by Stacy Gail
Only about a thousand, but she figured starting with the most obvious was the way to go. “How did you find me? How did you even know to look for me?”
“Your mother must have had a guilty conscience for not telling me about you, because in the end she reached out and gave me what information she could. You should know,” he added with a softer, more cautious tone, “that your mother became quite ill and passed away some time ago. I’m sorry you have to learn about her passing in this manner.”
Sass waited for something to happen—a wave of grief or regret—then shrugged when the moment passed. “She dropped me like a hot rock in some shady lawyer’s office and didn’t look back, so there’s no need to worry about upsetting me. Though, of course, I’m grateful for the information, so thank you for that.”
A corner of her father’s mouth curled. “I see your young man is right.”
“About what?”
“You are tough. Your mother didn’t drop you in the way that you think she did,” he went on when she frowned, because she wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an admonition. “Heather had thought she’d worked out a private adoption for you. She said she even wrote you a note explaining why she wasn’t prepared to care for a baby and that she didn’t believe a child of mine would be safe at that time. Unfortunately, this lawyer was shady, and he’d been planning to sell you to the highest bidder. But when he pressed her to find out who the father was to make sure he wouldn’t have any trouble with a paternal claim later on, he discovered that as my child, you would be much too dangerous for him to auction off. So he’s the one who dropped you like a hot rock on the city’s doorstep.”
She stared at him. “How do you know all of this?”
“The lawyer in question told me as much.”
“He just told you?”
“Some persuasion was involved.”
Yikes. “I see.” And, recalling that that lawyer was now dead, she told herself it was no doubt from natural causes, and hurriedly moved away from that particular landmine. “Juvenile records are sealed. I suppose you had to wait for me to age out of the foster care system and find that safe deposit box that my mother had put the letter in, right? You tracked me from that point on?” That was how she would have played it.
His dark eyes sparked with interest. “What a good idea, little Sass. Locating you that way would have worked, certainly, but no. I was much too impatient to find out if you were all right. I had several friends who work within the judicial system who owed me favors. When reminded of these favors, they were more than happy to track down a little girl by the name of Sage Ambrosia Stone.”
She made an involuntary face. “At least I was saddled with a name that stuck out.”
“As it was, you were already at the Panuzzi household and very close to, as you say, aging out of the system when I finally found you. You seemed happy there. Happier than you had been at any of your other foster homes.”
That made her go still, and as her guarded gaze clashed with the watchful probing of his, she recalled Scorpio talking about the Dietrichs. “You know everything.” Then she recalled what had happened to Ron and Deenie Dietrich when she was seventeen, and she knew the cosmic justice that had been visited upon them had come from the same source of cosmic justice that had been visited upon Liam. “Yeah, you know everything.”
From behind her, Rude’s hand closed over her shoulder, his thumb rubbing at the muscle where back flowed into neck.
“I know my little girl is strong.” Borysko’s chest heaved, his breath rattling even as his square, bulldog’s chin jerked upward in a surge of fierce pride. “I know my little girl is ferocious. I know she is determined to survive anything, anything life throws at her. I know she can rise above it all, and laugh and have good…friends and have love in… in her life…”
His face went pasty gray, and as he began to slump in his chair both Scorpio and Rude leapt forward. Since he was closer, Rude got there first, reached for the oxygen feed, set it in place and checked the gauges to make sure the flow was good.
“He should have a mask,” he said to Scorpio, who grimaced.
“You’re preaching to the choir. He says shit like that’s for old men. He didn’t even want to have Sass see him with the oxygen tank today, but he needs it.”
Sass hopped to her feet. “Where’s his mask? I can bring it to—”
Her father’s hand snapped out to shackle her wrist. “Sit.”
She looked to him in alarm and battled the urge to argue with him. He didn’t have the breath to argue, so pressing him on it wasn’t fair. In silence she sat on the edge of her seat and watched in wordless alarm as Borysko Vitaliev battled to get air into his lungs. Eventually his color improved, his breathing evened out, and as he sat back in his chair, he glanced over at her. His expression turned mournful.
“Don’t look that way, little Sass. You remind me of my mother with that face. Whenever she was about to lecture me for being a bad boy, she’d have that exact same expression. You look like her, you know. So much like her, it’s eerie.”
He hadn’t let go of her wrist, but she was too worried about upsetting him to point that out. “I’d assumed I favored your side of the family, since the picture my mother left behind of herself looked nothing like me, and her letter… well, that didn’t sound anything like me, either.”
“Every man has a weakness. Mine was cute, bubbleheaded blondes. And the truth of the matter is no man, no matter how strong he is, has any sense in his head when it comes to his weakness.” With a slow intake of breath, he shrugged and released her wrist to reach for the folder on the table. “It is true, there’s very little of Heather in you, devochka moya, in looks or in personality. If you take after anyone, it’s your grandmother, my mother. Did you know she ran a restaurant of sorts out of our flat in Donetsk? A restaurant not sanctioned by the government, of course, and we had no tables or chairs for customers. She just loved to cook the most amazing dishes. She would spend hours putting together menus for the week, so happy in this task, and our neighbors would eagerly drop by and pay their hard-earned money to get a taste of her creations. Does this sound familiar to you?”
