Page 152 of Ruthless Rustanovs

She shined her ridiculously small phone light at him, and he shined his much larger one at her. What he saw caused his breath to catch.

A girl, da, just as Gregory had said, but her moon-shaped face was like his. Beautiful on one side, but destroyed on the other.

One side was lovely. With bronzed skin, a wide nose, and brown eyes so big, he could still see them clearly behind a pair of large tortoiseshell glasses, even in the shadows.

But the other side of her face was destroyed.

No, not destroyed, he realized after a moment, but heavily damaged.

Covered in green and blue bruises and very swollen.

He’d seen this kind of bruising before, too many times to count.

He’d usually been the one inflicting it. But never on a woman.

Based on the girl’s small and plump stature, along with her glasses, he doubted she was a fighter. No, somebody had punched her. More than once. With what looked like a solid hook.

He stared at her in the light of his lamp, and she stared at him, both obviously taken aback by what they were seeing.

He opened his mouth to once again ask what she was doing here. Only to be caught off guard when she suddenly shoved him backwards.

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” she demanded. “Are you crazy or something? Huh? Caging Brian up like he’s some kind of dog!?”

Ivan glared at her, and suddenly understood the American term, “spitfire.”

“This man was on my property. Not only trespassing, but spying on me. This town has strict laws about trespassing. By all rights—”

“Are you freaking kidding me?! Nobody has the right to keep a person locked up in an unheated building without a real bed or access to food, water, and a toilet. Brian has asthma and he’s over sixty years old!”

“No need to bring my age into this discussion,” the prisoner, who Ivan could now see had probably dyed his graying hair brown, said behind her.

“Shut it, Brian!” she returned over her shoulder. “Now is not the time for vanity! The point is, he’s a monster for caging you up like this.”

The girl turned back to Ivan, her eyes blazing with righteous indignation. “What kind of person does this to another human being?” she demanded.

“The kind of human being who finds a drunken spy on his property. And now I have two trespassers.”

His voice was hard enough to convey threat, but inside, his mind was scrambling with questions. Who was she? How did she know the prisoner? Why wasn’t she flinching at his face? He knew she could see it clearly by now.

But all she said in the wake of his implied threat was, “Look, you have to let him go. He’s got a sick spouse at home. And classes to teach. People who love him.”

A teacher. Alexei had sent a teacher to spy on him?!?

“Why would Alexei send a teacher to spy on me?” Ivan asked her, finding this latest bit of information nearly impossible to believe.

The girl stopped, clearly wondering the very same thing. They both looked at the older man and she said, “Brian…?”

A beat of silence, then the man said, “Well, I might have slightly exaggerated my contributions during the Vietnam War.”

The young woman let out an exasperated groan. “Oh Brian, please tell me you didn’t give Alexei-freaking-Rustanov that bogus spy story!”

“It’s not bogus, dear girl. I delivered quite a few secret messages during that war!”

“Brian, you were a signalman—not a spy! And you delivered messages with flags! I can’t believe you agreed to do this!”

“We didn’t really use flags. I was in the Army, not the Navy—we had to erect our own radio towers, you know,” Brian replied testily. “Ask anyone, dear girl. We signalmen were a most valuable part of the war effort in Vietnam—!”

“Okay, okay, Brian…just please stop talking,” She shook her head and held up her hand at the older man before turning back to face Ivan. And to his surprise, she once again met his eyes with seemingly no trouble at all.

“So apparently he really was trespassing, but obviously you can see he’s harmless…”

“Harmless! I am hardly harmless,” the older man complained behind her. “If not for that ill-advised drink of Dutch courage at that sad establishment that passes for a bar in this town, I most likely would have completed my mission—”

“The point is, you can’t keep him here,” the girl told Ivan, speaking over the offended man as if he were nothing more than a frustrated child.

She continued to hold Ivan’s gaze, fighting for the old man despite his foolishness and despite the obviously painful injuries to her face, which confused Ivan even more. Who was this girl? And why wasn’t she afraid of him?

But somehow he managed to keep his expression as aloof and detached as possible, determined not to let his confusion show. “If the judge tells me I should release this man, then I will,” he informed her.

“When does the judge get here?”

“In the spring.”

“Great, we’ll come back then.”

She grabbed the prisoner’s arm and started to move forward, probably hoping to take Ivan by surprise again.

But not this time. He got in front of her before she could take so much as two steps.

“He is my prisoner, and you have no rights here. I was thinking of letting him go before you showed up. But you have pissed me off, so now he stays until spring.”

Her eyes widened, “What? That is ridiculous, not to mention grossly unfair—”

But then she stopped. Ivan got the feeling she wasn’t the kind of person who railed against life’s unfairness by the way her eyes darted back and forth. He could almost see her mind working over what he’d just said, as if the situation were a math problem she was trying to solve.

“No, I can’t leave him here,” she mumbled, seemingly to herself. “Eddie is sick and he needs him.” She shook her head as if making a final decision. “No, no, I can’t leave him here…”

She looked up at Ivan and said, “So how about if I stay here in his place? Like as collateral.”

Ivan blinked. Half sure he hadn’t heard her correctly. “You are offering to stay here with me?” he asked, not quite believing his ears. “Until the judge comes in the spring?”