“I guessed,” I said, pleased despite myself that I’d guessed correctly. “You assumed that Helen’s girl really was an orphan. It was something in your tone when you asked.”
He leaned back in his chair and regarded me. “I shall never attempt to hide anything from you,” he said. “There is no point. My parents died while on holiday without me in Turkey. The train they were on derailed in an accident. They were both killed instantly. I was seven.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. I meant it, but at the same time part of me eased and took a deep breath. He knew. He knew what it was like to be without parents, to fight and fight every day alone. Money didn’t matter here; anyone who has lost their parents, or never known them, knows that money doesn’t make it better. What matters is that horrible, yawning feeling of facing the world alone.
“It was terrible,” Alex agreed, keeping a close shutter on his expression. “And it was unexpected. They left enough money to see me raised and through Oxford, at least. And they left no plan of where I’d go, so I was passed from relative to relative for a time. I spent three years in Germany with my paternal grandparents.”
Yes, now that he said it I thought I could see German ancestry in him. “So you speak the language, then?”
“Fluently, and French as well. It’s my second home, Germany. But I came back to England for Oxford. And when I finished there, I traveled about for a time.” He smiled. “And now you see me, an aimless fellow with a great deal of education and not much to do.”
I looked at him, and the yearning in me was painful, like a sickness. The strong line of his wrist against the table, the careless glint of his wristwatch in the light, the line of his chin, the shadow of his Adam’s apple on his throat, the soft rise and fall of his chest beneath the white shirt—all of it had infected me like a plague. “I am glad I see you,” I managed.
He took one look at my eyes and pushed his chair back, fishing urgently in his pockets for money to pay the bill. “Let’s go.”
We walked for a time in the April night, our shoes splashing through thin puddles on the London streets, my gloved hand on the arm of his coat. I have no memory of what we talked about—serious things, things that made us laugh. He flirted outrageously with me, and I flirted back. He kissed me on a street corner somewhere, his hands in their leather gloves cradling my face, his lips warm on mine. It was a curious feeling—the leather so impersonal on my skin, as if I had a stranger’s hands on me. But his kiss was passionate, his intent unmistakable, and when I leaned into him, my own hands grasping for purchase on the front of his coat, he broke the kiss, hailed a taxi, and put me into it.
He had an apartment somewhere off Chalcot Road, near Regent’s Park, in a building that was respectable without being ostentatious. It was dark, tidy, nearly unused, with a front hall, a kitchen, a small parlor on the ground floor, and a flight of stairs leading upward. We toured none of it. By the time he got us through the door, I was dropping my coat and had started frantically unbuttoning my dress, and he was undressing nearly as fast. In the front hall, he kissed me until we were both panting. On the stairs, he debauched me. And in the bedroom—we barely made it past the doorway—he had me for the first time, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
We stopped bothering with niceties. Your body is made for mine, he said somewhere during that long, long night, and I could only clutch him harder and agree. I had never thought such a thing could be possible. But from the moment he’d walked past my desk, Alex Manders had entered my life and burned all of it down in a single night, as if with the flick of a match. And I gave in willingly and watched it go.
It wasn’t until much later that I thought to wonder why he had been in Casparov’s office that day and what exactly Casparov had thanked him for.
CHAPTER TEN
I behaved unconscionably, of course, that night with Alex. Unforgivably. Stupidly. All a girl had in life was her respectability, and I had thrown mine away.
I bathed as well as I could while Alex slept the next morning, and then I put my lavender wool dress back on and went to work at Casparov’s office. I had cleaned myself up, so I did not look exactly like I had just engaged in an illicit night of passion, but the dress was too fine for workaday wear. Helen barely looked at me, but Casparov noticed; he seemed to suspect that I was dressing to impress him, and when I sat down to start work he paid me an effusive compliment, badly translated from Russian. He did not touch me, for which I was glad. If he had touched me, I thought I might have screamed.
I kept my face impassive and sorted through the day’s pile of notes. Then, my mind scheming furiously behind my calm features, I began to type.