A Prize Beyond Jewels (13 page)

Rafe cared.

About the Archangel galleries.

About her...

And he loved his family deeply. And it was a love, after her conversation with Michael on Saturday evening, which she had no doubts his family returned.

The serious Michael had made a point of talking to her alone about his brother Rafe, casually at first, and then of how hard and diligently Rafe worked for the success of the galleries, of how they all owed much of the galleries’ continued success to Rafe’s ideas and innovations.

It was a caring part of Rafe that had already shone through bright and clear to Nina no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

Enough that she had already fallen in love with him.

A love that Rafe would never return.

She straightened her shoulders determinedly. ‘The only reason I’m here today is to show you my designs,’ she assured him coolly. ‘If you’re still interested in seeing them, that is?’

‘Nina, we can’t just sit down together and discuss your designs as if your conversation with your father on Saturday night had never happened.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she cut in icily.

‘Nina—’

‘Exactly what did he tell you about that conversation, Rafe?’ she prompted again, harshly. ‘How much of the truth, having known you for a week and me my whole lifetime, did he decide to confide in you?’

Rafe straightened, his tone soothing. ‘You have to calm down, Nina.’

‘No, Rafe, I really don’t. I don’t have to do anything, not any more.’ Her eyes had a reckless glow. ‘From now on I intend to do exactly as I damn well please. Now, do you want to see my designs or not?’

He winced at the aggression in her tone. ‘Of course I want to see your designs.’

‘Then could we do it now, please?’ She handed him the file. ‘I have business premises and an apartment to find this afternoon.’

‘You aren’t returning to your own apartment?’ He frowned.

Her jaw tightened. ‘No.’

Rafe was at a complete loss to know how to deal with this hard, unreachable Nina. He barely recognised her as the woman who had occupied most of his waking thoughts this past week—and quite a few of his sleeping ones too.

The woman he only had to look at to feel aroused. The woman who teased him and made him laugh. A woman of warmth and gentleness. A woman he had confided in. A woman so unlike any other that Rafe felt beguiled by her. The woman he knew he wanted to be with.

The same woman who was hurting so badly right now she was falling apart inside.

Because whatever Dmitri had told her on Saturday night it hurt her. Deeply.

Rafe didn’t know all the facts—no matter what Nina might think, Dmitri really hadn’t been willing to go quite so far as to confide in him—but Rafe knew enough to know that whatever secrets the other man had been keeping from Nina all these years it was breaking her apart.

If it hadn’t already broken her heart.

‘Nina—’

‘Please, Rafe.’ Her voice cracked emotionally. ‘If you care anything for me at all, then help me do this.’

If Rafe cared?

He had realised, during these past two days that he cared more for Nina, about Nina, than he ever had for any woman. Than he ever would again for any woman. ‘Nina...’

Both of them turned as the door to his office was suddenly thrown open without warning. Rafe groaned inwardly as the two burly bodyguards entered the room before parting to allow Dmitri Palitov to enter in his wheelchair.

One look at Nina’s white and accusing face, and Rafe knew that she believed he’d had something to do with her father’s unexpected arrival.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘D
ID
YOU
INSTRUCT
your assistant to inform my father if I came here?’ Nina looked at him with hurt accusation.

‘No.’

‘Rafe has absolutely nothing to do with my being here this morning, Nina.’ Dmitri spoke quietly, the two bodyguards once again instructed to wait out in the hallway, the door firmly closed behind them. ‘I’ve had both Rafe’s apartment and this gallery under observation since yesterday, on the off-chance that you might come to him.’

Rafe scowled darkly. ‘You have one hell of a nerve!’

Which wasn’t to say, despite the outrage Rafe felt now on Nina’s behalf, that he didn’t still feel a certain inner warmth in the knowledge that, whatever reason she claimed for being here today, Nina had come to him.

‘My apologies, Rafe. But it was necessary,’ the older man added.

