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“I’m sure she will be after what he put her through.”
“Do you trust her?”
Now it was my turn to shrug. “Not sure. I trust Theresa, though.”
“Do what you want with Donny, then,” he said, not looking too pleased about it. “But don’t make any rash decisions yet about Theresa. Baby or no baby.”
My face turned to stone as I glared at him. “The decision’s already been made,” I informed him coldly. “Can you accept that?” I didn’t want a fight there in the hospital, and clearly neither did he.
“We’ll talk about it more at Sunday dinner.” He began to walk away, then turned back. “Bring Theresa.”
I nodded. “I will. You’re going to love her,” I called after him.
He shook his head and didn’t turn back. I pushed aside my worry over Ivan and went to find my woman. Whether or not we disagreed, even if we had a whole new enemy to fight after only just getting rid of the old one, we would always have each other’s backs. I had to believe that would never change, despite how upset he was about the Rossis suddenly being our problem.
I found Theresa in an exam room, with a nurse finishing up the stitches to her forehead. She gasped when she saw me and asked if I’d been seen yet. I told her I was fine, and not there for treatment, and hustled her to the other side of the curtain so I could put my arms around Theresa.
“My mom’s going to be okay,” she said, dabbing at her stitches. “She’ll have to stay here for at least a few days though.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said.
“What about Donny? And his father?” she asked tentatively.
I took her hand and put on a smile I hoped she’d believe. “It’s all taken care of. You don’t need to worry about anything,” I assured her. I only needed to make that the truth.
Chapter 26 - Theresa
I sat at my favorite spot in the apartment and finally stopped painting, unable to remain calm while waiting for Aleksei’s brothers to show up. I assured everyone I was well enough to go to them, but even though it had been a week since the incident and my stitches were already dissolving, Aleksei wouldn’t hear of it. We were supposed to go to Sunday dinner at his older brother Ivan’s house the day before, but it was suddenly canceled at the last minute, and Aleksei refused to talk about it.
He had been spoiling me nonstop since that awful day, but I was getting a bit tired of being treated like a porcelain doll, and really didn’t like the fact I thought he was keeping something from me. I trusted him, but it felt like he wasn’t telling me everything to keep me from worrying, and I didn’t know how to make him see I could handle anything.
Well, almost anything. I was pretty anxious about meeting everyone at once. I made sure everything was perfect in the living room, from the fluffiness of each pillow and the placement of the ice buckets I’d filled with Aleksei’s best bottles of wine, down to the appetizers I made myself.
“Stop fussing, it’s just family,” he said, on his way to let them in the door at last.
“Your family,” I grumbled under my breath.
He heard me and called, “Yours too, little one,” over his shoulder.
I was surprised to see my mother crowd in with the three big Russian men, each one looking so similar to Aleksei I couldn’t help but already love them. My mom still had a bandage stuck to her forehead, her face was still bruised, but the swelling was much better, and her arm was in a sling. She looked like a condemned prisoner as she shuffled along in between the Morozov men. My bitterness against her had almost completely dissipated while she was in the hospital, since what she’d been through at Donny’s hands had been more than punishment enough for her betrayal. She was surprisingly meek and contrite at first, but as she regained her strength, her true self began to shine through, reminding me why I’d run from her in the first place, so I distanced myself again. I was curious why she was there, since nobody had informed me.
When everyone was seated, Aleksei stood up, waving his hand at me like I was a prize on a game show. “This is the woman I love,” he boldly declared. “We’re going to be married as soon as possible.” He stared at each of his brothers, lingering on Ivan. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Ivan snorted, nodding to my mother. “You should ask her. Is she going to be a problematic mother-in-law?”
At first my mom looked sheepish, then launched into a full charm offensive, batting her eyelashes at Ivan. “I’m going to assume you boys are as intelligent as you are gorgeous,” she said. Ivan rolled his eyes, Yuri blushed, and Nikolai snickered, but she kept going with her sales pitch. “If you are, you must have looked into how lucrative our art… import business is?”
Aleksei cleared his throat. “Yes, they have amazing contacts all over Europe.”
“And my daughter can sell ice cubes in a snowstorm,” she said.
I nearly choked on my iced tea at the first compliment I ever heard from her. Aleksei muttered in Ivan’s ear, and his older brother’s eyes grew wide. “That lucrative?” he asked, agog.
“We can get any painting anyone wants,” she said. “Any painting at all. Masterpieces that went missing during one of the wars, rare pieces that no one has ever seen before…”
“I counterfeit them,” I said, cutting to the chase.
“She does an amazing job at it, too,” Aleksei said proudly.
