Page 52 of Brutal Secrets

“You think it’s a joke.” The words come out as a strangled cry, choked by tears I’m trying to swallow down, but my throat clogs, my shoulders shake, and I start to weep. Ten years of pent-up longing come spilling out. “You’re here. But you’ll never really be with me.”

I push against him, but he pulls me closer. Then he’s with me, just the way I’ve dreamed of. Wrapping me in his arms and crooning sweet nothings to me in Russian. Calling me golden and precious and his zolotaya.

“Baby, don’t cry.” His lips caress my cheeks, my eyebrows, my hair, before making their way back to my mouth as he rocks me back and forth. “My golden girl. Let me make it better.”

That just makes me cry harder. I’m shaking and sobbing. Ten long years. He knew where we were all that time, and he never came. He never even got in touch.

“Oh, angel. Please don’t cry. I can’t bear to see you hurting like this.”

I bury my head in his shirt. I remember everything. He smells the same. Pinewood and salt and something that’s just him. And he only has to take one look around him, at the shrine I’ve built for our daughter, to know how I feel. How did I ever think I could keep my heart under wraps?

“My precious girl. Zolotaya. I’m here with you.”

“Are you?”

He presses his lips to mine in answer.

I kiss him back, savoring his mouth on mine for a final moment, then search his ice-blue gaze and let my fingers run down the scar on his cheek. After kissing him one last time, I lean back, cup his cheek, and ask the question I know I have to ask.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers.

It doesn’t matter what his reasons are. I won’t play happy families with a man who can’t be a father to Nadia, no matter what I feel about him.

I inhale a deep breath and push myself off his lap, swiping at my eyes. He reaches for me, taking my hand in his, but I pull my fingers out of his grasp.

“Give me a minute to compose myself,” I say.

He leans toward me, but I hold up a hand to stop him from coming closer.

“Please.” With closed eyes, I brace myself against the fallen tree, then step back and regard him steadily. “I’m in love with you, Vadim.”

He swallows hard. He’s probably wondering if I’m waiting for him to say it back, but I plow on.

“Or the idea of you, at any rate. I’m not such a fool that I think I know you, but this house, the songs...” I spread my hands to him in a gesture of surrender. “There’s no point in pretending I don’t feel something very deep for you. But none of that matters. You knew we existed, and you never came to find me. To find us.”

He looks at me quizzically.

“You’ve made it clear that you can’t be in our lives,” I say, “and I won’t give my daughter half a father. I won’t play games with her heart. Even if I was willing to gamble with mine, we’re playing a different game now.”

I pull my curls back into a twist and run my hands down my clothes, then sit next to him. His arm snakes around my shoulder and I allow him to pull me against him, soaking up the illusion of another adult on my side for a change.

Even if I know it can’t last.

I look up at him. Even with that scar, he’s still the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Perhaps it’s because he’s not manicured and buffed within an inch of his life like all the singers I work with. Stevie’s not much to look at, but he magnetizes women with his bass playing. But Vadim? His masculinity is a dark magnet pulling every needle of my nerve endings to his polar north.

I stare past his shoulder, at the tree line. The woods are so quiet, just like every weekend we’ve spent up here. We moved to New York to get away from Jimmy in Nashville and find a city where I could snatch some shreds of anonymity and make a new start. I scoured the state until I found a plot of land that reminded me of the woods outside Moscow.

“Since you asked, I built this place for Nadia. I really wanted her to have a slice of her heritage.” Reaching over, I take his hand and pull it into my lap. “I never had that. My mom was half-Japanese. My dad met her in Okinawa, and she died when I was young. I knew I was different, but I didn’t know what it meant or who I was.”

I tip my head into the crook of his shoulder and thread my fingers through his, tracing the outline of his long digits, which are surprisingly soft for a man in his line of work. A rabbit springs out of the bushes and bolts across the grass, its nose twitching. I turn my head to watch it bounce into the trees.

I look away from Vadim because I don’t want him to see too much. “With her father out of the picture, I wanted to give Nadia all the things I never had. I wanted her to have a sense of where she came from. It wasn’t about you.”

That’s half true. The other half of the meaning will be written in my eyes, which follow the rabbit’s tail. Running and hiding are my heart’s only defenses against Vadim.

Mercifully, he doesn’t look at me. He just pulls me tighter against him and presses a kiss to my hairline. I feel him inhale, and then his words gust across my forehead on an out breath. “I couldn’t have picked a better woman to be the mother of my child if I’d tried.”

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