HER RUSSIAN SURRENDER (29 page)

She sighed and finished with, “And that’s why I’m here today, walking around Greece with you instead of rotting away in the penitentiary system, just like my father. And that’s why I started Ruth’s House, so no woman anywhere would ever be left alone with her abuser like my mother was. And that’s why I do things like teach yoga and mindfulness along with providing counseling services, to give women the tools they need to get out of bad relationships and stay out of them. But trust me…”

She forced herself to look directly at him now. “I’ve got baggage, too, but here’s what I’ve learned working at Ruth’s House: your past doesn’t matter. Only what you do today matters. What you continue to do tomorrow. If you want to be a good father to Pavel and to this baby, you can do it. I know you can. You just have to try.”

And there it was. Her long, sordid story laid out for him in full, so he could see she wasn’t some perfect parent, pre-made. That she was a human, who’d done some truly terrible things before getting to the place where she could properly mother a child.

She’d hoped her story would inspire him, but judging from his reaction it did the exact opposite. He glanced over her, opened his mouth… closed it again. Then he looked away. Just like Anthony had looked away from her when he’d been dumping her across a gray metal table.

His inability to speak, to so much as look at her, made Sam’s heart sink.

Why had she told him everything? He already knew most of it anyway from the court papers. So why hammer it home here and now? This was why she never told anyone about her past. Well, except Josie—and even then, that was after years of knowing her, after hearing Josie’s own tragic story. But she’d only known Nikolai for a few months, and the fact remained that she barely knew anything about him. Yet she’d told this huge Russian guy everything—all because he’d read a couple of parenting books.

She couldn’t have been more pissed at herself.

They walked the rest of the way back to the hotel in awkward silence.

35

I
f Sam had been looking for ways to kill the romantic mood Nikolai created before they got back to the hotel, she could not have picked a better tactic. By the time they returned to the room, their merry romantic comedy of a night had turned into a Swedish film. Sam could have sworn she heard the mournful strains of a funeral dirge as they entered the room they would be sharing.

Someone, probably a maid, must have come by while they were out. A couple of lamps now bathed the room in soft, flattering light, and there were dark rose petals scattered on the large square bed, along with chocolates on each pillow. The hot tub which stood encased in white stone about two feet away from the bed was bubbling. Even if there hadn’t been a standing ice bucket with a bottle of champagne and two flutes tucked inside, she would have been able to easily guess that the room had been specially prepared for romance.

Nikolai walked over to the tub. The pronounced beep of him hitting its off button cut through the room, and the bubbling sound came to an abrupt halt.

Sam took a seat gingerly on the sea blue couch and watched Nikolai take off his jacket, vest, shirt, shoes, and pants with stoic efficiency before giving them the closet treatment.

Then he walked over to the bed.

Sam held her breath…

For naught, as it turned out. Nikolai’s next action was simple enough. Pillows and petals went flying as he displaced the romantic detritus and climbed underneath the covers. By himself.

It was exactly what she’d wanted, exactly what she’d said she wanted. Him in the bed, her on the couch. No one on the floor, making her feel like she was keeping him from his creature comforts just because she didn’t want to confuse an already emotionally fraught situation with sex.

But for some odd reason, Sam’s heart sank as she watched him get into the bed.

“Sounds like a hot date.”

Eva’s words came back to her with a mocking twist as Sam reached behind herself and unbuttoned her own dress. After several minutes of button wrangling, she walked over to the closet where whoever had set up the room for romance had set their two suitcases, side by side on white luggage racks. His chrome-colored, large polycarbonate Tumi suitcase right next to the purple cloth one she’d gotten on sale at Target for thirty bucks before leaving Alabama.

Opposites in every single
way, she thought to herself as she unzipped her bag… only to discover in her hasty packing job, she’d forgotten one very important item. Pajamas.

She silently cursed, going over her options. Jeans, a swimsuit, and a couple of t-shirts that would barely cover her bottom, if at all. Her eyes searched the blue bar above the racks. No hotel robes. In the end, she pulled out a t-shirt, thinking him seeing her bikini underwear probably didn’t matter now anyway. The mood was now deader than dead in their shared hotel room. Thanks to her.

