Page 56 of The Beauty Who Loved Him

“A gift,” she echoed.

“I don’t like to call them that. People get sentimental.”

And then they had to make a production out of it. It was one thing to buy a person’s loyalty. It was an entirely different thing to reward someone in a way that provided for them. Like a home for a kid who probably never had one of his own. Simply because he’d shown loyalty to a man who had done nothing to earn it.

“Huh.”

Vaslav peered through squinted eyes to see the way Vera stared off above him. Not down at him like he wanted, but away at something else in the sitting room that connected his master suites together.

“What?” he asked her.

Vera quickly glanced down, realizing her hands had stilled on his jaw, and pressed her thumbs into his back molars to help with the tightness and grinding of his teeth. It cracked his jaw, whatever she did, but it felt good all the same.

“I just wondered,” she said, “if you do that because you actually give a crap about Kiril, or because—”

“Igor does,” Vaslav said, “and at this point, he’s my only friend left. I think that counts for something.”

Or it should.

What did matter was that without Igor, nothing about Vaslav’s life would be the same. While it wasn’t exactly the life he had planned for himself, it was a quiet one. Which was more than he had asked for, really.

“Oh.”

Whether or not she was satisfied with his reasoning for his plans regarding Kiril, Vera didn’t say. She continued her massage of his face, jaw, and neck before moving back to his temples and scalp, and he was happy to let the conversation die. The time had to be crawling closer to two in the morning, but she didn’t complain the longer he laid in her lap.

“Will Kiril always keep an eye on me?” she asked carefully.

His answer wouldn’t be as easy to swallow. “Until I’m dead.”

It did quiet her questions, though.

“What else is that coconut oil good for?” Vaslav asked, honestly curious.

Vera giggled the most heavenly sound. “Everything. Even lube.”

Good to know.

12.

“You know, I was looking forward to a drive back to the city with Kiril,” Vera said from the backseat.

It wasn’t a lie. Despite his chatty nature, Kiril didn’t mean any harm. She hadn’t seen very much of him over the past couple of weeks as he came and went from the property without much interference from Vaslav or Igor since being given keys to a new car. Strangely, she missed him being around, putting in his occasional smartass comment, or lurking the property line, whistling for Marrow.

She hadn’t seen much of the dog since her father left, either. Although, she understood the dog hadn’t gone far because he howled a lot at night. Like the wind, his howls carried as far as they could go, but it never stopped her from falling asleep. Frankly, other than the dog, there wasn’t much else to hear but for the rolling mountainous forests and maybe the wind and rain when a storm came barreling through.

She’d quickly learned not to worry about Marrow ... the dog was practically wild, and the closer he was to the house determined a lot about Vaslav’s mood and pain level. She wouldn’t lie and say she liked Marrow, but she enjoyed watching him from afar. The dog was easier to appreciate that way, and less growly and quick to snap.

The neighbors couldn’t even keep chickens, according to Mira, likely too scared to shoot the dog because of who he belonged to, if they could even see the black beast slinking through their properties to hunt at night.

“At least Kiril has decent conversational skills,” she said to her current chauffeur. Vaslav and Igor could not say the same, and Vera dared them to try.

Igor, manning the SUV from the driver’s seat, passed a fleeting look into the rearview mirror before his attention was back where it needed to be. On the road. “Take that to him. I’m sure he’ll be around your place by the time I get you there. That was the plan, anyhow. If it makes you feel any better, I think Kiril is fond of you, too, yeah? He’s still young enough that he thinks anyone over thirty is old, and you’re just experienced enough to realize that when you constantly live life on the edge, you never learn to see beyond what’s right in front of your face. It works.”

Huh.

“I take back what I said, you’re not such a bad talker, it just takes a bit to get it out of you,” Vera said.

Igor chuckled. “Thank you. I think.”