Ruthless Russian, Lost Innocence(32)

Vadim felt a violent surge of dislike for Ella’s father. ‘Did he know you were scared?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ella said grimly. ‘I would be hysterical with fear when he dragged me up there-that’s why he enjoyed doing it. Refined cruelty was his forte.’

It was obvious that Ella had feared her father as much as she had feared the ghosts she had believed roamed her childhood home, and some indefinable emotion tugged on Vadim’s heart as he imagined her as a terrified little girl. ‘Did he ever punish you physically?’ he asked harshly.

Ella gave a start as a thunderclap shook the room, and she glanced nervously out at the black starless sky that seemed to smother the garden beneath a heavy cloak. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘He never hit me, but sometimes my mother would have bruises… She always said she’d fallen, or banged into the door… But I knew it had been him. Fortunately he never stayed at the Hall for long. He only came back from his house in France when he was short of money and needed to sell off another family heirloom, and it was a huge relief when he went away again.’

‘But if your father treated your mother so badly, why did she remain married to him?’

It was a question Ella has asked herself countless times, and she had never come to terms with the only answer she’d ever been able to come up with. ‘I suppose she loved him,’ she said at last. ‘She once told me that she had fallen in love with him the moment they met, and I think that whatever he did, however many times he broke her heart with his infidelity and his indifference, she never stopped loving him.’ She shook her head. ‘My mother was such a sweet, gentle person. I don’t understand why my father didn’t love her the way she loved him,’ she cried angrily.

‘Maybe he couldn’t,’ Vadim said quietly. He stared unseeingly across the dark garden while the familiar demon, guilt, stirred from its slumber. Irina had been gentle, and her sweet, shy smile had been the first thing he had noticed about her each time he’d walked into the grocery store where she had worked. He had loved her, he assured himself, but the painful truth was that he hadn’t loved her enough. He had known he was the centre of her world, but, much as it shamed him to admit it, she hadn’t been his.

His business, the pursuit of wealth and success, had been his mistress. He had not been unfaithful to his wife, as Ella’s father had been to her mother, but could he really say he had been a better husband than Earl Stafford when he had not spent enough time with Irina and Klara?

‘The reason he didn’t love her was because he was selfish and only cared about his own interests,’ Ella said bitterly.

Her words echoed in Vadim’s head and his guilt choked him.#p#分页标题#e#

Ella shivered. ‘I never want to be like my mother and fall in love with someone so desperately that I lose my pride and self-worth. Loving my father didn’t make Mama happy, and ultimately I believe it destroyed her. No man is worth that,’ she stated fiercely.

As she spoke, lightning zig-zagged across the sky and the crash of accompanying thunder was so loud that she screamed and dropped the glass of water she had just picked up. It smashed on impact with the tiled floor, but as she jumped out of her chair and bent to collect the shards Vadim strode around the table and pulled her to her feet. The room was plunged into darkness as the wall-lamps went out; the candles continued to flicker bravely for a few seconds before a gust of wind whipped through the open doors and snuffed out the flames.

‘It must be a power cut. Wait there while I find a torch.’

He was back within seconds, shining the torchlight in front of him as he took Ella’s hand and guided her over the broken glass. ‘I’ll clear it up later, when the power’s restored.’

The storm was directly overhead now, and thunder boomed like pagan drums while the darkness was rent apart periodically by flashes of lightning. Vadim could feel the tremors running through Ella as he led her over to the French doors and turned her so that she was looking out over the garden. ‘The power of the elements is awesome, but you are safe from the storm here with me,’ he murmured, sliding his arms around her waist and drawing her close, so that her back was pressed up against his chest.

From the storm outside, perhaps, Ella thought shakily. But her instincts screamed that she was not safe from Vadim-or herself. The storm raging inside her was equally violent as the tumult in the skies above, and the pressure of Vadim’s hard thighs pushing against her bottom evoked a burning heat in her pelvis. She could feel the erratic beat of his heart, and it seemed to pulse through her own veins as the drumbeat of desire thudding through her built to a crescendo.