Chapter 19 Cartier #2
Andrej rolls off me to sit on the floor beside the couch. He strokes my hair away from my face. “Don’t worry about it. She can probably hear your orgasms from her room at night.”
“Nooo…” I sit up and drag my sweatpants back over my hips. “No wonder she wanted to go back to Chicago.”
“Don’t worry.” He fists my hair and pulls my lips to his. “She won’t tell anyone.”
That isn’t what worries me. But how do I tell him that his bodyguard is in love with him when she might not even realize it herself?
“Cartier…” He pauses, his face so close to mine that our lips are touching.
“This sounds serious.”
“It is.” There’s another pause while he shifts onto his knees. “I hadn’t planned on doing it like this.”
“Doing what?” I furrow my brows. “Fucking me on the sofa?”
“No.” He isn’t smiling.
This is serious, and my stomach twists as bile rises in my throat.
“You’re scaring me, Andrej. What’s going on? Is Gianna okay? Has something happened in Chicago?”
“Gianna is fine.”
He averts his eyes, and it’s enough time for my savage brain to think that he’s going to fly back to America without me. I don’t want to stay here alone with Ivana and a security team.
“This isn’t my home,” I blurt out. “Whatever is going on in the States, I can handle it.”
“Hey, what’s brought this on?” He cups my face with both hands and peers into my eyes as if it will enable him to read my mind.
“You’re going home without me.”
He smiles. “Did you not hear me, Cartier? I’m never going anywhere without you. You’re stuck with me now, baby.”
“So, what is it then?” I suddenly feel hot and irritable, and I pull my sweater away from my neck to give myself some space to breathe.
“Cartier.” He raises himself onto one knee and produces a ring from thin air. “Will you marry me?”
I stare at the ring in his hand as if it’s a detonator.
Perhaps it is a detonator.
If I say yes, my world will be blown upside down. Even more upside down than it already is. And if I turn him down…
“You’re proposing?” My voice is small and distant.
“Yes. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Cartier. I love you. I’m in love with you. I’ve never met anyone like you before.”
The ring catches the glow of the fairy lights and throws sparkles across the room. It’s a huge emerald, the largest stone I’ve ever seen in real life, apart from the pendant in the vault, surrounded by diamonds to create a star shape. It’s beautiful.
It’s also too much, because I realize now that this must’ve come from the family jewels.
“I can’t wear this ring, Andrej. It belongs in your family.”
“You are the only family I want, Cartier. If you say yes… This will belong as much to you as to anyone else.”
“What about your sister? Or Gianna?” I’m stalling, and I’m getting angry at the sound of my own voice, but I wasn’t expecting this, and I don’t know what I want.
“I don’t want to marry them, Cartier,” he says with a straight face before his smile breaks through, refusing to be contained. “I want to marry you.”
“To keep me safe.” Jeez, that’s one surefire way to ruin a marriage proposal.
“Not to keep you safe, although you know that I will. I love you. I loved you the first moment I saw you, and I fall deeper in love with you every day that we spend together.”
I smile then, as my chest expands to accommodate my erratically beating heart.
He’s still holding the ring. Still on one knee. And I’m vaguely aware that I haven’t moved or given him an answer.
“Do you love me, Cartier?”
Do I?
I’ve never been in love before. The only men I’ve ever fallen for have been the fictional kind, the Heathcliffs and the Mr. Darcys and the Romeos that exist inside my head.
But deep down, I know that I don’t even need to consider my answer because Andrej Ivanov is my gravity.
He’s the center of my universe. He’s the other half of my soul, the half that Greek legends would have us believe that we spend our lifetime searching for to make us complete.
But can I marry a killer?
I look at his eyes, and my body melts. “Yes, Andrej. Yes, I’m in love with you too.”
His smile turns me into a gooey puddle that I have to stick back together before I can reassemble my thoughts. “Is that a yes?” he asks.
“I…” My fingers itch towards the emerald-and-diamond ring. “I need time… My parents…”
“I understand, Cartier.” He takes my hand, flips it over, places the ring in my palm, and then closes my fingers around it. “I want you to keep it. Then, when you’re ready to wear it, I’ll have my answer.”
I stare at my hand, at the cold ring in my palm. “But what if—”
“I’ll wait forever if that’s what it takes. There will never be anyone else for me, Cartier.”
Later that evening, when Andrej is outside patrolling the perimeter, I find my cell phone tucked away at the back of the drawer in the nightstand.
I stare at it until my eyes water, the engagement ring still in my other hand.
I can’t sleep, but my brain is so foggy that I can’t think either. I need to speak to someone. I need my friends.
Chicago is eight hours behind, so I Google how to make an international call and wait for it to connect me to Gianna.
“Cartier!” Her voice sounds a million miles away, but I can picture her with her babies as if they’re in the next room, sleeping peacefully in their cribs. “Are you alright? What’s going on? Is Andrej with you?”
I smile to myself as more tears well in my eyes. I’m an emotional wreck, and Gianna’s voice isn’t helping because I realize how much I miss her and Mika.
“I’m fine. Andrej is outside running security checks.”
“Is he looking after you, Car? Because if he isn’t, I’ll fly out there myself and sort him out.”
I chuckle and almost choke on my tears. “You can’t. You have babies to feed, remember?”
“Okay, I’ll send Leo then.” She pauses. “Seriously, Car, if he hurts you…”
“He proposed to me today.”
Silence.
Then, “He what? He asked you to marry him?” The line is muffled momentarily, and I wonder if Gianna is speaking to Leo in the background. “Did he give you a ring? What did you say?”
“Which question do you want me to answer first?”
“What did you say?”
“I haven’t given him my answer yet.”
“Wise.” I hear her sucking in a deep breath. “Ignore that. Do you love him, Car?” Her voice is gentle now. The surprise smoothed over.
“Yes.”
“So, what’s holding you back?”
I go to the window and peer out into the darkness, at the blanket of pristine snow glowing in the lights from inside the house. “I love him, but I don’t know if I can be with him.”
Gianna takes her time. “Because he’s Bratva?”
“Yes. They kill people, Gi. I just don’t know if I can live with that on my conscience.”
“Look, Car, I wish I was there so that I could speak to you properly about this, but for now, I want you to listen to me, okay?”
“Okay.” I stare at my hazy reflection in the window and pretend that it’s Gianna.
“I never told you and Mika about my background when we were in Montenegro together because I didn’t know how you would react.
But my family is mafia too. My marriage to Seamus was arranged by my parents because it was a good alliance between the Sicilians and the Irish.
But then I met Leo and, well, the rest is history as they say. ”
I feel numb. Gianna comes from a mafia family. The words roll out in front of my eyes, but they don’t seem to make any sense.
“Do you think I’m a bad person, Car?”
“No.”
I can almost see her smile. “Leo and Andrej are not bad people either. Their world is different to the world you grew up in, but they would die protecting their family.”
I think about Leonid rescuing Ivana and Tamara, and the story I heard about Andrej at the women’s shelter launch. Then an image of my biological parents being gunned down by Leonid and Andrej’s father pops into my head.
“My parents were murdered by the Ivanovs.”
“That’s not what I heard, Car.”
“What did you hear?”
Before she can answer, a sound from outside the bedroom door snags my attention.
“Hold on, Gi. I think someone is outside my room.”
I leave the phone on the nightstand and cross the room. My heart is pounding. I yank open the door and peek outside as someone wearing black pants and black Doc Martens rounds the corner at the other end of the hallway.
When I go back to my phone, Gianna is gone, and the line is dead.