Roulette (3 page)

“So, how did it go with Clairebeau?” Alexei asks carefully, staying near the door. Wise man.

“How did you know I was on with Clairebeau?”

He shrugs. “I heard you yelling ‘
de Villiers
’ down the corridor.”

I smile despite myself.

“You liked it, didn’t you? The conflict?”

I frown. “No. It was horrible.” But my face is still flushed from the interaction, a potent combination of intellectual excitement and something else that I am not about to reveal to Uncle Alexei.

“Do you want me to call him to follow up,” he offers, “so you don’t have to speak to him again?”

“No,” I answer, too quickly. “I mean, no. At this point it’s a matter of pride. I don’t want de Villiers to think I’m too much of a lightweight to pick up the phone and call him myself. I’ll renegotiate. He’s probably right in the end. We should have multiple investors on this project anyway.”

“Yes!”

“Did you just do a fist pump?”

“Yes,” Alexei crows, proud of knowing what a fist pump is. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” He clasps his hands in front of him. “Call me at home if you need anything else, and I’ll call Kriegsbeil tomorrow to let them know they are not going to be the sole investors. The bastards. After that, we should be pretty much set for the board meeting on Friday.”

“Board meeting?”

“Yes, just a formality.”

“What kind of formality, Alexei?”

“The kind that makes you the interim CEO until we find someone else?” At least he has the good sense to sound timid.

“Seriously. You need to leave this office right now, before I throw this enormous ashtray at your head.”

“Fine. We’ll talk more about it later.” He ducks out quickly as he sees me reach for the hunk of crystal on the far side of my father’s desk.

My cell phone starts ringing a few minutes later, and I answer it with a deep sigh when I see the contact info.

My mother.

“
Darlin
g
! Are you sure you’re okay? I am so sorry I can’t leave the set to be with you. It must be dreadful. All those horrible
Russians
everywhere.”

“Hi, Mom.” I exhale. It never seems to dawn on her that I am half horrible Russian.

“How is Alexei holding up? He’s so dear, but don’t let him make you all soft with his talk of passion and commitment and family. Those are myths, darling. He’s going to try to get you to stay in Russia.” She makes a dramatic shuddering sound, which I choose to ignore.

“Where are you? What time is it?” I ask, trying to turn the focus of the conversation back to her. Which always works.

“Oh, I don’t know, about three in the afternoon. We’re having piña coladas. I’m in Acapulco. I told you, remember? We’re doing that small independent film Jamie wanted me to do.”

“Who’s Jamie again?”

“Stop that.”

“It’s just a joke. But what’s his last name?”

“Miki!”

Jamie Robinson has been dating—or sleeping with, or using, or what have you—my mother for the past two years, and he has yet to remember I even exist. Not that my ego relies on the attention of my mother’s too-young boy toys, but it would help at family functions if the parasites could remember my first name when they want me to pass the salt.

I sigh into the silence.

“Are you really okay?” Her voice sounds weird, like she is actually concerned about someone other than herself.

“I’m fine, I guess. It’s not like Mikhail was some huge part of my life.” If I didn’t know she hated the guy, I might mistake that weird hiss for weeping. Instead of pursuing that awkwardness, I remember to tell her my other news. “Oh my god, Mom, I forgot to tell you. Landon asked me to move in with him.”

“What?” She blows her nose. “Sorry. Allergies.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Go on.”

“Anyway. It’s a little soon with Landon, I mean. But I said yes.”

“Well, of course you said yes. That’s the sort of life you say you want.”

Whatever the hell that means.
I don’t say anything for a few seconds, so she plows ahead. “Which is good, I suppose. At least now there’s no chance of your moving to Russia to run some horrible paper company. It’s just too awful. Get out of there as quickly as possible, darling.”

I do not like when I agree with my mother. It never feels quite right, because she is so wrong so much of the time.

