The Millionaire Affair

He marched off without waiting for a reply. Tatiana did not permit herself to smile until there was no chance of his turning round and seeing it. But as soon as he was out of sight she threw her gloves up in the air and gave a whoop of triumph.

‘Yes!’

Lisa heard the shout. By that time she had just about stopped dancing with rage. She had got to the point where she didn’t know if she was angrier with herself for being so stupid, or Tatiana’s visitor for being so arrogant.

Considering it, she realised that neither was the main course of her fury. It was the way he’d looked at her! Nobody looked at her like that. Nobody dared.

Angrily she stripped off her clothes and stamped into the bathroom. The floor-to-ceiling mirror showed her a slim figure, pale and shaking with temper—and a clown’s mask of smudged paint.

Lisa was taken aback. She leaned towards the mirror, fingering the mascara experimentally. It spread.

If that was what he’d seen, maybe there was some excuse for the way he’d looked at her. It couldn’t be often that the door was opened to a man like that by the Thing from the Black Lagoon. A brief laugh shook Lisa at the thought.

But then she took a firm grip of her anger again. Somehow she needed that anger; she didn’t know why. Nobody had a right to look another person up and down as if they were a thing, she assured herself. Even if they were looking a little strange at the time. If she ever saw him again—which of course she did not want to—she would tell him so.

She stepped into the steaming shower and prepared to put him out of her mind.

Ten minutes later she was still polishing the scathing things she would never now have the opportunity of saying to him and surveying her fridge blankly. One packet of carrots, going mouldy. One carton of milk, rancid. Two bottles of mineral water. She needed coffee and she hated it black. So—

A glance out of the French windows she had locked in the hateful man’s face told Lisa that it was raining. It looked cold, too. She really did not want to go out. But her stomach rumbled threateningly.

Quiet, she told it. Black coffee won’t hurt you for once. I’ll give the man time to go and then I’ll borrow some milk from Tatiana.

She sat down to wait. But the morning stretched into lunchtime, and there was no sound of the front door closing behind him. Lisa looked at the rain, now falling in a sheet.

‘Damn,’ she said.

She fetched an umbrella.

Nikolai was angry. He was sitting in his hired car, watching his aunt’s house like a private eye. It felt seedy and faintly ludicrous. He didn’t like either sensation.

Something else that was the fault of the downstairs tenant, he thought. On top of defying him, and then making him feel as if he was holding onto his control by the thinnest of threads! It was intolerable. It had to be put right. He had told Tatiana that he would deal with it. So he would.

He didn’t have to wait long. The front door opened and a figure huddled under an umbrella scurried out. She could not have looked more furtive if she was running away from the police, thought Nikolai. It filled him with an obscure triumph.

Lisa didn’t notice the man sitting in the Lexus across the road. She hurried along, head bent. The wind blew the rain in little swirls against which the umbrella was almost no use at all. In the end she put it in front of her like a battering ram, and, looking neither to right nor left, she pelted for the shop.

Nikolai put the car in gear and slid it smoothly out of its tight parking place. Lisa didn’t notice that either, deep in her absorption.

If only the horrible man hadn’t woken her up, she thought, she could still be fast asleep, without this need for milky coffee and a bun. And she wouldn’t be feeling the sting of having made a complete idiot of herself. And the weather made everything ten times worse.

She dived into the small supermarket and emerged with an unwieldy bag containing the Sunday papers, a litre of milk, a crusty baguette that she did not want but hadn’t been able to resist the smell of, and a pineapple—luxurious but low on calories. In fact the smell of new bread had cheered her up so much that it put a bounce in her step. She swung out of the door so energetically that she bumped into someone.

‘Oh, I’m sorry—’ she began, genuinely contrite. And then saw who it was.

Her smile died. ‘What are you doing here?’

Nikolai did not pretend. ‘Following you.’

‘Following—’ Even though it was what she’d suspected, Lisa was lost for words.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said, as if that was justification enough.

‘You’ve talked,’ Lisa said shortly.

Her carrier bag began to tip. Nikolai caught the wavering baguette.

‘Rather too aerodynamic, these things, aren’t they?’ he said pleasantly enough.

Then, to Lisa’s outraged astonishment, he broke the end of the crust off and ate it.

‘Not bad,’ he said, with the air of a connoisseur.

Lisa clutched her purchases to her breast before he could pillage any more.

‘And you’re an expert, I suppose?’ she said scathingly.

Nikolai gave her a wicked grin. ‘Pretty practised, yes.’

The grin was alarmingly attractive. It set off all sorts of warning bells in Lisa’s head. She didn’t want to be attracted to any man. In her experience it was a distraction at best, at worst a one way ticket to misery. And this man was arrogant and had already made her feel as much a fool as she had done in years.

So she hugged her lumpy package protectively and jerked her head in the direction of the shop’s interior.

‘Well, they’re on sale in there. Help yourself.’

She made to pass him. Nikolai did not move.

‘I told you. I want to talk to you.’

‘Great,’ said Lisa bristling. ‘Does it matter what I want?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. He didn’t sound in the least apologetic.

He hoisted the carrier out of her arms.

‘Come along. I have a car and we’re getting wet.’

Lisa stood stock-still. ‘Give me back my shopping,’ she said in a dangerously quiet voice.

‘Don’t be difficult,’ Nikolai said with odious patience.

Still quietly, Lisa said, ‘Then don’t challenge me.’

She held out her hand for the bag. He held onto it.

‘You have to admit you’d be more comfortable in my car. We’ll talk and then I’ll drive you home.’

Her expression was very steady. Too steady, her colleagues would have told him. Nikolai did not recognise the danger signals.