Page 13 of One Last Shot

“I need answers, and you didn’t exactly give me another choice.”

“You always do what you’re told?” He runs a hand through his hair and looks away, so it’s hard to know if he’s legitimately asking or if the question is meant flirtatiously.

“Actually, I usually give the orders.” I eye the living room through the eight-foot doorway to his right and the dining room I can see behind him. “Are you going to invite me in, or should we have this conversation standing in your entryway?”

“Sorry,” he mutters, gesturing toward the living room with its pristine carved wood walls. He walks into the room and heads toward an open door on the far side. I follow him into a much smaller sitting area, a room dominated by floor-to-ceiling glass doors along two walls and a fire burning in the fireplace along a third wall.

It’s hard not to gush about the city lights on the other side of all that glass. Instead, I silently walk over, observing the twenty-foot wide terrace with views of Central Park beyond the trees that line Fifth Avenue, and the Upper West Side lit up on the opposite side of all that green space. It’s like having a view of the NYC skyline from within New York.

“The view is even better during the day,” he says from behind me. He’s close enough that his breath tickles the side of my neck and a shiver runs through me.

“I’ll take your word for it,” I say, turning with my arms crossed under my chest. I stumble for a second over my next words because I’m not prepared for how much space he takes up, how he seems to tower over me even though in these heels I’m at least six feet tall. “That was a huge bomb you dropped on me in your lawyer’s office today.”

“I shouldn’t have surprised you like I did.” Aleksandr turns and sits on a large sling-style chair with a gunmetal frame and thick tobacco-colored leather cushions, and gestures to the long ivory couch next to it.

Instead, I take the chair that matches his on the far side of the coffee table. This seat gives me the perfect view of him. I can watch his face for the telltale signs I know—his left eye twitching when he lies, his lips turning down at the corners when he doesn’t like what he’s hearing—without having to be too close to him. Over here, I feel like I can breathe.

“Tell me how this happened,” I say.

He sighs and runs his hand through that thick black hair again. “I already told you. What we thought was a contract about my dad loaning yours money was actually a marriage contract.”

It’s hard not to be embarrassed, even all these years later, that my dad couldn’t afford the training I needed to make the Austrian ski team, and that Sasha’s dad “lent” it to him even though there was no way he could repay it. I’d promised myself then that I would pay him back myself. After years of skiing followed by a couple years modeling, I’d saved enough.

“I saw your dad years ago,” I tell Sasha. “I tried to pay him back, only to be told that the debt had already been repaid. I have no idea how my father could have managed to pay him back, and your father wouldn’t share any details, only insisting that I owed him nothing.” That money became the seed money to eventually start my own event planning company, and so in a way I feel like I owe Mr. Ivanov for my financial independence too. “He didn’t mention being my father-in-law.”

“Like he would.” Sasha rolls his eyes as he sinks further into his chair.

“And you really didn’t know a thing about this until your father passed away?”

The eye twitches when he saysno, just like it did in his lawyer’s office when he told me he had the same questions I did about our father’s intent.

“I know all your tells, Aleksandr. Which means I know you’re lying to me. What aren’t you telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” he says, and this time his eye doesn’t twitch. Well, what the hell doesthatmean? I don’t know what to believe.

I pick at a piece of nonexistent lint on my black wide-leg trousers just to have something to do, some way to channel all the energy that’s ricocheting around inside me. Finally, I look across the table at him. “Why would they marry us off to each other and not tell us? It makes no sense at all. And what if one of us had wanted to get married in the meantime?”

“That’s never even been close to being an issue,” he says. “Has it for you?”

“No, but that’s beside the point. My father’s been gone for six years. What if in that time I had wanted to marry someone else? Was anyone going to tell me I was already married?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, either,” he says.

I jump to my feet, too frustrated to keep still, and use the space behind my chair to pace along the wall of glass doors. The view from behind the chair looks directly across Central Park to the Upper West Side, but from this angle I’m looking north, toward the heavily wooded area. The buildings beyond the trees emit a glow that emanates above the North Woods.

The chunky heels of my black open-toed booties click noisily across the brick tiles as I pace. I have a sinking suspicion that he knows why our fathers agreed to this marriage and he isn’t telling me. With both of them in their graves, he is my only hope of discovering the truth. The frustration is evident in my voice when I say, “I came here for answers. If you aren’t going to give me any, why am I here?”

He stands and makes his way toward a low cabinet I didn’t even notice on our way in. “Here, let me get you a drink.”

“Don’t you dare open a bottle!” It is a Russian custom that once you pour from a bottle of alcohol, you finish the entire thing. It’s bad luck not to. And I’m not sitting around drinking an entire bottle of vodka with him tonight. I have too much to accomplish tomorrow, and I already lost too much time today looking into marriage laws in Austria and citizenship laws in the US.

He turns toward me, a flash of annoyance in his eyes. It is very bad form to turn down something your host offers you, and we both know it. I’m being both rude and petulant, but I couldn’t care less if I offend him at this moment.

“You are impossible, as always!” His voice, which is usually so level and controlled, is a loud growl. I find that I like that as much as I did when I was a teenager. I lived to rattle him, to see that carefully crafted layer of self-control begin to crack.

“Why are you guys yelling?” a small voice asks.

Both our heads spin toward the open doorway, where a little girl with an angelic face and dark brown hair in two braids stands in her light pink pajamas.

---