Author's Note: This story has a bit of build up and the sex may be a while in coming. Like all good things, I hope you find it worth waiting for. Enjoy.
*****
I ought to have been feeling cheerful, but I wasn't. The terrace of my suite in the Eden au Lac overlooked the lake in Zurich. In the distance, I could see the lights of the city and beyond that, the hazy outline of the Alps. It was the middle of December and the air was sharp and invigorating. The suite itself was luxurious, tastefully done, with soft lighting, elegant drapes and period furniture. I had just worked my way through a delicious meal - the Hotel's signature Hors d'oeuvres chaud and a Turbot au champagne, washed down with a wonderfully dry white wine of an obscenely ancient vintage.
The Michaelmas term had just drawn to a close in Balliol college at Oxford where I was reading the Classics and I was free for a month from the burden, actually rather a pleasant one, of being a student. I was headed the next day for St. Moritz, where my family owns a chalet, for a reprieve that I was eagerly awaiting.
I love the lake and the ring of mountains that surround the Engadine valley. The upper reaches of the mountains are covered in a blanket of snow in this season and the lower slopes are draped in stands of pine. And yet, for all of this, the breath left my lungs in a soulful sigh. My father always had that effect on me.
I had just received a call from him, which had been, true to character, brief and cryptic. He had hired a bodyguard to accompany me to St. Moritz and he was to remain with me for the entire season. Our conversations were always awkward and stilted and he had hung up even before I could ask him why on earth I needed a bodyguard in the first place. It was a mystery I couldn't fathom.
My father, Vladimir Lubyanov, is a man of many parts -- entrepreneur, takeover artist, commodities speculator and according to some, rogue at large. My father's family had been Russian aristocracy and had fled Russia during the revolution. Having had the foresight to stash a large part of their wealth in various Swiss banks, they had suffered less than others did during that tumultuous period. In my father's family, no heads had rolled and the dent in the family fortune, while substantial, had not been crippling.
My great grandfather had chosen England as the place the family would recoup and re-array their forces for a fresh assault on the portals of wealth. The operation had been immensely successful. Over the years, the family had acquired business interests in virtually every country in Western Europe. Some of the investments were so discreet and the web of cross holdings so convoluted that I doubted that even the family knew the true extent of their wealth. Unlike other Russian refugees of that period who were glad to have escaped alive and wanted nothing further to do with the motherland, my father's family had had the vision to cultivate their former contacts in the Soviet Union.
After the initial storm had spent itself, it was business as usual and my great grandfather, and my grandfather after him, had found ways of making money from the new Communist masters of the old country. So when the winds of change began to blow and the tide turned once again, my father was perfectly poised to take advantage of the political turmoil that ensued. As state property began to pass into private hands under the new dispensation, my father was there to help carve up the pie. A fortune that was already large multiplied several fold and began to assume proportions that were gargantuan. My father now found himself in control of a petrochemical giant whose tentacles stretched across Europe into Asia and the Middle East.
In all the empire building, my father had neglected a couple of things. One was me. I was happy to be ignored and can't claim to have missed him. The other was my mother. She regrettably couldn't say the same. She was old money, Scottish aristocracy, the sort of family that took pride of place in Burke's Landed Gentry. I think that's what drew my father to my mother in the first place. With the respect that dispossessed aristocracy always has for good breeding, my father placed much stock by the fact that the blood in my mother's veins clearly ran blue.
She was a fragile soul, given more to poetry and to painting the melancholy landscape of her country than to being the wife of a captain of industry. She spent her entire life in her family's manor house in the Northern highlands near Durness. It was a forbidding place, rock strewn and wind blown. The manor stood on the edge of a cliff, the foaming sea on one side and a ring of undulating hills, ghostly shapes lost in mist, on the other. The weather was not the most cheerful. It was cold and wet, the moss covered walls of the manor more often than not submerged in fog that had rolled in from the sea. The few trees that dotted the landscape struggled to stay upright, beaten into submission by the gale force winds that tore across the land. And yet the place had a magic all its own. It was almost unreal, trapped in a twilight zone where every shape assumed an ominous meaning.
The absence of sun and warmth bred sorrow and longing. For all his shortcomings, and there were many, my mother loved my father and she did not take to his long absences kindly. She moped about the corridors of that house, regarding the incessant rain with a doleful eye. While present in my life, she was yet absent and I had no choice but to get used to it. One winter night, while the wind rattled the windowpanes, she sat at the carved oaken desk that had belonged to her father and to his father before him and fired a bullet from the ancient revolver that had always hung in a glass case in the study through her brain. She died instantly. I discovered her slumped over the desk, her hair matted in blood, the stained glass window behind her shattered where the bullet had whistled out into the fog.