As arguments for getting some went, this had been a doozy, and as Sam put on the t-shirt, she wondered who else but her would have felt compelled to share the ugliest piece of herself after one of the most romantic dates she’d ever been on. She remembered how Josie had quite wisely called her after getting in an ugly fight with Beau about her staying out all night.

“He triggered me, and I know it’s partly my fault because I haven’t told him about my past, but I can’t bring myself to tell him, because I guess some fucked up part of me would rather him think I’m sleeping with somebody else, than tell him the truth. But I don’t know how I can go on with him if I don’t tell him. It’s too unhealthy. So I need you—I need you to help me tell him. Can you do that for me, Sam?”

Of course she’d come through for Josie, even joked about it though she’d had a few reservations about getting involved. Usually people asked her to help them leave bad relationships, not start new ones.

Back then, she’d been a little baffled by and rather curious about Josie’s situation. But now she understood exactly where Josie had been coming from.

Right now, she’d rather Nikolai still thought of her as a hotheaded woman dead set on rejecting his sexual advances. Not some emotionally traumatized psycho with a sad backstory. As vain as it probably was, she liked the Sam she’d crafted out of her mother’s ashes and she now wished more than anything that she’d gone on letting him believe she really had killed her stepfather in self-defense, that she really was the perfect mom in every way.

And despite her vow to stay as far away from Nikolai as possible, to not be swayed by his romantic vacation tactic, her body burned with what might have been. How this night could have gone if she hadn’t decided she just had to confess to killing her stepfather in cold blood.

Sam tied up her twists, grabbed an extra cover from the closet’s top shelf, and dragged it over to the couch. She’d leave the lights to Nikolai. If he was still awake, the remote to turn them all off was on his nightstand. If he was already asleep, then she didn’t mind sleeping with a few lights on. Either way, there was no way she was going to extend the awkwardness by going around the room manually turning off the lights.

She settled across the couch, grabbing one of its throw pillows as she did. Its satiny finish made her feel a little guilty. It was so pretty, like a work of art not actually meant for anything other than decor, and definitely not meant for sleeping on. But that was too bad because she wouldn’t have been able to get in bed with Nikolai at this point anyway. The awkwardness of doing so would have been too damn excruciating.

As soon as she laid her head down, all the lights clicked off, sending the room into darkness. So Nikolai must not have been asleep. Yet.

Sam breathed into the foreign night, listening to the sound of waves crashing outside the window. She found no peace in either activity, and doubted she’d get much sleep tonight. The couch, with its fine finish, was slippery in a way that made her fear she’d slide off if she so much as turned over. And her thoughts—well they were racing and in full panic mode.

Maybe tomorrow morning she could arrange for another room, or even better, her own flight back to Indiana. She had a few dollars in savings. Why not use it for a last-minute intercontinental flight? How much would that cost? If it was in the hundreds, she could swing it. But if it was in the thousands… well, she just might have to call Josie and ask for a loan, which would be another bad conversation, two months after the one about her marrying a Russian hockey player she barely knew because he’d knocked her up—the one that had ended with, “sorry, Josie, but the wedding is today and you’re not invited.”

Sam cringed in the dark. No, maybe not Josie, especially considering her and Beau’s baby would be arriving any day now, but maybe—

“He hurt me.”

The three quiet words made Sam blink in the darkness, wondering if it had been Nikolai who said them, or if some other man with a thick Russian accent had come into the room.

But then his voice sounded again in the dark. “My father never hit my mother. But sometimes he hit me. Mostly me. To punish her or… he said he was training me. But I never want train Pavel this way. I will never train him or our baby this way.”

She believed him and wanted to interrupt with some stories of men from abusive backgrounds who’d gone on to become perfectly good parents. But she sensed there was more he had to say, so she stayed quiet and let him continue.

“With my mother—he never put hands on her. More abuse of… how you say abuse of mind?”