‘In your opinion,’ Nina snapped, though she was relieved that Rafe hadn’t had anything to do with her father being here. She wasn’t sure she was strong enough to face another betrayal by one of the two men who meant so much to her.

Her father looked at her calmly. ‘Where have you been for the past two days, Nina?’

‘Right here at a hotel in New York.’

‘We checked all the hotels.’

‘I booked in under the name Nina Fraser,’ she said, feeling no sense of satisfaction as she saw the way her father flinched at hearing she had booked into the hotel using her mother’s maiden name.

She was hurt and angry with her father, yes, for the things he had kept from her, but Rafe was right, she wasn’t, and never could be, deliberately cruel to anyone, least of all her father. ‘You should have told me the truth about Mama from the beginning, Papa,’ she said softly.

A spasm of pain passed over his already strained features. ‘You were only five years old, and far too young to understand, let alone accept that truth.’

‘But later, you should have tried to explain it to me when I was older,’ she came back emotionally.

‘I thought of it, of course I did. But it was not pleasant,
maya doch
.’ Her father looked haggard. ‘Better, I decided, that you had the good memories of your mama and not the bad.’

Rafe had no idea what the two of them were talking about, but that didn’t prevent him from feeling as if he was intruding on something very personal to the two of them. ‘Perhaps you would like me to leave so the two of you can talk privately?’

‘No.’

‘No!’

Rafe nodded as both Palitovs spoke at the same time, Dmitri with resignation, Nina with an edge of desperation. And if Nina needed him to be here, then that was exactly where Rafe was going to be.

‘Let’s sit down, shall we, Nina?’ Rafe encouraged gently, sitting down beside her as she perched on the edge of the sofa.

Nina gave Rafe a quick glance as he lifted one of her trembling hands to lace his fingers with hers, a wave of gratitude sweeping over her at this tacit show of his support. Overwhelming love for him bubbled up, swelled to overflowing inside her, for the gentleness Rafe showed towards her.

Because Nina now knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she did love Rafe, that she was in love with him.

Which was why, much as she might have protested at the thought of Rafe leaving a few minutes ago, she now had to be fair to him and give him a chance to do exactly that.

‘I’m aware this is your office, Rafe, and I’m sorry for the way we’ve intruded.’ She spoke quietly. ‘But you really don’t have to be here to listen to this if you would rather not.’ She looked up, appealing to her father.

He understood her silent plea as he gave a slight nod before turning to the younger man. ‘You may prefer not to be here, Rafe.’

‘I want whatever Nina wants.’ Rafe’s expression gentled as he turned to look at her, once again noting the tension she was under, how the shadows seemed to have deepened in those deep green eyes. ‘I want to be here for you,’ he told her huskily. ‘If it’s what you want too?’

‘Yes, please,’ she breathed.

He nodded before turning back to Dmitri. ‘Then I’m staying right here,’ he told the older man firmly.

Nina’s fingers tightened about his in gratitude before she turned to look at her father with tear-wet eyes. ‘It was cruel of you to keep the truth about Mama from me all these years, Papa. Surely I had a right to know? A right to choose for myself?’

‘I did what I thought was best at the time.’ He sighed heavily. ‘And this conversation must be very confusing for Rafe,’ he added. ‘Which, as we are in his office, seems a little unfair.’

The tears were falling silently down Nina’s cheeks as she turned to Rafe. ‘It’s not too late, you can still leave.’

‘I’m staying,’ he stated grimly, wanting, needing, to know exactly what had reduced his Nina to this emotional state.

She drew in a deep breath. ‘Then you should know that nineteen years ago my mother was kidnapped.’ She nodded abruptly at Rafe’s harshly indrawn breath. ‘The kidnappers contacted my father immediately, demanding that he keep the police out of it, but that if he paid their ransom within one week my mother would be safely returned to us.’

Now Rafe understood the reason Dmitri Palitov had been, and still was, so protective of his daughter; his wife had been taken from him nineteen years ago, and he had no intention of the same thing ever happening with his young daughter.

