“Good.” One side of his mouth tilted up in a rueful smile. “The last thing I want to do is scare you out of Russia.”
His wry smile settled over her like a warm blanket.
“Now that you’re here, I’m not sure anything can scare me away.”
He crooked out his arm, and she wrapped hers around his elbow.
“Now,” she said impishly, “where’s that hot chocolate you promised?”
Chapter 12
Vadeem had camped out in the hall. The die-hard cop again forsaking sleep and a bed so that he could keep her safe. Kat scrubbed her face with both hands as she sat on the bone-hard wooden floor. Vadeem had jugular tenacity when it came to protecting her. If it weren’t for his twinkling blue eyes and cockeyed smile, she’d package the guy in the category of stalker… well, endearing stalker. She leaned her forehead against the door. The painted wood felt cool against her skin. Vadeem was out there and she was in here, and only a door separated them… a door of eternity.
Vadeem wasn’t a Christian. She’d known that since he’d nearly decked the monk at the monastery. But until this moment, this evening, she hadn’t given it more than a passing consideration. Shame roared up in her soul. Regardless of their future, she should have begun praying for Vadeem’s salvation the moment she’d caught up to him outside the chapel, white faced and looking like he was going to shatter. She ached for him. Never, regardless of how desperate she’d been as a child, or even now with her life supposedly in danger, had she felt that bereft of hope.
Kat had God. That meant whatever tragedy befell her, God could pull her through. Even when she felt the Almighty was hiding on the other side of the Cosmos, inherently, she knew He cared. Faith told her that.
Faith was the one thing Vadeem didn’t have.
She pressed her palm to the cool wood, fighting the urge to yank the door open, skid to her knees in front of him, and pull him in her arms like she might a potential adoptive mother waiting the results of a judge’s decision, whispering, “have faith.”
Instead, Kat folded her hands and looked up to the dark ceiling of her hotel room. “Lord, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I like this fella way too much for my own good. Please help me to stay on my feet, not to give my heart away.”
Kat knew better than to leap into the arms of an unbeliever. The momentary happiness would slowly be eroded by their differences. She served the living God. Vadeem served himself. As much as he worked to sacrifice himself for others, Vadeem’s basic desires would always be for himself. That’s what separated Christians from non-Christians. Christians followed Christ. “And please, Lord, help Vadeem see your truth. Give him faith to turn to you.”
Kat closed her eyes, letting the memory of his sincerity seep into her bones. I’m going to take good care of you. I promise.
Funny how that same statement coming from Matthew turned her into knots and tightened her jaw. Matthew meant, “Don’t do anything foolish. Obey me, and everything will turn out okay.”
She’d been obeying and dodging foolishness for three decades. She’d obeyed Matthew through college and beyond, too afraid to step out and follow her dreams, waiting year after year for him to finish school, believing that he knew best for her. She’d obeyed Grandfather, growing up on the farm, happily sheltered inside his singular attention. She had even obeyed when her mother lay dying, bleeding from a ruptured spleen.
“Stay here with Uncle Bert and be a good girl,” Grape-Grandma had ordered as she slid out of the pickup truck and slammed the door. “I’ll be right back.”
Kat stayed, counting the windows in the three-story county hospital, wondering why her great-grandmother had cut short Kat’s unpacking to rush them to the hospital, as if the old woman itched to go on her weekly visitation. If only Kat had known her mother’s life leaked out by the second.
Kat remembered her anger as she crossed her arms over her chest and willed her Grape-Grandmother to appear through the glass hospital doors. She’d waved good-bye to Mama and Papa only two short hours ago, looking forward to an entire glorious summer before her, riding through the timothy, and helping Grape-Grandma put up pickles, pick peaches and apples from the orchard. Summertime meant freedom and a life gloriously undefined by rules, conformity, and hemlines. Kat fought the urge to prop her feet up on the dashboard, anxious to get her vacation started.
She counted windows, mesmerized at the tint of morning sun turning the glass bronze. This hospital was minute compared to the one in New York City, where she’d visited Grandfather. A trickle of sweat streaked down her forehead and pooled at the stiff collar of her polyester dress.
It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last that she had been stranded in the truck while the old woman visited the infirmed. Her stomach lurched as Kat leaned her head against the hotel wall. Remnants of anger at the hospital regulations that decreed no one under the age of twelve allowed, at her Grandfather for being absent, out of town, again, at Grape-Grandmother and her notions of propriety that forced her into a Sunday dress when she would have much rather be in a pair of jeans and riding her mare, Hickory, on the farm. The injustice of Grape-Grandma’s abrupt morning plans had Kat gritting her teeth, and the drone of Uncle Bert drumming his fingers on the steering wheel only increased her pain. Uncle Bert wasn’t what she’d call overly sensitive. A bachelor with his own farm to run, he looked the disheveled part. Grandfather’s mutt collie, Butch, had a larger vocabulary than her gloomy Uncle Bert.
Grape-Grandmother finally appeared in the door, and something about the old lady’s expression had made fear coil deep in Kat’s stomach. She sat up as Grape-Grandmother approached, wringing a cloth handkerchief, her face solid, but her lip twitching just slightly, as if pain was about to leak out. Kat opened the car door.
“Oh, Kat,” was all the woman said.
Her wretched tone told Kat that the world as she had known it had shattered.
How could she step over the line after that? Rather, she’d been grateful for their protective hovering. First Grape-Grandma, then Grandfather. They treated her like something made out of milk-glass, and Matthew easily took over the job when she met him at Nyack University. She often wondered if her grandfather didn’t set up the meeting. It wasn’t every day that a medical resident wandered into the Nyack library, especially when he had his own prestigious library at Columbia. But he’d helped her pick up a stack of books she’d dropped, and she should have seen then that he’d made it his mission to keep her safe… too safe.
So safe that, after seven years of dating, her world consisted of Matthew, her college roommate, and two colleagues at work. A world that seemed to cinch tighter each year, her dreams becoming smaller and smaller. “You need me, Kat. You won’t be okay without me.” Poor Matthew. He’d been wrong. This journey to Russia seemed like the most okay thing she’d ever done. She’d help unite a family, she’d met a woman from the past who’d cracked the door to her grandfather’s war, and she’d met a man who made her feel brave and beautiful.
“I’m going to take care of you,” Vadeem had said. For the first time, she liked the idea of a man looking out for her. And Vadeem’s sudden appearance gave her the distinct feeling that Vadeem had invested in her mystery. Invested enough to do some digging into her past. Invested enough to hop a plane. Invested enough to surrender sleep to make sure she got hers. And that meant he wouldn’t hold her back.
Vadeem was a good man. Kat knew it in her bones. She sensed his controlled emotions as they walked back to the hotel, the way his muscles tensed under her arm, and his tenderness as he ran a finger along the bruise on her jaw line, now turning yellow. “See you in the morning,” he’d said, as he lowered himself onto the hard wooden floor. He hung his arms over his up drawn knees. “Go to bed. You’ll be fine.”