She’d woken up late the next afternoon to a cell phone filled with angry messages from her father. Where was she? She was supposed to have arrived late the night before and he and her mother were worried sick. According to the last message, they were thinking about sending her perfect older brother, Steve, to Dallas to make sure she was all right.
She shook Alexei awake, and then playfully squirmed out of the way when he reached up to pull her back down on the mattress. “I’ve got to go, Lexie,” she said. “I was supposed to drive home last night and my parents are mad as a house of cats.”
Alexei regarded her through hooded eyes, heavy with sleep. “This is fine. When I see you next, we will be at your apartment. You will cook dinner for me and I will thank you for food all night long. We will sleep together and next morning we will fuck again in shower.”
He then kissed her mouth, which had fallen open with shock and said, “Go to your family. But come home to me, kotenok.”
The sharp ding of the captain turning on the seatbelt light jolted Eva out of this memory. They were beginning their descent into Dallas. With another spike of guilt, she performed a mental scrub, wiping away the memory, and instead concentrating on Aaron’s handsome face. He was the one she loved, the most important person in her life, she told herself.
Four hours later she arrived home at the sprawling villa she and Aaron shared with her parents. No one knew she was coming home early, so no lights had been left on. It didn’t matter, she had grown up in this place, and she easily picked her way through the living room and up the stairs in the dark. She took off her heels at the top of the stairs and padded past her parents’ room to the second door on the floor.
Though she’d tried to be as quiet as possible, Aaron must have heard her because he was sitting up in bed when she opened his door.
“Mama, is that you?” he asked, his little voice sleepy but strong in the darkness.
“Yes, it’s me.” She walked into the room and turned on the bedside lamp so she could see him and he could see her.
He spoke to her with half-mast eyes, just like his father used to when he was tired. It was even more eerie, because though Aaron inherited most of Eva’s facial features, including her full lips, high cheekbones, and wide nose, his eyes plainly revealed who he really was, the son of Alexei Rustanov.
She hugged him to her with fierce love.
“Mama, I’m sleepy,” he said, disengaging from her overly cloying hug after about thirty seconds.
She chuckled. She had probably only gotten that long of a hug because he was tired. Lord knew he didn’t put up with too much affection from his mother when he was awake, especially if they were out in public. Like most boys his age, he spent a lot of energy trying to prove to the world he didn’t need a mother, even if he did.
“Do you want a glass of water?” she asked, though he was already beginning to curl back up under his X-Men sheets.
“No, thank you,” he said. “Night-night, Mama.”
“Night-night,” she said.
She turned off the bedside light and left, but as she did, she looked back at her beloved child and reminded herself how hard she had worked to keep him a secret from Alexei, and of all the reasons she must continue to do so.
Chapter Four
Six months later.
EVA’S father called just as she was finishing up the paperwork from the Rodriguez’s home study. After years of trying for a third child, the two Drummond Oil employees were hoping to complete their family through adoption, which meant a qualified professional had to assure the Dallas-based adoption agency they’d chosen to work with that they were responsible people, with steady jobs, and the ability to take on another mouth at their dinner table.
In a big city like Dallas, this kind of thing would be handled by someone affiliated with either an adoption agency or a formal home study service. But in a town that only existed because it was where the Drummond Oil headquarters was located, Eva had to take on home studies along with her many other duties. These duties included handling all counseling for the local school district, following up on any domestic disturbance calls reported by the police, providing any child protective services needed, and handing out social security checks to the folks who preferred to pick them up at Drummond’s one-woman Social Service & Welfare office.
That day she was particularly rushed because she needed to get the Rodriguez’s paperwork in the mail by three o’clock to meet their adoption agency’s cut off date, or else she’d have to drive all the way to Dallas to hand deliver it. It was already two forty-five. Luckily the post office, like every other civil service in Drummond, was on Main Street, albeit at the opposite end as her building. If she walked really fast, she could get there in under ten minutes.
She thought about not answering when the phone rang just as she was getting out of her chair to leave. But when she saw her father’s extension pop up in the caller ID box, she knew she would have to. The mayor’s office was only two doors down from hers. He knew she was in the building, and if she didn’t pick up, he’d just make the small walk to talk to her in person, delaying her even further.
“Hey, Daddy,” she said, picking up the phone. “I can’t really talk right now. I’m handling some important paperwork.”
“That can wait. I need to see you in my office.” Cleveland St. James’s voice rung through the phone line with austere authority.
Eva rolled her eyes, resenting how her father always made it seem like she should drop everything at her “little social work job” and come running whenever he called.
“It can’t wait. It’s adoption paperwork, and if I don’t get it in the mail by three, it won’t get to Dallas on time.”
“Finish it up after we meet, then I’ll have Berta overnight it for you.”
“You’re going to let me overnight it?” Now he really had Eva’s attention. Her father was notoriously stingy about allowing anyone who worked for the town to overnight anything on Drummond’s dime. “That’s why all these small towns are going broke,” he’d said the last time she had asked to overnight something, as if every small town fiscal crisis had less to do with businesses closing down or moving away and more to do with frivolous local employees.
“Is everything okay?” she asked him. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Daddy, do you think you’ve had a stroke and just don’t know it? I hear that can happen.”
An irritated beat. “Eva Janelle St. James, get in my office. Now.”
Less than a minute later, Eva dropped into one of the brown, leather guest chairs in her father’s office. Just like the home they lived in, Cleveland’s office was large and stuffed to the gills with leather furniture, hunting trophies, and framed commendations from political, social, and community organizations.
He scanned her outfit of jeans and a neon-pink T-shirt with frank disapproval but didn’t say anything. They’d already had many discussions about her refusal to wear a suit or even business casual in her position as Drummond’s only social worker, until they had both agreed to let the issue lie. Eva liked to be comfortable and she wasn’t going to budge. Still that didn’t keep her father from wearing his blatant disapproval all over his face every time they met during the course of a work day.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Daddy? I mean what could be so important that you’d be willing to break out Drummond’s dusty FedEx account?”
Cleveland heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I keep on hoping one day you’ll grow up and realize not everything’s a joke, but it just doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon. Thank goodness we had your brother first, or you would be too much of a trial to bear.”
She tried to keep the hurt his words caused her from showing. She didn’t know why his low opinion of her still bothered her so much. It had always been this way between them, him wondering out loud why she couldn’t be more like her brother, Steve. For a short time, she had actually managed to gain his approval when she decided to get her M.S. in Social Work in order to take over the Social Services & Welfare Office post from her mother, who had been doing the job for over thirty years. The summer before she started the master’s program, he had told anyone who would listen about his son who was in the Foreign Service program and his daughter who had decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
But that had been before their three-year estrangement and before the birth of his only illegitimate grandchild.
“I’m a social worker. I do realize everything’s not a joke,” she said. “But you’ve kind of got to have a sense of humor to do what I do.”
“Your mother always took her duties very seriously. None of this waiting until the last minute to get important forms in the mail, no asking if I had a stroke when I told her I needed to meet with her about something important.”