by Bethany-Kris
Wyatt shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Might as well.”
“I rolled it a little while ago, so it’s ached a lot on and off recently.”
“No steady pain in the mornings or evenings that seem to come on without aggravation? When it’s cold?”
“None.”
“You might get a few years yet then before any arthritis flares.”
But it was almost guaranteed to happen eventually, she knew. Or that’s what every doctor said. As it was, Vera had major surgery to set the bones and correct the connective tissue damage in her ankle and foot, but she’d been lucky not to need hardware to do it. That was still a possibility should her ankle, that was already weak, get re-injured or start to cause her a lot of pain.
She didn’t want to travel that road.
“So you’re really not going to break me out of here even though you took time out of your night to come all the way across the city to check in?”
Wyatt chuckled, and nodded at the balloons and the vase of colorful daisies and roses coloring up the corner of the room. “Looks like you’re being taken care of. I think you can manage the seventy-two hours.”
*
The doctor stayed less than a half hour, but it was long enough for the announcement to come over the speakers declaring visiting hours to be over in the meantime. As he said goodbye at her door, she could see the shadow of another man waiting just outside the room. It was only after Wyatt had left that Vaslav entered the room and closed the door to just a crack.
She laughed at the folded white blanket and thin pillow he hugged under one arm like a football. “Did you steal that from some cart?”
Vera couldn’t imagine Vaslav nicely asking for the items, and he also wasn’t a patient. Speaking of which ...
“Aren’t visiting hours over?” she asked knowing good and well he would have heard the announcement made had he been inside the hospital.
“I may or may not have paid a nurse to help me out with a few issues,” he said, strolling over to the wooden rocking chair where he’d left his coat earlier. He dropped the blanket and pillow over top the coat, and then pulled the simple, black folding chair Igor had found earlier to the side of her bed where he could sit.
“I heard you couldn’t convince your doctor to break you out of here,” he said, grinning.
With his elbow propped up on the edge of the hospital bed, and his chin resting in his hand, it was all too easy for Vera to become mesmerized by the easy way he seemed to study her right back. Looking at her, his cold gaze almost warmed. He even smiled.
“You shouldn’t eavesdrop,” she returned.
Vaslav’s gaze narrowed. “Spy, or bribe—which do you prefer?”
“Vas.”
Her playful hiss blew right over his head.
And it seemed he had better things on his mind.
Without warning, both his arms snaked up the bed and his hands circled her wrists like tight shackles she didn’t want to escape. It took him tugging her closer for Vera to lean down to give him what he wanted when his head tilted upward toward her. He didn’t purse his lips for the kiss—not even a pout.
He did, however, tell her, “Hurry up, now.”
Vera pressed two soft kisses, one after another, to his unmoving lips, and as she pulled away after the second, he didn’t let her go very far. In fact, she could feel the way the wind of his quiet sigh blew over her lips when she wet them with her tongue.
“I don’t actually have to stay,” he said. “If you don’t want me to, just say.”
“I don’t think you mean that when you say it after asking for a kiss.”
“Who asked, kisska?”
She pressed her lips in a line to suppress the smile fighting to form and failed miserably. So instead, she kissed him again. That time, he kissed her back, teasing open her mouth with slow flicks of his tongue until she gave in to the control he seemed to have over her with no effort at all.
It wasn’t so bad.
“Stay,” she whispered against his retreating kiss.
Vas yanked the chair a bit closer to the bed and resumed his previous position with his head propped up on his hand so he could watch her. “Another night in that chair won’t kill me. Much.”
Vera made a face. “Don’t say that. Where did you go, anyway?”
He brought her the vase but disappeared again.
“I had to put something in Igor’s car to take back to the house. Nothing important.”
“You got something from the hospital?”
Vaslav nodded, never missing a beat. “From the gift shop.”
“The gift shop?”
She couldn’t imagine him shopping.
He smirked. “A little hedgehog stuffy for Marrow to destroy.”
Huh.
“That’s sweet. He didn’t really seem like the kind of dog who liked toys to me, though. Maybe someone’s fingers as chew toys with the way he growls.”
“Da, me too. I always thought that’s why he destroyed them, no? It’s like he takes a personal offense to the very sight of them—hunting wild hares, it’s one snap of his jaws and the rabbit is dead. Those toys? The death lasts. It’s funny to watch.”
Vera snorted back her laughter, muttering, “That’s terrible.”
Vaslav grunted under his breath and leaned back in the chair where he could fold his arms over his broad chest. “The nurse let me know she’ll be bringing something back for you soon. Some soup, or—”
“That’s fine,” she interjected with a smile. “I’m not even that hungry now. Could you do me a favor?”
Vaslav arched a single eyebrow high. “Careful, my favors rarely come free.”
“Mmhmm.”
“What do you need?”
“I don’t know where my phone is, to start,” she said.
Vaslav lifted a hand and cut it through the air. “Kiril has it—took it back to your place. It was dead, the charger is there, and I told him to just leave it for the night, anyway.”
“Right, well, my mother needs a call.”
His gaze widened subtly. “Oh?”