She stared at him, stunned. “She liked to cook?”
“She loved to cook. Like you, so creative. Like you, so happy to make others happy with her food. The people of our building thought she was a saint. I suspect the people you give your food to think similar things about you.”
She had to shake her head. “I doubt it.”
“No, he’s right.” Rude once again had his hand on her shoulder, his hip bumping gently against her. “My colleagues at PSI adore you, and all it took was you feeding them once.”
“I didn’t feed everyone.”
“But everyone heard about it. When they thought Scorpio was a threat, everyone who was in-house at the time volunteered to protect you. And Mary Jane wants to adopt you.”
Her jaw dropped. She hadn’t known that.
“There. You see? Just the same.” Looking happy but unsurprised, her father flipped the file open and handed her an eight-by-ten, black-and-white photo of a woman. Her dark hair was done up in a style that her rockabilly foster sister, Scout would have adored. But it was her face that stopped her breath.
They could have been twins.
“Damn.” Looking over her shoulder, Rude raised his brows. “Okay, I guess there’s no need to see the results of the genetic tests when you have proof like this. You’re obviously an apple that didn’t fall far from the Vitaliev family tree, Sass.”
“She is devochka moya—my little girl.” Though still weak, there was nothing weak about the pride burning in Borysko Vitaliev’s dark eyes. “In this file, I also have many of my mother’s recipes, written in her own hand that I wish to give to you today, Sass. I had them translated for you, so you could try them out. I know she would have loved that, just as she would have loved you, the precious granddaughter who unknowingly followed right in her footsteps.”
; “Thank you.” She took the offered file and hugged it to her heart as the priceless treasure it was, wishing fervently that she’d gotten a chance to meet the woman she was so like. Something deep inside ached with the force of that yearning, and she tried to console herself that in going through her grandmother’s recipes, she’d at least have a chance to know that small piece of her. “You don’t know what this means to have this. Truly, thank you.” Her voice broke on the last word, and she turned away so he wouldn’t see the tear that had escaped.
“My girl. My daughter. Look at me, please.”
She tried to be discreet about wiping her face and she couldn’t help but do an unfortunately loud sniff before she turned back, only to find him smiling at her. And no matter what he was, when he smiled the smile of a loving father, it was one of the most heart-stopping sights she’d ever seen. “Thank you for agreeing to see me today. Thank you for being strong enough to survive alone in the wilderness, until I could get to you to help you thrive. Thank you for being brave enough to open your heart so you could love the people in your life, as well as the man who protects you now. Thank you, thank you, for being everything a father could ever dream of in a child. To me, you are perfect.”
Emotion ballooned too fast to be contained, a happiness that was so intense it was a beautiful anguish to bear. It spilled out in the form of motion as she set aside the file and surged out of her chair to throw her arms around his shoulders, careful not to disturb the oxygen feed while embracing the man who gave her life. A horrendously imperfect man. A scary, dangerous man. Some would even say an evil man. And she had no illusions; those who would say such things were probably justified in their view.
But he was her father.
And her father thought she was perfect.
It moved her so much it hurt.
“Thank you for caring enough to look for me. Thank you for watching over me and giving me a place to live. Thank you for the job I love so much, for getting me syndicated in all those newspapers across the country, and for the cookbook deals,” she whispered, trying very hard not to let her tears fall on his beautiful suit and mess it up. Just the thing she didn’t want him to remember her for—getting him all snotty with her blubbering. “I’ll work even harder at my job and try not to let you down.”
“The apartment and your first syndicated column, yes, I did this. But everything else—all the other papers picking up your column, the popularity of your blog and all the ad space it demands, the cookbook deals—all of that you did on your own, silly girl.”
“What?” Just when she thought nothing else could shock her, his words proved her wrong, and she backed up to search his face. When Rude had told her that her father had looked out for her for years, she had been both touched and bitterly disappointed that all the triumphs she’d won for herself hadn’t really been triumphs at all. But this changed everything. “Really?”
“I opened one door. One. You chose to not only walk through it, you blasted through every subsequent door before I could even think about getting ahead of you to open them up. The day you announced on your blog that you had closed a deal on your first cookbook, I was as shocked as anyone.”
“He ordered champagne that night for dinner,” Scorpio offered from his place near the wall. “It was a good dinner.”
“But there were no Russian or Ukrainian recipes in that book, Sass,” Her father pointed out, suddenly serious. It was as though he’d found a flaw in the Mona Lisa. “This I know. I went through every page. Many Italian dishes, though.”
“My mother takes credit for that,” Rude admitted. “She’s always bragging to her bingo buddies how she, Mama Coco, is mentioned eight times in Sass’s book. I swear if she does it one more time they’re going to roll her into a ditch.”
Scorpio’s cough sounded suspiciously like a laugh.
“I have a feeling there will be more than a few recipes from your mother—my grandmother—in the next book.” Only as the words came out did she realize her father, in all probability, wouldn’t be alive for its release, and it was like a knife going through the center of her heart. “What was her name, so I can give her credit? I want people to know her story, as well as how talented she was in the kitchen.”
