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I turned one of my monitors to face him and let him have the keyboard so he could fix whatever he thought was broken in his software code, and I kept running through the footage. We sat in companionable silence, and it felt like we were at home for a while, and my heart hadn’t been broken.
“Need any more help?”
I looked up at the sound of Mikhail’s voice to see him standing in the doorway. He’d been helping me quite a bit by sorting data into categories. Even though it felt like a knife was twisting in my chest at the sight of him, I nodded.
Leo gave me an odd look as if wondering what happened to my voice. “Come on in,” he called.
Mikhail kept looking at me, waiting for explicit permission to get any closer. Or maybe it hurt him just as much to be near me. Then why come and ask if he could help? I should have told him we had it covered, but I waved him in.
“You can just do what you’ve been doing,” I said stiffly. It was like my mouth didn’t work properly. “Take my spot at the desk.”
I got up to move to the couch, but he hurried to stop me. “No, it’s fine. You need to watch the footage. I can do my thing on this side of the desk like usual.”
He pulled up a chair and dragged the stack of files over. I stared at him until the pain in my chest reached a point I had to take a deep breath. All the while, he studiously avoided looking at me. This was a bad idea. It was worse than us hating each other. This felt almost dishonest. And Leo could sense the weird tension, giving me odd looks, probably wondering why Mikhail and I were being so stiff and polite to each other.
I scowled at Leo, and he shrugged it off. “The sooner we find out what we need to bring these scumbags down, the sooner we can get back to normal,” he said.
“Agreed,” Mikhail piped up, smiling at Leo and then starting to sort the files.
Okay, then. It seemed like the thing I wanted more than anything else was well and truly over. However, I still had my mission to take over the Novikoff territory. That had been the most important thing to me not so long ago, even though it felt like a lifetime had passed. I got back to work, hating the awkward atmosphere that crackled between Mikhail and me across the desk, but I wouldn’t have changed it. It was better than nothing at all.
Chapter 24 - Mikhail
After a few days, nothing was better. It still caused a deep ache in my chest whenever I crossed paths with Evelina. Every morning I woke up determined to stay away. It wasn’t like I didn’t have plenty to do. The planned vacation time I set aside was long over, and I was getting calls from both my people in Miami and in Moscow with questions about what to do about this or that. If I didn’t start showing my face around town soon, my enemies might grow bold again.
I could have stayed away from her, even moved to the other side of the house. But I knew that from the beginning, and it didn’t work then, either. Every morning I had the best intentions to guard my heart, but by evening I was seeking her out. I used to think she was torturing me, but now I was the one looking for the pain.
It was better than nothing, and now that her brother was back, they both swore they were on the verge of a significant breakthrough in the Novikoff project. If that was true, it meant she’d be out of danger soon. I should have wanted that. Why did I want to keep her locked away with me when it only caused both of us so much anguish?
I saw the pain in her eyes, the downturn of her mouth. The fact she only wore baggy sweatpants and oversized shirts was only partly because of her brother’s arrival. Every time I caught her looking at me, wistful and full of longing, it nearly broke me not to reach for her. Start pretending once again that there was a chance for us.
Having Leo around as a buffer while we worked on her surveillance operation would have been a relief, but her twin’s curious and sometimes resentful looks bothered me. It was awkward that she’d told him, to say the least, but now that things were clearly over, it was worse. He was fiercely protective of her, just as she was of him, and being a guest in the man’s home who broke your sister’s heart must have rankled him.
I wouldn’t fight him if it came to that, and if the kid wanted to take a swing at me once he was back to full capacity, I was resigned to letting him. And I really shouldn’t have thought of him as a kid since he and Evelina were the same age. But she was so much more mature I truly often forgot the twenty years between us. She was an old soul despite her often-impetuous actions. An old soul I hoped I hadn’t gravely injured with my own immature inability to control myself around her.
Maybe I imagined all her hurt looks. Maybe I was assuaging my own ego because my pain was so great. Maybe she was already well over me.
My phone rang, and I blinked, realizing I was still sitting out in the garden with my latest whiskey on the rocks. The ice had long since melted, and the glass was drenched in condensation. I frowned at the lowering sun beyond the acres of palms and cypresses. The time on my phone told me it was nearly dinner time. I’d been sitting out there stewing in my misery for hours. Whiling away the time until I couldn’t stand it anymore and went to look for Evelina.
The call was from Kristina. She was currently in Honolulu, where I’d booked her into a resort under the guise of an early birthday present. She went along with it, not wanting to ask if something was still wrong any more than I wanted to answer. The one condition for her surprise vacation was that she checked in with me once a day.
“Hey Papa,” she said cheerily, the sound of the surf crashing in the distance. “I just threw my towel down on the sand to bake all day.”
“Don’t forget sunscreen,” I said.
“You sound just like my agent,” she laughed. Oh good, this again. “Seriously, you’d really like her. She’s just divorced and won’t be single for long.”
I smiled at my daughter’s new obsession with matchmaking. Did she sense the recent sadness I had been trying to keep from her? She was always an intuitive person. The thought of meeting someone when my heart was so raw, let alone a talent agent, was completely untenable. I’d only compare the poor woman to Evelina; she’d only come up short.
“We’ll see, sweetie,” I said, realizing I was pulling one of those soft lies I’d admonished Evelina for. “But probably not,” I added.
“I hate thinking about you being alone. And don’t say you’re always surrounded by people. Bodyguards don’t count.”
“You don’t ever have to worry about me,” I told her. I didn’t need this new layer of heartache.
“I know. I consider it a hobby.”
I laughed, the first genuine one in days. “Take a surfing lesson instead,” I said. “But be careful. And don’t—”