“If I’m going to be in here for another day, then she needs a call because she was worried about me and told me to go into the doctor sooner than I did,” Vera muttered, fidgeting with the edge of the blanket.
“I’ll call her in the morning.”
Vera gave a little laugh at that. “Right, you’ll call my mother.”
“I will,” he said offering no room for argument with his tone. “Or I’ll get Mira to do it. Kiril won’t be back tomorrow. He’s busy with other things, I believe. Unless you want to call her with my phone right now?”
Vera considered that ...
It wasn’t a hard choice.
“When she’s worried, it makes me more anxious,” she admitted.
“All right, so I will call. I’ll get you something to write it down on in a minute.”
That left Vera with another thought.
And one last favor.
“Vas?” she asked, turning to look at him again.
He smiled back. “Hmm?”
“I want to pick my own engagement ring.”
She could tell by the way he turned to stone that he hadn’t been expecting that to be what came out of her mouth.
“Is that a yes, then?” he asked. “Are you finally agreeing to marry me?”
“By winter?”
He nodded. “By winter, kisska.” A laugh split his lips into a smile. “Hell, you can even pick the date.”
Vera prided herself on making smart choices and doing so all on her own. Without the influence of opinions from other people who wouldn’t be made to live with the consequences of said choices. Before Vaslav called her mother to deliver the news of her short hospital stay and learned that her father was probably already on his way to Russia—if not, Demyan would be soon—yes, it was an easy choice.
It wasn’t the ultimatum of her father’s safe arrival that made it, either. Or at the very least
, she hoped when Vaslav put together the timing of her decision to the arrival of her father, he didn’t think so.
“Yes,” she told Vaslav, “I’ll marry you.”
24.
Vaslav didn’t wait until the morning to make the phone call to Vera’s stepmother all the way across the pond. So to speak. Once he knew she was sleeping in the uncomfortable-looking hospital bed, and the corridor outside the room was practically dead of any staff movement, he stepped out with the phone number she’d scratched onto a piece of paper with a half-dried pen he found in the bedside table.
He could have gotten Mira to make the call—maybe he should have—but that would require an ignorance on his part that he couldn’t afford to have, really.
After punching in the long, international number, Vaslav put the phone to his ear and waited as the call rang once, and then twice. On the third, a soft-spoken woman picked up the call with a polite and cheery, “Hello?”
He considered hanging up.
Some men might take a personal call to their wife as a slight that couldn’t go unanswered. Given the state of Vera’s father’s business, he might very well be one of those men. Vaslav didn’t concern himself with the problem seeing as how it wasn’t a real threat now.
It took the woman speaking again to finally trigger Vaslav into responding.
“Hello, who’s there?”
“Do you often pick up calls from unknown numbers ... it’s Mrs. Avdonin—yes?”
It could have been the question he asked immediately that caused the woman on the other end to answer with silence. Or perhaps it was his clear, thick accent that made the woman pause.
“I prefer Claire,” she eventually said.
“A bit informal,” he returned under his breath. “Friendly, even.”
He never knew what to do with friendly people.
“I’ve been told I am quite friendly, actually.”
“Funny, I am not told the same,” Vaslav deadpanned.
At the reference to himself, the woman seemed to be reminded that she was talking to a stranger.
“Who is calling?”
Vaslav let out a sigh as his back pressed against the brick wall of the hospital corridor. Swathed in gray tones and dim lighting, only dancing shadows from various rooms proved there was any life left in the place. “Vera wanted to give you a call, but her phone is out of battery, and not with her at the moment. I offered to call for her.”
“Vera—”
“Your daughter, yes?”
“Is she okay?”
The rushed question made him flinch. He should have prefaced with the fact that Vera was fine, but hindsight was what it was.
“Seems the infection she had got worse, and the doctor she saw decided to keep her on IV for seventy-two hours,” he explained. “And other than being tired and grumpy that she can’t go home, she’s perfectly fine.”
“Oh—thank you for calling ...?”
The way the woman trailed off expectantly, waiting for him to give her a name to put to the mysterious voice calling from an unknown number, said the two were not on equal footing here. He could leave Vera’s mother in the dark, but he didn’t think that was fair.
“Most people call me Mr. Pashkov, but you’re welcome to use Vaslav, Claire.”
Just like her silence earlier had been a tell for him—it was in that second, too. It didn’t last nearly as long as the first had, though.
“Are you the man, then?” Claire questioned.
Vaslav arched his brow although the woman couldn’t see it. “What man?”
“The one Vera told me about when she called a couple of days ago. The one who has her father so worried that he’s twenty-something-thousand feet in the air alone just so he can see her? The one I don’t know very much about at all, but people who are important to me apparently know enough about to say I don’t want to? That man?”
He appreciated her frankness.
And her honesty.
Humming under his breath, he settled on asking, “And what if I was that man?”
“Well,” Claire said with a little laugh following the word, “I’d hope at some point that you might invite me for dinner.”
It was not the response he expected.
Lucky for her, it might have also made him smile.
