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“I guess so.”
“You think she’ll stay?”
“Not long. She won’t like Svetlana.” Her mouth tightened. “I don’t much either. Fucking bitch.”
“I’ll get your mother’s jewels back… You don’t have to worry on that score.” I made the promise easily, knowing that was a point of contention for my wife and her stepmother. It had been enough of a catalyst for a fight before our wedding, after all.
Her eyes flared wide. “You’d do that for me?”
Svetlana the Slut, who had money grabbing whore written all over her, didn’t deserve shit, never mind something that mattered to Inessa.
“Oh, Eoghan,” she whispered when I just shrugged, maneuvering us upstate where the folks had moved a year ago after a security scare at their old property.
Unease settled inside me at her gratitude. This relationship with Inessa was unlike any other I’d had with a woman. I didn’t even have female friends outside of Aoife, and Finn kept close tabs on her interactions with the family—mostly because of Da, I knew that.
With my father like a lightning bolt that could surge out of nowhere, it was safe to say that no one outside of the family knew how to handle him.
Unless you’d lived with him for years on end, no one was prepared for the deep pit he could sink into.
A shrink might say he was bipolar, maybe even manic, but whatever he was, he’d never take pills for it, and the house would exist under a storm cloud for up to a week at a time before he came out of it, turning back into the relatively cheerful man he was around Ma.
One of my biggest fears was that I would be like him. Everyone said how similar we were, and even though my wife was still, relatively speaking, a stranger, I didn’t want that for any woman. Stranger or not.
Da had never hit Ma during those blackouts of his, but I’d seen her crying in the kitchen. Whether that was in concern for him or for something he’d said, I’d never asked.
Maybe I should have, maybe, with fears of my turning into him, I should have delved deeper, but all I could do was make sure I kept myself in check.
It was why, the other night, I’d been so pissed at myself for hurting Inessa’s feelings.
Accidentally wounding her with words was a slippery slope that I didn’t want to fall down.
A soft hand appeared on my lap. “Eoghan?”
I blinked, surprised at her touch, but even more surprised by how deep down the rabbit hole my mind had taken me. “Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Her whispered gratitude made my chest feel weird. Like it was too full.
She was…for want of a better word, sweet.
I didn’t tell her that. I doubted any woman wanted to be told they were sweet. It was like the personality equivalent of cute, and even I knew most women thought being cute was a crime. They wanted to be sexy, to vamp it up. But I didn’t think it was a crime.
If Inessa had been brazen, it’d have been a surefire way to piss me off and to lock her out.
As it was, she kept doing shit that made it easy to accept her presence in my life.
This whole trying to cook stuff was charming, especially as she always got one aspect wrong, and she’d look up at me with those fucking eyes of hers, all round and wide, hope filling them as she tried to please me, then when I barely refrained from gagging—and I had a cast iron stomach thanks to all the MREs I’d eaten in my time—that need to please would disappear and she’d scowl at me, biting into the dish, then, more often than not, spitting it out.
I knew she was trying to soften me up, but her nature came out, revealing her true self, and it often amused me.
The other night she’d gagged, too, when she’d tried the ragu. Apparently, she’d put a whole can of anchovies into the mix, which made it taste like some ungodly concoction I wouldn’t wish on Vasov—wait, maybe I would.
Then there were the cinnamon rolls she’d drowned in vanilla extract, and they’d made the apartment smell like the Pillsbury Dough boy had let off a wet one in the apartment. They’d tasted quite good, actually, but they’d been sloppy as hell. More raw dough than cinnamon roll.
Then there was the Jell-O she could never get to set.
I wasn’t sure how she did it, but do it she did.
