He placed a palm against my cheek. I didn’t move. This hand that could caress so gently could just as easily slap so hard I would feel the vibration in the bones of my neck. This time his fingers moved to caress. At that moment I felt an old tug in my heart. This was my father. All said and done he had fed, clothed, sheltered, and protected me for most of my life. I felt sad at the reminder of his insistence that I marry Maxim. That was the only thing right now that threatened to pull us apart. I looked into his eyes. If I was ever going to reason with him now was the moment.
But as if he understood what I was about to say, he placed a kiss on my forehead and rose to his feet. “We are going out to dinner. Put on a dress and maybe,” he leaned forward and brushed his fingers through my crazy hair, “tie your hair back? There are four new dresses for you to try.”
I nodded dumbly and looked past him to the coffee table in my lounge area. There were four large boxes tied with peach ribbons awaiting me.
“Take your pick tonight and keep the rest,” he threw over his shoulder as he exited my room.
I unboxed the dresses, at first without interest, but they were so extraordinarily beautiful I couldn’t help but be seduced by how gorgeous they all were. I chose a white silk dress with spaghetti straps and a slit that shot all the way to the middle of my thighs. It was one of those dresses that was so simple and classic you knew the moment you saw it, it must have cost the earth itself. A stylist would have recommended peach or apricot lipstick, but I went for bold red. I pulled my hair back into a high ponytail on my head and finished off the look with an emerald choker that had been my mother’s. Then I closed my safe, and quickly slipped into a pair of white strappy sandals.
As I came down the stairs I knew I looked the part, but when I saw Elena’s eyes widen with surprise, I realized I must look better than what I thought.
“You look like your mother,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” I whispered back. Tears threatened to choke me. Elena couldn’t have paid me a higher compliment. My mother was a great beauty queen. She had been crowned Miss America in her time.
“Your father is in his study.” I went to his door and knocked softly. He called me to come. I opened the door and I entered.
“Beautiful,” he declared with a nod of satisfaction. Then he moved forward and took my arm.
“How severe is the pain?”
“It’s much better now. It can be ignored, so no need to worry,” I said as we slipped into the back of his limo.
As the car slid smoothly out of the tall black and gold gates our conversation moved to his last trip to Peru. Cocooned in the comfortable interior of the car I began to relax. When my father decided to charm someone, there was no way they were not going to be charmed. I was charmed. I listened eagerly to his adventures and laughed at his stories until the car came to a stop and my father said, “Ah, we are here.”
I thought we would be going to one of my father’s usual super expensive haunts in the heart of Moscow, but we had pulled up in front of a set of iron cast gates I was all too familiar with. I turned to my father with a look of betrayal.
“What are we doing here?”
“Having dinner.”
I turned my face away. “I’m taking a taxi home.”
He didn’t say a word and that was worse than if he had bothered to tell me off. I sat stiffly, fuming inwardly, my face turned away from him until we arrived at the front of the splendid Ivankov mansion. The door was pulled open for me, but it was not by the Ivankov’s butler, but Bianca herself. She was grinning widely and seemed filled with a child-like excitement to see me.
“Freya,” she called out merrily, and for a moment I was so stumped to see her I forgot I was meant to be furious at my father’s deception. The next thing I knew, I was being pulled into the house by the hand. Bianca pulled me through the house right into the kitchen where there was a flurry of activity. She pulled me through it all towards a long table filled with too much food. She picked up a tiny square of toast with caviar on it.
“Do you love caviar?” she asked excitedly.
I was too bemused to tell her caviar was not special to me. I could have eaten it for breakfast every day of my childhood and I had always chosen cereal instead. I took the tiny toast offering and popped it into my mouth. Bianca snagged two flutes of champagne from the tray of a passing manservant and held one out to me.
Her eyes were sparkling almost as much as the golden liquid in our glasses when she clinked her glass with mine and said, “To us.”
I echoed her words and took a sip of cold bubbles.
“You look really beautiful,” she said.
“So do you,” I said sincerely. Her hair was pulled back just like mine, with golden stray strands framing her lovely face. Her silver dress was superbly cut, sleeveless, and hugged her body exquisitely.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
“Maxim’s father is in town, which apparently hardly ever happens so they wanted this to be a sort of introductory dinner between the two families.”
“Hmm…” I mused sarcastically. “An introductory dinner, for a marriage I have countless times said I am not interested in.”
Her happy smile broke and I felt sorry for always pulling her into the midst of my anger with the Ivankovs. I actually liked her, and given different circumstances, we might have even become friends.
There was something I did wonder about though, and couldn’t hold it back any longer. “You love Levan a lot, don’t you?”
Her eyes softened and she smiled. “I do.”
I concluded then she wasn’t well versed in the horrors of being married into a Russian mafia family, especially one as dangerous as our two families. I drained my glass and chose not to say anything. Who knew? Maybe I was wrong and she was right. Her love would be strong enough to weather all the storms coming their way.
She however knew exactly what I didn’t want to say. She reached for my hand, held it in hers, and said, “I owe everything to Levan. He and I came together out of tragedy. It’s a long story which I will tell you in detail someday, but basically, I was kidnapped by a madman and everyone around me suffered and nearly even lost their lives trying to get me out. My father, my best friend, Levan … and Maxim.”
My brows shot up in surprise at the mention of the last person.
She nodded. “Yes, Maxim. Secretly he might have wanted to kill me for all this trouble I was causing. Levan was almost given a life sentence because of me.” She smiled. “But he saw that his brother was in love with me and he helped. Repeatedly.”
“Wait, what? Maxim helped repeatedly?”
She nodded.
“Are you sure we are talking about the same person?”
She laughed. “Yup.”
I frowned. I couldn’t imagine Maxim being moved by love.
“So, Freya, I have experienced the dangers of being involved with this family and the mafia in general in the most brutal, first hand way, but I couldn’t let Levan go and neither could he, so we found a way to make it work. After our wedding, he will be leaving the conglomerate for good. We’re moving to South Africa, and he’s going to become a brewer there. It’s been his dream to make the finest craft beer ever made, but he’s always had to put it aside because of the family.