Stiletto by Robbins Harold

Author:Robbins, Harold [Robbins, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780795341403
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

13

Her mother was English and only seventeen when she had married the dashing young Rumanian, Baron de Bronczki. The tabloids at the time had called it a storybook romance. Less than a year later Ileana had been born, there had been a revolution and the storybook was ended. Life has a way of dealing with romance.

Actually she never had much of a chance to know her parents while she was a child. She had a vague idea that her mother had been a very beautiful girl and her father a very handsome man, but she had spent most of her life in schools away from them.

First there had been that school in England. She had gone there when she was almost five years old when the war had begun. Her father had gone into the British Army and her mother was wrapped up in the wartime social frenzy and had no time for her.

Then when the war was over they had moved to Paris and she had been sent to a school in Switzerland. The excuse then was that her father, almost a cripple now from his wounds, would be too occupied with his struggle to regain his lands and former wealth to let them settle permanently in any one place. It never occurred to her to question her mother on her feelings about it. Her mother was always too busy with her friends and social activities. Besides there was something about her mother that made Ileana feel too awkward and out of place to dare speak with her.

Ileana was almost fourteen then and the school in Switzerland was different from the one in England. In England the emphasis had been on the academic, in Switzerland the emphasis was on the social. The school was filled with rich young ladies who had been sent from England and America to have superimposed on their youthful freshness a finishing polish that was available nowhere else in the world. Ileana learned to ski and swim and ride. She also learned how to dress and dance and make small talk.

When Ileana was sixteen, she had already begun to fulfill the promise of her beauty. Her complexion and eyes were English, her figure and grace came from her father. And right across the lake from her school was a similar school for young men. Close contact was kept between the two schools for they needed each other to complement their work.

There had been an outing that summer when she turned sixteen. Her partner had been a tall dark young man who was heir to some throne in the Middle East. He had a long name that no one could remember so they called him Ab, short for Abdul. He was a year older than she, and darkly aquiline, blue-eyed and handsome. Their canoe had taken them to a small island away from the others and now they lay, stretched out in their swimming suits on the sand, soaking up the bright midday sun.

He rolled over on his side and looked at her for a moment.

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