by Nora Roberts
“No. That’s an adventure.”
Somehow they made it without mishap. But the moment she’d squeezed into a parking place two doors down from his parents’ row house, he held out his hand. “Keys.”
Sulking, she jingled them in her hand. “I didn’t get a ticket.”
“Probably because there wasn’t a traffic cop brave enough to pull you over. Let’s have them, McNee. I’ve had enough adventure for one day.”
“You just want to drive.” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “It’s a man thing.”
“It’s a survival thing.” He plucked them from her hand. “I just want to live.” Not that he was going to object to handling the natty little Mercedes. But he decided against bringing that up as they climbed out of opposite doors.
“Pretty neighborhood,” she commented, taking in the trees and freshly painted house trim and flowering plants, the scatter of kids riding over the uneven sidewalk on bikes and skateboards.
A few of them called out to Alex. Bess found herself being given the once-over by a group of teenage boys before they sent hoots and whistles and thumbs-up signs in Alex’s direction.
“Ah, the first stamp of approval.” But she rubbed her damp palm surreptitiously against her skirt before taking his hand. “Did you used to ride bikes along the sidewalk?”
“Sure.”
Battling nerves, she strolled with him toward the house. “And sit on the curb in the summer and lie about girls?”
“I didn’t have to lie,” he told her with a wicked grin. He glanced up the steps as the door opened and Mikhail came out, Griff on his hip.
“You’re late again.” He started down, jiggling Griff.
“She missed the turn.”
“He’s always late.” Mikhail smiled. “You’re Bess.”
“Yes. Hello.” She held out a hand and found that his was hard as rock. Griff had already leaned over to give Alex a kiss, and now, still puckered, he leaned toward Bess. Laughing, she pressed her mouth to his. “And hello to you, too, handsome.”
“Griff likes the ladies,” Mikhail told her. “Takes after his uncle.”
“Don’t start,” Alex muttered.
Mikhail ignored him and continued to study Bess until she was fighting the need to squirm. “Do I have dirt on my face, or what?”
“No, sorry.” He shifted his gaze to his brother. “You’re improving, Alexi,” he said in Ukrainian. “This one is well worth a few sweaty mornings in the gym.”
“Tak.” He skimmed a hand down to the nape of Bess’s neck. “If you tell her about that, I’ll strangle you in your sleep.”
Mikhail’s grin flashed. The resemblance was startling, Bess thought. Those wild, dark looks, that simmering sexuality. And the child had the looks, as well, she realized. Lord help the women of the twenty-first century.
“Guy talk?” she asked.
“Bad manners,” Mikhail said apologetically, deciding he liked not only her unusual looks, but the intelligence in her eyes, as well. Yes, indeed, he thought, Alex was definitely improving. “I was complimenting my brother on his taste. Take her in, Alex. Griff wants to watch the kids ride awhile.”
“Sydney?” he asked as he mounted the steps.
“She’s here, but she’s tired.”
“She works too hard.”
“There is that.” The grin spread again. “And she’s pregnant.”
Alex stopped, turned. “Yeah?” He went down the steps again to catch Mikhail and Griff in a bear hug. “It’s good?”
“It’s great. We want our children close, our family big.”
“You’re off to the right start.” He grabbed Bess’s hand as Mikhail lifted Griff onto his shoulders and crossed the street. Griff was clapping his hands and shouting toddler gibberish to the other kids. “I’m still trying to get used to him being a papa, and now he’s going to have another.”
She’d forgotten her nerves. Perhaps the child’s sweet, unaffected kiss had done it. She slipped an arm around Alex’s waist. “Come on, Uncle Alex. I want to meet the rest of them.”
“They’re loud,” he warned as they started back up the door.
“I like loud.”
“They can be nosy.”
“So can I.”
At the door, he took both of her hands. He’d brought women into his home before, but it had never been important. This was vital. “I love you, Bess.” Before she could speak, he kissed her, then pushed open the door.