“Well, it’s not a
horrible
paper company. It’s just not what I signed up for. I have my job at USC—”

“And your life with Landon. I know, I know. And he’ll want you to have babies and look fabulous at charity events with your two high-powered jobs. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” The way she says “
I know, I know
” makes it sound like
blah blah
.

Is
it what I want? Sort of? The truth is, I have no clue what I
really
want. I remain silent.

“I don’t understand you at all, Miki.”

Well, that’s a relief.
I always feel better when my mother doesn’t understand me
at all
. That usually means I’m doing something most people would consider rational. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’ll be back home on Sunday.”

“All right. Call me if you need me. My phone is a bit spotty here, but you can always leave a message with Tori if it’s an emergency.”

“Okay. Thanks for checking in. Bye, Mom.”

I stare at the phone and try to let all the weirdness dissipate. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve played this internal game, especially when my mother is being particularly
outré
. I close my eyes and pretend I'm a normal girl from Southern California, born to normal parents. When I was young,
normal
meant my parents were married, of course, and my dad worked at one of those jobs I always saw in my first-grade social studies book: teacher, postman, carpenter. One of those tangible occupations. And my imaginary mom cooked and cleaned and sewed my clothes. Or maybe she had a job, too, but in my imaginary world, she was always physically there for me. And she loved my imaginary dad.

But somehow I got switched at birth and hurled into the life of this
other
girl, the one who happens to be the secret, illegitimate hate child of an Academy Award–winning French actress and a Russian paper tycoon of dubious repute.

So, instead of going to swimming camp at the local YMCA—like a normal kid, I used to whine—I spent my childhood summers in Sardinia. Surprisingly, that part seemed really normal. Uncle Alexei was always there with his lovely wife. And my Russian second cousins always seemed to materialize from every corner of the globe: Olga from Mexico City; Maria Teresa and Joaquin from Bogotá.

But in the background lurked my father, Mikhail Voyanovski. My namesake. I always called him Mikhail; the idea of calling him Dad or Papa never made sense. He was more like a high-end travel agent crossed with Albert Einstein. We had entire phone conversations that sounded like this: “You will meet me in Corfu. I have to go now.”

Totally unreachable. Totally brilliant. Totally gone.

Ugh. I shake my head free of the fresh sadness and return my attention to reworking the Clairebeau bid/offer analysis.

CHAPTER FOUR

M
any hours—and four strong coffees—later, I pick up the phone and call de Villiers. He must be sitting at his desk with his hand hovering over the receiver, because he answers before I hear a single ring.

“
All
ô
!” he barks.

“Hello.”

“Yes?” he asks. It sounds like he is unaccustomed to answering his own phone. “May I help you?”

“Yes. This is . . . Mikhaila Voya—”

“I know who it is.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, I wanted to see if we could start over.”

I try not to sound too contrite. Yes, the shark in me wants to leverage a little sympathy, but I don’t want him to think he actually affects me. Maybe he’ll give me some slack because my father just died. Or not.

“Who are you, anyway?” he asks coldly.

“You know what, de Villiers?” I start, guns blazing.

“No, no!” he protests. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ I’m sorry. I meant . . . is Mikhaila Voyanovski your real name? Because I asked my assistant to do a search on you, and she came up with nothing. I mean, it’s odd for anyone these days not to have a single reference on the Internet. Don’t you agree?”

I sigh. “Yes. It’s unusual.”

“So. Why?”

He’s too direct. His French accent is molesting me again. “It’s my middle name—I mean, it’s my father’s last name—but I was raised in the United States, by my mother.”

“Are you going to tell me your surname?”

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. But yes. It seems to matter to me to know with whom I’m dealing. Are you a senior consultant from McKinsey who just acquired your father’s business? A stay-at-home mother of seven who enjoys balancing the family checkbook in your spare time?”

I repress a laugh at the wandering nature of his thoughts, then try to make it sound like a small cough.
I might like him to make me laugh all the way.
Then I scowl at myself for thinking such an unprofessional, stupid thing.

I hesitate. “My birth certificate reads Mikhaila V Durand.”

