The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [210]
Now, as he stepped into the elevator and was wafted slowly up to Missie’s hotel suite, he knew that this woman was the only person in the world who knew that he had taken Alexei. And if he was clever there would finally be a way to get Russia the money she wanted.
She was waiting for him beside a tray of silver jugs and china cups. Though she looked as calm as if she were about to preside over a ladies’ tea party, his experienced glance noted her dark eyes with the dilated pupils. She was afraid.
“So we meet again,” he said, speaking to her in Russian.
She shook her head. “It has been too many years since I spoke your language, Captain—General Solovsky.”
He sat opposite her in the expensive rose-pink and gilt room with its opulent swagged drapes and carved mirrors. “I think you will find my English has improved. It would not be easy to fool me a second time.”
“Nor would it be easy for you to fool me.”
Their glances met. “Then we are equal,” he said softly. “You have one Ivanoff child. I have the other.”
She said nothing, pouring tea with a steady hand, and he smiled. She was a fighter and he respected that.
She placed the cup in front of him, offering lemon and sugar. “Please, tell me about Alexei.”
“It seemed I had two choices as far as the boy,” he said abruptly. “I could have killed him and left him for the wolves along with the rest. Or I could take him with me, a prisoner of the new Russia. But there was a third option, a private one. I could reverse the roles and bring up the prince as a common man.”
He told her about his own upbringing in Siberia, about his meeting with Lenin, his klassnaya dama and his education and how he had dragged himself up by his peasant bootstraps via the army to become a man of importance in the new regime of the Socialist Republics.
“I already had a son,” he said, his deep voice booming through the pretty room, “and now I would have two.
“Sergei, as I called him, followed me around like a puppy. His gratitude was overwhelming, not for saving his life but for avenging his mother. He never spoke of his family and tried his best to fit into our simple life. My plan was working well—he was clever at sports as well as book learning. He quickly won a scholarship to a good school and left our home in Byelorussia to come and live with me in Moscow. It was years before I let him set foot in Leningrad—St. Petersburg as he had known it. I was afraid to trigger old memories and disturb our relationship.
“Sergei went on to Moscow University and then did his army training. He proved a capable officer and now, at twenty-seven, he is a dedicated Party member with his feet on the first rungs of the ladder to high political position. He never talks to me about the past. It is forgotten.”
He said calmly, “I am proud of the success of my experiment. And proud of my son Sergei. So you can imagine my surprise when tonight I stumbled over you and realized that I had found what Russia had been searching for for years. Except, of course, they never had any real proof that the Ivanoffs did escape. Only you and I know that. They searched the world for them and they have not given up that search. It is important to Russia that if the Ivanoifs are alive, they be found. And you know why.”
Gripping her hands tightly together to stop them trembling, Missie asked, “Are you going to tell them?”
It was the question that had been burning in her brain since she met him and he knew it. He smiled at her pleasantly. “May I have another cup of tea? It’s very cozy here by the fire. Almost like being back in a Russian dacha in the old days.”
He studied her face as she poured the tea. Her downcast eyes hid her expression, but he knew he had her exactly where he wanted her.
“You and I have done our duty by our ‘children, ’” he said. “Now our work for them is done. Ava and Sergei have found the kind of personal success they could never have dreamed of as the son and daughter of Prince Michael and Princess Anouska. Sergei is his own man.