I like her very much.” He frowned, then said, “At first, I didn’t. I didn’t like the idea of her. I didn’t like how my brother was acting. I was not shy in letting him know.” His tone implied an understatement.
“What do you mean?”
“He was a sworn bachelor who saw only escorts. His longest ‘relationship’ was an hour. Then I heard rumors he was obsessed with one woman—after a single date—and living with her after their second. For him to veer so drastically from all the years before, I wondered if he was having some kind of early midlife crisis.”
“What changed your mind?”
“It’s not a pretty story.”
I waved him on. “Please.”
“A man targeted her for her money, learning everything about her, then courting her.” Oh. Shit. He sounded like a con artist, maybe a serial groom. But a true grifter would never target a good person.
Aren’t I right now? No sins, still in?
Dmitri continued, “He tricked her into marrying him, planning to murder her once she’d signed over everything.”
“My God.” Not a con artist. He was a killer who’d stolen some of our methods to do evil. Step nine in the progression of the long con was not murder your mark. “The man sounds like a psychopath.”
“He was. She ran from him for years, but he found her and stabbed her in the chest before my brother could reach her.”
My eyes went wide. I couldn’t imagine anyone taking a knife to the lovely girl I’d laughed with. “Then what happened?”
“The man pulled a gun on Maksim, had a bead on his head, but my brother charged him anyway.” Dmitri couldn’t sound prouder. “Maksim would have died if Lucía hadn’t found the strength to hit that fuck’s arm at the last second. Maksim took a bullet in the shoulder.”
“I had no idea.”
He shrugged. “It’s not something we lead with.”
I put my elbow on the table and rested my chin on my hand. “Your brother charged a loaded gun for her?”
“Da.” Now Dmitri couldn’t look prouder. “He was ready to give his life for her. How could I deny what that meant?”
So Maksim was part of the three percent. Had his younger brother been cut from the same cloth? “What about Aleks? You’re not as close to him?”
“Before one year ago, I did not speak to him.” The mended fence. Yet another of Dmitri’s changes that had taken place around that time. “I had not even been in the same room with him in decades, not since we were young.”
“Why?” I couldn’t imagine being estranged like that from a loved one. Sure, my family could frustrate me, but they would lay down their lives for me in a heartbeat. Just as I’d do for any of them.
“He was not there for me when I very badly needed him to be.” Dmitri gazed away, the wheels of his complicated mind turning.
Oh, yes, this man had been hurt. And he’d longed for his oldest brother to have helped him in some way. Dmitri’s history was a puzzle, but I could be patient, easing information from him here and there.
Yet then I frowned. I only had eighteen days with him, at best. Surely, he’d be called back to Russia soon. “I’m sorry, Dmitri. But you’ve since worked things out with Aleks, right?”
“Yes, we’ve reconciled,” he said, his thoughts still clearly mired in the past.
I wanted to jolt him back to the present. With me. “Hey, big guy, did you have a near-death experience about a year ago?”
His gaze snapped to my face. “Why would you say that?”
“You started talking to Aleks, you began working out, and you got the idea to try BDSM. You also got pierced.” So that things would be different. “Did you make any other changes?”
“Yes. Many. It was time for me to.” Making his tone lighter, he said, “Come, let’s speak of happier things. If you didn’t work at the Calydon, what would you do?”
He hadn’t answered my near-death question, but I let it go. “I would design and create clothing. I made this dress you both love and hate. I make all my clothes.”
He raised his brows. “You must want to pursue your talent.”
Another instance of gazing at the stars. I was past that.
Even if my pack wasn’t in crisis mode, I needed health insurance, for fuck’s sake. At the very least, my own personal credit-card cloning machine wouldn’t go amiss. Please, Santa, please.
Everyone in my family was sacrificing. We all had dreams we’d put on hold. Karin wanted to