Vlad ignored the sharp pain in his leg as he stood. He didn’t care. If he’d hurt it again, his leg would heal, and even if it didn’t, he’d survive. But he wouldn’t survive another day without Elena. Nearly losing her had put things in perspective rather quickly.
He hobbled toward his wife. His beautiful, smart, generous, brave wife. Elena’s features softened, and her arms shot out just in case he fell again. He limped straight into her embrace, wrapped his arms around her, buried his face in her neck, and sobbed. He clung to her. Breathed her in. Kissed her neck and tasted the life-affirming salt of her sweat and tears.
“I was so scared,” he choked. “I thought I lost you.”
“I thought I lost you too. I’m so sorry, Vlad. I’m so sorry.”
He pulled back and smoothed the hair from her face, rage pushing at his temples at the sight of blood on her skin. “I wasn’t there, Elena.” His voice was a snotty hiccup. “If I hadn’t left, if I’d been there—”
“I’m glad you weren’t, because they might have killed you on the spot.”
He went cold at the factual, impassive tone of her voice. As if she were willing to risk her life to protect him. Vlad wiped his face and glowered. “You say that like any of this is normal.”
“In my life, it kind of has been.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe your father made you think that.”
She curled her lips into a patient smile. “Vlad, I think you should sit down, because I need to say some things.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. I need you to hear me.”
Vlad nodded reluctantly. He sat down, and she stepped between his legs. He had to look up to see her.
“You learn a lot about yourself when someone kidnaps you,” she said.
“That isn’t funny,” he rasped. “How can you joke about any of this?”
She smoothed his sweat-soaked hair back from his forehead. “Because a macabre sense of humor is how journalists like my father and me process the horrific things we see.”
“You are not like your father.”
“But I am. In so many ways I am.” She rested her hands on his shoulders. “He did a lot of things wrong. You were right about that. And I think you were also right that I’ve been desperate to make his absence in my life worth it.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. It was cruel.”
“No, I needed to hear it. I couldn’t see what I was doing to myself and to us. You helped me see that, and I will love you forever for it.”
Her bottom lip trembled, so he gripped her hips and tugged her closer. She pressed a hand to the center of his chest. “But I need you to understand that this is part of who I am and will always be part of who I am. I am a journalist at heart, and I don’t want to deny that part of me. Not when I know that I have a passion and a skill that can do good things in the world. I can’t change who I am, but I can promise that I will be better. Better than him. Better than I have been. Better to us.”
She curled her hands around his cheeks. “I will never put us at risk for the sake of a story. Ever. Because nothing is more important to me than you. I’ve been living with the ghost of my father for so long that it blinded me to everything else. To you. And I nearly lost you. And I’m so, so sorry, Vlad.”
Her expression was a combination of tenderness and ferocity, and he realized with a jolt that it was uniquely her. Two mutually exclusive traits had somehow merged when the universe created this woman, and he’d never appreciated it, never saw it, until now. Until she stood before him with her gentle fingers on his face and her determination sparking like lightning in her eyes. For so long, he’d considered the two sides of her as separate beings at war with each other, and only one could win. But to truly love her, he had to love both sides of her. The nurturing woman who heated his blood and fed his soul with her poetry and passion. And the warrior woman who would likely give him heartburn but make him so damn proud with her crusades for the rest of his life.
Vlad turned into her touch and kissed her palm. Then he slid his own hands up her back and brought her flush against him. “I love you,” he declared. “And if this is what you want to do, then I am behind you. Just promise me, promise me, that you will never shut me out. I want to be part of it all. Every ugly part of it. Don’t hide anything from me, because you are part of me.”
And then he kissed her, and she kissed him back. She kissed him like she knew how close they’d come to never kissing again. She kissed him with unrestrained passion and roaming hands and panted breaths. Like it was their first time and their last chance. She kissed him with his name on her lips, her heart in her eyes, with joy in every breath.
“It’s going to be okay now, Lenochka,” he whispered. “Everything is going to be okay.”
A clearing throat brought them apart. Vlad looked around her body to see Colton peeking his head in through the curtain. “You know, just because none of us speak Russian doesn’t mean we don’t understand sex noises. You’re shocking the staff.”
Elena laughed and dropped her face to Vlad’s shoulder. He hugged her tightly, hand palmed around the curve of her neck to hold her, safe and sound and secure.
“So, is it safe to come in now or what?” Colton asked.
“Go away,” Vlad grumbled.
Elena laughed and turned around in his arms. “You can come in.”
A single-file line walked through the curtain. Colton. Mack. Malcolm. Michelle. Claud. Noah. Cheese Man.
Cheese Man? Vlad glowered at Colton. “What is he doing here?”
“He’s a friend of Elena’s too.”
“I was very worried,” Cheese Man said. He reached for Elena’s hand, probably to kiss it, the bastard. Vlad slid his arms around Elena’s waist and pulled her against his chest in an unabashed possessive pose.
“Thank you for coming,” Elena laughed, covering Vlad’s hands with her own. “That was very kind of you.”
