by Bethany-Kris
“Beautiful,” Koldan repeated.
A live wire. That’s what she felt like. As if her nerves were exposed and snapping with electricity. Like she was going to burn into ashes beneath this man.
When he finally started to move, Ana let go again.
Chapter Eight
“Koldan,” Ana said, her voice coming out faint and unsure.
Koldan didn’t look up from the newspaper he was reading. “Yeah?”
Ana glanced at the plastic device in her hands. Month after month, nothing happened. She’d stopped worrying about it because they were young and healthy. It would come when it came.
“Ana, what is it?” Koldan asked.
She met his gaze from the kitchen entryway, wondering how to tell him. It was exciting and terrifying at the same time. It was new and beautiful … and holy shit.
Was she ready for this? Was she ready for what this meant?
She thought she was … before two little pink lines crossed a screen.
“Ana?”
“It’s positive,” Ana said quietly.
Koldan cocked his head to the side, his brow lifting high. “Positive? What is?”
“The pregnancy test.”
The cup of coffee Koldan was holding dropped to the table with a bang. What little bit of liquid was left in the cup splashed over the marble top, but he didn’t act like he’d noticed or cared. Ana had stopped telling him when she used a test because she just waited to see if her cycles came or didn’t. This month, it hadn’t. So, she went and picked up a test just to see.
“I’m pregnant,” Ana whispered.
“Pregnant?” Koldan asked.
Ana nodded.
The widest, happiest smile graced Koldan’s features. His arms flew wide as he stood from the chair. A loud whoop of excitement echoed through the house as he rounded the table and took a step toward her.
Ana was frozen in place.
“Pregnant?” he asked again.
“Yeah,” Ana said, waving the test.
“Oh, my fucking God!”
She didn’t get another word in edgewise. Koldan was there in front of her in a flash. Ana found herself buried into his embrace as he held her tight.
Pregnant …
Chapter Nine
“And?” Adrik asked pointedly. “Tell me what it is, now. I need to know.”
“You can wait a few more minutes,” Koldan said, waving his father off as he snatched a pickle from the middle of the table and handed it to Ana.
“I absolutely cannot!” Adrik muttered.
Ana stuck the pickle in her mouth and bit down on the sour food to keep from laughing at her father-in-law.
“You’ve waited four months so far,” Koldan said.
“I didn’t have a choice then,” Adrik argued.
“Oh, well.”
Adrik sighed. “He knew what time to call.”
“Anton had something to deal with,” Koldan explained. “Ana promised to tell him first. You wanted to know first. Compromise.”
Koldan’s hand found Ana’s slightly rounded stomach. She sighed into the touch of her husband, feeling little flutters from the baby inside. At nearly five months along in her first pregnancy, things were going exceptionally well. The baby was on par and healthy. She wasn’t too tired, and she managed to sleep well through the night. Koldan spoiled her more than ever. He was so proud that he was going to be a father.
Ana couldn’t wait to see him with their little one.
Koldan was in love already.
Anton, on the other hand, was demanding Ana come home more often, but the two hour car drives were just a little too much for her to handle with the motion sickness she seemed to have. So, her father and mother had been making trips to Jersey instead. Ana figured that helped her papa to see what her life was like here, and how she was doing without him.
“Some compromise,” Adrik said. “He wouldn’t know.”
Ana swallowed the last bit of her pickle. “He’d know.”
“You think?” Adrik asked.
Cara laughed but hid it by raising her wine glass to her lips. Even Sofia rolled her eyes at her father’s question.
“You have met my father, haven’t you?” Ana asked.
Adrik didn’t grace that with a response. It was self-explanatory enough. Anton Avdonin knew everything if he wanted to. Simple as that.
Ana’s iPad dinged with an incoming message, and she knew that was the iMessenger. Bringing up the screen, she opened the video chat to see her mother and father as well as her brother, Vera and a very pregnant Claire sitting around the table. Ana set her own iPad in the middle of the table against a serving bowl. Everyone at the table moved so that they could be in frame, and the Avdonins could see them as well. Guessing by the fact Ana could see everyone in the frame from her father’s side perfectly well, Anton had put his iPad high again.
That would be the third one he broke doing that.
“You shouldn’t sit your iPad on the hearth, it might fall off,” Ana told her father.
“Yes, Viviana,” Anton said, as sarcastically as he could manage. “Thank you for the help.”
Ana’s mother snickered but stayed quiet.
Adrik smacked his palms to the table. “You’re late, comrade.”
Anton shrugged. “Vine made pie.”
“Pie?” Adrik asked. “You made me wait for pie?”
“You should taste my wife’s pie,” Anton replied simply. “Maybe you would understand.”
“Cora—”
“Doesn’t cook,” Cora interrupted her husband. “Don’t even start, Adrik.”
Adrik scowled. “Whatever. Are we ready?”
Ana giggled at the sight of her father’s smirk.
“I would think so,” Anton replied.
Ana looked to Koldan, who only shrugged in response.
“Don’t leave me to do this alone,” Ana said.
Koldan laughed. “Do you want me to do it, then?”
“Just tell me,” Adrik said. “Pink or blue?”
