there for a moment and remember, and then she looked tenderly at all of them. “Merry Christmas, children. God's blessings on us all.” She took a sip of wine then and slowly stood up. “I will leave you now. I'm very tired.” Clayton saw that she could hardly walk as Zoya helped her to their room, and returned a few minutes later. Vladimir left shortly after that, with a last look of envy at Clayton. But he smiled at him. He was a lucky man to have Zoya look at him the way she did. She was so young and so alive and so pretty.
“Merry Christmas, Zoya.” His eyes were sad, still touched by the midnight service.
“Merry Christmas to you, Prince Vladimir.” He kissed her cheeks and hurried back down the stairs to his taxi. His daughter and her friend were waiting for him at home. And as the door closed, Zoya turned quietly to Clayton. It was all so bittersweet, the old and the new, the happy and the sad. The memories and the real … Konstantin, Nicolai … Vladimir … Feodor … Antoine … and now Clayton. … As she looked at him, she remembered them all, and her hair shone like gold in the light from the fire. He walked quietly to her and took her hands in his own, and without a word he took her in his arms and kissed her.
“Merry Christmas.” He said it in Russian, as he had heard again and again at St. Alexander Nevsky.
She repeated it back to him, and for a long quiet moment he stood and held her. He gently stroked her hair, and listened to the fire crackle as Sava slept beside them.
“I love you … Zoya …” He hadn't wanted to say it to her yet, he had wanted to be sure, and yet he was. He had known it since September when he left her.
“I love you too.” She whispered the words that were so easy to say to him. “Oh, Clayton … I love you …” But then what, there was the war, and eventually he would have to leave Paris and go back to New York. She wouldn't let herself think of it now. She just couldn't.
He pulled her gently onto the couch, and they sat holding hands, like two happy children. “I've worried about you so much. I wish I could have stayed here for all these months.” And now they only had four days, a tiny island of moments in a troubled sea that might drown them at any moment.
“I knew you'd come back.” She smiled. “At least I hoped so.” And she was more than ever grateful that she hadn't allowed her grandmother to force her to marry Antoine. If she had listened, she might have been married to him, or even Vladimir, by the time Clayton returned to see her.
“I tried to fight this, you know.” He sighed and stretched his long legs out on the ugly green rug. It had grown even more threadbare in the past months. Everything in the apartment looked dingy and old and shabby, except the beautiful girl at his side, with the green eyes and red hair, the sharply etched face like a perfect cameo, the face he had dreamed of for months, in spite of all the reasons he gave himself to forget her. “I'm too old for you, Zoya. You need someone young, to discover life with you, and make you happy.” But who was there? The son of some Russian prince, a boy who had as little as she did? The truth was that she needed someone to take care of her, and he wanted to be the one to do it.
“You make me happy, Clayton. Happier than I've ever been …” she smiled honestly, “in a long, long time anyway.” She turned to him with serious eyes, “I don't want anyone younger. It doesn't matter how old or young you are. It only matters what we feel. I wouldn't care if you were rich or poor, or a hundred years old, or ten. If you love someone, none of those things should matter.”
“But sometimes they do, little one.” He was older and wiser than she was. ‘This is a strange time, you have lost everything, and you're trapped here, in a war, in a strange land. We're both strangers here … but later, when things quiet down, you might look at me and ask yourself what am I doing with