Cheese Man pointed at Vlad. “You are a lucky man, my friend. I hope you recognize it.”
Vlad kissed Elena’s neck. “I do.”
“Keep it PG, kids,” Colton said. “You can’t do the humping in here.”
The aggressive scrape of the curtain rings heralded the arrival of a very annoyed ER doctor. “Folks, we can’t have this many people in here. Just family.”
Elena leaned into Vlad’s chest. “This is our family.”
“Damn straight, it is,” Mack said.
“Well, there are too many of you. You can visit her when she’s admitted to her own room.”
Vlad tightened his hold on her waist. “You’re admitting her?”
“Overnight for observation.”
“Do I have a concussion?” Elena asked.
“Yes, but I cannot go into details with all these people here.”
Colton snapped and pointed. “Point taken. We’re leaving.”
One by one, the guys stopped in front of Elena to kiss her cheek and pat Vlad on the shoulder. Except Cheese Man. He just waved before ducking out. Michelle gave her a long hug, and Claud just smiled. The doctor left, too, and said he’d be back in a few minutes to discuss the results of her CT scan.
Vlad turned Elena around his arms and then stood up on one leg. “You need to be in bed. A concussion is serious. I know these things.”
He held her hand as she crawled onto the mattress. Then he draped the thin white blanket across her lap before sitting down in the small chair next to her bedside. Their hands laced next to her hip.
“I love you,” she said, resting her head on the pillow.
“I love you too.” He leaned forward and kissed her hand. “And I want us to have a real wedding.”
“You do?”
He looked up in time to see a happy tear roll down her cheek. “Here in America, with all our friends and my parents. I want to wa
it for you as you walk down the aisle, and I want to kiss you in front of everyone, and I want my mother to read a poem.”
“Sounds like you have it all planned out,” she teased, another tear dripping onto the pillow.
“I’ve thought about it a lot.”
Elena smiled. “I just have one request.”
“Anything,” Vlad said, using the pad of his thumb to wipe away her tear.
“Can Cheese Man cater it?”
EPILOGUE
One month later
Vlad thought it was torture when the guys were reading his words. That was nothing compared to this.
It had been three hours since Elena had taken his manuscript with her to bed with a stern order not to bother her until she was done. He’d set his rehab back a month with his fall in the hospital, so he’d used the time to his advantage. He took care of her as she recovered from her concussion, and he finished his damn book.
Taking care of Elena had been the harder part of the two. In the month since the incident, there had been FBI interviews and media attention and interest from literary agents who wanted to sign her to write a book about her experience and her investigation. The team’s immigration attorneys were working to make sure they didn’t violate any visa laws if she chose to do so, but it was low on Elena’s priorities. She’d already vowed that any money offered for her story would immediately go to Marta and the other women Yevgeny and his goons had hurt. Marta was now safely hidden under federal protection while Gretchen represented her claim for asylum.
The assholes who’d taken Elena were in prison awaiting trial on charges that would ensure they never stepped foot outside a cell again. That didn’t make Vlad any less worried, though. He’d upgraded his security system and hired a bodyguard for when she left the house without him. She’d tried to argue that issue, but one look at his face, and she’d backed down.
After all that, it should have been a breeze to have Elena read his book. It wasn’t. He was dying. He lay on the couch and flipped through the channels as the hours ticked by. Finally, her soft footsteps padded down the stairs.
He couldn’t see her face or her expression at first when she walked into the dark room. He zapped off the TV and sat up. “Well?”
Elena stepped into the light. Her eyes were puffy and red. “Vlad . . .” she breathed.
“Wh-what does that mean?” He gulped.
She crossed the room to the couch and curled up next to him. When she pressed her hand into his chest, his world tilted off its axis. It happened a lot with her. “Vlad, this is so, so good.”
His heart leaped into this throat. “Are you lying to me?”
“No,” she laughed. “Look at me.”
He obeyed, but reluctantly.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you could write like this?”
“I don’t know.”
She rubbed a circle over his heart. “That soft part of you, the one that cries at animal shows and weddings, the one that studies poetry and kisses chickens . . . you’ve poured all of it into a story that made me cry and cheer and want to kiss you until you can’t breathe.”
He gulped again. “I like the kissing part of that.”
She obliged. She straddled his lap, and their mouths met in a tangle of wild and unrestrained longing. It was a sloppy kiss, tender and fierce at once, just like her. This was the moment he’d read about so many times, but nothing he wrote in his own book would ever come close to capturing how this felt. The completeness of handing your whole heart to someone who gave hers back in return.
Vlad gripped her head and brought them brow to brow. “ ‘My voice that is for you, the languid one and gentle . . .’ ”
She choked on an emotional noise, and her voice broke as she picked up the verse for “The Night,” an ardent declaration about the burning fire of love, the poetry of passion, the rivers that ebb and flow between two lovers. Vlad stroked her velvet mouth with his tongue before pulling back and panting the final lines, written, it seemed, for them alone. “ ‘My friend, my sweetest friend, I love—’ ”
But his throat clogged with a rising sob of joy, cutting off his voice. Elena kissed his nose, gently, sweetly, and took over for him, completing the promise with a fervent whisper against his lips. “ ‘I love . . . I’m yours . . . I’m yours.’ ”
Promise Me
“Tony, you have to eat something.”