They certainly were loud, Bess discovered. No one seemed to mind if everyone talked at once, or if the big, droopy-eared dog barked and raced around the living room to hide behind chairs. And they were nosy, though they were charming with it. She’d hardly had a chance to get her bearings before she was sitting next to Alex’s father, Yuri, and being cagily interrogated.
“So you write stories for TV.” He nodded his big, shaggy head approvingly. “You have brains.”
“A few.” She smiled up at Zack when he offered her a glass of wine.
“Rachel says more than a few.” He sent his wife a wink as she sat with her hands folded over her enormous belly. “She’s been watching your show.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I admit I was curious.” Rachel wanted to shift to get comfortable, but she knew it was useless. “After we met, I taped it a couple of times. Then, when I gave in to Zack’s hounding me about taking maternity leave, I realized how easy it is to get hooked. I’m not sure I’ve got all the characters straight yet, but it’s amazingly entertaining. Nick’s caught it with me.” She glanced at her brother-in-law.
To his credit, Nick didn’t blush, but he did squirm. “I was just keeping you company.” He might have come a long way from trying to prove his manhood with gangs like the Cobras, but even at nearly twenty-one, he wasn’t quite secure enough to admit he’d gotten caught up in the “Secret Sins” of Millbrook. He shrugged, shook back his shaggy blond hair, then caught the quick grins of his family. “It wasn’t like I was really watching.” His green eyes glinted with humor. “Except for the babes.”
“That’s what they all say.” Bess smiled back, enjoying him. Too bad he wasn’t an actor, she thought. Those brooding good looks—tough, with just a hint of vulnerability beneath—would shine on-screen. “So, who’s your type, Nick? LuAnne, our sensitive ingenue with the big, weepy eyes, who suffers in silence, or the scheming Brooke, who uses her sexuality to destroy any man who crosses her?”
Considering, he ran his tongue around his teeth. “Actually, I go for Jade. I’ve got this thing for older women.”
Zack caught him in a headlock.
“Hey.” Nick laughed, not bothering to try to free himself. “We’re having a conversation here. I’m trying to make time with Alex’s lady.”
“Kill him in the other room, will you?” Alex said easily. “We have to eat in here.”
“I watch your show many times,” Nadia said as she popped in from the kitchen. Alex’s mother’s handsome face was flushed pink from oven heat. “I like it.”
“Well, that Vicki’s not hard to watch.” Zack stood behind his wife now, rubbing her shoulders.
“Men always go for the cheap floozies,” Rachel put in. “How about you, Alex? Caught any ‘Secret Sins’?”
“No.” Not that he’d admit. “McNee keeps me up on what’s happening in Millbrook.”
“It must be hard.” Sydney, looking pale but blissfully relaxed in her corner of the couch, sipped her ginger ale. “The pace.”
“It’s murder.” Bess grinned. “I love it.”
“So, how is it you meet Alexi?” Yuri asked.
“He arrested me.”
There was a moment of silence, while Alex aimed a killing look at Bess. Then a burst of laughter that sent the dog careening around the room again.
“Did I miss a joke?” Mikhail demanded as he swung through the door with Griff.
“No.” Rachel chuckled again while her brother sat on the arm of the couch, beside his wife. “But I have a feeling it�
�s going to be a good one. Come on, Bess, this I have to hear.”
She told them, while Alex interrupted a half-dozen times to disagree or correct or put in his own perspective. Even as they sat at the big old table to enjoy Nadia’s pot roast, they were shouting with laughter or calling out questions.
“He put you in a cell, but you still go out with him.” This from Mikhail.
“Well.” Bess ran her tongue over her teeth. “He is kind of cute.”
With a hearty laugh, Yuri slapped his son on the back. “The ladies, they always say so.”
Alex scooped up potatoes. “Thanks, Papa.”
“Is good to be attractive to women.” He wiggled his brows at his wife. “Then, when you pick one, she is helpless to resist.”
“I picked you,” Nadia told him, passing biscuits to Nick. “You were very slow. Like a bear with, ah…” She struggled for the right word. “Soft brains.” She ignored Yuri’s snort of objection. “He did not come to court me. So I courted him.”