“Dasha. Her name was Dasha.” His voice broke over the name, and it seemed to be his turn to be overcome with emotion. “You would do this? You would let the world know of her?”
She was shocked he had to ask. “Of course.”
“Devochka moya, this makes me so happy.” His breath shook as he hugged her to him, and he kissed her hair. “I have to live to see this. Write fast, sweet girl, yes?”
“Yes… Papa. Yes.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
They were quiet on the drive back into the city, both lost in their own thoughts. After she had given her father the promise to finish up her latest cookbook as quickly as possible, he’d asked Scorpio to see her out while he had a few words alone with Rude. She seemed to be the only one surprised by this request, as Rude nodded as if he’d been expecting it. He hadn’t been long, no more than five minutes, but he refused to discuss what was said between him and her father. He only shared that it had been “man talk” as he’d helped her into the car.
In her humble opinion, his answer sucked.
The moment they got home, she started on that turkey she’d wanted to brine for the holiday edition of her food blog, then sat down to go over contents of the file she had been given. While a few recipes her grandmother Dasha had come up with wouldn’t tempt the American palate—meat jelly and a warm salad made with boiled beets and prunes were a definite no—there were others that could be used and modified and made healthier.
She just had to do it fast.
She was so immersed in the file that she wasn’t aware of the passage of time. The only thing from the outside world that reached her was her awareness of Rude, who had gone out for a bit after they’d arrived home, but was now puttering around in the bedroom. Only when the buzzer sounded for the downstairs entrance did she lift her head, and found Rude heading for the door.
“Awesome. Food’s here.”
She started guiltily when she realized it was dark beyond the windows. “Crap, I’m sorry. I forgot all about dinner.” The combo of an apple cake, honey-roasted carrots, a green bean casserole, sausage stuffing and brine water definitely wasn’t dinner material.
“No worries, babe. Pizza’s always the dinner of champions.”
In minutes a flat white box was in Rude’s hands, but after snagging a couple longnecks from the fridge, he surprised her by heading back to the bedroom. “Come on, Sassy Pants. Time to relax.”
More curious than anything, she rose from her chair. “Don’t we need plates and napkins?”
“Nope. Just get in here and get naked.”
Well. That got her attention.
With the exception of the bedside lamp, the lights were off in the bedroom, but a golden glow was coming from the master bath. She followed it and came to a stop in the open doorway, too stunned to move.
“I cleaned the drugstore out of candles,” Rude announced, tugging his long sleeved shirt over his head, then toed out of his shoes while reaching for his belt. “I didn’t think twenty-seven candles would give off that much light, but I’m impressed. Just be careful where you toss your clothes, yeah? This shit stops being romantic if we set the building on fire.”
“Rude.” Lit candles of all shapes and sizes were everywhere—on the vanity and all along the back rim of the never-used tub now half-filled with steaming water. A few of them were obviously scented, but with their perfumes mingling she couldn’t tell what they were. It didn’t matter. Even if the scent eventually overwhelmed them, it was the most beautiful and thoughtful thing she had ever seen. “This is amazing, sweetheart.”
“It’s not going to be amazing if both the bath and the food get cold while you’re standing there fully dressed.” Naked and bathed in candlelight, he dodged around the vanity stool tha
t had been pulled near the tub and had the pizza box balanced on its surface. He stopped just in front of her and pulled the scarf off, then bent to catch the hem of her sweater dress. “Arms up, baby.”
Excitement roared to life as she did as he asked, and with a rustle of fabric the dress was off and thrown through the open door and into the bedroom. Since she’d already removed her shoes and chunky jewelry, she made quick work of her tights and underwear while he got rid of her bra and sent that sailing into the bedroom. Then she was against him, his arms wrapped around her waist with such strength it lifted her up on her tiptoes.
“Crazy day, huh?” His mouth was against her neck in a soothing yet arousing caress, and she curled her arms around his shoulders to hold him in place.
“Very crazy, and very enlightening. I needed this,” she whispered, loving the sensation of her breasts flattening against his strong, muscled-padded chest. God, she loved the feel of her man. “I didn’t even know I needed to understand where I came from, but I did. All this time I’ve been missing entire parts of me, but they fell into place today. It was overwhelming.”
His arms tightened. “I can imagine.”
“I’m so glad you were there with me today.”
“I wasn’t about to be anywhere else, Sassy. I’ll always be there, closer than your own shadow.”
She knew that. Now more than ever, she knew she could rely on him to be the bedrock on which she could build a world. “Just thinking about who my father is to the rest of the world causes all kinds of moral dilemmas and confusion, you know? But to me… I know this sounds crazy and maybe even wrong, but I see him as my father, and I think he might actually love me.”
“Of course he does, and don’t you let anyone put you in a position where you feel you have to apologize for loving your parent, you hear me? And I know you love him,” he added, lowering his head so that his brow rested against hers and his lips were no more than a breath away. “That beautiful heart of yours is strong enough to love me, so I know it’s strong enough to love him. That’s why both your dad and I think you’re a miracle.”
