Page 56 of Keeping Ruby

“I’m going to shower.”

Twenty-Five

Ruby

“I would rather stay here with Simba. I just started a book before we left that I was enjoying. You can go—” I wave my hand at the door. “Play on your sled. I’ll just stay here.”

“You’re not staying.” He pulls a snowsuit from the closet. It’s black, but small, so I know it’s meant for me. Or maybe he’s brought other women here, and he has a particular fascination with petite women. Maybe that’s why he’s determined to keep me for himself.

I huff, letting my foot fall to the floor with just a hint of a thud. “I don’t want to go.”

“I have something I would like to show you.” He pulls another suit from the closet, this one far bigger. “Then we’ll drive into town and have dinner. Give you a night off cooking.”

My attention snaps to him. “You’re going to take me to town?”

His lips hitch in a knowing grin. “Don’t get any ideas, wife.”

I feign indifference. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He drops the boots he’d lugged from the closet not a moment before, and prowls predatorily closer to me. “This town is small, and every living soul in it knows who I am. They know who the Volkov family is, and there is respect in that knowledge. You could scream that I’ve kidnapped you at the top of your lungs, and not one of them would hear. You could run, and they would all hunt you, returning you to me.” His hand touches my face, and I don’t even bother flinching as he dips his head to claim my mouth. His kiss is deep and claiming, and my body responds, warming even though my mind rages. “It matters not where we are in this world, wife. There is nowhere you could run that I would not find you. And there is no one who would survive standing between us.” His tongue licks at mine. Sparks detonate inside my core. “Do you understand me, Ruby?”

He waits with his lips a hairsbreadth from mine. I nod.

“Good.” He stands back. “Get dressed.”

He tears through the untouched powder under a dimming blue sky, over a snow-covered path through thick trees, to come to an abrupt stop where the earth simply drops. My heart is in my throat, a wild, restless thing. Red nips at my cheeks from the cold, but my body is warm under the suit I wear. Although I noted it smelled new—not like another woman’s perfume—when I’d put it on. I still can’t help but wonder if he’s had another woman wear it. If he’s taken another woman out here, like he’s taken me. If he’s made love to her in the same bed where he tore through my hymen with his thick fingers.

I want to ask. Why do I want to ask?

I shouldn’t care.

And, unlike me, my husband isn’t twenty-three. Not by a long shot.

But how old is he?

How much older is he?

He cuts the engine of the snow mobile, and I slide off the back into deep snow. Then, I catch my breath because this view.

“Oh my God.” The words hardly sound on a breath. “This is—Kirill, this is—there are no words.”

The cascade of turquoise ice glows iridescent under the setting sun. Like crystals erupting raw from the earth to spear a river that isn’t quite frozen, below.

“Do you see it?” Kirill asks close beside me. “The way the ice dances?”

Fixing my gaze on the ice, I gasp when I do, in fact, see it. “How?”

“The river still flows. Much of the fall has turned to ice, but below the ice, there is a layer of running water. It dances all winter long just like this.” His voice is quiet and uncharacteristically soft. “I used to come here as a boy.”

“You did?” I tear my eyes from the mystical view, to the hard man who, I’m coming to suspect, has some parts that are soft.

“The cabins are family owned, but I’m the only one to visit in the last five years.”

“Do you come often?”

“As often as I can. I like to get away.” He tips a rueful smile at me. “This may surprise you, considering I am a highly public man, but I don’t enjoy people.”

“Then why spend so much time with them?” It’s an honest question. I sincerely want to know what would drive a person to spend their life doing something they find so taxing.

---