Page 37 of The Bratva's Innocent Sold Bride
She looked at me for a long moment, crunching resolutely. “As long as I can pick the movie.”
“Okay,” I said, perking up. “But you know I can’t speak Russian, and I’m planning on being too drunk to read subtitles soon.”
She laughed again, and that made more times in two minutes than I’d heard from her since I met her. She intimidated me a little, but she also intrigued me since Mat thought so highly of her. I was a little bit jealous that she was able to come and go freely, do what she wanted, and nobody felt the need to stop her, but that wasn’t her fault. I needed a friend, maybe she did too, since she was new in town.
The housekeeper or the butler had already put Artem in his room, since he was still too exuberant to be trusted with free run of the place until he was fully housebroken. And he had recently decided he liked chewing on shoes as much as his stuffed toys, but we were working on it. I freed him and he bounded up and down the hall a few times before joining us in the living room, the only place that currently had a TV screen, even though there was a room that was clearly meant to be a theater.
I was working on it, and the furniture I carefully picked was trickling in bit by bit. It would have been faster and easier to hire a decorator, but Mat wasn’t complaining, and I enjoyed being choosy.
“Do you like old movies?” Masha asked, scrolling through the choices on the screen. “Musicals?”
“Do you like musicals?” I asked. “How aboutFootloose?”
“I don’t know that one,” she said, her English surprisingly perfect. Where Mat had a slight accent and sometimes questioned his word choices, she could have been born down the street.
“Well, it’s old, and it’s a musical,” I said. “About a tyrant who doesn’t let anyone in the town dance.”
She looked skeptical but found it and clicked. After the first bottle of wine was nearing the bottom, neither one of us really cared what we were watching, but the music was fun. Masha got down on the floor, swaying a little as she waved one of Artem’s toys around over his head.
“Who’s a good dog?” she asked. “Artem is.”
I smiled. “I’ve heard Mat ask him who’s a good dog, but he never tells him it’s him.”
She looked at me shrewdly. “You’re pissed off at him.”
“What? No. What makes you think that?”
“You’re wearing a pretty evening dress and a bunch of expensive jewelry, so you must have gone out. You’d only go out with Mat, but he’s not here, so I extrapolated that you two had a fight.”
I sighed, pouring the last drops of the bottle into our glasses and standing up to get another. When I returned, she kept looking at me, not about to drop it.
“I don’t want to…”
“Talk shit about my cousin?” she finished for me. “Go ahead. He probably deserves it.”
“Okay, any other night and I might have agreed with you, but I’m not even sure I’m mad.” I filled her in on how he had just left the party and then left me without a word. “And he’s dead set against me getting a job.”
“Well, of course,” she said, hiccupping. For being such a badass, she was kind of a lightweight when it came to alcohol.
I scowled. “But he just runs off at all hours of the night, and he’s hardly home during the day. I have goals, Masha, and they’re not to be a pampered housewife.”
“You’ll get them,” she said.
“That’s the wine talking,” I said. “I don’t see how. But what about you? Why were you eating cornflakes all alone in the dark?”
“I can’t sleep when I’m stressed, and I was hungry,” she said simply. When I inquired what she was stressed about, she shrugged. “I’m in a male-dominated field,” she said. “I don’t see why you want to bother, to be honest.”
“Women are rising in the tech field,” I said. “Do you mean you don’t want to be in the Bratva anymore?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “No, I love my family. But I’m sick of being on stakeouts with Mat’s smelly underlings. Seriously, CJ, it’s like they’ve never seen soap.”
I started laughing, and she joined in until we were both in a heap with the dog dancing between us, thinking our hilarity was a new game.
“But you love what you do,” I sighed, worn out and slightly dizzy.
“Yes, it’s my life. Stinky men or not, I’d never give it up.”
I had a feeling she wasn’t telling me what was actually keeping her up at night, and I slapped the carpet in frustration. “No one tells me anything,” I said.
