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“I told you you’d have doctors,” he rumbles. “I had an examination room built in the east wing so Dr. Calloway can keep a close eye on you. She’ll be here for the duration of your pregnancy.”
That’s entirely too much information to process at once. He had awhatbuiltwhereforhow long?I’m still dazed and possibly concussed, though, so I set those questions aside. Future June will figure out the answers.
“You play the piano,” I mumble through fat lips.
“Very perceptive.”
“How did you learn?”
“My mother,” he says simply, but he doesn’t offer me any further information.
“Did she teach both of you?”
He doesn’t answer. His eyes are skewering me a little more aggressively than usual. The blue in them is alive, like the face of a melting glacier. His face, though, is perfectly still.
“Well, you play beautifully,” I say, focusing on my blotchy ankle. “I didn’t recognize the music, though. Who was it?”
The pause right before he answers forces my eyes back to his. “Kolya Uvarov,” he says, deadpan.
I stare at him in shock. “You composed that? The… the whole thing?”
“That’s generally how compositions go.”
I just sit there, gaping at him like a goldfish. I know I must look like an idiot, but I can’t seem to change my expression. I detect a smidgen of amusement in the slant of his mouth.
I have a ton of follow-up questions, but they’re all cut short when Dr. Calloway walks back in with a medical-grade ice pack. Kolya retreats back to his corner as Dr. Calloway wraps everything up tightly.
“You’ve aggravated an old injury, it seems,” she remarks, casting a critical eye over my leg. Her gaze traces down the scar that snakes from my calf to my knee. “When did that happen?”
I try very hard not to look at Kolya. “Almost two years ago now.”
“It must have been a bad accident,” she offers delicately.
“It changed my life.”
I can feel the lump in my throat, and apparently, Dr. Calloway can too, because she drops the subject there. “Let me give you some painkillers, just for the initial discomfort. It will subside in a day or two.”
She hands me a pill and I knock it back gratefully with a little water.
“Excellent. Now, all you need is a little rest.”
I’m about to wriggle off the bed when Kolya slips his arms around me and hoists me into his arms. I stifle a gasp while Dr. Calloway holds the door open for us, completely mute.
The walk to my bedroom is silent. I should feel uncomfortable, but the painkillers the good doctor gave me are making me feel a little bit loopy already. The kind of loopy where you start to say things you shouldn’t. I bite my tongue, just in case I give in to the lure of the babble.
God, he smells so good, though.
And he feels so strong. A truck could crash right into him, and the truck would be the one that needs attention. I’ve never met a man so solid before. Not just physically solid, but solid in who he is.
Adrian was the opposite. He made promises he never kept. Told stories that were never true. I never knew if the man I fell in love with was going to show up, or if the other guy would. The mournful drunk, the wild drunk, the silent drunk, the ghost.
“How are you brothers?” I mutter. “You’re so different.”
He looks down at me, but he doesn’t answer. I decide he didn’t really hear me. The next second, I find myself sinking into sheets so soft they feel like a hug.
I expect him to leave, but instead, he grabs a pillow and arranges it carefully under my bandaged leg. I feel tears inch their way to my eyes and I have to bite down on my tongue to stop them from surfacing.
I want to cry. Not because of the pain. Not because of the embarrassment of the situation. Not because I’m pregnant and alone, or because I’ve lost my life partner, or because I’m being held against my will in a strange house by a scary man.