I say my last name—my famous mother’s last name—in the French way, and his quick intake of breath lets me know he recognizes it immediately, but I continue as if it’s not a big deal.

“My mother left the space marked
FATHER
blank. I guess writing that simple
V
was her small concession to acknowledging my father’s existence. Not that she ever kept it from him, or from me, but she certainly didn’t want the rest of the world having a hand in any of her private affairs . . . affair.”

I can practically hear the wheels of his mind clicking and spinning across the time zones as he processes the pieces of the puzzle in the order in which I relay them. A love child. Now it makes sense to him. He must know that Mikhail always set aside time, inviolate time, for summer vacations and winter holidays with Alexei and all the cousins. And me.

“So . . . Mikhail and Simone . . . Interesting . . .” de Villiers says in a low voice.

“Not really. Trust me, it was too brief to be interesting.”

“Fair enough.” His words sound satisfied, but I can hear him typing away in the background, probably running an Interpol search on my entire extended family.

“So, I’ve taken another look at the Segezha deal, if you’re still interested,” I say.

“Very well.” He sounds like he wants to rub my nose in it but refrains. “Now that you’ve had time to . . . reconsider. Where would you like to begin?”

We spend the next two hours hammering out a three-year deal that ensures both Clairebeau and Voyanovski Industries will be reasonably compensated at the end of it. In the midst of the negotiations, I Google him and then myself to see what he is seeing. There is my dour headshot on the USC website. Glasses, floppy tie. I’m a caricature of what a female management professor should look like. It isn’t too much of a stretch to remove the glasses and see the resemblance to my mother’s famous beauty, but I still think of myself as a bit coarse compared with her gamine style. More solid, like my father.

“Rome?” I prompt a second time. We are long past all that de Villiers-Voyanovski nonsense.

“Yes, sorry, Miki . . .” he says slowly, distracted. “It’s getting late.”

I am exhausted and losing patience. “Not that I’m trying to one-up you, but it’s two hours later here. Almost midnight, actually.” I want to tie this up and move on. Sort of. It’s not every day I get to talk to someone for that long about business, to hear how his mind gets around ideas, how he works through the numbers the same way I do. I feel like we would get along in real life. Which is a really stupid thing to feel.

Since I am moving in with Landon.

The thought drags itself to the front of my mind like a disgruntled teenager.

“You’re right,” he says kindly. “I’m so sorry to have gone on so long, but you are very enjoyable.”

My stomach plummets. It is a silly trick of his English, I tell myself, how he infuses the word
enjoyable
with something akin to an orgasm. Then again, he is too smart to say it that way by accident. “Rome.”

“Miki.”

And just like that, my heart is off at a very steady gallop. There is no longer talk of corporate finance or management structures. There is the raw scrape of a man’s voice—two syllables—strumming every chord in my body. I stay quiet, not knowing what else to do.

“So . . . what are you going to do about USC? Do they know you’re leaving?”

I am dead quiet; then: “Have you been Googling me while we’ve been talking?”

“Obviously. And you should definitely rethink the glasses.”

This is so far from a business conversation. I feel heat fly up my neck to my cheeks. His voice is way too intimate. Knowing.

“I got contacts last year.” I try to sound practical. “That picture’s from a couple of years ago. Not that it’s any of your business.” I clear my throat. It is sounding way too . . . throaty. “As for USC . . .”

He lets me lean into the silence, which is pretty exciting all by itself, since Landon typically jumps to finish my thoughts for me. In a helpful way, but still.

How much do I want to tell this guy? And why am I comparing him to Landon?

I decide I might as well confide in him, since I am never going to see him in real life. “If you must know, USC is about to offer me a full-time, tenure-track position at Marshall. I came here on my vacation to tell Alexei and Mikhail in person that I am taking that job. Paper-and-pulp factories are not in my plan.”

“Yet there you sit.”

“Alas. Here I sit.”

“We should meet.”

The heat that started to recede with our transition into a more normal conversation flies back up my face like a flare off the sun. “Why?”