“Every time I turn, there she is. In my way.” When he looked at his wife, Bess saw memories and more in his eyes. “There was no prettier girl in the village than Nadia. Then she was mine.”
“I liked your big hands and shy eyes,” she told him. Her smile was quick and lovely. “Soon you were not so shy. But my boys,” she added, turning the smile on Bess, “they were never shy with the girls.”
“Why waste time?” On impulse, Alex put a hand on Bess’s cheek and turned her face to his. Her smile was puzzled. Then surprise shot into her eyes as he covered her mouth with his. Not a quick, friendly kiss, this, but a searing one that made her head buzz.
She had no way of knowing that he’d never kissed a woman not of his family at his mother’s table. Nor that by doing so, he was telling those he loved that this was the woman.
As the table erupted with applause, Bess cleared her throat. “No,” she managed. “Not a bit shy.”
Nadia blinked back tears and raised her glass. She understood what her son had told her and felt the bittersweet pleasure that came from knowing the last of her children had given his heart. “Welcome,” she said to Bess.
A little confused, Bess reached for her glass as all the others were lifted. “Thank you.” She sipped, relieved when the chattering started again.
How easy to fall in love with them, she realized. All of them were so warm, so open, so comfortable with each other. Her parents would never have had such a sweetly intimate conversation at the table. Nor had they ever embraced her with the verve and passion both Yuri and Nadia showed their children.
Was this what she’d been missing all of those years? Bess wondered. Had lacking something like this caused her to be so socially clumsy as a child, and, making up for it, so socially active as an adult?
Still, what she had had, and what she hadn’t, had forged her into what she was, so she couldn’t regret it. Well, perhaps a little, she mused, falling unknowingly into the family tradition by sneaking the dog bits of food under the table. It was hard not to regret it a little when you saw how lovely it could be to be part of such a solid whole.
Absorbing everything, she glanced around the table. And found Mikhail’s eyes on her. This time she smiled. “You’re doing it again,” she told him.
“Yes. I want to carve you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your face.” He reached out to take it in his hand. The conversation continued around them, as if he handled women at the dinner table regularly. “Very fascinating. Mahogany would be best.”
Amused, she sat patiently while he turned her face this way and that. “Is this a joke?”
“Mikhail never jokes about his work,” Sydney commented, coaxing one more green bean into her son. “I’m just surprised it’s taken him so long to demand you sit for him.”
“Sit?” She shook her head, and then her eyes widened as it all came together. “Oh, of course. Stanislaski. The artist. I’ve seen your work. Lusted after it, actually.”
“You will sit for me, and I’ll give you a piece. You’ll choose it.”
“I could hardly turn down an offer like that.”
“Good.” Satisfied, he went back to his meal. “She’s very beautiful,” he said to Alex, in such an offhand way that Bess laughed.
“I’d say that Stanislaski taste runs to the odd, but your wife proves me wrong.”
Mikhail brushed a hand over Sydney’s halo of auburn hair, stroked a finger down her classically lovely face. “There are different kinds of beauty. You’ll come to the studio next week.”
“Don’t bother to argue.” Sydney caught Mikhail’s hand, squeezed it. “It won’t do you a bit of good.”
At the other end of the table, Rachel winced. Nadia leaned closer, spoke gently. “How far apart?”
Rachel gave a little sigh. “Eight, ten minutes. They’re very mild yet.”
“What’s mild?” Zack glanced at her, and then his mouth all but dropped to his knees. “Oh, God, now? Now?”
“Not this very minute.” She would be calm, Rachel told herself and took a deep, cleansing breath to prove it. “I think you have time for some of Mama’s cream cake.”
“She’s in labor.” He gaped across the table at his equally panicked brother.
“We’re not ready here.” Nick stumbled to his feet. “We’re ready back at home. I’m supposed to call the doctor, but I don’t have the number.”
“Mama does,” Rachel assured her husband’s younger brother. Then she lifted a hand to her husband’s. “Take it easy, Muldoon. There’s plenty of time.”
“Time, hell. We’re going now. Shouldn’t we go now?” Zack demanded of Nadia.
