The long pause while I wracked my brain for things I like to do may have given away the fact that this is a lie.
“Then go do those.” He shrugs those muscled shoulders, and I feel heat creeping up my neck. I’m not used to pushback when I ask for something.
“No.” I fold my arms across my chest. “I want to work here. It’s part of our family territory. I should know how it works.”
Aleksandr raises his eyebrows at me, his mouth set in a line. He takes a step closer and my pulse quickens at his proximity.
“I don’t think you really want a job here, Natalia. And I’m not sure you have any skills that would be useful.”
“I have skills,” I protest.
I can write. I can read. I can analyze artwork.
“I’m sure you do. But I don’t think manual labor is for you. You know, carrying things. Operating machinery. Do you even have a driver’s license?”
Damn. He does have me there.
“No,” I admit reluctantly.
I’ve never seen either of my parents drive, either. We always have a driver.
Aleksandr nods at me as if to say this conversation is over,walking into the living room. I follow him. This conversation is not over.He doesn’t know how persistent I can be.
“You don’t understand, Aleksandr. This is boring. I’ve been here a week and I’m dying for something to do.” I add an edge of whining into my voice, hoping to irritate him into giving me what I want.
For some reason, my whining doesn’t seem to irritate him the way I’m trying to. He gives me a mocking smile as he flops onto the couch, resting his arms behind his head.
“You’ve been locked up your whole life, princess. What’s one more week?”
“I’ve been locked up in a mansion. At home. With books. Artworks. People.”
The sheer size of him is overwhelming. He takes up the entire couch with his body, his feet hanging off the end as he stretches lazily.
“What, is this not up to your standards? I didn’t promise a five-star resort experience.”
“You did promise me something, though.”
The truth about my brothers.I’m not going to let him forget it.
His brows lower over those penetrating eyes.“You’ll get that once your parents stop trying to undermine this deal, Natalia. I don’t trust you, not by a long shot. Don’t think I don’t know that you want out of here. I can smell it on you.”
All I can smell on Aleksandr is his deep, clean, cedar scent. I’ve never been good at reading people, and I hate how he can read me like a book.
The next morning, he makes a suggestion.
One that would have had my heart soaring as a child. After so many crushed dreams, it simply twists the knife that my father stabbed me with.
“You’re an artist. Why don’t you paint something? I can bring you materials, if that’s something you’d want.”
I shake my head, confused. Why would Aleksandr think that?
I had wanted to be an artist, once. When I was a child. When my brothers were alive. But even then, my father laughed at me. He took me down into the storage cabinet and slid open one of the wooden doors.
Behind it was a single piece of paper, framed in glass, with an almost comically simple sketch of a horse. One continuous line. Breathtaking in its simplicity, in the stark difference between the black ink of the animal and the bright white of the paper.
Just a line on white paper. It looked almost like a doctor’s note rather than an artwork.
Papa let me get close, looking at it through the glass, studying it. It was closer than I’d ever been to the collection before.“This was probably a draft. A scribble. Nothing serious. And now it’s worth more than our house. Us mortals are nothing in the face of true artists like that.”
