Page 106 of Forged By Sacrifice

“You have not, but your winning streak has to give out at some point,” Georgie teased.

On the way, I listened as Georgie and Raisa caught up on the trip, Raisa’s roommate at Stanford, and how things were at home in Russia. The sisters were close in a way that I couldn’t imagine being if you really grew up on different continents. But then, Georgie had said Raisa had been staying with her over the last few summers. Her parents saw it as a way to strengthen her English. Georgie and Raisa had just seen it as a way to build and keep a relationship.

We were seated at the bar, waiting for a table, when Raisa’s phone started going off in a series of high-pitched chirps that would have driven me crazy if I’d had to listen to it every day. She responded to all the texts and then looked up.

“Mom does not believe you are here with Macauley. May I take a picture to send her?”

Georgie sighed but then pulled me close to her. I smiled for the camera before turning and kissing her cheek. I couldn’t help it. I could tell that her nerves had turned to gentle swells, and I was happy she was relaxing. Raisa giggled and took another picture with my lips on Georgie’s cheek.

It was a picture I would never have taken before Georgie. Lips on someone’s skin.

Georgie grabbed Raisa’s phone. “Do not send her that one. She’ll expect me to have an engagement ring the next time I see her.”

“I think that can be arranged,” I said before I even thought about it. Both women turned to me with mouths agape, and I could feel my cheeks heat up. I rarely blushed. Growing up with a family like mine and then hanging with Eli, Truck, and a unit full of twenty-something men made me pretty immune to it. But this slip, even though I was surprised by it, didn’t cause me to want to take it back like it should have. “I mean…if you need a ring to make her happy.”

Georgie flicked my shoulder and then looked at Raisa. “He’s just teasing. He isn’t proposing. He knows I wouldn’t say yes.”

That comment, deflecting or not, hit me to the core. That she could so flippantly disregard the thought of marrying me. That she could so easily say she wouldn’t accept my proposal. Because, Lord, I’d been right about keeping her. I didn’t think I’d ever find anyone else who could fit into all my pieces as carefully and as closely as Georgie did.

If she noticed I got quiet after that, she didn’t say anything. I hardly needed to be there for the conversation between the sisters to keep up. They didn’t exclude me, though. They just had a rapid-fire pace of talking together that was fun to watch and listen to.

When we finally sat down at our table, Malik still hadn’t shown up. The ladies decided to order without him, as if it was something they accepted as part of his normal behavior. I couldn’t help it; it made me dislike him slightly without ever having met him. The fact that he would disregard a meeting with his family so easily. That he would disregard Georgie, who he hadn’t seen in a couple years so easily.

When I’d been stationed on the USS George Washington, every single time I’d gotten on dry land, the first thing I’d wanted to do was see my family. All of the crazy bunch at once. I never would have blown them off for some meeting. It made me wonder if he really was here on business for Petya. I was pretty sure, even with no longer being at the DoD to look into it, that Petya’s business was only partially on the up and up. It made me want to protect Georgie. To keep her from anything that might blow back on her and ruin her chances at the bar and a law career, regardless of my own career.

“So, Raisa, Georgie tells me you want to create a new, clean energy source.”

Raisa nodded. She didn’t look like a scientist. She definitely didn’t look like a green scientist like Thomas was a green lawyer. He looked like a hippy child who came to live in the twenty-first century. Raisa, like Georgie, looked like she should have been on a magazine cover. Beauty and brains rolled into an intoxicating combination.

“Yes. We cannot sustain our world this way.”

“Wouldn’t Petya want to sell it if you came up with something?” I asked, and Georgie frowned at me. I hadn’t realized that Stepdad was off-limits.

Raisa grinned at me. “Father thinks I will find a good boy and settle down. He thinks my being in the sciences will give me opportunity to meet smart man. He does not truly believe I will do this on my own. What he does not know will not…what is the phrase? Will not stomp him?”

Georgie and I chuckled. “Hurt him. Will not hurt him,” Georgie corrected.

Raisa then launched into a discussion about a bunch of scientific terms that had my head reeling in ten minutes. I wasn’t missing any brain cells, but her level of science was enough for me to need the CliffsNotes version. Raisa didn’t seem to notice, and when I looked at Georgie, she was smiling, but she winked at me and then reached under the table to squeeze my hand. I instantly felt better. She wasn’t exactly keeping up with her sister, either.

After we walked Raisa back to her hotel and made arrangements to see her the next day, we caught a CarShare back to the apartment. Georgie snuggled up to me, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulder, pulling her tight up against me.

“She’s pretty incredible,” I said into her hair, kissing her head.

Georgie nodded against my shoulder. “She’s going to change the world, and I’m going to be lucky enough to call her my sister.”

“I think she’s already lucky to call you sister,” I said.

“You’re just saying that because you think you’re going to get laid tonight.”

I laughed. “I’d love to get laid tonight, but I’d say it regardless.”

She looked up at me, eyes happy, face relaxed. She’d been nervous for no reason. Like the night of the embassy party, I couldn’t resist kissing her, a gentle kiss that turned heated in seconds. My hand running along her bare back and tugging at the knot on her halter top that I wouldn’t undo in the car but had every desire to undo once we were alone. The night wasn’t young, and we had work and class the next day, but I didn’t care. Embedding myself in Georgie’s body and soul for a few hours would be worth any bit of tiredness in the morning.

? ? ?

The next night, we met Raisa and Malik at the hotel for dinner. Malik wanted to go to a nightclub after. It wasn’t a club I knew from the times Dani had dragged me out, but when I looked it up online, it was in a decent area and had good ratings. I didn’t have a reason to say no.

As soon as I met Malik, I knew I had an issue with him. Not only because he’d stood up Georgie the night before, but because of the way he sniffed and kept squeezing his nose. He was a drug addict. My heart sank for Georgie, and her family, and the pain that was going to ensue from this at some point. But also because drug addicts were the worst thing to have in a campaign family. They were notoriously going off the rails and would sell their soul for drug money.

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