Irena smiled broadly at Ed. “Then, yes, I’ll be back.”
Brody didn’t want her to feel obligated to pitch in. She’d already done far more than her share. “You don’t have to.”
“I know. I want to.” Because Brody looked unconvinced, she added, “Might as well be useful while I’m here.”
Why did she feel as if she had to be perpetually in motion? “Did it ever occur to you just to kick back and rest?” he asked.
“No.” A trace of defensiveness entered her voice. “Did it ever occur to you?” she countered.
“No, not here.” But that was because he’d dedicated himself to making the lives of both the people of the Kenaitze tribe and the local Inuits better. In effect, this was his job. His payment came in the form of satisfaction. “But if I went someplace for a visit—”
“I didn’t come for a visit,” she reminded him, then lowered her voice. “I came for a funeral. That’s not quite the same thing.”
He didn’t want to argue with her. For whatever time he had left, he just wanted to enjoy her. “We’ll take what we can get,” he told her.
What he actually meant, he thought, was that he would take what he could get. When it came to Irena, expendable things like pride weren’t allowed. A moment spent in her company was a moment he would cherish. Nothing else mattered to him.
Irena glanced at her watch. “Right now, we need to get me back to Hades. I promised my grandfather I’d spend some quality time with him before I have to go back to Seattle. I want to be sure I keep my promise.”
“An honorable woman,” Ed pronounced, nodding his gray head in approval. His eyes met Brody’s for a moment before he crossed to the front door and opened it for Irena.
“Never thought of her any other way,” Brody replied, placing a hand lightly against her elbow as he escorted her out.
“Even when Ryan and I were together?” she couldn’t help asking, walking with him to his car. “Did you still think of me as being honorable then?”
He laughed softly. “Not only honorable but exceedingly patient and kind.”
“I think the word that you’re really looking for is ‘stupid,’” Irena told him, getting in on the passenger side as he got in on his.
Their seat belts clicked simultaneously as they buckled up. “Why?”
Irena leaned back against the seat, closing her eyes wearily. “Because I believed Ryan when he told me that he loved me—”
This was where he could run down a list of all his brother’s shortcomings, making her see that loving Ryan had been a mistake. But he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make himself look better by making his brother look worse. Couldn’t allow her to find fault in herself to gain his goal.
“I honestly think he did.”
Whether or not Ryan loved her was only part of it. “And I believed him when he said he was being faithful to me.”
Brody shook his head. He couldn’t lie to make her feel better—because, in this case, she’d know he was lying. “Well, now, there you might have been a little myopic,” he allowed.
“Not myopic, stupid,” she repeated.
He wasn’t going to have her beat herself up. Ryan could always be charmingly persuasive and his brother could manifest the sincerity of an angel when he wanted to.
“It’s not stupid to believe in love, Irena. It’s not stupid to want to believe that someone you love feels the same way about you as you do about him. You were faithful. You had every right to expect Ryan to be the same.”
She shook her head. Brody didn’t understand. “I didn’t expect Ryan to be faithful, I believed him to be faithful. There’s a difference. When you expect something from someone, in the back of your head you know there’s a chance he might not deliver. But when you believe a person to be a certain way, that means that you’re positive that he is. I actually believed that there was no one else in Ryan’s life but me.”
Staring out the window, Irena blew out a breath. Looking back, she shook her head, marveling at her own naïveté.
“I don’t know what I could have been thinking. This was Ryan. Ryan the charmer. The guy who made every girl’s heart skip a beat just by walking down the school hallway. I knew what he was like before he ever singled me out. And yet, for some reason, I thought I could make him want to change. I thought that he had changed. For me,” she said sadly.
Talk about dumb, she thought.
“He should have,” Brody told her. Which made his brother an idiot, because Ryan continued being what he was: a womanizer. “If Ryan’d had a brain in his head, he should have. The trouble with Ryan was that his philosophy had always been—so many women, so little time. And his ran out.”
Brody glanced at her, noting how rigid her jawline was. She was trying not to cry, he thought. Damn it, Ryan never deserved her.
“If you ask me,” he continued evenly, struggling to keep his feelings under wraps, “Ryan was the stupid one. Stupid for ending his life and even more stupid because he couldn’t recognize how lucky he was, having you in his life.”
She knew Brody was just trying to comfort her, but she appreciated it. “So just when did you develop this silver tongue?” she asked, a sad smile playing on her lips as she turned to look at him.
“If I sound as if I have a silver tongue, it’s only because you bring it out of me. That, and I’m a quick study,” he admitted. “Can’t be around Ryan for all those years and not pick something up, even if you don’t mean to.”
With tears scrambling up the inside of her throat, Irena didn’t trust herself to form an answer. She merely nodded her head as if in agreement, even though she was becoming more and more convinced that the only thing Ryan and Brody shared was a last name and some DNA. Otherwise, they were as different as night and day. And from where she stood, that was beginning to be a very good thing.
“It is being about time,” Yuri said the moment she walked in.