*
Vaslav’s gaze didn’t waver from the dried, slightly crumpled rose head he twisted at the short stem between his fingers. Not even as Mira stepped into his den with a quiet good morning in Russian that he only half-heartedly answered back.
If grunting could be a reply.
His lackluster mood didn’t bother her as she went about her business. Besides the swish of the rose stem rolling between his finger and thumb, only Mira’s soft footsteps and the clink and clatter of the tea set she carried echoed in the room. He’d left the hospital at a reasonable time, waited for Vera to wake up, anyhow, but the time had crawled closer to eleven by the time he got home.
His empty stomach churned from lack of food, and all it took was the smell of tea steeping after Mira had poured him a cup to drag his attention away from the rose.
“I’m starved,” he told her.
“I’ll make up something quick,” Mira replied.
“Perfect.”
“Igor passed along a message before he left.”
“Kiril went with him?”
“I might have heard the young man say he didn’t have much to do around here, but he was quick to find some excuse when I had a list of chores ready.”
A smile tugged at his lips. “Oh?”
“I don’t think he likes to be mothered.”
“But has he ever had a mother?” Vaslav returned.
That was an important question when dealing with a young man on the cusp of his adulthood that didn’t do well with female pressure. At least, the pressure from any woman older than what Kiril would consider pursuing.
Mira didn’t speak, but he also didn’t need her to for him to know that wouldn’t stop her from trying with Kiril. Sometimes the boy seemed willing to indulge her mothering—from far—and other times, not so much. Other than Vaslav and whatever friends Mira made on her trips to whatever shops she preferred, the woman didn’t have much of a life or a family.
Him and this home. The grounds it rested on and the one dog and various birds that came to visit and stay from the spring through to summer. What else?
Practically nothing.
He wouldn’t discourage Mira from entertaining herself. She seemed resigned to spend her life serving him, after all, this was what she’d chosen. Vaslav pulled the steaming, nutty-smelling teacup and the small plate it rested on closer to him as he nodded for Mira to continue. “But back to the message.”
“He’ll call through to let you know if Vera would rather go home, or here when they sign her discharge papers later today,” the maid explained. “And the chartered flight he had flagged—he’ll have that ready for you, as well.”
“Did he bitch about me taking the car out of the shed again?”
“Barely,” Mira said, shrugging.
Vaslav chuckled, because yes, Igor had absolutely thrown a fit when he realized his boss had taken the white Rolls out when he wasn’t supposed to. In the chaos of the past couple of days, he wasn’t surprised that Igor didn’t bring the issue straight to him.
It was coming.
“Just a sandwich, or something,” Vaslav told Mira, bringing them back to his bigger issue at hand.
His growling stomach. “Anything to put in my stomach at this point.”
“Sure,” she replied, leaving the yellow tea pot painted with matryoshka dolls with him at his desk while she headed for the door. “It won’t be long, Mr. Pashkov.”
She had just reached the door.
Vaslav’s attention went back to the rose he’d placed off to the side during their conversation, although it hadn’t really left his mind. Resting on top of the envelope he’d gotten from the doctor full of brain scans and offic
ial reports he didn’t care to mentally revisit, the hidden medical information sat atop the file of information Igor had gathered on Vera months ago.
A pile of secrets.
Or was it answers?
“Mira?”
“Hmm, yes?”
The squeak of her shoes told him that she’d turned around in the large doorway, but he didn’t look away from the dried rose. Although it lost quite a few petals in its travels, the bulb somehow managed to find its way into the pocket of the slacks he’d been wearing the night they danced under the Eiffel Tower. Had she picked it up, or was it the stranger who helped the two that evening?
Did it even matter?
Whoever did it, Vaslav found the broken rose—long dried—and kept it tucked in the top drawer of his den’s desk where just the sight of it brought him back to that night. Over the past handful of years, his life had turned into a constant nightmare of erratic episodes and blindingly long bouts of migraines with pain he couldn’t escape. That night wasn’t any different, really.
Another episode.
More pain to fill his bucket.
Except there was Vera, and whenever he pulled out that rose and was faced with remembering that night, he didn’t really think about the things he hated. He thought about her.
“Vaslav?” Mira pressed, pulling him out of his thoughts.
“Sorry, the rose distracts me.”
Had she noticed it?
Mira didn’t say either way. “It’s fine. What did you want?”
“To ask a hypothetical question.”
She offered him one of her easy smiles when he finally took his attention away from the dried flower. Mira remained still in the open doorway, as patient as ever.
“Would you marry a man you knew was hiding something from you?” he asked.
Her eyes widened. “I’m not sure—”
“Not something he’d done, or anything like that. Those are surface things. Everybody lies. Everybody does things to get what they want. Not like that.”
Mira shifted from foot to foot, then, muttering, “Maybe a call to your mother would suffice for a conversation like that. I’m not exactly the type of woman who would understand the nuances between—”
“And my mother would?” He scoffed hard. That bitch was fine right where she was for the moment, and he had no plans on inviting her closer with something like a personal phone call. His mother didn’t need the encouragement. “No, I definitely won’t take it to my mother. And now, you’re the only other woman around whose opinion I could get on something like this, so here we are. Consider it.”