“Blue,” Ana and Koldan said together.
“A boy?” Anton asked. “Another?”
Claire was having a little boy, too, as far as Ana understood. They would be born only three months apart.
“A very healthy boy,” Koldan confirmed.
Ana wasn’t sure where all the noise came from between her family or Koldan’s. But the cheers were goddamn deafening.
And lovely.
A boy.
• • •
“Ana, you’re going to be fine,” Anton said softly.
Fear crawled up Ana’s spine like she’d never felt before. Never in her life had she ever felt so completely inadequate or incompetent at something. Shouldn’t this sort of thing come natural to a person? You know, like once the little creature was inside a woman growing, that motherly instinct should somehow kick in and all that?
Apparently not for Ana.
“I don’t know—”
“Yes, you do,” Anton interjected firmly.
“Papa, listen to me for five seconds.”
Anton sighed harshly on the other end of the line. “Fine, Ana. Get it out.”
“What if I just … fail?” Ana asked.
“At being a mother?”
“Well … yeah.”
“Ana, my God,” Anton mumbled.
Okay, so when she put in that way, it kind of sounded stupid.
“You’re going to be a great mother, my dushka,” Anton said firmly. “I know you’re scared because this is new and you’re getting close to the end of the pregnancy, but you can’t get sucked into that nonsense right now. You have better, far more important things to worry about. You will know what to do and you will feel if something isn’t right, Ana.”
“But I don’t feel like a mom,” Ana said quietly.
“Do you know when I felt like a father?” Anton asked instead of responding to Ana’s statement.
“When?”
“When I he
ld Demyan for the first time. I looked down at him, and he had his eyes wide open, looking right back at me. I could see me all through him and I knew he was mine, and I was his. In that second, he was my boy and I was his father. No two people are the same, Ana. You’re scared and worrying over nothing, sweetheart. Rest and let that husband of yours take care of you while you can enjoy being pampered and spoiled with what time you have left alone.”
“I want to be a good mother,” Ana said.
“You will be. After all, you had the best mother to learn from, Ana.”
She had.
Chapter Ten
Pain coursed through Ana’s system. She breathed through it, or tried, anyway. Over and over, unrelenting and constant, the pain continued. It felt like her insides were being ripped out and then stuffed back in again for a few minutes before the process started itself all over.
Nobody prepared a woman for this.
Saying it hurt wasn’t enough.
Labor was hell.
Ana had been in the midst of hers for thirteen hours with no immediate end in sight.
Whining, Ana let all the air out of her chest and sucked in another big breath. Tears tracked fat lines down her cheeks. She was sure her hair and face was a goddamn mess. She held onto anything that she could for dear life as the contractions ripped through her body.
“It is not like a wave,” Ana muttered.
Koldan laughed bleakly. “No?”
“No,” Ana cried, shaking her head. “It is nothing like a wave. Fucking liars.”
Someone had told her to think of the contractions like a wave that would come in slowly, reach a peak, and then decline. They lied, the bastards. Ana’s contractions just felt the same all the way through each two damned minutes of one.
Pain medication had been offered. Ana refused. Women had been doing this very thing for thousands of years, after all. Why couldn’t she do it, too? Ana was seriously starting to regret that decision.
“Tell me what you want,” Koldan whispered. “Or what you need, Ana. Anything.”
Ana felt her husband’s forehead press to hers. His lips ghosted over her trembling, dry ones. They were alone in their private hospital room. The nurses would come in every so often to check Ana and offer her medication. The last time, she’d demanded they leave her alone unless she called for them. At least until she wasn’t so agitated.
“Ana, please,” Koldan said.
She melted into the feelings of his thumbs rolling over her cheeks with the softest pressure. He’d not left her side even once. She knew he was having a hard time because she was in pain and he couldn’t take it away. That was the kind of man Koldan was.
He never wanted Ana to suffer for anything.
“I want my mom,” Ana said, barely above a breath.
Not her father or one of her close friends. No, her mom. Because Viviana had been here and she had done this. And sometimes, girls just needed their fucking mothers.
And right now … at almost twenty-six-years-old, Ana needed hers.
Koldan’s gaze dropped from hers, his shoulders slumping. “You know I can’t do that, krasivyy.”
Viviana and Anton had taken a trip out of town for the weekend. With two weeks to go on her due date, no one thought Ana’s first pregnancy would go early. Everyone, even her doctors, thought she would go overdue by several days, as was the norm with first pregnancies. Viviana was supposed to come up the following week and stay with Ana so she could go in to the hospital with her.
The baby had other plans.
No one seemed to be able to get a hold of Ana’s parents. Demyan was making the trip to Vermont to the secluded cabin, but chances were, that would take several more hours before her brother would be able to get her parents back. The baby boy would probably already be born.
“I really want my mom,” Ana said, feeling another fresh line of tears track down her cheeks.
Koldan blew out a heavy breath. “Five minutes, okay? Just give me five minutes and I’ll be back.”
Ana didn’t want him to go anywhere, but she nodded anyway. With another kiss to Ana’s sweaty forehead, Koldan left the private hospital room. Somehow, Ana managed to get off the godforsaken hospital bed that was doing nothing to help her. Crouched low to the floor with her palms on the cold tiles, Ana breathed her way through another wave of pain and sadness.