Since she’d only spoken with her grandfather’s wife this morning, Irena couldn’t help but wonder just what kind of message Ursula had passed on to the old man.
She began at the beginning. “I’m sorry, Grandpa. I wanted to help Brody.” Just as she said it, she heard the sound of Brody’s car, driving away.
Yuri cocked his head as he looked at his granddaughter. “Brody?”
She could hear the flash of interest in her grandfather’s voice, saw a knowing smile curve his mouth. Had she just made a tactical mistake? Was he going to try to get more details out of her? Specifically about how she’d spent the night? God, she hoped not. Her grandfather was as tenacious as Ursula when it came to extracting information.
“Yes.” She took off her parka. “He was going to the reservation to help them raise a new building.”
“Brody is being a good man.” He beckoned her over to the kitchen. Warm smells embraced her. Her grandfather loved to cook and there was bread baking in the oven. “And that was what you were doing today, too?”
Irena sat down at the table. “No, today I flew to Anchorage to see if I could get one of the tribal elders his money back from the unscrupulous car salesman who tried to unload a clunker on him.”
Yuri took the bread out of the oven and set it on top of the counter to cool. Turning his attention to the coffeepot, he poured out two very inky cups of coffee and set one in front of her as well as one for himself. Rather than take his usual seat at the head of the table, he sat down beside her.
“Clunker?” he repeated. The word was obviously foreign to him.
“A used truck that didn’t run,” she explained.
“Ah.” He nodded his head sagely. “And you are doing this, yes?”
“Yes.” She took a sip from her cup, letting the warmth wind through her like the effects of a loving embrace. “I got him his money back.”
“Good. Good.” And then to her surprise, her grandfather took her chin in his hand, as if that could somehow help him study her. “But you are not happy,” he concluded.
She drew her h
ead back and he dropped his hand. “Of course I’m happy.”
But he shook his head. “No, that is being a little happy. Something else is making you sadder.” His eyes met hers. “Tell me.”
He couldn’t possibly know. He was just trying to break her by pretending he could delve into her thoughts, Irena insisted. She knew that, and yet, she could feel herself wavering.
“Grandpa, there’s nothing.”
Yuri refused to back off. “I am knowing this face of yours. I have been knowing it since you were being a baby. You cannot fooling me.”
She stalled, drinking more of the coffee. The warm embrace eluded her. “I am not trying to ‘fooling you,’ Grandpa.”
“Then it is yourself you are trying to fool?” he asked, concerned. Before she could make up an answer, he pressed, “What is being wrong, Irena? My English is not good, but my heart is,” he went on, softly. “And my heart is knowing there is something wrong.”
She blew out a breath, looking off through the window. It faced the wilderness. The vastness of it made her feel alone. She felt his rough hand covering hers, giving lie to her feeling.
“I’m just confused, Grandpa.”
He waited, then coaxed. “About?”
“About where I belong.”
Yuri smiled as he took her hands in his. “That is easy.”
She fully expected him to say “here,” but decided to let him tell her. Maybe, if he did, she might believe it. But she doubted it. “It is? Where, Grandpa? Where do I belong?”
Yuri stared at her for a long moment, as if he was peering into her soul, her thoughts. She knew it was all her imagination. And yet…
“You are belonging where your heart is. Because you cannot be doing without one,” he added with quiet conviction.
The problem was she knew he was right. The bigger problem was she no longer knew where her heart really belonged.
Chapter Eleven
“Maybe,” Yuri continued thoughtfully after a few moments had passed, “you are trying to being something that is not right for you.” When Irena looked at him, he tried to explain more succinctly. “Maybe, what you are thinking you want is not what you are really wanting.” And then he smiled his broad, crooked smile at her. “I am thinking you are needing to stay here a little longer to be making up your mind.”
Irena saw through him. “You just want me to stay,” she said fondly.
Her grandfather made no attempt to deny it. “I have never been saying anything else. But more than seeing your pretty face, Little One, I am wanting for you to be happy.” Rising from the table, Yuri kissed her forehead. “And only you can be deciding what is making you that way.”
What made her happy? That was the million-dollar question, Irena mused.
Lost in thought, Irena stared into the empty coffee cup as her grandfather’s footsteps in the hallway grew fainter and fainter. She had grown up here and for eighteen years, like so many other native teenagers, all she could think of was leaving Hades. Of going off into the world and making her mark. She’d wanted to get away from the tiny town even before she discovered Ryan’s infidelity.
And now, now she didn’t know anymore. Being here had filled her with nostalgia, something she would have sworn wasn’t possible—until she’d experienced it. For the last eighteen months or so, following her usual routine and working the long hours that were required had left her feeling burnt out. The wave of triumph after a victory grew shorter and shorter until it wasn’t there at all.
Of late, she had been feeling unsatisfied. Purposeless and oddly hollow clear down to her toes.
She hadn’t felt that way yesterday, she remembered. Working beside Brody and helping him and the others construct something meaningful—a place for a family to live—had filled that hollow feeling.
Granted what they had wound up building couldn’t compare to her apartment back in Seattle, much less any of the many houses she’d been invited to these last few years. Houses belonging to the people she associated with as well as the people she successfully defended and their friends.