He held the bandage at his side, where just a week ago, a Nazi bullet had torn a hole through him. He shoved the plate away with his other hand and stood. It had been a week since the rescue. A week since he’d been shot. A week since his last fleeting image of Anna standing above him, crying and screaming his name, before her blood splattered his face. And then the world went black.
Two days ago, the light returned when he’d woken up on this hospital ship headed for the U.S. with Jack sitting next to his bunk, an agonized and regretful look on his face. He hadn’t left Tony alone since. As if they were bonded somehow in shared grief.
“You’re not going to heal if you don’t eat,” Jack said, following with Tony’s untouched tray. “I’m trying to help you.”
“I don’t want your goddamned help.” He whipped around and knocked the tray from Jack’s hands. Chipped beef and applesauce flew in every direction. Tony ignored the stab of pain in his side and grabbed Jack by the lapels of his hospital robe. “You were supposed to save her! Where the hell were you?”
“Do you honestly think I’m not as broken up about this as you are?”
“I don’t care what you feel.”
“I’m the reason she’s gone. She saved my life, and I couldn’t save hers. I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I loved her as much you did, Tony.”
The sound of a high-pitched gasp brought them apart. A Red Cross nurse stood with her hand to her mouth, eyes wide and disbelieving. She took a tentative step toward them, blinked rapidly, and then spun around to run in the other direction.
“What the hell was that?” Jack asked, bending to pick up the tray Tony had knocked from his hands. “She looked at us like she’d seen a ghost.”
Tony crouched. “We’ve all seen ghosts in this war.”
An orderly came by with a mop and a bucket. Tony held his side as he stood and reached for the mop. “Let me do it. It’s my mess.”
“No, sir,” the young man said. “This is my job. Yours is to get better. You go on and sit down. Both of you.”
Tony hesitated but finally held out a hand to help Jack to his feet.
Another feminine gasp interrupted. They turned in unison. A woman stood alone by the small door, silhouetted against the light. A bandage was wrapped around the crown of her head.
She stepped forward on shaky steps.
Oh my God. Anna.
Tony felt his knees give way, and the orderly dropped the mop to quickly catch him. Next to him, Jack trembled from head to foot. How? How was she here? How was she on this ship? A million thoughts collided at once, but he couldn’t focus on a single one except the fear that he was dreaming.
“Anna . . .” A man’s voice groaned her name, and Tony had no idea if it came from him or Jack.
With a cry, Anna rushed forward and threw her arms around them both. Tony wrapped a single arm around her waist, still afraid that this was just a dream. But she felt real. She was warm.
“Anna . . . how?” That time it was Jack.
She held a hand to each of their cheeks and spoke as tears poured down her face. “I was rescued by a Red Cross unit and brought on board. There was so much confusion, and I was in and out of consciousness.”
“You were shot,” Tony choked. “I saw it.”
“It grazed my scalp, that’s all.”
No. That couldn’t be possible. Tony ran his hands up and down her body. “You’re okay? I can’t believe you’re alive.”
“Tony,” she whispered.
A groan escaped his lips as he yanked her against him. “I thought I lost you.”
Next to them, Jack shuffled his feet. Tony pulled away from Anna and watched in agony as she turned to him.
“Jack . . .”
A small, sad smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “It’s okay, Anna.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “It’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean to . . .” A sob broke off her voice.
“Didn’t mean to fall in love again?” He looked at Tony. “You’re a good man, Tony. I can’t think of anyone else who could possibly deserve her.”
Jack held out his hand, and Tony accepted it with a lump in his throat.
“Jack,” Anna whispered.
He ran a knuckle down her jaw. “I’ll always love you, Anna. But you belong with Tony.” He wiped a hand across his cheek. “I’m going to give you two some time.”
Tony couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. So, he did the only thing he could. He kissed her. In front of everyone. He wrapped his arms around her, ignored the twinge in his side, and held her as tightly as he’d ever held her. He was never letting her go.
“Anna . . .” Her name was the only word he could say. So, he said it over and over again. Chanted it like a sacred prayer.
“I’m here,” she whispered, soothing him with her touch, her kisses. “Everything is going to be okay now.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I created the lovable character the Russian in the first Bromance Book Club book, I never intended for him to get his own story one day. I owe a huge thank-you to all the readers, bloggers, and reviewers who sent me messages and tagged me on social media to say, “Please give this gentle giant his own book!” I listened, and I’m so glad I did. I hope I have done justice to the man you’ve all grown to love so much.
Huge thanks to my niece, Madison Kefferstan, a real athletic trainer who helped me research hockey injuries and rehab. Thanks for indulging all my questions, no matter how ridiculous. I can’t wait to see where your career takes you! Also thank you to attorney Melissa Indish for your invaluable help in researching the complex and heartbreaking realities of the American immigration system. Any mistakes in either area are entirely my own!
Isn't It Bromantic? Page 29