Page 89 of Ruthless Rustanovs

NIKOLAI sat on the couch, and so did Sam. For several minutes it was very quiet in the plane, with nothing but the soft whooshing of the aircraft eating up the miles.

It didn’t take long for the chill to set in. Sam was still completely naked and her confession hadn’t exactly left her feeling warm and fuzzy. More like cold and ashamed.

But before she could reach down to gather her clothes, he came out of his fugue. “You heard phone call?” he said.

“Yeah… I heard it.” Sam reached down to pick up her blouse and put it on without the bra, just wanting to cover herself up, to hide from this conversation and Nikolai in any way that she could.

“I heard it all. About how I’d fallen right into your trap to make me perform like a real wife in bed.

” A fresh dose of humiliation surged through her and she grimaced.

“And that is why you hate me? Because I take advice about how to make you real wife?”

“I don’t hate you,” she whispered as she did up the last button. “I hate the way you make me feel.”

He looked over at her then, his eyes deeply troubled.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked him.

“I also think this to myself,” he answered. “Several times I think it. I hate way you make me feel.”

“No, Nikolai, it’s not the same,” she said with a bitter shake of her head. “I’m frustrating to you because I won’t act the part you want me to play. Because I won’t surrender and be the perfect wifey and let you fuck me whenever you want. The way I feel about you, that’s different.”

He stilled. “Different how?”

She sighed, and decided to tell him all of it, to kill every last ounce of pride she had.

“The reason I can’t have a sexual relationship with you is because it would hurt me too much.

It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. But I’ve fallen in love with you and I’m going to work on not being in love with you, but I can’t do that if we’re having sex, or if we’re still married, so I can’t be married to you anymore… ”

Nikolai’s mouth worked and at least six different kinds of distress registered across his face, before he finally choked out, “You love me?”

“Yes, I love you,” she admitted with a shake of her head. “Because I’m a masochist, who apparently doesn’t know how to not become overly attached to every walking sob story that comes across my path.”

Nikolai frowned in that Russian way of his. “So this love has happened before. Man tell you he has bad past and you love him?”

“No,” she answered, wishing she was anywhere but stuck thousands of miles in the air having this conversation with Nikolai.

“I’ve never been in love before. Believe me, if I’d thought it would be a possibility with you, I wouldn’t have agreed to the marriage in the first place.

But I’ve started two domestic violence shelters.

And it still breaks my heart whenever one of my intakes goes back to her abuser.

Every single time—but keep in mind, I still want to open forty-eight more Ruth’s House shelters. ”

She looked away from him. “I fell in love with Pavel pretty much from the first moment I saw him in your laundry room, all dirty and skinny. And I couldn’t adopt Back Up soon enough after I read the little card outside her cage at the rescue fair, talking about the abuse she’d suffered.

” She took a deep breath, and forced herself to meet his eyes again. “Obviously, I have a problem…”

“Obviously,” Nikolai agreed. A look of deep consideration came over his face. “So you are saying you love me like you love Pavel and Back Up. Because I am broken man and my story makes you sad.”

“Yes, I guess so,” she answered. “Though, I maybe wouldn’t have put it in such a harsh way.

But yes, I stupidly let myself fall in love with you.

Maybe I could have prevented it from happening if we’d just kept it contained to sleeping in separate places back in Indiana, but c’mon…

Greece… and the Veronica Mars movie… and your gruesome back story…

and then you ordered me breakfast! Why did you have to order me breakfast?

Nobody’s ever done that for me before, and it really messed me up. ”

“So you are in love with me now because of date, my sad story, and breakfast I order.” He considered this information with a heavy frown, then he shrugged and said, “Okay, I take it.”

Her near-crushing heartache turned into deep confusion. “What? What do you mean?”

“You will stay with me, no divorce, and I will take your love.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Okay, that’s not exactly how it works.”

“No?” Nikolai asked, with what sounded like genuine confusion. “How does ‘it work?’”

“I’m in love with you and I’m putting some distance between us because I don’t want to be in love with you.”

“Why not?” Nikolai asked.

