Page 14 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

His raised voice echoed over the quiet lake.

Vera shrugged in response. “No, not really.”

Her father blinked. Whether it was from the shock of her frank answer or the situation facing him, she didn't know.

“You’re always doing that to me,” he murmured. “Demanding distance. Taking space. But I don’t think you realize how it looks from my perspective. You don’t see what I see. Every time I turn around and blink, you’re someone different, Vera. Look at you.”

Nobody ever said Vera was perfect. Sometimes, though, she didn't recognize her own selfishness until it stared her down to the ground. Or rather, how it reflected in the eyes of her father. She never actually considered how her need to learn and express herself away from her family would hurt them.

He clapped his hands without warning, making Vera jump in place.

“You stopped holding my hand to cross the road one day, and the next you wanted to do ballet,” he said. Then, Demyan clapped again. “Boom—sixteen, and you’re off to Russia without as much as an argument from me because I knew you’d hate me forever if I refused you.”

He clapped once more.

Vera spoke for him that time. “I’m all grown up, only talking to you on a screen, and getting married.”

His hands fell to his sides, but he nodded. “It’s just ... a part of me thinks this is your way of running. I never could figure out what you were running away from, though. Was it me?”

“No.”

Of that, she was positive.

Demyan didn’t look like he believed it. “You scared me to death.”

Vera let out a laugh. “How?”

He jerked a hand toward the guesthouse. “How, are you serious? Who is more like it!”

“You only know that because you paid someone to keep tabs on me and bring the information back, Papa.”

“Which is my right, the very least I can and will do!”

To him, he was allowed his opinion, and Vera wouldn’t argue the point.

What was done was done.

“You were hiding something from your mother and I,” Demyan said, “and you can’t fault me for finding what it was.”

“No, I omitted details that weren’t your business.”

“You’re getting married and that’s not my business?” he demanded.

“The engagement is still new,” she tossed back.

Weakly.

Demyan outright scowled. With her twenty-seventh birthday approaching in only a couple of months, Vera shouldn’t have folded in on herself as much as she did in the face of her father’s disappointment.

You’re a grown woman. Act like it, she told herself.

And still ...

It didn’t help.

Vera opened her hands and arms in a sign of surrender. “I’m fine. I’m okay, look at me. I was going to tell you that I’d met someone. Soon,” she hedged.

At that, her father’s posture loosened up again. Not that it helped with the tension between them.