When she realized she was staring at his mouth, she shook her head and met his gaze. His already dark eyes were darker still and she could swear he was standing closer than he’d been a moment earlier.
Would this reaction to him ever go away? When they’d been together all those years ago, she’d gotten excited every time she saw him, every time she heard his voice. Apparently, four years of pain and hurt hadn’t lessened her feelings for him at all.
It had, however, broken her trust in him. “What are you doing here? How did you find us?” A light snow had started while they were eating lunch and Vlad’s dark hair was flecked with white, but she didn’t invite him in.
“I went to see your parents,” he said.
“You faced Connor and Marta? That was ballsy.” Her parents hated Vlad for what he’d done to her. And they were extremely protective of their only daughter—and now their only grandchild.
He grimaced. “Your mother did spend an hour scolding me in Spanish. There were a lot of very angry arm gestures involved.”
She chuckled.
Her mother knew perfectly well Vlad didn’t speak Spanish. When they’d first met, Vlad had wrongly assumed that because her huge husband was Irish and she had blonde hair and blue eyes, she must be Irish, too. Marta had not only assured him of her Mexican heritage, she’d gone on to lecture him on the mistake of assuming anything from someone’s outward appearance. Most of the lecture was delivered in Spanish—a habit Marta wasn’t inclined to stop because she knew it frustrated Vlad.
It used to make Rose laugh. She was sorry to have missed it this time. She imagined her mother had some choice words for the man who’d broken her daughter’s heart.
“Did my father hit you?” she asked.
“No, but it was close. He did make a point of reminding me that he kept a gun in the back office.”
“How on earth did you manage to convince them to tell you where we were?” She crossed her arms as the cold air seeped through her thermal t-shirt.
He took in the gesture. “May I come inside and talk? I don’t want you standing here getting cold.”
“I haven’t decided yet. How did you convince my parents to talk to you?”
“My youngest brother, Yuri, went to see them. He got there about the same time Anton found you at their house. Yuri can be…intense.” He lowered his voice to a very quiet murmur. “He doesn’t hide his disgust with humans or his fanaticism well, though he thinks most humans are too stupid to notice. Your parents were extremely suspicious of his questions and put him off. I went to see them the next day—I wanted to make sure my brothers left town first—and they were nervous enough to let me in so they could grill me.”
“Why didn’t they tell me any of this?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe they thought you already knew everything? I told them you did.” He tilted his head, then winced. “I also made sure they knew my brothers had a lot of resources and they needed to be discreet on the phone.”
“So, basically, you scared the hell out of them.”
He winced again.
“Mommy, you coming in?” Zoe called.
“Just a minute, baby,” she called back. “What did you tell them, exactly?” she asked Vlad.
“That my brothers wanted to hurt you and Zoe,” he answered even more quietly, glancing past her toward the interior of the cabin—and Zoe with her bionic hearing.
“And they believed you?”
“Enough to tell me where you were. Eventually. I did have to do a lot of convincing first.”
Rose trusted her parents implicitly. If they were worried about the danger enough to send Vlad here, she knew she should be worried, too.
“Come on in,” she said, stepping out of the doorway to make room.
When he passed her, his scent reached out and enveloped her, going right to her head. She leaned toward him for an instant before she stopped herself. The urge to bury her face in his neck and breathe in all that yummy male scent was overwhelming. She’d almost forgotten she could feel this much heat and desire just from the way a man smelled. And if that man had been anyone other than Vlad, she might have given in to the urge.
She needed to focus on the situation, not the way Vlad made her feel. “You didn’t tell them about…the other thing, did you?”
“The reason I can help Zoe with her episodes? Not specifics. Just that I could help.”
“So you manipulated their concern for their granddaughter?”
“Not manipulated. Told the truth. I can help her, and you. I just want to keep you both safe, Rose.”
She nodded without actually commenting.