“Breakfast time,” Austin said smartly. “I got room service to bring all the major food groups. Remember, you’re eating for two.”
He held the tray over her head and she squirmed into an upright position. Proudly, he laid it across her lap. With a regal flourish, he took off the silver dome covering the gold-rimmed plate. He held up the heavy white linen napkin to put on her lap.
“Voila,” he said. “I think, given the history of our relationship, I’m really going the extra mile for you with breakfast in bed.”
Tarini looked down at the plate.
Ghastly smells. Disgusting lumps of food on the plate. A sudden roiling in her stomach. Her head felt heavy. She turned away.
“Yuck. It looks so gross. What is that stuff?”
“Scrambled eggs. Crispy bacon. Hash browns. A half grapefruit. You used to love a big breakfast”
“Get it out of here!” She leaped up, knocking the tray to the floor.
“Is this that independence stuff again?” Austin demanded. “You know, that I-don’t-need-any-special-treatment-because-I’m-pregnant stuff? Or maybe the I-live-to-torture-you-Austin stuff?”
“No!” Tarini shouted over her shoulder as she headed for the bathroom. “This is the I’m-going-to-throw-up-like-a-sick-dog stuff!”
She slammed the bathroom door and was sick. Again and again. Just like every other morning since she’d found out she was pregnant. Now at the end of her first trimester, she looked forward to the morning sickness diminishing.
She knew she’d feel better again. Sometime. Probably in less than twenty minutes. The nausea and accompanying weakness would pass quickly. She would will it so.
Knock. Knock.
“Go away!” she warned darkly.
“Would you rather have oatmeal?” he said through the door.
The thought of it made her heave again.
“Okay. How about a cup of tea?”
“That’s a better idea,” she conceded. She washed her face—so ghostly pale—and brushed her teeth. Wanting only to crawl into bed and stay there until the nausea passed or she died—whichever came first.
When she came into the bedroom, she noted that he had cleaned up the food, moved the tray out of sight, and was holding out a comforting cup of hot tea.
“Thanks,” she muttered as she took the tea and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to steady the wavering earth with her own willpower. She remembered she was wearing just a T-shirt and a pair of scanty undies.
She ignored his appraisal of her legs, feeling too bone-tired to reach for her jeans.
“Do you get sick like this every morning?” he asked.
“Yes. Don’t ever try that breakfast-in-bed routine on me again.”
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Any other things that…you know, are different?” he asked delicately.
She shook her head, overcoming her nausea to reach for her jeans.
“That’s my little reminder that I’m pregnant,” she said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t notice any difference. I’m not an invalid. I’m not weak or out of commission in any way. I’m just pregnant, that’s all. And frankly, if you weren’t hanging around, I wouldn’t think about it at all.”
“Have you been to a doctor?”
“Yes,” Tarini said tersely, remembering the doctor’s exasperation that while Tarini was scrupulous about keeping her appointments she was utterly unenthusiastic. She hadn’t even watched the sonogram screen. Somehow the mothering instinct hadn’t hit her. Tarini worried it might never.
“Do you have special vitamins?” Austin persisted.
Tarini slid into her jeans and zipped them up. She noted his flicker of interest—her stomach was still flat and the slim-fit jeans still fit as well as they had the day she bought them.
Maybe just a little snug.
“I take my vitamins,” she said, withholding the important word sometimes. “Look, you seem very intrigued by all this.”
“I am. Purely because I’m responsible for you now. You’re carrying my best friend’s child. He’s not here, so I’m responsible for you.”
“Well, stop that Neanderthal stuff. You make me feel like a breeding cow.”
“You’re carrying my best friend’s child,” Austin repeated. “If anything happens to Vlad, this child is his legacy.”
“And what if it wasn’t Vlad’s child?” Tarini asked casually, slipping her feet into her sneakers. From beneath her tousled hair, she saw his look of shock and loathing.
“There was another guy?”
She was about to tell him she wasn’t that kind of woman, and then remembered she was the one who had persuaded him that she was exactly that kind of woman in the first place. “No, I’m asking what if it was yours,” Tarini said through her teeth.
“If you told me it was mine, I’d remind you I didn’t want kids,” Austin said coolly. “And then I’d cuff you someplace safe and go find Vlad.”
“And then?”
“Then I’d take the baby, get my mom to help out and give you a tidy settlement to start a new life. You’ve never struck me as the domestic type.”
Tarini let out a deep breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “Glad to know you’re still a real romantic,” she said, relinquishing the last smidgen of guilt about lying to him. She went to the bathroom and rummaged through her purse for a comb.
“Is it?” Austin asked, following her. “Is it mine?”
“We were careful, Austin, remember?”
She shoved the bathroom door shut to foreclose any further conversation.
They had been careful. Very careful. He couldn’t even known how careful.
She had made love to him because she loved him, so much that she couldn’t think clearly about all that she was risking. He had done it because… well, he had had lots of women and Tarini wasn’t about to guess why he had made love to her. The challenge of having yet another woman in his bed would have been at the top of his list of reasons.