“Because I want to.”

“Does that line usually work for you?”

“Quite often. Yes, now that I think about it. Yes. I think people appreciate honesty.”

“Honesty?”

“You know what I mean. I could pretend we need to sign the documents in person or I want to shake on it or whatever. But I like talking to you; there’s something about the sound of your voice. And so, yes, I want to meet you. Very simple, really.”

“Do you have plans to visit Saint Petersburg?”

“Is that an invitation?”

I am so grateful the scalding heat on my cheeks is not visible through the phone. Even so, I feel like I might as well be naked in the same room with him, given how it makes me feel, the way he talks to me—as if he is unwrapping me.

“I’ll have to think about that,” I hedge. “Probably unwise. You know what they say about business and pleasure.
Bonsoir.
”

I hang up quickly, not wanting to hear some velvety parting shot laden with innuendo. And then I resume breathing.

I fall asleep at my father’s desk, my face pressed against the back of one hand. The morning sky is just beginning to lighten outside the window when I look up and hear the murmur of voices in the corridor behind the closed door to the office. I let my head fall back down when I realize it must be the two security guards making the rounds.

A few seconds later, the door swings partially open.

I jump up so quickly that my modern, black mesh desk chair flies behind me and then spins around like a top.

“May I help you?” I ask the guard who is poking his head in, as I try to rub the sleep out of my eyes. Highly professional, I know.

“Thanks, Georgi.”
Smooth. French. Voice.

Oh. No.

There is no mistaking that damnable accent.

I look from the wrinkled, leathery face of the ex-KGB henchman who protected my father through all those strange, violent years to the man who emerges from the hallway behind him.

Men are not supposed to look like that in real life. All the pictures online made him look hot and sexy, but I assumed it was a trick of the lens. At thirty-three, he should’ve looked sallow or washed out in real life. Fatter. Hungover.
Something.

As it turns out, real life makes him even hotter, because he emanates a physical energy that’s impossible to convey in any photograph. He crackles.

And obviously he is an old acquaintance of Georgi’s, the guard who worked for my father since forever. Since my father sat behind this big desk at the Kremlin.

“I’m sorry, Miki,” Georgi explains in Russian. “Mister de Villiers is such an old friend of your father’s, and he says he flew in just now
on his private plane especially to see you and to pay his respects, so . . .” He shrugs, hoping I won’t be mad, I guess.

“That’s fine.” I turn my attention from the apologetic guard back to de Villiers. His clothes look like they were created to hug his body. Speaking of which, how dare he look so perfectly turned out, when I spent the night slumped over a desk? His white collared shirt is neatly pressed and open at the neck. The skin there looks really . . . good. Groggy thoughts. Groggy, half-asleep thoughts. I shake my head to wake up and force myself to quit looking at that patch of skin.

My eyes skim lower. He probably hires someone to wear his blue jeans until they achieve that ideally worn-in look. Do the faded creases have to make him look so good?

To be honest, I am not the type of woman who falls flat on her face for a good-looking guy. My mother’s been doing it for so many years—yes, sure, she’s all feministy and sex-positive and all that crap—but the bottom line is, I can’t look at her endless sexploits as anything but an uninspired attempt to relieve her boredom. So she likes to screw around? Fine. I’m not judging her moral code. It’s just that when
I’m
bored, I go to the Getty Museum or go surfing. I don’t go seduce a stranger.

But, damn. This guy. He is the gold standard of stranger seduction.

I reach up to touch the necklace Landon gave me for my birthday a few months ago and try to stay grounded in some version of reality. And anyway, there is no way Rome de Villiers just flew to Russia to see me.
Wake up, Miki!

I finally look away from him and answer Georgi in Russian. “Thank you for showing him in. Of course I’ll meet with him.” I walk to the door and shut it after I see the older man’s wide, strong back recede down the hallway. As the door closes and I turn slowly to face Jérôme Michel de Villiers, I have the strange sensation there is no longer enough air or space in the large office.