Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 79898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Mother and Father were in the drawing room. Mother was perched on the edge of a couch in a position that looked painful. She was wearing booties with impossibly high heels, cream cashmere pants, and a soft sweater. Father looked more formal in a pair of black pants and a shirt buttoned all the way down his barrel chest.
At the sound of the maid clearing her throat, my mother looked up at me. She saw the flowers I was still holding and her painted lips curled into a practiced smile.
“Oh, Nikolai, they’re lovely,” she said. “For me?”
“Of course,” I said politely. Mother’s accent got thicker with every year that she was away from this country, and sometimes I found that I could hardly understand her.
My father walked over to me and clapped me on the back, then pulled me into a hug and kissed both of my cheeks. I noticed for the first time that I was not only taller than him, but that his hair was beginning to thin.
“Hello,” I said, kissing his cheeks. We stepped away from each other and the maid took the flowers from my arms before disappearing into the attached kitchen.
“We have brunch now,” Mother said. She was still smiling her unnaturally stiff smile and I followed her and Father into the breakfast room where a table was laid with a giant, traditional Russian spread. Black breads and pickled eggs and dishes of caviar and crème fraiche and blini and even what looked like a roasted duck.
“This is enough food for like, fifteen people,” I said, raising an eyebrow at my mother. “Are we expecting anyone else?”
Her smile wavered for a moment, then beamed brighter than ever. My heart sank. Fuck, I thought. She’s invited some girl and promised them that I’d ever-so-eligible.
Or worse, more than one girl.
“No,” Father said, rather coldly. “It will just be us.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and my mother’s smile faded.
“So good to see you, darling Nikolai,” Mother said. “It has been too long,” she added, enunciating every word.
Sometimes, I wished they’d just go back to speaking in Russian around me. My own Russian was adequate – I always worried about forgetting nearly everything until I saw the familiar Cyrillic alphabet of my youth, and the things I hadn’t even known that I still remembered came rushing back.
Oddly, in that moment, I suddenly thought of Harper. What would she think of this – the lavish spread that could feed over a dozen people, my mother’s designer outfit that I suspected she’d purchased just for this meeting?
Even my father – the way he was looking at me like he’d never seen me before.
Mother and Father sat and after a second, I followed. As always, my father began heaping his plate with food. My mother took a single blini and pushed it around on her plate with a small silver fork.
“So,” I said, leaning back in my chair and raising an eyebrow at my parents. “What’s the occasion?”
“We need no occasion to see our only son,” Mother said stiffly.
“Come on,” I said. “Cut the shit – there has to be something.”
My father reached over the table and made to cuff me on the back of the head, but I dodged his swipe. I couldn’t help but grin.
“I know there’s something,” I said calmly as I reached for the tray of blini and caviar. “So, you’d better just get out with it already.”
Mother said. “You are getting old.”
I stared at her. “You’ve been telling me that since I turned nineteen,” I said.
“That was far too long ago,” Mother echoed. She cleared her throat and turned to my father. “Dmitri, a little help please.”
My father narrowed his eyes. His cheeks were bulging with food and he made a great show of chewing thoroughly before swallowing.
“Svetlana, he is your son, too,” he said thickly, speaking through half-masticated duck. “You tell him.”
My mother put her hands on the table in front of her and I looked over the large, opulent rings adorning her thin fingers.
“We would like to see you married,” she said, as if she’d just invited me to afternoon tea.
I rolled my eyes. “Seriously? You couldn’t have just told me this over the phone?”
My father grunted under his breath. “The disrespect,” he muttered. “I did not raise you to be this way!”
I frowned.
“We have several eligible young women,” my mother continued. “All Russian – none of that Ukrainian trash, you do not worry.”
Inwardly, I groaned. I’d never cared about getting married and having children – especially not to some glorified prostitute who would only care about money and the status of marrying someone like me.
“I don’t care,” I said flatly. “I’m not interested in meeting any of them.”
I was only interested in Harper – but there was no fucking way that I felt like telling my parents that. And it was technically their fault that she’d quit working for me in the first place – if only they hadn’t been so fucking insistent on my getting married.