The images played in a loop, but always snagged on a specific one. His face filling with colliding emotions as he’d said goodbye. Watching it over and over as she sat there, she took it apart, looked at it from every angle, until she finally realized something.
How hard it had been for him to say it.
Jerking out of her stupor, she fumbled out her phone, her heart starting to thunder as she searched out the direct number he’d saved on it. She hit Dial as she restarted the car. He answered after only one ring.
“Anastasia?”
To everyone she was Ana. Only he called her by her full name. Every time he said it, he filled the simple utterance with so much, it filled volumes in her being. She’d once thought she’d heard how much he wanted her, and everything else he’d felt in the way he said it. She’d since come to believe she’d been only hearing what she’d wanted to hear.
But there was no mistaking how he’d said her name now. It was the very sound of agitation and solicitude combined. He was worried she needed something, and that it was big enough only he could deal with it, important enough to make her call him.
Before she could reassure him, his urgency silenced her. “I just hit Dial and the phone rang instead.”
Did she get that right? “You were calling me?”
“I went to Alex’s house and your mother told me you went home, but I arrived here and didn’t find you. I was calling you when your call connected first. What happened? Where are you?”
He’d been looking for her? Was at her home now? Why?
“Anastasia.”
His bark was pure anxiety now, clearly imagining another disaster had befallen her.
She rushed to allay his concern. “Nothing happened. I—I just stopped somewhere on the way.” He didn’t need to know that she had only sit there staring at a memory reel starring him. But she needed to know one thing. “Why were you looking for me?”
There was a long beat of silence on the other end, before his deep voice poured into her brain again, and his words snuffed out any light that remained in her world.
“I wanted to see you again before I went back to Russia.”
* * *
Anastasia didn’t even remember the drive back home.
Her brain registered nothing until she saw him sitting in his car outside her family home, like a predator lying in wait. He got out as soon as she neared, looking like a god descended to earth with the setting sun behind him. Even from a distance she felt the tension radiating from him. It swamped her as she drove past him into the garage, as he opened her door and helped her out.
Her throat tightening, her heart hammering, she invited him into the house. Every nerve fired with his nearness, with the intensity blasting from him.
Needing air, she led him all the way out back to her favorite part of her mother’s garden—the gazebo. It was where she’d sat alone countless times with her laptop or a book, where her mind had always ended up dwelling on the man she’d loved and lost. She turned to him now.
He towered over her, his eyes that hypnotic green she’d always drowned in, his expression singeing her blood with its heat. And she just couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t let him say goodbye. Not yet.
Not before she said what she’d called him to say.
“Anastasia—”
“I could have died, Ivan.” Her quavering words cut off what he’d begun to say. “But I didn’t. Because you saved me. Now I need one more thing from you.”
He took a step closer, tight, barely leashed power in the move. Power she felt could move mountains, as he’d done for her and Alex. “Anything, Anastasia. Tell me what you need.”
“I need you to show me that I didn’t just survive, Ivan. I need you to prove to me that I’m still alive.”
His eyes flared with such a blaze of emotions, she almost needed to shield her eyes. “Anastasia...”
This time he said her name as if it hurt, the inflection filled with seething hesitation. And she knew he wouldn’t make a move. Either because he couldn’t credit what she’d asked him for, or because he was taking it upon himself to protect her from any recklessness in her weakened, needy state.
But she couldn’t take no for an answer. This was the one thing she needed. The last thing she’d have of him.
He’d nurtured her back to physical health, but she now needed a salve for her emotions, a reviving dose of passion from the only man she’d ever been intimate with.
Her move ate up the distance between them as a trembling hand rose to his face. The moment she cupped his rugged jaw and felt his strength fill her palm, overflow into her being it was like the years apart evaporated. Nothing remained inside her but longing, and it had taken only this contact to break the dam and have it all come pouring out.