Page 4 of A Surprise Baby for the Russian

“Oh, wonderful! You’ll explain everything,” she snaps back. “I’ll add it to my ever-growing ‘What the fuck?’ list, shall I?”

“Raya, I’m not my father, and I’m not Yaroslav; for the minute, that’s all you need to know.”

She glares at me, and I can see she desperately wants to give me another mouthful, but to my surprise, she settles back in her chair. “No,” she agrees, “I know how you helped Selene, and that she loves you.” She takes a moment to inspect her nails. “My brothers are still going to kill you for kidnapping me, though.”

“Holy shit, Raya. I am not kidnapping you, okay?” I reach across and hold out my phone without looking away from the road. She looks at it. She looks at me. “Call Selene,” I say. “Tell her what’s happening before the guards report back. That you’re not being kidnapped in the way any of them will be imagining. Tell her to talk to Simon immediately, and to tell your brothers not to move yet, because I need them not to come after me before I’ve had a chance to explain myself. If your family mobilizes right now, the shit is going to hit the fan spectacularly, making everything considerably more complicated.”

“When you say ‘explain yourself’,” she says, not taking the phone yet, “do you have an explanation? A good one?”

“Would I be doing this for no good reason?”

“I don’t know; this seems to be a Mykros M.O.”

I roll my eyes at her cheek. “Call my sister.”

She takes the phone and calls Selene. I listen to half a conversation in which she says, among other things: ‘I am absolutely being kidnapped, but apparently not in the conventional sense. Apparently you need to talk to Simon before they send an army out searching for me, and he will explain himself. She sounds steady. Dry, even. I find that I’m smiling and stop immediately.

By the time she hangs up, she seems a degree calmer. Handing my phone back, our fingers touch for the briefest of moments; the soft warmth of her skin is everything I imagined it to be.

“Selene’s calling Simon now, and for what it’s worth,” she side-eyes me, “Selene says you’re not a complete monster.”

“High praise,” I say.

“I thought so, although I reserve the right to form my own opinion.” She looks out of the passenger window. “Simon may buy you a few hours, but Matvei’s a different story. What can I say? My big brothers love me, and they’re probably going to want to kill you. Slowly.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“Oh my gosh!” She turns her whole body to face me. “My security detail is unconscious on a sidewalk; how are you going to hide that?”

“I’m not. It’s not my problem to fix. They’re your family’s men, not mine.” I glance at her. “Look, if it makes you feel better, I called it in anonymously when I saw them through the bakery window. Ambulance, not police. They’ll wake up on a stretcher instead of a sidewalk; someone from your side will need to go collect them from wherever they get taken. That’s the best I can do.”

“That’s not hidden.”

“No,” I agree. “It isn’t. I’m not interested in hiding this, Raya. Your family’s about to know exactly what happened. I’d rather they hear it straight than piece it together and get it wrong.”

She is quiet for approximately forty-five seconds, which I suspect is a personal record. I keep my eyes firmly fixed on the road because if I look at her, I am going to do something counterproductive like stare, and we are currently on a freeway.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“Somewhere safe.”

“That doesn’t tell me a lot.”

“I know.”

She gives an infuriated sigh. “Right. So I’m in a car with a man I’ve never met, going somewhere he won’t tell me, because my only alternative was the other Mykros brother, who is arguably worse, and I’m not actually being kidnapped. This is, apparently, your average Tuesday.”

“It’s Wednesday.” I risk a glance; she’s giving me her best ‘this is all bullshit’ stare. I saw it a few times on the surveillance feeds from the place my father kept her and the twins in last time. It was sexy as fuck then; up close, it’s another thing entirely.

“I don’t think that’s the relevant part of that sentence.”

She doesn’t say anything else for a while. Neither do I. The city gradually falls away behind us, and I keep my eyes peeled for any evidence we’ve been tailed. I don’t want to scare her while we’re still vulnerable out in the open. When we’re somewhere safe, I’ll tell her everything. She’s going to be seriously pissed, but she’ll see my reasoning. If she doesn’t, well, fuck if I care. By nightfall, Raya Volkov is going to be my wife, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Her included.

Chapter 4 - Raya

We’ve been driving for hours; I’m pretty convinced that for a large part of it we’ve been going in circles. I don’t say this out loud because I’ve already said quite a lot out loud, and at length, so I’m giving myself a moment to regroup. I’ve been running through my options since we got on the freeway. There aren’t a lot, obviously, given the circumstances, but so far I’d come up with jumping from a moving car, which I immediately ruled out because, one, I have things to live for, and two, I don’t really want to break every bone in my body while doing so. I toyed with the idea of grabbing the wheel, a genuinely tempting option, but again, death is likely to be a result, and whatever I currently feel about Yakov Mykros, Selene would be genuinely upset, and I couldn’t live with the guilt, even if I were dead. This left the third option, which I thought was the best. Basically, scream at him until he pulled over, but when I tried it, he turned the radio up. So I’ve settled on watching where we’re going and clocking every turn, which is at least something.

I know we’ve headed north-west out of the city, then east for a while, then north again on roads that get progressively quieter. If he is going in circles, they are very large ones. He drives with one hand on the wheel, eyes on the road, but I notice the way he is constantly looking in the rear-view mirror, undoubtedly checking to see if we’ve been followed by his brother or some other member of his psychotic family. He seems unnaturally calm given what the hell is going on right now, and it irritates the hell out of me. There is something deeply aggravating about a person who will not be rattled, particularly when you are doing your level best to rattle them.