I never forgave my father for it though I don't think he was entirely to blame. My mother's was a delicate disposition and I don't think he could have ever been the husband that my mother wanted. And yet, I could not forgive him for not being there, for letting me find her body strewn across that desk, for that scream trapped in a ten year old's throat. I was already older than my years and when my mother died, I grew up in an even greater hurry. I resented my father for that too, for the loss of my childhood. But most of all, I think I resented him because I feared that I would become like him or even worse that I was already him. I took some consolation from the fact that while my name -- Ivan -- was unmistakably Russian, I was my mother's spitting image, with raven black hair and an aquiline nose that screamed Scottish.
For a brief space, I thought, she lives on through her son...
My reverie was interrupted by a discreet cough from the direction of the suite. It was the butler, elegant as usual, impeccably turned out ... this is one of those hotels where the valets are always better dressed than the guests. Well, I would presently have the answers to my questions, I thought. The figure beyond him was shadowy. The lights were not on in the room and I strained to make out the features of the bodyguard who had been assigned to protect my person and who was being shown by the valet into my presence.
When the figure finally passed through the door into the soft light of the terrace, I noted with some surprise that it was a woman. This was eccentric even by my father's prodigious standards. She walked up to the table where I was sitting and placed a thin folder on the lace tablecloth. When I looked at her enquiringly, she said briefly, "My credentials."
I flipped open the folder only to look at her name -- Elena Pemkova -- and then snapped it shut. I had no doubt that she would be qualified to do whatever it is that she did. That way, my father could be quite exacting. I wasn't surprised that he had picked a Russian. In the end, for anything important, he trusted only his own kind. That was true even for the string of women that he ran through after my mother's passing. They were the same body type -- tall, blonde, blue eyed and bigboned. I could barely tell one from the other. I wonder sometimes why he married my mother in the first place.
He makes a half hearted attempt to hide his dalliances from me for reasons that I haven't entirely understood, perhaps out of some sense of delicacy that is otherwise quite unlike him. But these things are, of course, hard to hide. We maintain a conspiracy of silence about his little flings and pretend during our occasional meetings that he is celibate. Just like his marriage with my mother, his relationship with me is also beginning to fill up with lies. I wondered idly if Elena was also a squeeze, one of his occasional diversions. I somehow thought not.
I had not offered her a chair. My manners were brawling with my sense of irritation at being imposed upon and the irritation was winning. If she had an opinion about my lack of grace, her expression didn't reveal it. Her face was calm and composed, the face of a person who had the rare blessing of certainty. Her eyes were clear blue, like slivers of arctic ice. She had high, sharp cheekbones, which were an interesting counterpoint to lips that were soft and pronounced. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was tall and rangy, her limbs loose and relaxed. Her hands were very still, the kind of hands that didn't need to fidget. She was dressed in a dark blue jacket over a white silk shirt paired with soft woolen trousers. An unmistakable bulge in her side revealed a shoulder holster. She was evidently packing. Her gaze was level and met mine without hesitation or dissembling.
"Despite what my father might think," I said, "I don't need a chaperone."
"I'm not a chaperone," she replied softly, "I'm a bodyguard. You already know that."
Her voice was deep, with a warmth that was in stark contrast to the severity of the rest of her. I caught myself thinking that perhaps the warmth was genuine and the severity was a pose.
"Whatever," I drawled, "But I don't see why I need either."
"I don't know very much, Mr. Lubyanov, but I was informed that your father recently acquired a company that owns a perfumery near Basel and laid off a couple of hundred workers."
That was more than I knew. But it did sound like my father, though perfumes were not our usual stomping ground.
"Nothing new," I replied, "There's always trouble in my father's empire. Sometimes, I believe he wouldn't sleep soundly if there wasn't."
I struggled to keep the sarcasm out of my voice and failed. She pretended not to notice.
"I believe there has been some unrest among the laid off workers. Your father fears there may be an attack on you. You are a soft target."
"I see. Why you?"
"You mean ... why a woman?" Since she had put it like that, I nodded.
"Don't be fooled, Mr. Lubyanov. I'm good at what I do. And your father thought that I would be less obvious." She hesitated before adding, "He thought that perhaps I would pass unremarked, being a woman, if I escorted you."
I was a little surprised that my father had thought it through quite so thoroughly. It was not exactly typical.
"I see," I said dryly.
I let her stand there for a while as I gloomily contemplated the reflection of the moon shimmering in the waters of the lake. After a while, she spoke.
"If you have no further need of me, may I be excused? In case you need to go out, please call me, regardless of the hour."
"I'll do no such thing," I said, in as firm a voice as I could muster.
She sighed heavily, the first hint of exasperation she had betrayed all evening.
"Then I have no choice but to wait outside your door the entire night. My orders were clear."
I can be difficult sometimes when provoked, but even I'm not that churlish. I suddenly felt very, very tired.
"Oh, alright," I said finally, "I'll call you if I need you. Get a good night's sleep."
