other men want what he has. Besides, his driving passion is politics. He tolerates her lapses and she tolerates his ambitions. It seems to work fine for them. More than fine—they are not a couple I would want to come between.”
“Perhaps. It still seems a little sad.”
“Why? Don’t tell me the scandal of two continents believes in fidelity,” he said with a mocking twist of his mouth. Why had I never noticed how thin his lips could go?
“Three continents, actually. You forgot about that time in Buenos Aires. And yes, I do believe in fidelity. Not to you, of course,” I added with a malicious smile. “But I have always been faithful to my husbands until they either died on me or the marriage broke down. I have never deceived a man I promised to love until death.”
He said nothing for a minute. He was too busy painting furiously. Then he peered around the canvas. “I had a letter from my sister. She said the Paris gossip mills were working overtime when your Russian prince died. Word is you might have had a hand in it. Did you?”
“No,” I said slowly. “But he asked me to. He gave me his revolver. It belonged to the last tsar of Russia, you know. It was a beautiful little piece, but lethal enough. I just couldn’t pull the trigger. A better wife would have done it.” I thought of Ryder’s choice under the same circumstances. It was strange that we had something like that in common. It made a bond between us even though we had answered the call quite differently. He was stronger than I was. Or maybe he had just loved his father more than I had loved Misha. You had to love someone completely to be willing to destroy them.
The paintbrush clattered to the floor. “Jesus Christ.”
I took a deep drag off my cigarette. “Well, you did ask,” I said evenly. “That was the last time I saw him. I put the gun to his head and my hand was shaking. And I thought of how many times I had stroked that hair and brushed it and clutched it as I screamed his name. And I couldn’t make myself squeeze the trigger. I walked out and left him there, knowing he wanted to die and that I didn’t love him quite enough to help him do it.”
He didn’t attempt to retrieve his brush. He just stood there and stared at me as I talked.
“Why did he want you to do that? Was he that upset about the divorce?”
I laughed, but it didn’t sound like a laugh. It sounded like a sob, something dry and brittle rattling between the bones. “I’ve never broken any man’s heart badly enough to kill him, Kit. He had cancer, the painful, sly kind, wedged down deep in his bones. There was nothing the doctors could do. He wanted to go out on his own terms before things got worse. He had been shooting himself with morphine, but it had gotten so bad that it was barely knocking the edge off the pain. It was time.”
“What happened after you left?”
I shrugged. “Misha found the courage I had misplaced. He put the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger and ruined a yard of expensive wallpaper at the Ritz. They billed me for it, the bastards.”
Kit put down his palette and walked slowly to the bed. “I don’t even know how you live with a story like that.”
“Easy. Like every bad thing that’s ever happened to me, I lock it up and don’t think about it. And once in a while someone asks, and I take my pain out and pass it around for other people to look at. It’s like a glass eye or a wooden leg. It shocks them and it gives me a gruesome little thrill to inflict it on the unsuspecting.”
He shook his head. “You have always been dazzling—the life of every party, the glamour girl who dances until dawn.”
“Well, I am. But I’m dancing on broken glass. I’m Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, Kit. A frothy, expensive, mice-eaten confection. I’m the Sphinx’s nose, the fallen Colossus. I’m a beautiful ruin, and it’s time that has done the deed.”
To my astonishment, he reached out and held me then, and after a moment I let him.
He put a finger to the black ribbon at my wrist. “I’ve always wondered what you’re hiding. Makes you even more mysterious, you know.”
“What do you think is under