Well, fuck a duck.
The show better be damn well worth it if he was going to be muzzled through it.
Fine. He could do this. Blending into the background was his specialty.
Sadie scurried out of the room and quickly returned with two glasses of chilled water. She handed one to Babushka. And for the first time since they’d entered her personal office, she glanced at Roman as she slipped him his own glass.
That light he’d been searching for in her gaze flickered like a match being struck. Kindling. The fire didn’t take hold, but he saw the ember. Saw what could be. What had been.
Destiny.
How forever feels.
He closed his eyes and regrouped. She had only offered water, not a declaration of her undying love and desire to mend all the fences time had built between them. Yet, that cold glass meant she’d thought of him, even for just a moment. Yeah, he’d take what he could get.
“You vould have more clients if you served vodka.” Babushka tossed back a gulp of water like it was a shot of liquor.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sadie replied, humor evident in her tone.
She didn’t sit on the other side of the desk. No, she pulled a chair next to Babushka so there wasn’t anything in between her and her new client, and they were nearly knee-to-knee. She focused her attention on her new client. Again, it was as though he wasn’t even present in Sadie’s world. Even though he was sitting. Right. There.
“What can I do for you?” Sadie asked Babushka, adjusting the yellow legal pad at the table to her right. She tapped her pen against the lined parchment.
Roman took a swig of his water in the Dvornakov way—dealing with the fact that it was only two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen instead of all parts vodka.
Babushka sat tall in her padded chair, crossed her ankles like royalty, and held the bag carrying the image of his grandfather in her lap. “I need divorce.”
The moment zipped to a stop. He choked on the water he’d been trying to drink.
Say what?
Babushka was going wildly off script. Not that they had a script. But if they had had a script, this would not be it.
He coughed and, honest as all fuck, tried to get the liquid to go down his throat. The thing was, Babushka had made her announcement when Roman was mid-gulp. Had he known what she was going to say, he never would’ve invested so heavily in that slug of water. Because in that moment, the water caught in his throat and he spit it all over the table and Sadie’s legal pad.
Lucky for him, he’d aimed away from Sadie. So the only collateral damage was the paper. Also, lucky for him, it was only hydrogen and oxygen. The drops of water settled into the paper, smearing the blue lines.
Sadie looked at him slightly shocked, a little curious, and a bit like he’d gone bananas.
Which he was certain he might have.
He pounded at his chest. “Divorced?”
If this was Babushka’s idea of pushing them together, the woman had seriously lowered her standards.
Where was the grandmother who had settled comfortably into his new sister-in-law’s cookie kitchen to ice cookies and force his brother into dating her?
“Did you get married?” Sadie asked, sounding more than a little concerned. “To one of your boyfriends?” She shook the spit-out water from the paper.
Roman had explained his grandmother’s love triangle to Sadie when he’d shown her the office. There was a lot he’d told her that day—information she should have before she committed to legally representing her new landlords.
“Yes, I married my love in 1947.” Babushka pulled out the framed photograph of his dedushka. “This is my husband.”
Still attempting to stave off his coughing, Roman sipped at the rest of his water.
Sadie scratched at her temple. “I’m sorry. I thought you were divorced. I just assumed—”
“No, I am not divorced. But I would like to file the papers. So I can officially move on. Get married.”
