I furrowed my brow, heading toward the study to meet my father.Everything?I was trapped with this need to learn all there was to know about her, but I intended to take that journey of discovering her on my own.
Andre:About where she worked before. Where she’s from.
She had to have gone through a background check to even enter this building, and the staffing agency she was sent here from would’ve provided the preliminary details about her. I trusted Oleg to tell me more, for him to give me his impression.
Because until I had more answers from her—things I’d need to unearth beyond the persistent small talk I was forcing her to engage in with me today—I had to be cautious.
“Always cautious,” I muttered to myself as I entered the room where my father was waiting for me.
“Cautious about what?” He stood near the window, looking out at me. His gaze shot straight to the bandages and wrap that made my shoulder look puffy. “Getting shot?”
I nodded as I took a seat. This study wasn’t used for anything but holding private discussions like this. My office was a messier hell hole of disarray, where I knew where everything was as it should be. But that room was likely still being cleaned up from last night.
“Why didn’t you come to Claire for help?” He sat as well, watching me closely. Even though he was preoccupied with Owen’s birth, helping my sister Anya adjust, and taking care of his new wife, he would never dismiss me. For my entire life, it’d just been me and him against the world. My mother, Olga, had never been in my life, and I hadn’t missed out with that arrangement.
Mikhail Orlov was the only parent I’d ever needed.
“Oleg showed up at the clinic,” he said before I could reply. “Daria and Anya were there to help him, but they said you weren’t there with him.” And he’d been aware of Oleg and me going to the warehouses. It was no coincidence he was confused why my right-hand man had shown up wounded but I was absent.
“I didn’t want to be a bother,” I said sardonically.
He smirked at me with disapproval. “It’s not abother. She’s a doctor, for fuck’s sake.”
“And Claire is also a new mother. A tired and cranky one.” I sat forward in my seat and sighed. “I wasn’t hit that bad, anyway.”
“That’s not how I see it.” He arched a brow. “Not when you requested a cleanup in your office.”
“That was more to do with my finding the mole and killing him. Not becauseIwas bleeding out in there.” I almost caved to a smile, remembering the moment of surprise and confusion when Sofia leaned over me and told me to take it easy. To go nice and slow. “Besides, a new maid happened to be nearby. She helped me.”
“A maid?” He scoffed. “We’ve got a doctor, nurses in training, a fucking clinic, and you resort to asking amaidto play nurse.”
“It didn’t seem like she was ‘playing’ nurse.”
He frowned. “This new maid?” He never concerned himself with the details of how I ran my home or whom I employed. Usually, the house staff stuck to the background, blending in and staying out of sight, anyway. Sergei, Roman, my father, and I each had our own building in this block, with staff as we saw fit. We worked together, often closely, but we still had our separate residences.
“Yeah. Sofia.”
His gaze turned critical. Assessing me.
“What?”
“Is shejusta maid?” he asked with measured concern.
I don’t know.Something seemed different about her, but I couldn’t pin what. Maybe it was how she broke the usual barriers of actually speaking to me directly, unlike other hired help. Perhaps it was the burning need to assist me when I was in pain that impacted me.
“I’ll check that she is,” I replied.
“Hmm.”
I frowned again, perturbed by the amusement in his eyes. “What?” I repeated.
“Just be careful that you’re not letting her get to you.”
“How so?” If he meant keeping my desire in check, that was already a lost cause. Curvy brunettes happened to be my type.Her stubbornness for distance between us appealed as a form of her playing hard to get—also my weakness.
“You’ve got no room to be distracted by a woman,” he said with a grunt. “Not now when you’re working on finding out who’s selling intel about our drugs to fucking Giovanni.”
“Icanbe distracted by a sexy maid all I want,” I argued. “I told you. I handled him. I found Yusef snooping through my things in my office. He was the mole, and he’s dead. That’s the end of it.”
