Page 51 of Kidnapped Bride

The outline was rough but there was something graceful about the way she'd shaped the wing.

"A bluebird," she said. "I make them for the church bazaar every spring. They sell for a few dollars each but the women there like them. And," she said with a grin, the money goes to help battered women."

"It's pretty."

"Thank you." She smoothed it back into the table and picked up the needle again. "My mother taught me. She could stitch anything. Flowers, animals, whole landscapes on a piece of linen the size of a napkin."

I watched her work for a minute and wondered why she found that particular hobby enjoyable.

It looked like a pain in the ass to me, but then she worked for the biggest pain in the ass I knew.

Maybe she just had extraordinary patience.

"How long have you worked for him?" I asked.

Her eyes flicked up in confusion for a second before she smiled. "Eleven years. Since before he bought this house."

"Eleven years?" I tried to imagine spending that much time in someone else's home, cooking their meals, washing their clothes, learning the rhythms of their life until you knew them better than they probably knew themselves. "And you've just been here this whole time? Cooking and cleaning for a criminal?"

She didn't flinch at that and her steady expression didn’t change, like she was working out what I was getting at.

"Does he kidnap women often?" I asked and I realized as I was saying it how snarky it sounded. But he deserved the scrutiny.

"You're the first woman he's ever brought here," she said. "In eleven years I've never seen him bring anyone home. Not a girlfriend, not a date, not a guest who stayed past midnight. Not once."

I didn't know what to do with that so I picked up the ginger tea and forced down a cold sip to distract myself from the expression on her face.

"What kind of man is he?" I asked. "When he's not out kidnapping women and catfishing them?" I felt sadness well up inside me.

Here I was, wondering who Nikolai really was, but I couldn’t ask him myself.

I didn't believe a word out of his mouth anymore.

One minute he was a sweet man, the next he seemed like a monster.

Anya worked the needle through the bluebird's wing while she talked. "He reads more than anyone I've ever met. Most mornings he's in his study before I'm even up, already through half a book with his coffee going cold. And he doesn't raise his voice at me, but he pays me more than I'd make anywhere else."

"That doesn't make him a good person." I felt defensive. Maybe the reason I needed to know more about him was more personal than just what my enemy looked like. If I was pregnant with this man's baby I figured I should know what that baby's father was like.

"No, I suppose it doesn't." She paused and set the stitching down. "I know you don't believe it, but Nikolai is a good man, Kira."

I looked down at the magazine and opened it back up. I wanted to believe that Nikolai was a good man, but it was hard to wrap my mind around.

I understood loyalty, which was clearly why Anya thought so highly of him. I grew up surrounded by it. My father had people who'd been with our family for decades.

The cooks, the drivers, the security who rotated through our home.

They were loyal to my father not because they feared him but because he'd earned it over years of treating them well.

They'd earned his respect.

But loyalty to his staff and loyalty to his family were two different things, and my mother had figured that out a long time ago.

That was why she spent most of her time in Europe with my aunts, traveling between Paris and Milan and a villa in Tuscany that she'd purchased with money my father gave her to keep quiet.

God I missed her.

She was there now—somewhere in Europe, shopping and drinking wine and doing whatever it was she did to drown the pain of a broken heart caused by my father.