Rafe felt a hard jolt in his chest just imagining how Dmitri must have suffered all those years ago. The pain and agony of having his wife taken from him followed by days of wondering if he would ever see her again.

Imagining how he himself would feel if it had been Nina!

The knuckles on Nina’s hands showed white as she held on tightly, painfully, to Rafe’s hand. ‘My father obeyed their instructions, paid the men their ransom, but—but—’

‘This is where our stories start to diverge,’ Dmitri put in softly, heavily, as Nina faltered. ‘At the time I told Nina nothing about the kidnapping, only that Anna had died. And then when Nina was ten years old I told her of the kidnapping, as a way of helping her to understand why I was so protective of her, but not— Until Saturday evening I was still not completely truthful about her mother’s fate.’

Rafe looked at the older man searchingly, eyes widening in shock as he read the truth in Dmitri’s agonised expression. ‘Anna didn’t die when Nina was five,’ he breathed, remembering how he hadn’t been able to find any record of Anna’s death when he did an Internet search on Dmitri Palitov.

Dmitri’s jaw tightened. ‘Anna died five years later, in the private nursing home I had been forced to place her in just days after she was returned to me. She is buried in the churchyard nearby. Her mind had gone, you see, so that she no longer knew me. She had retreated to a place neither I nor anyone else could reach her, for ever broken from what those animals did to her in the week they held her captive.’

‘Don’t, Papa!’ Nina choked emotionally, reaching out to him with her other hand, aware of the cracking of the ice that had encased her heart since she had learnt the truth two days ago.

That ice now broke wide open, shattered completely, before melting away as she saw the agony of that shocking past in her father’s pained green eyes.

It had been too much for Nina to take in on Saturday night, for her to be able to fully comprehend what his having kept that secret all these years had done to her father, emotionally. All she had heard then, all that had mattered, was that her mother had been alive for five years more after Nina had believed her to be dead.

But she realised, as she looked at her father now, how alone he must have been in his grieving for the wife who had never completely come back to him. Of the five years he had suffered, visiting Anna once a week at the nursing home where she had lived out the rest of her short life, so lost in the safety of the world she had created for herself that she hadn’t even known who Dmitri was, let alone that she had a young daughter who loved her too.

And Nina realised now that he had done that for her. So that she might grow up with only the happy memories of her mother.

‘It was wrong of me.’

‘Don’t put yourself through having to say it all again, Papa!’ Nina pleaded emotionally. ‘It isn’t. I was the one who was wrong on Saturday evening, for not understanding.’ She released Rafe’s hand so that she could stand up to go to her father, her arms moving about him protectively as the tears now trailed down his weathered cheeks.

‘I’m so sorry, Papa. So very sorry that I walked out on you on Saturday night. For putting you through yet more pain by disappearing for two days.’

‘I would forgive you anything,
maya doch
, you know that.’ He spoke gruffly. ‘Anything, as long as you are safe.’

Nina began to cry in earnest now, no longer able to shut out the thought of all the years her father had suffered, unable to share or express his grief for the wife who still lived but no longer had any knowledge of him or their young daughter.

‘There’s more, isn’t there?’

Nina kept her arms protectively about her father as she turned to look across at Rafe.

‘Not that this isn’t already enough.’ Rafe stood up abruptly, too restless to continue sitting any longer.

His hands were clenched at his sides as he resisted the impulse he had to take Nina in his own arms, knowing that this was a time of understanding, of healing, for Nina and Dmitri. A time when Rafe’s own emotions had to be kept firmly in check. Which wasn’t to say he didn’t feel them.

He gave a shake of his head. ‘I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am that this happened to all of you. It’s incomprehensible. Too huge to take in completely.’ He ran a hand through the shaggy thickness of his hair as he gave a shake of his head, wondering how Dmitri had ever managed to live with the pain.

