There he was.
Dimitri’s tall, slender form was unmistakable. He looked as gaunt and sickly as he’d been in San Francisco, but he was gorgeously attired in a fine black overcoat with a red scarf wrapped around his neck. He was leaning on a gold-handled cane. Scars marred the side of his face, and he walked gingerly, as if each step hurt. But oh, that smile! It cut straight to her heart.
She closed the distance between them, heart pounding as she arrived to stand before him. “What happened to you?” she asked, taking in his ghastly pallor and a fresh scar running from the corner of his right eye down into his beard.
“A bomb in Saint Petersburg,” he said, and she recoiled in horrified surprise. He was supposed to be in his country dacha, not mingling with crowds and anarchists.
She reached out to lay a hand, gentle as a butterfly, against the side of his face.
“Ouch!” he said and flinched back.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “Is it still tender?”
“No, your hands are cold.”
She choked off a laugh and wanted to berate him for being such a crybaby except that it was obvious he’d been through something terrible. Every ounce of longing for her sweet, heroic, and terribly dandified dearest friend came roaring back.She wanted to embrace him but didn’t dare, because he truly did look awful.
“Oh, Dimitri, I’m afraid I’ve missed you terribly.”
“I was hoping so.”
“You did?”
“I’ve come all this way to see you, and it would be a shame if you had not suffered at least a little on my behalf. And now here I am. Half-dead on my feet and nowhere to sit down.”
She would fix that! She glanced over her shoulder at Liam. “Get Poppy to help you sell the records!” she called out. Poppy looked aghast, but it would do her stepmother good to stand on her feet in gainful employment for an hour or two.
Natalia led Dimitri to a bench, and he winced as he lowered himself to sit. The light from a nearby lamppost made the hollows on his face look even worse.
She held his hand as he told her of the explosion in Saint Petersburg, how time felt suspended as he watched the explosion unfold before his eyes, incapable of escaping the bricks and glass that came flying at him. He suffered a concussion from the blast, as well as cuts on his face and elsewhere on his body from the flying shrapnel. He fell sick with a wicked case of pneumonia, and his ankle had been broken during an accident at Mirosa.
“It is mending?” she asked, glancing down at his foot.
“Yes, but look—I have a blister on my palm because of the cane.”
She kissed it.
“I have not had a decent manicure since I left New York.”
“I’ll take care of that,” she assured him, already looking forward to the chance to start pampering him. Once again, he seemed to have suffered terribly over the past few months. He needed someone to look after him, and she desperately wanted to be the person to do it.
“Why did you come back?” she asked.
“I got your letter suggesting you would visit in the spring. It got me to thinking....” The corners of his eyes darkened withgrief. “Natalia, I do not think you belong in Russia. It is not the sort of open society where a woman like you can flourish. I came to tell you not to come.”
She swallowed hard. “All right.”
Did that mean they didn’t have a future? If so, he could have told her in a letter.
“I realized that I must decide between you and Russia,” he said. “I will always love Mirosa, but it has changed. Or perhaps it is I who have changed. A peasant from Mirosa emigrated to America, and I found myself envious that he could break away for a new life. A lady I cared for who once lived for nothing but her father’s bank broke away from it to start a new company, and I was envious of her too.”
“Even though she lives in New York City?”
His shoulders sagged, and he looked even more tired. “Even though,” he acknowledged with a reluctant smile. “When I struggled with pneumonia, I feared I was about to die. I had so many regrets, mostly that I had found my dearest friend and the woman I wish to spend the rest of my life with, but I walked away from her because of my love for a family farm. A farm! Natalia, I don’t know what the future holds, but we have conquered greater challenges in the past, correct?”
“You got the czar to recommit to the 1858 treaty,” she said. “You moved a nation.”
“Only because you helped,” he said. “Togetherwe moved a nation.” His hands covered her chilly ones, warming them. “I came here so we can have some of those conversations you mentioned in your letter. I think we are destined to be together, and it must happen here in New York. Perhaps my fate is to be like one of your mundane domestic novels with a predictably happy ending. A shame, but I have survived this long, so perhaps I am not supposed to enjoy a heroic death quite yet. Dearest Natalia, if I stay here, would you be willing to marry me?”
