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She took my elbow in a vice grip, her long fingernails threatening to dig all the way to my bone. “Did you sleep with Donny?”
“What? No, why?” And furthermore, why did she care?
She shook me. “You whore,” she hissed. “You need to take a pregnancy test.”
That hit harder than the slap, and I staggered backwards until my back touched the wall. “What?”
“It’s obvious you’re pregnant. Go find out for sure. If it’s positive, we’ll need to figure something out.”
Looking like she wanted to spit on me, she turned and stalked back into the gallery full of people, leaving me reeling. My blood ran cold, but I managed to find my way to a pharmacy, where I bought a couple of pregnancy tests. We weren’t far from the apartment, so I walked, each footstep landing like lead and with each breath I uttered a prayer that she wasn’t right. But now that I was faced with it, the symptoms made sense. I did both tests at once, and the results appeared on both almost immediately.
“Damn it,” I said, leaning against the hammered copper tub. Why wasn’t I wailing? It had to be shock, because I couldn’t think of anything much worse. I ignored the tiny, almost buried ray of light that refused to be doused when I thought about Aleksei’s baby. Our baby.
“Nooo,” I groaned, grabbing my phone.
I scrolled to the payment app that still had the huge amount Aleksei had sent me and I never transferred. Too stubborn, too angry to accept. That rage when he sent me the message had long since subsided and now I might not have a choice but to use the money. I didn’t like my mother’s proclamation that we’d figure something out at all. That meant only two things. Terminate, which had me pulling my knees to my chest as if to protect the little being inside me. That would never happen. My mother would have to kill me. The second option could only be to trick Donny into thinking it was his, which meant sleeping with him. It had been a miracle that he hadn’t wanted to so far, and I chalked it up to wanting to be respectful while living with us under my mom’s roof. Or maybe he just wasn’t attracted to me.
The thought of seducing him made me lean over the toilet and heave, but my stomach was empty. Both choices were untenable. But I still had a third option, didn’t I?
I looked at the sum in the payment app again, a calm settling over me as I decided what to do. I was good at what I did. Even if I cut ties and lost my family’s black market contacts, I could sell art. Any art. Even my own. A good lot of people all over the world already owned my work, even though they didn’t know it and would be pissed to all hell if they found out. It didn’t matter. I could go somewhere far from my mother’s reach and start a new life. Just me and the baby.
Staring down at my nest egg, my calm started to dissipate. Even though I came from a long bloodline of criminals, I was honest at heart. How could I leave town with Aleksei’s money, Aleksei’s baby growing in my belly, and not at least tell him? The thought of keeping his child a secret from him felt like a form of stealing that I could never reconcile with myself.
I certainly wasn’t going to ask anything from him, and even though the fact he was engaged to Sofia Pavlov was a thorn in my side that often interrupted my futile daydreams about him, I refused to let this news ruin his relationship.
Ugh. I heaved some more from thinking about them being together and sharing the happiness I’d never have with him, or anyone, now. No, If he wanted some kind of relationship with his child, I couldn’t deny him that, especially since my life might have been so much different if my father had been in it. Trembling so much I almost dropped my phone, I stared at his number for a long time, finally finding the nerve to call.
Chapter 12 - Aleksei
I should have been married weeks ago, but Roman had to return to Russia to take care of an emergency, offering me the best gift of my life. It truly felt like I’d received a pardon from death row, just minutes before the lethal injection. With his signature gruffness, he told us to go ahead with the wedding, but Sofia dug in her heels, refusing to be married without her father present. That was more than fine with me. My forced fiancée hadn’t grown on me in the past month and a half, and in fact, became more grating. She constantly nagged me to go to parties or events with her, despite knowing I liked to keep a low profile if it wasn’t something at one of my family’s clubs.
Right after my reprieve, I managed to go an entire week without thinking about Theresa, how she tasted and smelled, the fact she completely ghosted me without even giving me the satisfaction of a good, sexy rage. There was no use thinking about her since I was certain she’d gone back to Boston where she belonged. I might have been able to get her out of my mind completely, but then Sofia had to tell me how she saw the girl from the restaurant at a gallery opening or something, droning about how helpful she’d been and how I should be more interested in decorating our new home.
After finding out Theresa was still in Miami, she was firmly back in my thoughts, alternating between extreme lust and extreme irritation that she was so far under my skin. It was always an extreme. I found out from one of my contacts up north that her family specialized in black market art and possibly even counterfeiting, along with some other run of the mill endeavors. Nothing they were doing down here interfered with Morozov dealings so I let it go, hoping, and not hoping, they’d go back home where they belonged.
I stood in front of her paintings that I’d given pride of place in my living room and chuckled to think that Sofia wanted me to show more of an interest in art. I doubt she would have been so thrilled about my obsession with at least one artist. She swore she didn’t care what I did as long as I showed discretion, but if I could be with Theresa again, there’d be no hiding it. Which was all the more reason she needed to get her gorgeous ass back to Boston, because pretty soon I was going to go to one of those art shows and force her to face me. Knowing she was so close was testing my limits and they were about to break.
Which was why I was so stunned to see her number pop up on my phone, that I almost didn’t answer it. I thought I was dreaming. Common sense told me to let it go and, if she left a voicemail, to delete it without listening to it, but before I thought it through, I answered. No power on earth could have stopped me.
“Aleksei?” Her voice was quiet and her soft exhale had me harder than steel. God, the things she did to me.
“What do you need, little one?”
There was a slight pause. I glanced down to see if she’d ended the call. “Can I meet with you?” Her somber tone deflated my cock and put me on edge. After only two encounters with her, I still knew her well enough to be able to tell something was wrong.
“Of course,” I told her. “Come to my apartment.”
“N-not there,” she said.
“Goodbye then.” As much as I yearned to see her, I wasn’t going to let her twist me around her finger.
“No, wait, Aleksei, I’ll come,” she said.
I ended the call with a smile, pleased to hear the anxiety in her voice was replaced with irritation. I prowled the apartment like a caged lion until I heard the bell, and studied her on the small security screen. She hugged her arms across her chest and kept her head down, stepping from foot to foot, but without any eager anticipation. She was scared of something. Certainly not me?
I swung open the door and stepped back, refraining from taking her in my arms, though every cell in my body wanted to. She stepped in and looked past me to notice her art on the walls. Her tense face softened a bit.
“You really hung them,” she said.