Rafe had grown up in the security of the deep love his own parents had for each other, and he knew, without a doubt, without needing to ask, that his own father would have acted in exactly the same way Dmitri had in these same circumstances. That having lost his wife, Giorgio would have done everything in his considerable power to care for his wife, and ensure his three sons were protected from the truth.

Rafe also knew that Gabriel, so in love with Bryn, would tear the world apart looking for anyone who dared to hurt her.

Just as Rafe knew, if that had ever happened to him, that once the initial shock had receded he would be filled with that same rage. That he would want to find the men responsible, to destroy them, to tear them apart with his bare hands, for what they had done to the woman he loved, and to make sure they were never able to hurt another woman, to destroy another family in the way that they had.

He drew in a hissing breath. ‘Your car accident wasn’t an accident, was it?’

‘No,’ the older man confirmed as he drew himself up stiffly while retaining a tight hold of Nina’s hand. ‘It took time, but I hunted the three kidnappers down until I found them, and then I arranged to meet with them.’ He drew in a controlling breath. ‘It was my intention to kill them that night, at a secluded spot far from the city, to make them suffer, as my Anna had suffered—’ He broke off as Nina gave a pained cry. ‘I did not succeed,
maya doch
,’ he assured her huskily.

‘You didn’t?’ Nina gasped. ‘But all these years I’ve thought—believed— We never spoke of it openly, but I always assumed...?’

Dmitri gave a rueful shake of his head. ‘It would seem they had the same intention in regard to me. They did not wish to have anyone left alive who could identify them.’ His jaw tightened. ‘They rammed my car on the way to that meeting, attempted to drive my car off the road. Instead it was their own car which bore the brunt of the impact.’ His mouth tightened. ‘Two of the men were killed instantly, the third died a year later, as a result of the injuries he had received.’ Dmitri made the statement evenly, unemotionally, and with no apology for what he had intended.

As far as Rafe was concerned no apology was necessary. Dmitri had done what he felt he had to do. What most men would have done in the same situation.

What Rafe would have wanted to do given those same circumstances.

‘I think,’ Rafe spoke slowly, ‘that if I had known you then, Dmitri, young as I was, that I would have wanted to help you in your search for the kidnappers.’

Nina felt so grateful to Rafe at that moment, for not judging, for not condemning her father for what he had intended, that she could have kissed him!

She wanted to kiss him anyway. Had been longing, aching, to do exactly that since the moment she had entered his office half an hour earlier.

Just as she had longed to go to Rafe on Saturday night, despite the things her father had told her. She had needed Rafe then, had been desperate to feel his arms about her, to lose herself in their lovemaking rather than dwell on those lost years with her mother.

But she had known instinctively that it was the wrong thing to do.

Knew that if Rafe ever learned the details of the conversation she’d had with her father he would feel she had been using him that night, rather than what was true—that she had just ached to be with him, to be held by him that night. Because she loved him.

‘You are an impressive young man, Raphael D’Angelo.’ Dmitri spoke appreciatively.

Rafe raised dark brows. ‘I happen to think your daughter is the impressive one.’ He looked at Nina with open admiration. ‘All these years she’s secretly wondered if you killed those men that night, and yet she’s held her own counsel, never speaking of it to anyone.’

‘Yes.’ Dmitri’s pride glowed in his eyes for his daughter.

Nina winced. ‘Maybe if I’d spoken to my father about it before now I wouldn’t have been left secretly wondering. I feel so ashamed now, for thinking what I did, Papa. I’m sorry. I really believed—thought that...’

‘It was only fate that decreed it otherwise,
maya doch
,’ her father soothed gently. ‘I left our apartment that night with every intention of ridding the world of those three men.’

‘But you didn’t do it.’ She clasped her father’s hands tightly in hers as that truth finally sank in completely, Nina feeling as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. ‘You didn’t do it, Papa!’ And that weight lifted even higher as she realised what that knowledge meant to her own life, and the freedom, the choices it now gave her.