“Because it hurts too much.”

“Why?” he asked again.

Was he serious?

“Because you don’t love me back!” she answered, stringing the words out carefully since obviously Nikolai was even lower on the emotional intelligence spectrum than she’d originally feared.

Nikolai’s brow wrinkled and he turned fully towards her, laying his arm across the back of the couch.

“Zhena, I have important question for you. When you said I could learn be good parent, did you mean it?”

“Yes, I meant it,” she answered immediately, though she had no idea why he was asking this in response to her confession of love.

“So why you think I not learn to love you?”

Before she could answer, he looked down, almost as if he were frustrated with himself for not being able to solve a tricky math problem. “No, I not ask right question…”

He looked back up at her, his green eyes the opposite of ice now. So heated, they seemed to burn.

“I will answer now question you asked me before,” he told her.

“Yes, zhena, my father was enforcer for our former Rustanov mafia family. Yes, he taught me everything he knew. I did not, how you say, follow in his footsteps. I became hockey player. But I did remember these things. I did use them to kill those Russians. I killed them to protect Pavel, and I killed them to protect you.”

Sam stared at him wide eyed. Why was he telling her this now? To get her to stop loving him? To convince her she’d made a mistake by bringing her heart into it? If that was the case, then he’d used the wrong tactic.

She looked down, then back up again to say, “I see where you’re going with this, but unfortunately that only makes me love you more. Nobody’s ever gone out of their way to protect me before.”

Nikolai looked at her for a few moments and let out a sad sigh, as if she were the most pitiful woman he’d ever encountered—which maybe she was.

Then he said, “When you did not realize it was date until I say to you, ‘Zhena, this is date,’ I thought maybe you are smart in some ways, and maybe not so smart in others. But now I see question I should ask you is are you same as your mother?”

Her heart stopped, her back going up straight. “Why would you ask me that? Because I’m not upset about you killing the Russians? You think I want to be in an abusive relationship?”

“No, I asked you, because you thought I told you about my killings to make you stop loving me. This is why I ask,” Nikolai answered, his voice harsh and angry. “Are you same as your mother? Do you think you are—how did you say—undeserving of loving relationship?”

Sam froze. “I…”

She wanted to say no. She wanted to say she used to dream about being in a loving relationship, of having a family with someone she loved, so obviously she thought she deserved one. But she ended up telling him the truth instead.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

Nikolai reached out to her then, cupping the side of her face gently with his large hand. “I will tell you another secret now, zhena. I was not talking on phone with cousin. I was talking with Pavel.”

“Pavel? But why?” she asked, sitting back in stunned surprise.

And his hand fell from her face.

“Why did I ask nine-year-old boy how to make you my wife in every way? Because I was desperate,” he answered with a miserable look.

“So I ask Pavel his help. And he told me story. He said when you saved him, he thought, ‘She is good person. I wish she was my mother.’ So he called you mama, because he wanted you to be mama to him, and after we married you became his mama. This made him very happy. So when I ask him advice, he told me to do same. He said to be nice to you, treat you like real wife and he said if I do this, you become my real wife, same as you became his real mother.”

Sam stared at him in horror and he shifted his gaze away from her. “You look at me like this because I took advice from child.”

“Not because you took Pavel’s advice, but because you asked a child how to get me into bed!”

Nikolai screwed up his face. “You think this is about sex only?” he asked. Then he reset with an annoyed huff. “Okay, you have been in Indianapolis less than year. Maybe you don’t understand yet. I am big deal. I could have many girls at any time.”

“Oh, I get that, Nikolai,” she answered with a pained expression. “I totally get that.”

“Then why you think this way about me?”

Nikolai asked this question, both his tone and his face filled with hurt, and it disarmed Sam.

Not only because she wasn’t used to him showing emotion, but also because…

“Because yeah, maybe you think you can learn, but I’m not sure you can.

I don’t even know if you’re capable of love.

You said it was a silly custom. Remember? ”

“I know what I said!” he snarled. “But you—how you say—should observe things I do, not things I say!”