Her world was comprised of money and prestige. Someone on the outside looking in would have said that she had it all. That she’d “made it.”
Professionally, but not personally.
Wasn’t it the same thing?
She’d once thought it was; now she wasn’t quite so sure. From what she’d observed, she was fairly confident that Brody was far happier with his accomplishments than she was with hers.
Irena pressed her lips together, thinking of what she’d seen on the reservation yesterday. She hadn’t realized it would be like that. Hadn’t given it any thought, really. But seeing the poverty had been devastating. Children lived with this poverty every single day.
And Brody, well-intentioned Brody, could only give so much, do so much…
There was going to be a point, she thought again, when Brody was going to run out of money.
Unless…
Ideas began popping up in her head, crowding her mind. Suddenly, Irena didn’t feel lost anymore. Maybe this wasn’t the solution to what she wanted to do with her life, but her idea—if she was able to get positive responses—certainly would help Brody with what he was doing. And it would help a great deal more than just an extra set of hands for a few days. This could help him for an indefinite time to come.
Irena found herself grinning.
Inspired, she poured herself a second cup of coffee, then hurried into her room. Setting the cup down on the nightstand, for the first time since she’d arrived in Hades, she unpacked her laptop.
There were people she needed to get in contact with. People whom she could coax into making significant donations. Donations that would wind up helping to continue the fund what Brody was trying to accomplish.
Funding.
Foundation.
Thoughts raced through her mind, gelling rapidly. Of course. Why not form a foundation?
This time, when Irena took a sip of the new cup of coffee she’d poured, the feeling of a warm embrace was back.
She could hardly contain herself. Half a dozen times that day she caught herself reaching for the telephone. Once she even dialed straight through before she hung up. No, she wasn’t going to tell him. Not until she sent out all the e-mails and had gotten at least one positive response.
The latter wasn’t long in coming.
And she learned something.
At bottom, Irena realized as she read one e-mail after another, the people she associated with were a generous lot. They might be as competitive as hell, but given a worthy cause, their checkbooks came out. It was a way to painlessly give back a little of what they’d been blessed with.
She couldn’t wait to tell Brody what she’d come up with. But this time, she didn’t reach for the phone. She opted to do it in person.
Irena was up hours before the sun was, counting the minutes until Brody arrived on her doorstep. Neither her grandfather nor Ursula were up yet when Brody came by to pick her up. She counted it as a merciful blessing.
Irena was outside, greeting him before his knuckles could made contact with the door. Brody dropped his hand to his side.
“Eager to get to work?” he guessed, amused. He noticed her eyes were actually sparkling. He could have spent the entire day just staring into them like a lovesick puppy.
Now there was a self-image he could do without. Brody forced himself to look away and lead the way back to his car.
“I’ve got some good news,” Irena announced, addressing his back. It took a great deal not to shout out the words. The last e-mail she’d gotten this morning had brought with it an astounding pledge.
Opening the door for her, Brody quickly got in on his side. “You’ve decided to stay a little longer?” he guessed, mentally crossing his fingers. He turned the key in the ignition as she buckled up.
Brody’s guess caught her completely off guard. Her mind, wound around this new turn of events, came to a skidding halt. She stared at him a
s he began to drive. Did that mean what she thought it did?
You’re getting ahead of yourself again.
“Would you want me to?”
Brody laughed softly to himself and shook his head. “If you have to ask, Irena, then you’re not as sharp as I thought you were.”
“I’m considering that,” she admitted, then, realizing that her words sounded ambiguous, she said, “Staying a bit longer, not whether I’m sharp.” She saw the grin emerging on his lips. Now it sounded as if she was bragging. Since when had she gotten so tongue-tied? “I mean—oh, don’t confuse me, Brody.”
“Never my intention,” he told her innocently. He spared her a look. “Okay, so what’s this good news you have to tell me?”
She took a deep breath, trying to get everything in order in her head and not just jump into the middle of it. She’d been dealing with e-mails and pledges for the last eighteen hours or so. She had to remember to begin at the beginning.
“I e-mailed some of the people I work with or have represented—”
“Criminals?” he questioned. “You e-mailed criminals?”
“No, wrongly accused people,” she stressed. She refused to take a case unless she believed in the client’s innocence. She’d made that abundantly clear and because she kept winning her cases, Eli humored her, saying he saw no reason to tamper with success. “I deal with some very wealthy people.”
He thought of the world she was in now. A-list people, people rich enough to buy and sell Hades a thousand times over.
“Must have been a culture shock, coming back here,” he imagined.
“Will you let me talk?” she pleaded.
“Sorry.” Taking one hand off the steering wheel, he raised it in a gesture of surrender. “The floor is yours, Irena.”
“Thank you.” She still talked quickly, knowing he was going to interject something. It was only a matter of time. “Anyway, bottom line is I asked them for contributions.”
“Contributions?” He wasn’t following her. “For what? You planning on running for office?”
Loving the Right Brother Page 11