She smiled and nodded. “It would be best for you, Zack.”
“But, Mama—”
Rachel’s protest was cut off by Nadia’s gentle flow of Ukrainian, the gist of which had a great deal to do with placating frightened husbands.
“She should put her feet up,” Mikhail announced. “This helped you, yes?”
“Yes,” Sydney agreed. “But I think we should wait until she gets to the hospital.”
“Nine-one-one.” Alex shoved away from the table and sprang to his feet. “I’ll call.”
“Oh, sit down.” Rachel waved an annoyed hand at him. “I don’t need a cop.”
“An ambulance,” he insisted.
“I’m not sick, I’m in labor.”
“I take her in the truck.” Yuri was already up, prepared to lift his baby girl into his big arms. “We get there very fast.”
While the men began to argue in a mixture of languages, Nadia rose quietly and went into the kitchen to call Rachel’s obstetrician.
“I’ve already been through this,” Mikhail was saying to Alex. “I know how to handle it.”
“Ha.” Their father pushed them both aside and pounded a fist on his broad chest. “Me, four times. You know nothing.”
“We don’t have the tape recorder or the music.” Nick ran a hand through his flow of sandy hair. He was desperately afraid he’d be sick. Though no one was listening to him, he continued to babble. “The video camera. We’ve got to get the video camera.”
“Honey, you want some water? You want some juice?” When she yelped, Zack turned dead white. “Another one? It hasn’t been ten minutes, has it?”
“You’re breaking my hand.” Rachel shook it free and sent a pleading look to Sydney.
“Okay, guys, back off.” The steel under velvet that made Sydney a successful businesswoman snapped into her voice. “Alex, go upstairs and get your sister a pillow for the ride. Yuri, go start the truck. That’s a very good idea. Nick, you, Mikhail and Griff go back to your apartment and get what Rachel needs. We’ll meet you at the hospital.”
“How do you get there?” Mikhail demanded.
“I have a car.” Bess was watching the family drama with fascinated eyes. “We can fit three in a pinch.”
“Wonderful.” Dispersing the troops with all the flair of a general, Sydney gave
her husband a kiss and a shove. “Get going. Zack and Nadia will ride with Yuri and Rachel. I’ll go with Alex and Bess.”
As the next contraction hit, Rachel began to breathe slowly, steadily. “Sorry,” she said to Bess in between breaths, “to put you out.”
“No problem.” She had to bite her tongue to prevent herself asking what it felt like to go into labor at a family dinner. There’d be time for that later.
“I called the doctor, and Natasha.” Nadia came back into the room, pleased that Sydney had organized the troops. “Natasha and her family are coming.”
“We should go.” Zack helped Rachel to her feet and swallowed hard. “Shouldn’t we go?”
By the time they arrived at the hospital, Sydney and Bess were the best of friends. It was difficult to be otherwise, when they’d been crammed together in one seat while Alex drove like a madman back to Manhattan.
They talked about clothes, a few mutual friends they’d discovered, and the Stanislaski men. Sydney agreed that it was very forbearing of Bess not to mention the quality of Alex’s driving, after he’d been so critical of hers.
By the time they found their way to the maternity level, Rachel was already settled in a birthing room, Zack had gotten over the first stages of panic, and Yuri was patting a pocket full of cigars.
“She’s in the early stages,” Nadia explained to them in the corridor. “Company is good for her.”
Alex strode straight through the door, but Bess hung back. “I don’t want to intrude,” she said to Nadia.
“This is not intrusion. This is family.” Nadia cocked her head. “Are you uneasy with childbirth?”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t be, after I’ve written so many.”
Alex poked his head back out. “How’d you research that, McNee?”
“I did rounds with an obstetrician.” Her dimple winked out. “And found a few mothers-to-be who didn’t object to having me hang around during labor and delivery. Have you ever seen one?”
“No.” His eyes changed. Just like a man. “They, ah, show us films, just in case, but I’ve never been at ground zero.”
“It’s pretty great.” She laughed, perfectly able to read his thoughts. “Don’t worry. I’ll hold your hand.”