Katya looked around at her four boys. So handsome with their light brown hair of varying lengths and their deep brown eyes. All of them so strong, so large. She sighed. She knew that it strained them, to sit still, indoors for so long. But they did it. To please their mother. They were good boys.
“Go,” she told them when the last bite had been eaten. “Go run.”
“We’ll help wash, Maciaryszki,” Maxim insisted.
“There’s nothing to wash!” Katya laughed. “You’ve licked your plates clean again. Go. Before you all come out of your skins. Go and give me some peace and quiet.”
Her boys were about to accept her offer when the doorbell rang. Ilya was out of his seat and racing to answer it as fast as he could. Having grown up in a smaller town in Belarus, Ilya was used to knowing all of his neighbors very well. Answering the door, even for solicitors, and ‘talking small’ as he called it, was one of Ilya’s favorite things to do in the world.
Danil glanced at the gaudy, gilded clock on his mother’s wall. 8:45 on a Sunday night. It was a little late to be selling Girl Scout cookies.
“Look,” Maxim said, slinging an arm around Anton’s shoulders. “Danil is suspicious of our visitor. He thinks Sunday nights are not good time for ringing doorbells.”
Anton gave his characteristic quick-flash smile, here for one brilliant second and completely gone the next, absorbed into his dark, somber face.
“Well,” Anton replied as a woman’s voice floated through the house to them. “Danil does fear strange women.”
Danil lunged for his brother, but froze mid-scowl as the voice he was hearing rang a very specific bell. It was a silky voice, sweet and unassuming. And it was tightening a fist inside his chest that had been tightened only earlier that evening.
Danil ignored his teasing brothers and followed the sound into the living room, where his father sat in his armchair across from a cap of shiny dark hair, a battered leather jacket and eyelashes for days. Jesus Christ, it was that Dora woman.
“Well, I’m new in town. I live just over the way,” she gestured vaguely as she spoke to Ilya, obviously holding him, gleefully, in her thrall. “And I was just wondering if you’d had any encounters with bears. I live alone and I’m a little nervous about them.”
Ilya’s face broke out like a sunrise. He had the secret joy of a private joke written all over him. He connected eyes with Danil in the doorway as he answered the woman’s question. “Da. I know about bears. Quite a bit.”
His father spoke in careful English, but his face spoke of no hesitation. Danil’s stomach turned. His father was not a discreet man and he loved a good story. Danil thanked his lucky stars that he was here to intercept this woman before she got his father’s entire life story.
“Oh,” Dora Katsaros cocked her head to one side, noting Ilya’s accent. “Are you Russian?”
“Belarusian,” Danil answered as he stepped into the room, hands in his pockets.
Dora’s eyes snapped up to his and Danil had the feeling that every single detail about him was being absorbed in the matter of a second. Her eyes lingered for a moment over his untucked shirt, his loosened tie. Her discerning look quickly melted into a winning smile that might have worked, had Danil not seen her use that same look on Rickford not two hours ago.
“Twice in one night,” she purred. “Must be my lucky day. Dan, was it?”
“Sure,” he nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. He could feel his father’s disapproval of the icy way he was treating this guest but more than one alarm was blinking in Danil’s head right now. She’d been arrested for trespassing twice in two days and now here she was at his father’s house, asking questions about bears? Nuh uh.
“You know this woman?” Ilya asked Danil in Belarusian.
“Da,” Danil answered curtly. He could explain everything in a moment, once he’d gotten her the hell out of his house and away from his family.
Dora looked back and forth between them. “Your father was just filling me in about the bears in the area, Dan. I have a little phobia, you see. And I just want to make sure I’m safe.”
“You have fear of bears?” Maxim asked from behind Danil, moving into the room with a grace that belied his large stature of 6’ 4”.
Danil watched Dora’s eyes take in his brother, much the same way they’d taken him in just a moment before. But for some reason it annoyed the shit out of Danil. Was that interest he detected in her little smile? It wasn’t unheard of. Women fell all over themselves for Maxim. And it had never bothered Danil. He had no trouble with ladies. But right now, that look on her face was making Danil want to shove his brother through the plate glass window in the front of the living room.