Page 2 of The Lies Between Lovers

“You didn’t even call me about breakfast the next morning like you promised to!”

“I was up and gone before I could,” Vera replied just as hotly.

Except Hannah wouldn’t know that—you didn’t explain, she told herself. Not to mention, all the phone calls she had ignored. Was this really her friend’s fault?

Vera already knew the answer to that.

“I’m sorry,” Vera said again, turning her back to the street and facing her villa instead. She hadn’t even seen her neighbor, Mr. Anatoly, since arriving home. Faced with a fast-approaching fall season, he would usually be outside prepping his garden beds for a final harvest.

Or maybe she had been too distracted to notice.

“I have a lot of things on my mind,” she added when Hannah stayed silent.

Her friend picked up on that.

“Like what?” Hannah asked. “The guy?”

“What guy?”

“What guy,” her friend replied with a little laugh. “The guy, Vera. The one you came to Paris with. Who else?”

Vaslav was only one problem of many that Vera currently faced and didn’t know how to deal with. Or maybe he was one issue that she didn’t have to think about to deal with right this second, because he hadn’t attempted to contact her by any means once since she stepped off the jet—even leaving her to find her own way home from the airport, not that it was too hard to do so.

“Vera?” Hannah asked quietly.

“I’m—”

The playful shouts of children and the crunch of tires rolling across asphalt stopped Vera from explaining exactly what had her so distracted—a culmination of things, really. She turned back to the street to find the reason for the children’s yells rolling closer to her home in a two-door black sedan.

He was even driving.

“I have to go, Feliks is here,” she told Hannah.

Well, almost. Another fifty feet and the prick would be parked in front of her place. At least he hadn’t been driving recklessly because the children felt safe enough to go back into the bend on the street to play with their bright red soccer ball.

“Feliks?” Hannah shrieked. “What are you doing with that asshole again?”

Vera bristled at the again comment. Like the very fact that she even spoke about the man meant there was something happening in a romantic or personal sense beyond what she couldn’t control—work.

“I decided last night to tell him I was going to quit before I have to go back to work, actually,” she explained, trying to keep her tone level.

Did she succeed?

Not particularly.

“Oh,” Hannah returned.

“Yeah,” Vera muttered, eyeing the approaching vehicle as it rolled to a stop. “I don’t want to do it in front of the kids; that’s not fair to them. And even though he is an asshole that doesn’t deserve anything from me, and doesn’t have a current contract that he can keep me tied up in, I respect The Swan House enough to do it privately and figure out a way that quitting can work for everybody.”

Hannah scoffed at that. “You think it’ll really work like that with Feliks?”

“Why would he even care if I stayed? I only teach kids ballet.”

“He’s just not the type,” her friend said.

“The type to what?”

“To feel like he’s lost something.”