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“Okay,” he said cautiously.
“If they give me that, I’ll do it,” she said.
“I’ll call Antonov now,” he said.
He heard her draw in a breath. “Leo wants you to come in for breakfast.” Hope surged in his chest, then escaped as she continued. “I… I don’t know where we go from here, Logan. I don’t know if there’s a way for us to be together without the past casting a shadow, but let’s have breakfast at least.”
He swallowed the disappointment that clogged his throat. “Breakfast sounds good.”
“See you soon.”
She hung up and he stared at the house. He realized now that’s all it had been before Ella and Leo. Just a building made of wood and glass and concrete.
It hadn’t been a home until they got here. Logan imagined them inside, Gabriella and Bea moving around the kitchen, filling the air with vanilla and melted butter and maple syrup, Leo sitting at the counter with his coloring book and crayons, filling in pictures of dinosaurs.
His chest contracted with something only vaguely familiar, and he realized a second later it was loss.
He picked up his phone and dialed.
When Lyonya Antonov answered, his voice was placid. “Do you have an answer?”
39
Lyon adjusted his suit jacket and looked around the entry of the Baranov mansion as he waited for the butler to return. He took in the fine art, the paneled walls, the priceless antique furniture. It made him feel hopeful, inspired.
Everything Viktor Baranov had, Lyon would someday have as well.
He looked up as movement came from the top of the stairs and watched as Kira Baranov descended the wide carved staircase. She held his gaze without blinking, surveying him as if he were a bug under glass, something only slightly interesting and ultimately unimportant.
She had always been imperious, even as a child. Lyon had defended her for a time, before he’d realized how little she thought of him.
“Kira,” he said as she neared the bottom of the staircase. Beauty wasn’t an expansive enough word to describe her. Of course, all the markers of beauty were there: the thick mane of fair hair curling around her shoulders, wide green eyes, a generous mouth.
But there was something only slightly off in the symmetry of her features, something that made her face as interesting as it was beautiful, her eyes a little too far apart, her nose almost too thin over her full lips.
Her gaze flickered. “Lyonya.”
The regal tilt of her chin, almost a dismissal, sent a shot of annoyance through his body, but he forced himself not to react.
Soon, she would not be so dismissive.
She passed in a fragrant cloud of lavender, vanilla, and a surprising undertone of something he would have sworn was pachouli.
He watched her make her way down the hall, hips undulating under her fitted white dress, heels clicking softly on the wood floors between the patterned runners.
She disappeared around a corner just as a set of doors opened halfway down the hall. The butler emerged and walked quietly toward Lyon.
“Mr. Baranov will see you now.”
40
Gabriella put her last pair of shoes in her suitcase and closed the lid.
She looked around the bedroom where she’d spent the last three weeks and tried to breathe through the crushing sensation in her chest. It wasn’t there because of the bedroom, but it was easier to focus on missing the house on the cliff, the sound of the waves crashing onto the rocks below, than on the fact that Logan would no longer be part of her everyday life.
“All set?”
She turned to find him studying her from the doorway