“Emotional abuse,” she supplied.

“
Da
.” His answer came back terse and thick. “He refused marry her, because of Fedya. He said she didn’t deserve marriage, even though she was mother of his child. He left her alone in apartment with us. For weeks, sometimes months. But if she tried to move on to another man…”

He grew quiet for a few seconds before finishing with, “He made it bad. Very bad. She learned not to take other man. She learned to wait for him always—at least I thought she learned this. But she was beautiful woman. Very beautiful woman, like you are beautiful woman. Men gave her attention, and I think she was lonely.”

Sam’s heart beat faster, sensing this story was not going to have a happy ending, but she gave him the respect of silence. Listening without comments, so he could get it all out, like he’d let her get it all out.

His Russian accent grew even thicker as he continued with his story. “One day she asked me go get pregnancy test from store. I do it and she went into bathroom to take… my mother was not weak woman. She had strong voice, strong will, even when my father tried make her submit. She never cried, but I can still remember her that day. Crying behind bathroom door.”

Tears sprang to Sam’s own eyes in that moment, thinking about the unfairness of the situation. A woman whose boyfriend refused to be a true partner to her, but also refused to let her move on.

“She died week later when she tried to get rid of it. She could not go to clinic, because my father—he was well connected. He would know if she went somewhere official. So she went to bad place to get rid of baby. I took her to this place. She went into back room and she didn’t make it out alive.”

Sam could no longer hold back her words. “I’m sorry!” she whispered in the dark. “I’m so sorry.”

“I do not tell you story so you feel sorry for me,
zhena
.” He answered, his voice one part stern, and another part annoyed. “I tell you so you understand. I did not protect her from my father. I should have killed him after she took test to keep her safe. She is dead because I did not do right thing.”

“No, she’s dead because she was in an abusive relationship,” Sam told him, sitting up on one arm, even though she couldn’t really see him in the dark. She had to let him know. “It’s never the child’s fault.”

“I was seventeen. Almost same age as you. And I was big. Larger than you are now.”

“Still a child,” she insisted, realizing for the first time as she said it that this was true in her situation as well. “Size has nothing to do with it. Nobody that age is emotionally equipped to deal with those kinds of circumstances. And it’s not like killing your father would have made your life any easier. Trust me on that one.”

A moment of silence… then, “I do. I do trust you,
zhena
.”

Her heart stop beating. He trusted her. For a victim of domestic violence, that was huge, almost the equivalent of saying “I love you” because it was harder for people who’d grown up like she and Nikolai had to trust. She’d been dealing with trust issues all her life. Was still dealing with them, in fact. Which was why throwing herself heart and soul into her two shelters was almost easy in comparison to having a normal, healthy relationship with someone.

But Nikolai was telling her right here in this hotel room that he trusted her.

She couldn’t have been more honored. “Thank you,” she whispered.

No answer. For a very long time. So long, Sam was beginning to think maybe he’d fallen asleep when he said, “You say we have nothing in common. You say this why we can’t be together as man and wife. But maybe… maybe we have much in common. Maybe that is why I can’t stop chasing you, even when you push me away. Maybe that is why I feel like I would do anything, offer you anything, if you would agree to share this bed with me.”

He let out a harsh, ragged breath. “Tell me what you want,
zhena
, and I will give it to you—”

She was across the room before he even finished the sentence, struggling to get her leg not only over the high bed but also over his big body. But then she didn’t have to struggle because she was lifted into the air, hauled right on top of Mount Nik, his large hands grabbing on to the sides of her face as they erupted into a frenzy of kissing.

36

N
ikolai didn’t attend church. Had never thought much about whether he believed in the God his mother had paid homage to most Sundays, depending on whether Sergei was in residence or not.

But having his wife finally come to him felt like nothing less than a prayer answered. To feel her on top of him, her hips grinding on his boxers as their tongues tangled… he came back from their hour of sorrowful tales instantly. Hard as stone and wanting—no needing—very much to be inside of her.