She didn’t hear the hospital door open a second time. She didn’t hear anything until Cora Vasin was crouching down in front of Ana and holding her face in her hands. Ana stared at her mother-in-law, feeling incapable and overwhelmed.
“You’re doing great,” Cora said, her voice uncharacteristically soft.
“It hurts,” Ana said.
That was all she could really think to say.
“It does,” Cora agreed. “A lot. People lie all the time. You don’t forget. But you’ll be fine. What you don’t need to do right now is panic or worry about things you can’t control. What can you control right now, Ana?”
Her breathing. Her feelings. The people around her and things in the room like the lighting and sound. The more Ana thought about it, the more she realized there was a lot she could control to make this situation easier.
Ana stayed quiet.
“I know I’m not your mother, but I will stay until she gets here,” Cora said.
“She might not get here,” Ana whispered.
“Then I will stay.”
Ana felt Koldan’s hand touch her back before he was kneeling behind her. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, leaned his head to the back of her neck, and rocked her back and forth.
“You’re doing great,” Cora repeated. “What do you need right now, Ana?”
Her mother.
But Cora was good, too.
“Pain meds,” Ana settled on saying.
Koldan chuckled.
Even Cora laughed. “I think we can do that.”
Chapter Eleven
Ana felt like a mother when she heard her son cry for the first time. It was like an instant shot of understanding, love, and need straight into her heart. Nothing was ever as perfect or as beautiful as that one little sound had been. And when she held him, wrapped in fluffy blankets and still dirtied from being taken from his happy home, Ana decided the pain was worth it.
Because she did something amazing.
Adrik Nicoli was an easy child. He didn’t fuss or make a lot of noise. He was most happy in his mother’s arms, but he had an obvious attachment to his father, as well. Koldan planned on thoroughly spoiling his first son. It didn’t matter what Ana or anyone else said, Adrik was Koldan’s golden child. The boy could do no wrong.
Well, to Ana, Adrik could do no wrong, either.
“My God, he’s gotten big,” Viviana said.
Ana watched her eighteen-month-old toddler run after his grandfather in the back yard. Anton hid behind a tree and then popped right back out, making Adrik fall back to his butt on the grass. The toddler squealed loudly as Anton tickled the boy from his kicking legs all the way up to his belly.
“He’s growing fast,” Ana agreed with her mother.
“He eats all the damn time,” Koldan put in, laughing.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Claire said as she came to stand in front of the table with a tray full of glasses and juice. “Just means he’s healthy.”
Even Demyan had taken time out of his schedule to come over to visit with Ana, Koldan, and little Adrik. A smiling, grinning Roman sat on his quiet father’s lap. Demyan had been playing a game where he bounced Roman over and over and sang a song of some sort. Roman had his father doing the game for thirty minutes nonstop.
“Again,” Roman demanded in that childish voice of his.
Demyan shook his head, chuckling. “You’re making my knee tired, Rome.”
“GRANDPAPA!” Roman cried. “PAPA SAID NO!”
“Jesus,” Demyan muttered under his breath, dropping Roman to the ground. “Go, little man.”
Roman scampered off
to Anton’s side. Without leaving either child out of the game, Anton managed to wrangle Roman into the tickle fest, too. It was so unusual for Ana to think of her father as a former crime boss when she saw him now like he was with the kids.
Only one thing mattered to her father: his family.
“He is so spoiled,” Demyan said, sighing.
“You love it,” Claire replied, grinning.
Demyan didn’t say a word but he caught his wife around the waist and pulled her into his lap.
“You think he’s bad, you should have seen you when you were that age,” Viviana said, smirking. “If there’s anything Anton does best, it’s spoil kids. It’s too late to save Roman, Demyan. Just grin and bear it.”
Demyan shook his head. “You’re awful, Ma.”
“I know.”
“He’s a good kid,” Demyan said, resting back in his chair. “A little high strung, but good.”
“I don’t know where he gets that from,” Claire said.
“Anton,” Viviana muttered.
Laughter rung out over the backyard.
“Where is Vera?” Ana asked.
Demyan scowled. “Ballet.”
Claire smacked his leg. “Stop it. You know she loves that school.”
“I know,” Demyan said, his voice heavy. “But they’re hard on her. If she misses a step, they’re right on her ass. I can’t sit there and watch it without needing to hold myself back from breaking someone’s fucking neck.”
“I know it’s not the same thing, but competitive swim training was hard, too, Demyan,” Ana told her brother. “The coaches—or teachers—are there to push you to be better. If she’s going to make a career out of dancing someday, the harsher the teacher, the better.”
“I still don’t like it,” Demyan replied.
Yeah, Ana supposed he wouldn’t. Demyan had always been a little overprotective when it came to Vera.
Ana felt Koldan’s hand slip into hers. Silently, he tugged her closer into his side. Content there, Ana took in Koldan’s warmth, silent strength, and love.
“So, when are you two planning on telling the rest of the world?” Viviana asked, never taking her eyes off her husband and the kids.
