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The man who was supposed to be steeping himself in the mysteries of Russian politics was sitting calmly in an Auckland café laughing and sipping drinks with an elegant male companion who looked as if he had just stepped from the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly. He was back in Auckland and hadn’t bothered to let her know!
Anne didn’t stop to think. She slammed open the door and marched over to their table. Hunter and his guest looked up in surprise as she opened her mouth and let fly.
During her few days at Golden Bay, Dmitri had given Anne some personal coaching in Russian conversation, recording some tapes which she had brought back with her and humorously complying with her request to teach her some pithy nautical phrases and insulting slang, some of which he had refused to give her literal translations for, claiming it was too obscene. She used them all now, with great relish, telling Hunter exactly what she thought of his worthless character and criminal antecedents and finally, wildly, accusing him of planning the whole trip to Russia for the sole purpose of punishing her for daring to get too close.
When she paused for her first breath Hunter, who had folded his arms and bowed his arrogant head with every indication of penitent shame, raised mocking eyes and said blandly, in crisp English, ‘It’s wonderful to see you too, Anne. I’d like you to meet my very good friend of many years, Alexei Danilov. Alexei is a professor of English at Moscow University. We arrived on the same flight together this morning and I offered to help settle him into his hotel before we parted ways. It’s his first time in New Zealand and first impressions are so important, don’t you think? Alexei, this is the lady I’ve been boring you about.’
‘Oh, no!’ Anne sank down into the empty chair that Hunter coolly thrust out with his ox-blood shoe and covered her mortified face with her hands. And she had thought she was being so clever, spitting out her temper at Hunter in a language she thought only the two of them would understand!’
‘Delighted to meet you, Anne,’ said the suave stranger in a voice that held a low quiver. ‘And may I say that you’re a great deal more accomplished in my language than my friend here has led me to believe.’
‘Unless I miss my guess, she’s been consorting with sailors…or at least, one sailor in particular,’ Hunter said slyly. ‘Dmitri is such a wonderful fund of information, isn’t he, Anne?’
She refused to lift her face from its grateful hiding place. ‘You’re not supposed to be here—what are you doing here?’ she said into her cupped hands. ‘You’re away for another six weeks.’
‘I reassessed my priorities more quickly than I expected.’ His wry reply gained him the reaction he sought. She peeped hopefully at him through her fingers and he pounced. ‘Invented any good fiction lately? Anne considers herself something of a budding author, Alexei…’
His sarcasm made her burn and Anne’s hands crashed to the table, making cutlery and crockery jump. ‘No, I don’t! You know damned well it was Katlin, not me, who won that grant. I can’t write for peanuts!’
‘Mmm, your skills are definitely more in the verbal line,’ agreed Hunter silkily. ‘You’re a fierce little liar when your protective instincts have been aroused.’
She should have been furious with him but, looking into those deep black eyes, she was suddenl
y over-whelmed with love. His hair was a little longer and his skin a shade darker than when she had last seen him, but otherwise he was very much the lover of her fevered dreams.
‘How long have you known?’
‘About your pretending to be Katlin? For certain, only a few days before I left, when I saw Dmitri’s humanitarian grounds documentation—I used it in Moscow to circumvent the system and get certified copies of his educational and medical records from sympathetic records clerks. But I’d already had a hunch there was something strange about you and that book. You seemed far too blasé about your first novel. You just didn’t seem to have a real writer’s temperament…’
‘You mean selfish and cynical and sullen and suspicious and always believing the worst of people?’
‘You certainly thought the worst of me. Did you think I made a habit of seducing innocent virgins and then throwing them to the wolves? Damn it, Anne—you gave all your loyalty to your family, even to Dmitri who was a complete stranger—and none of it to me! You can’t blame me for storming off in a snit.’
Anne tried not to notice Alexei’s amused interest. ‘Yes, well…you acted pretty callously sometimes. You were always pushing me away. And how could you not tell me you were going away for two months!’
‘I was too busy whistling in the dark. I was afraid that my judgement was becoming impaired by the intensity of my feelings—as it had been when I met Deborah—so I proved that it wasn’t by functioning in that part of my life in which you weren’t already involved as if you didn’t exist.
‘But you do exist, and all I proved was my folly in believing that I could control passion and love in the same way that I controlled fear and bad memories—by ignoring them.’
‘But in that letter—’
‘Oh, I believed everything that I wrote…at the time,’ he added the self-derisive qualifier. ‘Especially the bit about self-sacrifice. All those years you cared for your mother and family you dreamed those secret dreams of travel and adventure and a challenging international career. You’d earned the right to those dreams, Anne, the hard way. I had no right even to think of asking you to put them aside again, perhaps forever, in favour of my idea of paradise—a home and children, and equal partnership—the kind of ties that bind forever. I had one relationship which was destroyed by conflicting careers and broken dreams, I didn’t think I could face another…’
‘Oh, and I thought the letter was being sarcastic about my dreams of being an author,’ Anne blurted out in relief, a star-burst of happiness forming in her breast. She shrugged happily. ‘That roving translator thing…it’s not set in concrete, you know. It’s only one of so many wonderful possibilities. Who knows what I might turn out to be best at by the time I graduate? Whether I might rather teach, or start my own language school…And people do travel with children, you know. Nowhere does it say that babies have to be chained forever to their birthplace—travel is very broadening for the young mind…’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You’re doing it already. Don’t be so bloody accommodating—’
‘I can if I want to, that’s what freedom of choice is all about,’ she said tartly. He loved her, and she was going to make him admit it if she had to arm-wrestle him to the floor. ‘I can be as accommodating as I like and no one can stop me!’
‘Least of all me. Yes, I finally managed to work that out. But I was so caught up with my noble act of self-sacrifice that it took me a few miserable weeks to realise that I was doing exactly what I had walked away to stop myself from doing—denying you your right to choose freely your own destiny. For better or worse. So, Anne…’
He paused and looked around the crowded, noisy café with a pained expression before he turned back, visibly composing himself.
‘Yes, Hunter?’ Anne asked innocently.
From the corner of her eye she saw Alexei, chin on hand, watching in amusement as his big, bullish, fearsomely confident friend toyed with a spoon, shifted the vase in the middle of the table left and then right again, and cleared his throat.
‘Alexei says that St Petersburg in springtime is a lovely place for a honeymoon.’