She had never let him know how high the stakes were for her, certain she would scare him off. He didn’t know that she had been a virgin their first time together—she had affected a cool sophistication even as her fragile heart had nearly broken at the wonder and terror of making love for the very first time.
And there had been that one time, that one time when his ardor had been so great that she hadn’t excused herself to take care of the precautions.
Thank God Vlad had rescued her, immediately seeing a solution to her pregnancy, a solution that would solve so many problems—personal and patriotic—all at once.
He’d provided salvation and now, even if he weren’t the living symbol of all that was good and right and wonderful about her people, she would still honor her debt to him.
She had to find Vlad.
And being Austin’s captive wouldn’t help.
She ran the comb through her hair, swiped a brick-colored lipstick across her mouth so she’d look nearly civilized and then deposited everything in her cosmetics bag.
She would be free of Austin soon enough. She planned to ditch him at the first opportunity.
“So what’s on the agenda this morning?” she called out.
She felt for her gun, checking the safety with a grazing of her fingertips. She shoved it to the bottom of her purse—didn’t want him suddenly to get the bright idea of disarming her. She opened the bathroom door.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“You are going to my parents’ house,” he said, with irritating emphasis on the word you. “I called my parents. I want you out of the line of fire.”
“Aren’t your parents living in England?”
Austin shook his head.
“That’s just a story we float,” he said. “They have a place in Connecticut A little farm. No one knows about it because they’ve had to use it a few times…as a safe house for diplomats in other tight situations. They’ve just returned
from Africa. My father has already set up a secure perimeter.”
“I…I didn’t know,” she said, feeling hurt because he’d never brought her into his confidence before—when they were together, when he didn’t have any reason not to trust her. Just one more indication of how little she had meant to him.
“If you’re going to protest about being kept safe, I can take care of you some other way,” he said, measuring her with his eyes.
“No,” she said briskly, striding by him into the bedroom to find the jacket he had given her the night before. “You’re absolutely right. It makes no sense for me to put my life in danger.”
“Vlad’s child’s life,” he corrected.
“Whatever,” she said with a perfectly measured dismissive sense of pique. She had seen her opening. He’d take her to safety, run off in search of Vlad, and she’d be home free. “Just get me someplace where no one’s going to shoot at me. Then you can go and do that macho thing. I don’t want any part of it.”
She flounced into the armchair and picked up the complimentary newspaper. She would not give him any hint of her plans to lose him.
While she scanned the hotel newspaper—an article about a mysterious gun battle on her street was buried on page ten—he put on his shoulder holster, brushed his teeth, threw some water on his face and shrugged into his green quilted aviator jacket.
As he stood ready to leave, she was dialing her mother’s apartment.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I want to talk to my sister.”
“Don’t. Your sister betrayed you to Karinolov. Besides, her line could be tapped. Karinolov would zero in on us…”
“We’re leaving, aren’t we? What do we care if he knows where we’ve been? Anyhow, my sister is not a monster. She’s misguided,” Tarini corrected.
“And I am her only sister. I will talk to her and set her straight.”
Austin sullenly crossed his arms over his chest.
She held the phone and listened anxiously to the rings. She hoped her mother wouldn’t answer the phone. So much explaining to do.
“Hello?”
Tarini’s heart flip-flopped.
“Mama?”
“Oh, my darling child Tarini, where are you?”
“I…” She glanced up at Austin’s look of warning. “I can’t say. Mama, where’s Tanya?”
Her mother snorted in disgust. “She’s with that Karinolov.”
“What?”
“He took her to an early-morning mass,” her mother said. “He’s got Tanya thinking he’s some kind of old-fashioned suitor. He brought her flowers yesterday evening.”
“Talk to her for me,” Tarini said. “Explain how our country really works. Doesn’t she understand what our family has been through? How can she even speak to that horrible snake?”
“I can’t tell her anything,” her mother said. “She was raised in America. She’s a free woman, twenty years old. We gave her everything to make up for…well, she doesn’t remember what our country was like. Not like you. You remember.”
Tarini shuddered as she recalled her early childhood on the refugee trail leading from the capital to anywhere the soldiers weren’t.
“Besides,” her mother added, “I’m a little afraid of him. Afraid to say anything.”
Her mother afraid? Impossible to believe that the widowed Schaskylavitch matriarch would be afraid, and yet there was an unmistakable tremor in her voice.
“Mama, I’m going away for a while,” Tarini said. “With Austin. Austin Smith.”
She glanced up at Austin and then registered the intake of her mother’s breath.
“Who is this Austin Smith?”
“He’s…a friend of Vlad’s.”
“I believe I met him at one of Vlad’s dinner parties. Where will you go?”
“To his parents’ house.”
“Alone?”
“Yes,” Tarini replied, knowing that her mother was thinking of the consequences of an unmarried woman traveling with a man.
“I thought you were working. Tanya told me you were doing some top-secret work for the INS.”
