Page 38 of The Beast of Moscow

Her ocean-blue eyes widened when she smiled. It was pleasing in a way that he would continue the conversation just to see if he could make her do it again.

It wasn’t like Vaslav to share—hell, he’d ignored the first fifteen times his mother asked about the tea, and it took her a significant more amount of time to finally get her more recent answers.

“Those triangle bags smelled like coconut and cashews, and I was already in a mood,” Vaslav added, readjusting his seat on the left side of the loveseat. “I forgot about them for a couple of weeks, stumbled on them one night, and then had to find the man to make me more because he’d been right.”

Vera arched an eyebrow. “About what?”

Already, he’d offered the woman more information than he wanted to because it opened the conversation for her to ask more, and he hated giving people details. It was bad enough that he had to talk to anyone in the first place.

But he was quickly reminded that he’d asked this woman here—assuming she wouldn’t even come—and because of that, he had no plan. No set way he intended for this conversation and tea to go, so that left him open and vulnerable to her soft-spoken question asked with a pretty smile.

“You don’t have to answer,” she said without warning.

Vaslav leaned forward to place what remained of his second cup of tea. “Most people choose not to point out my long stretches of silence when they have conversations with me.”

“I didn’t point it out ... exactly.”

He scoffed, hearing how derisive it sounded and not caring a bit when she tried to hide her wince. “Don’t try to—”

“Complex people have complex thoughts. Sometimes that means they spend a lot of time inside their own mind, thinking or overthinking. Sometimes in conversations, they need a second or two to think. Either way,” Vera said, lifting her shawl-covered shoulders in a shrug, “they almost always have the most interesting things to say.”

The harsh, angry words he had planned to tell her to make sure she did not make the same mistake with him in further conversation died on the back of his tongue. He swallowed it down, but didn’t find any bitterness left behind.

It wasn’t often that he couldn’t find words.

Vaslav was the first with words—cruel, swift words ready to cut, command, or cull. She called him complex and posed it as a compliment, but his medical history explained those lapses in his speech and time lost in his thoughts as something else entirely.

“What would you know about someone being complex?” he asked.

She considered that, her reply not as fast, and he took just a little bit of satisfaction in that. The woman had been terribly quick on her toes from the moment she walked into his den, but for the moment, she traced the rim of the teacup with the tip of her thumb in silence. He almost missed it, but just before she dropped his gaze, her stare fell on his hands. It lingered there, just for a second, on his tattoos and rings, before she focused on the cup instead.

“Personal experience,” Vera finally replied. “It sits heavy in your stomach, doesn’t it? The tea, I mean. I like how it keeps the nutty aftertaste, but it’s almost like it ... fills you.”

How ironic, he mused.

He hadn’t wanted to answer her question in the first place, and even deflected their conversation into dangerous territory, only for her to come up with the truth all on her own. In a way.

“It soothes the churning, empty feeling because of that—but only if I drink it in small sips, as it goes from hot to lukewarm. And it tastes good, of course,” he added.

He didn’t add that his digestive issues were symptoms of medications that were supposed to help with the pain. Sometimes they did, until it hit the magical threshold, and nothing worked.

“Of course,” she echoed, glancing up at him again with a smile.

“I imagine I am not very good company—even for tea, no?”

Vera didn’t bat an eye, and her laughter had a tinkling quality when she replied, “Well, I think you’re only a little moody.”

*

Vaslav loosened up a little once he was wandering the rear property line with Vera not too far from his side. She’d mentioned the sun dropping once, and he remembered that she would eventually have to leave. So, before she had even finished her second cup of tea, he offered to take her around the back of the house for a stroll, and they would come back to the front where he knew Igor was still waiting.

Vera agreed.

“There’s a pond down in there,” he explained as Vera leaned over the metal gate that kept a small dirt road blocked. “Once you walk behind the trees, and around the bend. Tucked behind the guesthouse, but it’s rarely lived in now. I used to swim in the pond a lot when I was a boy.”

Vera peered back at him over her shoulder, still beaming. How someone could smile as much as her, even in his constantly scowling presence, Vaslav simply didn’t know. He found it fascinating, though.

Or just her.