smoothly than I could’ve anticipated. Especially given the time frame. I’m particularly surprised with how things are coming together in New York and London.”
“Pleasantly, I hope.”
“Very. Not only that, it appears that the press is deciding that you are changing, after all. Your commitment to me solidifying that you are indeed going in a new direction.”
“I gather they will be terribly disappointed when our engagement ends.”
“No, they won’t,” she said, lifting her glass. “They will be thrilled because they have something new to report on. Happiness gets stale after a while. They really don’t like that.”
“For someone whose past has been so alarmingly free of scandal, you seem to know the inner workings of the press quite well.”
“Because I pay attention, because I am aware that there are certain things I need to avoid. It has always been my aim and intention to keep my reputation as spotless as possible.” Which was true enough, cutting out the period in history where she hadn’t thought much of it at all. When she hadn’t thought about much of anything beyond herself.
“I imagine having grown up in the spotlight is a different experience to having come into it later.”
“Yes, I cultivated in awareness fairly early.” She had no illusions that she had escaped the iron fist of the press by mere luck. It was fortunate that her father had had no desire to uncover her, that Nathan, for all his sins, had simply wanted London Diva and not to humiliate her or crow about the methods by which he had won his victory.
Though sometimes she thought that the lack of crowing, the lack of open cruelty...the pity he’d looked at her with when she’d bared her body to him...was much worse than disdain.
She shook off the memories, the encroaching shame. None of it mattered now. That part of her didn’t matter.
“I confess that when I was thrust into the spotlight I had very little awareness for how the media could impact my life and what I wanted to do with it. In fact, until recently I hadn’t given it much thought, because it had never prevented me from achieving an aim. I’ve never cared what people thought of me, never minded that I was seen in a negative light based on how I had come into my fortune, based on the number of women that I’m seen with. Until now.”
“I suppose that has to do with several fundamental differences between the two of us.”
“Such as?”
She took a sip of her wine. “Well—” she set the glass back down on the table, smoothing the wrinkles of the cloth down around it “—for a start, I’m from a wealthy background. Second-generation money and all. I’m not exactly self-made.”
“And the other difference?”
“I’m a woman. So while your reputation might have always been bad, it was in that way people like men to be bad. It’s considered rather rakish and charming when you’re male, isn’t it?”
“Until you want to run a charity for children. Then you’re suddenly a monster of some kind not fit for polite society.”
“Oh no, once you get children involved they trump all. Think of the children.”
“You are quite cynical, Victoria. For someone who has had a life as charmed as yours.”
His words made her chest tighten. She ran her fingertips over her arm, feeling the moisture left behind by the heavy air. “I have had a privileged upbringing, I won’t deny that. But I also learned a very valuable lesson early on about human nature. Having my blinders ripped off so effectively made me look at things differently. It made me look at people and their motives differently. I have never been able to take people at face value, not since that happened.”
“And now I’m intrigued. What exactly did happen?”
Bugger. She thought about lying to him, and truly, she would be justified. Because it wasn’t his business, and it had nothing to do with their agreement. Nothing at all to do with their interaction, or her relationship—if you could call it that—with him. But she’d never been the type who lied well on her feet—she excelled in being blunt and straightforward, and putting people on the back foot with that method. Subterfuge wasn’t in her bag of tricks. Sadly.
“When I was sixteen my father introduced me to a friend. A business associate of his. He was incredibly handsome, in his early thirties and I developed a massive crush on him from the first moment I laid eyes on him.”
“This is not starting where I imagined it might,” he said, and she could see that the muscles in his body had started to tense.
Yes, well, if he thought it was going to be difficult for him to hear, he had no idea how difficult it would be for her to say.
“I don’t imagine it is. However, this is where it begins. I developed an instant attraction for him. It was nothing like I’d ever felt before. I had always felt like boys my age were rather silly and it had been easy to ignore them in favor of my studies. This was different.” She looked up and met Dmitri’s gaze, refusing to look down, refusing to look as ashamed as she felt. “Nathan was different. At least, I thought he was. I think he knew how I felt, too, immediately. I think, perhaps, I was terribly obvious. Either way, he found ways to get in touch with me. Excuses to drop by and discuss business with my father when my father wasn’t there. And over the course of that time we were able to talk quite a bit. I fell for him, hard. You can’t imagine how hard. I thought he loved me, and I certainly loved him. And when the line of questioning changed to my father’s business affairs I didn’t think anything of it, because he worked with my father on various projects and seemed to be his friend. And I trusted him. But I let slip some very crucial information about a new fashion line, and Nathan gave the information to a competing company. They stole our ideas out from under us, launched their products first and sent London Diva’s stocks into a spiral. From there, Nathan purchased the majority of the shares and ousted my father. Because of me. So you can see, it’s my responsibility to get it back. And you can see where I learned to start questioning the motives of others.”
She looked back up at Dmitri’s face. The expression there could only be described as murderous. He opened his mouth as though he was about to say something when the hotel staff returned with different plates of food. They waited while their entrées were placed in front of them, and she watched Dmitri as he watched the staff leave.
Then he turned back to face her, his dark eyes fierce. “Any man that age who takes advantage of a sixteen-year-old girl is no man.”
She huffed. “Oh, you get no argument from me, but the fact remains I was instrumental in the loss of my family business. Nathan acted badly, but I was a fool. It’s my responsibility to rectify that mistake. And I am doing so.”
“I don’t see how it’s your responsibility to atone for the sins of others.”
“Because I’m the only one who cares to atone for them. You don’t see Nathan hanging around groveling, offering to return London Diva to the Calder family.”
“Well, in part because he can’t. Because I bought it out from underneath him.”
Victoria couldn’t conceal the smirk that curved the right-hand corner of her mouth upward. “So you did. I knew I liked something about you.”
“It does not surprise me that you like the rather more cutthroat part of me.”
“It shouldn’t. I admire it because I had to change after I made that mistake. I knew I had to fix the way that I saw the world and the way that I acted within it. I had always been a good daughter, and I had never done anything wrong, but it didn’t matter because I made a mistake that cost my family greatly. I might as well have been rebellious for all of my life. A couple of piercings and tattoos would’ve been a lot less costly.”
Dmitri stretched his arm out across the table, pushing his white shirtsleeve up past his elbow, revealing the intricate tattoo