pause although he couldn’t figure out why.
‘But...why?’
He realised he would have to finish the story even though he didn’t want to he gave her the brutal honesty of his early life. ‘My mother was a washed-up, drugged-out beauty queen and presumably my father was one of her many lovers. By the time I was five I was a liability she didn’t want. We were living in squalor anyway so finding myself on the street wasn’t that much of a stretch.’
‘Except you were alone on the streets!’
Yes, he’d been alone. He’d been alone for a long time now.
‘Before you morph into some kind of agony aunt,’ he drawled, ‘let me remind you that I am one of the wealthiest men in Russia. My mother did me a favour when she discarded me.’
Shock was etched into her wide hazel eyes. ‘But how did you survive?’
‘Like many of the thousands of other kids out there. You rob, you steal, you scrounge around in trash cans and sleep in train stations and drains. I was put into an orphanage at one point.’ But that had been even worse. Full of people who looked at him with a mixture of pity and wariness. He’d lasted only a few months until he’d hit the streets again in search of his mother. Like Eleanore, something inside of him had still believed back then that it had all been a terrible mistake. That his mother hadn’t meant to leave him alone and starving. He’d found out the truth soon enough.
‘My life wasn’t pretty but when I was sixteen Tomaso convinced his brother to give me a ride on his container ship. I didn’t know much back then in the way of books and schooling but I knew enough to recognise an opportunity when I saw it and the rest, as they say, is history.’
‘Survival of the fittest,’ she murmured, repeating his earlier words. ‘But what about the police? Couldn’t you go to them?’
His soft laugh was full of scorn. ‘The police aren’t too fond of street kids, Eleanore. They sometimes hit the hardest of all.’
God, her childhood had been a fairy tale compared to his, Eleanore thought. Yes, she’d felt ignored at times and often not as good as her sisters, but she’d always known she was loved. Deep down. And yes, things had changed after her mother had died; her father had become remote and married another woman but he hadn’t deserted her. He hadn’t packed her off on a train to fend for herself.
‘That’s why you’re building a school,’ she murmured half to herself, remembering a conversation she’d had with Petra earlier in the week.
She’d come across a brochure for the St Petersburg Street Kids Foundation with a lot of photos of Lukas posing with a bunch of kids. At the time she’d thought it was promotional jargon playing to his vanity. A sort of look at me—aren’t I a great guy? type thing.
Petra, of course, had waxed lyrical about how Lukas volunteered one morning a week when he was in St Petersburg and how he was currently trying to find a location to start a school that the kids could freely come and go from without recrimination. Somewhere they would feel safe, she had said.
Naturally she had assumed that Petra had exaggerated to make Lukas sound like a prince. Now she wondered if in fact he wasn’t one.
‘What do you know about it?’ he asked gruffly.
‘Only what Petra mentioned.’
‘That woman has been with me for far too long.’
‘So it’s true?’