“Mama…”
She wished she had time to explain everything. She wondered if her mother would understand.
But the murderous look Austin gave her stopped her short.
“Mama, I’ve got to go. I love you very much. Talk to Tanya. Persuade her to stay away from Karinolov. I’ll call later.”
She hung up before her mother could protest.
“Why’d you do that?” Austin demanded. “Told her where we were going?”
“She doesn’t know where your parents live. She doesn’t even know who you are. When you talked to Tanya, Mama must not have been home.”
“No, she wasn’t home. But she could tell Karinolov that you called, that we’re going to my parents’ house.”
“I thought the location was a big secret,” Tarini said peevishly. “Besides, I’m a professional. I listened for the click. There’s no tap, Austin.”
Tarini swept up her things and stormed past him to the door.
“My sister may be temporarily dazzled by that charming bastard, but none of the Schaskylavitch women are traitors to the Romanov family.”
Chapter Six
In chilly silence, they walked to the palm tree-lined lobby and dropped off the room key. Austin bought a coffee to go at the bar on the first floor. It was early, a quarter to nine, the final sprint to the office for most of the people who passed them on the street.
They went through Grand Army Plaza and three blocks up Fifth Avenue to a parking lot where a laconic teenager took Austin’s money and gave him a receipt.
But when Austin asked for the key to the Porsche, the kid brightened.
“I was admiring your car when I got on duty this morning,” he said, smiling. “Want me to bring it out for you, sir?”
“No,” Austin replied curtly. “Tarini, stand right here where I can see you. I’ll start the car.”
“Hey, sir, can I at least see the interior?” the teen persisted. “Maybe even sit in it? Only for a minute, man. I swear, it’s just that it’s such a dynamite car.”
“Absolutely not. You’re not touching the car. Stand here with her.”
Austin walked away.
The teen looked at Tarini.
“Is he like this all the time?”
“He’s a jerk to me, too,” she assured him. “All the time.”
Then she looked around, surveying the city blocks. Should she make a break for it now? Or was it better to stick to her original plan of being sweet—and cooperative until he left her at his parents’ place?
She was confident of her skills, knowing she could escape from a farm in Connecticut so long as she didn’t have Austin to contend with. They had to have cabs in Connecticut, right?
She wasn’t quite as confident she could outrun Austin in the city. She walked up the gravel lot toward the car.
“Tarini, get back!” he screamed Annoyed, she wondered why he was on such a control trip about where she stood. She squelched her indignation, remembering that she would soon be rid of him, and walked back to the parking attendant.
Then it happened.
She felt the heat first, at the back of her head, like a hair dryer gone ballistic. She heard sound— a roar and then whoosh! and felt the shards of busted car windows. Glass sprinkled like hail on the concrete lot.
The parking attendant screamed and fell to the ground. She turned her head only slightly, but enough to see the fireball rise in the air, trailed by a jet-black smoke cloud that spread around the lot like octopus ink.
A sight so familiar from her childhood in wartorn Byleukrainia, but something she had never seen here. Here in the safety of America.
A bomb.
Austin!
Something inside snapped and all she could think was that she had lost him before she had even had a chance to tell him.
To tell him what? That she loved him? Tha
t she was scared of that love? That she was just as terrified of being a mother as she was of being his woman? That she tried her best to deny that which she feared?
She ran toward the flames, but the heat and smoke shoved her back as firmly as a brick wall.
She heard somebody screaming and realized that she had joined her voice to the parking attendant’s.
She ran back into the black wall of smoke, swallowing her fear. She screamed Austin’s name. Coughed and choked on black smoke.
Nothing.
“Lady, he’s dead!” shrieked the attendant.
Dead?
Austin, dead?
She coughed up a lungful of blistering hot air and doubled over in pain.
Suddenly, arms reached out and grabbed her. For a second she panicked, and then, joyously, she realized it was him.
Bruised, his face tracked with splintered glass and smudged with ash. Blood running from his hairline.
But he was alive.
She hugged him, long and hard. She remembered every part of his embrace, where she had once felt safe. It was there again, all his strength and all his manliness. And in his arms, everything that they were together came back in a rush of memory.
Then he pulled away. The smoke drifted skyward. Austin’s eyes searched hers. Wary. Suspicious.
Neither one smiled the smile of survivors.
“Timed device,” he said simply. “Thought they might try that.”
He led her out of the parking lot, after first checking that the attendant was all right. Scared but all right. Austin gave the boy his cellular phone and told him to call the fire department. Behind them, the black skeleton of the Porsche burned, the smell acrid.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “But we’ve got to get a car. We’ve got to get out of here. We don’t have time to wait for someone to start shooting again.”
“I’m sorry about your car,” she said, feeling that her words were inadequate—worse, she was talking like a complete idiot.
“The car was just transportation,” he said, sagging against her for support.
“You never used to talk like that,” she said, keeping up the banter to distract him from his pain—and from his momentary dependence on her.
His Kind Of Trouble Page 7