CHAPTER THREE
THE ROOM WAS SPINNING. Bright lights flashed in front of her eyes, forming colourful patterns as if she were looking through the lens of a kaleidoscope. Elin blinked and found she was staring up at the chandelier in the drawing room. She had never noticed before how the crystal prisms sparkled like diamonds.
‘Can I get you another drink?’ A voice sounded over the pounding beat of rock music. She felt disorientated and strangely disembodied, as if she were floating and looking down at herself. She tried to focus on the guy who had spoken to her, and vaguely recognised he was one of Virginia’s friends who had been at the nightclub earlier in the evening. Elin didn’t know half the people who had come back to her family’s London residence in Kensington to continue her birthday celebrations.
‘You can’t be on your own tonight,’ Virginia had insisted when the nightclub where they’d planned to spend the evening had closed early. ‘You’ll only feel miserable, remembering your mother. I’ll put the word around that the party is carrying on back at your place.’
Elin hadn’t argued because Virginia was right; she couldn’t bear to be alone with the memories of her adoptive mother’s shocking death six months ago. She’d told Ralph she was spending her birthday with friends in Scotland, but freezing fog had caused travel disruption at Gatwick and her flight had been cancelled. The person she most wanted to spend her birthday with was her brother, but Jarek was in Japan on business for Saunderson’s Bank. His trip was unavoidable he’d said, but Elin had a feeling that Jarek was avoiding her because he blamed himself for Mama’s death.
‘Elin?’
She jerked her mind back to the guy—Tom, she thought he’d said was his name. He was standing too close and looking at her in a way that made her wish she hadn’t worn the daringly low-cut dress Virginia had persuaded her to buy. The dress was little more than a wisp of scarlet silk and chiffon and the shoestring shoulder straps meant she couldn’t wear a bra.
Tom plucked her empty glass out of her hand. ‘Do you want the same again?’
‘I’d better not. I think I’ve had too much to drink.’ This strange feeling must be because she was drunk. It was odd because usually alcohol made her sleepy but she felt wildly energetic and euphoric. The exhausting grief of the past months seemed distant, as if she were detached from her emotions. Maybe the answer was to drink herself into oblivion, the way her brother had done too often lately, Elin thought bleakly. For a split second, misery ripped through her. But she couldn’t cope with it tonight. She was desperate to forget for a few hours the image of her mother collapsed on the floor and lying so still. Too still.
‘What was in the last cocktail you made me?’ she asked Tom. ‘It tasted different from a usual Manhattan.’
He gave her an odd look. ‘I might have added a dash too much Angostura bitters.’ He slid his arm around her waist and Elin repressed a shudder when she felt his hot breath on her cheek. He was good-looking and she guessed a lot of women would find him attractive, but there was something about him that repelled her and she stiffened when he murmured, ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can be alone, baby.’
‘Actually, I would like another drink,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m really thirsty.’ It wasn’t a lie. She had a raging thirst, and for some reason her heart was beating unnaturally fast. She watched Tom push his way across the crowded room to the sideboard which was being used as a drinks bar and hurried away before he returned.
In the lounge, someone had rolled up the Wilton rug so that people could dance. The music was even louder in here and the heavy bass throbbed through Elin’s body. Someone grabbed her hand and started dancing with her. The pounding beat was irresistible and she shook back her long hair and danced like she’d never danced before, wild and abandoned. Laughter bubbled up inside her. It was a long time since she’d laughed and it felt good.
Many times in the past months she’d tagged along to nightclubs with her brother so she could try to stop him drinking too much. She’d learned that the best way to distract the paparazzi’s attention away from Jarek was to grab the limelight herself, and so she’d thrown herself into partying and made sure it was her the press photographed falling out of a club in the early hours rather than her brother.
The tabloids had dubbed her an It Girl and said she was a spoiled socialite. She had been accused by some of the media of bringing shame to Lord Saunderson and to the memory of his wife.
What a way to repay the philanthropic couple who adopted Elin from an orphanage in war-torn Bosnia when she was four years old and gave her and her older brother a privileged upbringing!
That was what one journalist had written. Elin didn’t care what the tabloids said about her as long as Jarek’s name stayed out of the headlines and he did not earn even more of Ralph’s disapproval.
But tonight she wasn’t pretending to be having fun. Tonight she felt super-confident and carefree and if it was because she’d had too much alcohol, so what? It was her twenty-fifth birthday and she could do what she liked on her birthday. And so she carried on dancing and laughing because she was scared that if she stopped she would plunge back into that dark place of heartache and grief that had consumed her for six long months.
She had no shortage of dance partners. Men crowded around her and she flirted with them because for this one night she was a siren wearing a sexy red dress. At midnight Virginia brought out a cake covered with candles. ‘Don’t forget to make a wish,’ she reminded Elin.
A birthday wish was supposed to come true if you blew out all your candles with one breath. But a million wishes could not bring Mama back. Elin looked around at the party guests. Some were friends she’d known since her childhood after her adoptive parents had brought her to England. Others she’d never met before, but she
