‘You’ll buy me a career, will you?’ She didn’t want to hear it, he turned everything on to its head. ‘You’ll give me everything and then leave me with...’ She was almost gagging, trying to hold back tears, because he was offering more and then he would leave.
‘I’m not your father, Alina.’
‘Don’t even go there.’ Her face twisted in suppressed rage. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep.’
‘Talk to me...’ Demyan urged. ‘Alina, please...’ He was locked in urgency; the whole of Sydney glittered behind her shoulders, and it was a view that almost soothed him. ‘Alina, I am trying to make the biggest decision—’
‘Get on your knees, Demyan.’ She hurled his crude words back at him, assumed he was talking about Nadia, and right now she would prefer torrid sex than confrontation, but he gave just a wry smile because on his knees he wanted to be...
...in proposal.
‘Talk,’ Demyan said. ‘Row if we must but I’m not the only one who has stuff to sort out, Alina.’
‘Then sort it,’ she said. ‘But, please, do it well away from me. She shook her head. He was just way, way too much for her. ‘I want my life back, Demyan.’
‘Alina...’
‘I mean it, Demyan. I want my life back. I want to go home.’
‘No, you don’t,’ He was sure of it. ‘Come on, Dorothy, click those heels...’
‘I don’t want your black brick road, Demyan.’ She didn’t, she wanted safe, she wanted this done, she wanted this over, so she could commence her healing now rather than later.
He would be gone, Alina knew.
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Very.’
‘I don’t nag.’
‘Beg,’ Alina corrected.
‘I don’t do that either.’
He wanted to call her back but stood there. For a small moment he had glimpsed a different world and he truly did not know if he was capable of it, this home filled with laughter and fat babies and telling Roman at the airport tomorrow that he always had a home here, in Sydney, with him and Alina...
He looked out of the windows at a view that had for a second again soothed him, but the magic was gone now.
Fool to think it could be different.
Alina was right: she was better away from him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HE NEITHER NAGGED nor begged.
Alina wanted him to, though, but it was all over by ten past nine on Monday.
‘Well done!’ Elizabeth said. ‘Demyan called and said how well you’d done and he’s forwarded a very glowing reference.’ Alina closed her eyes. ‘You’ll go places now, Alina.’
Places that she didn’t want to go, yet in his black way, with his glowing reference behind her, Demyan was pushing her towards her vision of safe, rather than towards being the woman she really wanted to be.