Roman shook his head when she asked if he wanted to accompany her, his focus zeroed in on the empty stage. If she’d had more presence of mind, if she hadn’t been so distracted by her own focus, she might have entreated him to explain, might have wondered what had happened to cast her husband in such a dark aura. But she hadn’t and as she went in search of Ivan she instead only felt the thrill of the chase, the hope and expectation that she would secure her and Célia’s first client.
* * *
‘Come on, darling.’
It was his mother’s voice, not Ella’s, that Roman heard when she returned to him.
‘Let’s go.’ Ella’s clipped words cut through the memories that had shrouded him the moment he’d remembered where she’d wanted to go that evening. As if his mind had worked against him, had purposely chosen to forget that they were to attend the ballet.
He frowned, his mind taking a moment to catch up with what Ella had just stated.
‘Go?’
‘Yes. I… I want to go.’
‘What happened with Ivan?’ he asked as he stood up and was practically hauled from the box, out into the hallway mid-performance and out to the waiting car that would take them to the helicopter he’d arranged to fly them back home.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Are you going to repeat everything I say?’ she asked, the bitterness on her tongue nothing compared to the glittering tears he could see gathering in the corners of her eyes.
‘But I’ve heard your pitch, it was faultless. He would have been mad to turn it down.’
‘It wasn’t a problem with the business plan,’ she said, her head turned away from him as they slipped into the limousine.
‘Then—’
‘You.’
‘What?’ he asked, outraged.
‘Ivan was deeply apologetic, but he simply wouldn’t do business with the wife of the Great Wolf,’ she concluded scathingly.
An almost savage fury roared within him—that he had been the cause of Ella’s upset—and then he truly appreciated the irony within that thought. His mind quickly veered away from that to action, to purpose. Roman was more than willing and capable of tangling with anyone who would want to mess with him, but his wife? Oh, no. That would not stand.
‘He will regret it,’ Roman forced darkly through his teeth.
‘Really? And what damage would that do to my business? You can’t bully and cajole clients into working with me.’
‘I will find someone for you,’ he declared.
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘I said no. I think you’ve done enough, don’t you?’
Every single other question, suggestion or attempt to broach the shield around his wife was met with a withdrawn silence that cut him as deeply as the thought that he had been responsible for her failure.
By the time they had returned to the estate and he had watched Ella, all poise and elegance, retreat to her room, Roman felt as if he were fit to burst. Sleep would be impossible as fury had lined his veins like detonating cord and he needed to move, to walk off this energy that was almost sparking from his fingers.
Restlessness like he’d never known before spurred him out onto the sloping garden that led towards the stream and the forest. The darkness of the night shrouded him in a heady combination of past memories and present concerns. That he’d been the cause of Ella’s failed business meeting ate at him, that the reputation he’d garnered in order to achieve his own ends with Vladimir had somehow directed Ella’s future had caught him by the throat and the ache that formed there lodged into a solid, painful thing.
* * *
Ella hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d tried, forcing herself to let go of the anger and frustration that had clouded her since being dismissed by Ivan. That it was not the business or the plan that he had objected to but the person she had married had infuriated her. Not for one moment had she placed the blame at Roman’s door—but as she lay in bed she realised that was quite possibly what he thought.
No, she was furious that, once again, she had not been seen or valued in her own right, but as an attachment to someone else. A way to lash back at Roman for some prior reckoning that he had nothing to do with.
Only now, as flashes of the night before burst through her mind, did Ella realise that something had been wrong with Roman long before her business meeting with Ivan. Something she had failed to see at the time. Because the dark aura that had surrounded him belonged to neither her fiancé nor the man she seemed to have married. It was something strange and new and something she now desperately wanted to confront.
But his bed was empty, his room, the entire house, save for Dorcas, curled up on her bed in the corner of the landing. She had raised her head briefly as Ella had moved about the empty rooms and, apparently deciding that this was the business of humans, had promptly gone back to sleep.
Returning to the landing, Ella took in the view of the sloping garden, the forests, the copper domed gazebo glinting in the moonlight and the silver thread of the freshwater lake winding across the bottom of the garden like a slash upon the horizon. Although Ella hadn’t seen a glimpse of him, she instinctively knew that he was out there. She ran back to her room and grabbed the first thing that came to hand—the red cloak—swept it around her shoulders and, with bare feet, slipped from the house and into the forest.
She found him sitting on the cold stone steps of the gazebo, staring out into the distance, where a strange fog had begun to roll in off the Pyrenees, creating an odd sense of foreboding. For a moment she held her breath,
