Chapter 16 – Luka
T here was nothing pulsing in my chest.
Well…not nothing. Anger at the situation sizzled spicy and sharp. Annoyance at the pakhan flared like a cloud of bad stench. Frustration? That was from seeing the want in Vivian’s eyes, but she wouldn’t trust me.
Not that I had given her a reason to.
But other than those three strong emotions dancing in a typhoon-strength waltz, there was nothing. Being with Vivian didn’t feel wrong.
Which was different. There had been a few other women since the bullets made me a widower. But after the blast of release, the guilt ate away at me for weeks. Sometimes months. The last one-night stand had been three years ago. Had enough time finally passed? Were my feelings for Sasha finally dulled?
“No,” I laughed on a shaky breath. I reached up, fingers trailing over the sore, already bruising spot on my throat. “It’s her.”
Vivian was the difference in this equation. The fire in her eyes was so damn familiar. She didn’t look like my dead wife. But she challenged me. She made me feel alive. I knew it almost immediately, but I refused to acknowledge it. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.
“I’m drawn to her.” I looked across the sea. The briny wind whispered in a cool breath against my cheek. The caress was gentle.
“You know what you have to do, Cool Hand,” my muse whispered.
I did. “I have to help her.”
Putting aside my strange reaction to her, Vivian deserved to know what happened. I couldn’t just hand her over to the man who’d paid us to transport her. Not without her consent. I swiped a hand over my face. We needed to talk.
That was not a conversation I could foresee going well.
One of my favorite bits of wisdom came rushing to my aid. “‘If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment,’” I recited to myself.
It was a convoluted way of saying I could control my reaction to outside events. I stood a better chance of dealing with the difficulties if I was in control of my reactions.
It was the best shot. Control myself and convince Vivian to talk to me. She needed to explain what she meant by being disowned. When we were contacted about collecting her, it had been to bring an endangered heiress back. Dimitri had jumped at the conclusion to work with someone as well connected as Markem.
“He wouldn’t have if he thought for a second there was anything fishy about the situation,” I reassured myself.
Disappointing my cousin was the least of my worries. If my hunch was right, and Vivian wasn’t what her fiancé said she was, Dimitri would agree with the change of course. He’d done his due diligence, but from outward appearances, Vivian seemed like the runaway bride her fiancé claimed she was.
The word unstable had been used. An unstable, emotional woman who didn’t care for her own safety.
Would an heiress lower herself to work as a maid? Would a distraught woman crave the rush of jumping at the amusement park? Would an emotional person remain calm in the face of a home invasion? Would an unstable person—
A rough laugh left my chest. “I’m not the right person to be asking these questions.”
Pushing to my feet, I brushed the sand off my boxers. There were missing pieces to this picture. Until I found the answers, this delivery was on hold.