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“Just away.” She heard her own voice, snappish and rude, and pressed a hand to her head. “I’m sorry, I’m not handling this well. I need some time. I need to go away.”
“What you need to do is sit down until we talk this out.”
“I can’t talk about it.” She felt the pressure inside her build like floodwaters against a dam. “Not yet—not until I…I only wanted to tell you before I left.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” He grabbed her arm to pull her back. “And you damn well will talk about it. What do you want from me? Am I supposed to say, ‘Well, that’s interesting news, Natasha. See you when you get back’?”
“I don’t want anything.” When her voice rose this time, she couldn’t control it. Passions, griefs, fears, poured out even as the tears began. “I never wanted anything from you. I didn’t want to fall in love with you, I didn’t want to need you in my life. I didn’t want your child inside me.”
“That’s clear enough.” His grip tightened, and he let his own temper free. “That’s crystal clear. But you do have my child inside you, and now we’re going to sit down and talk about what we’re going to do about it.”
“I tell you I need time.”
“I’ve already given you more than enough time, Natasha. Apparently fate’s taken a hand again, and you’re going to have to face it.”
“I can’t go through this again. I won’t.”
“Again? What are you talking about?”
“I had a child.” She jerked away to cover her face with her hands. Her whole body began to quake. “I had a child. Oh, God.”
Stunned, he put a gentle hand upon her shoulder. “You have a child?”
“Had.” The tears seemed to be shooting up, hot and painful, from the center of her body. “She’s gone.”
“Come sit down, Natasha. Talk to me.”
“I can’t. You don’t understand. I lost her. My baby. I can’t bear the thought of going through it all again.” She tore herself away. “You don’t know, you can’t know, how much it hurts.”
“No, but I can see it.” He reached for her again. “I want you to tell me about this, so I can understand.”
“What would that change?”
“We’ll have to see. It isn’t good for you to get so upset now.”
“No.” She swiped a hand over her cheek. “It doesn’t do any good to be upset. I’m sorry I’m behaving like this.”
“Don’t apologize. Sit down. I’ll get you some tea. We’ll talk.” He led her to a chair and she went unresistingly. “I’ll only be a minute.”
He was away for less than that, he was sure, but when he came back, she was gone.
Mikhail carved from a block of cherrywood and listened to the blast of rock and roll through his earphones. It suited the mood he could feel from the wood. Whatever was inside—and he wasn’t sure just what that was yet—was young and full of energy. Whenever he carved, he listened, whether it was to blues or Bach or simply the rush and whoosh of traffic four floors below his window. It left his mind free to explore whatever medium his hands were working in.
Tonight his mind was too cluttered, and he knew he was stalling. He glanced over his worktable and across his cramped and cluttered two-room apartment. Natasha was curled in the overstuffed, badly sprung chair he’d salvaged off the street the previous summer. She had a book in her hands, but Mikhail didn’t think she’d turned a page in more than twenty minutes. She, too, was stalling.
As annoyed with himself as with her, he pulled off the headphones. He only had to turn to be in the kitchen. Saying nothing, he put a pot onto one of the two temperamental gas burners and brewed tea. Natasha made no comment. When he brought over two cups, setting hers on the scarred surface of a nearby table, she glanced up blankly.
“Oh. Dyakuyu.”
“It’s time to tell me what’s going on.”
“Mikhail—”
“I mean it.” He dropped onto the mismatched hassock at her feet. “You’ve been here nearly a week, Tash.”
She managed a small smile. “Ready to kick me out?”
“Maybe.” But he put a hand over hers, rubbing lightly. “I haven’t asked any questions, because that was what you wanted. I haven’t told Mama and Papa that you arrived at my door one evening, looking pale and frightened, because you asked me to say nothing.”
“And I appreciate it.”
“Well, stop appreciating it.” He made one of his characteristically abrupt gestures. “Talk to me.”
“I told you I needed to get away for a little while, and I didn’t want Mama and Papa to fuss over me.” She moved her shoulders, then reached for her tea. “You don’t fuss.”
“I’m about to. Tell me what’s wrong.” He leaned over and cupped her chin in one hand. “Tash, tell me.”
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted out, then shakily set the tea down again.
He opened his mouth, but when the words didn’t come, he simply wrapped his arms around her. Taking along, labored breath, she held on.
“You’re all right? You’re well?”
“Yes. I went to the doctor a couple days ago. He says I’m fine. We’re fine.”
He drew back to study her face. “The college professor?”
“Yes. There hasn’t been anyone but Spence.”
Mikhail’s dark eyes kindled. “If the bastard’s treated you badly—”
“No.” She found it odd that she was able to smile and caught Mikhail’s fisted hands in hers. “No, he’s never treated me badly.”
“So he doesn’t want the child.” When Natasha merely looked down at their joined hands, Mikhail narrowed his eyes. “Natasha?”
“I don’t know.” She pulled away to stand and pace through Mikhail’s collection of beat-up furniture and blocks of wood and stone.
“You haven’t told him?”
“Of course I told him.” As she moved, her hands clasped and unclasped. To calm herself, she stopped by Mikhail’s Christmas tree—a one-foot evergreen in a pot that she’d decorated with bits of colored paper. “I just didn’t give him much of a chance to say anything when I did. I was too upset.”
“You don’t want the child.”
She turned at that, her eyes wide. “How can you say that? How could you think that?”
“Because you’re here, instead of working things out with the college professor.”
“I needed time to think.”
“You think too much.”
It wasn’t anything he hadn’t said before. Natasha’s jaw set. “This isn’t a matter of deciding between a blue dress and a red one. I’m having a child.”
“Tak. Why don’t you sit down and relax before you give it wrinkles.”
“I don’t want to sit down.” She began to prowl again, shoving a box out of her way with one foot. “I didn’t want to get involved with him in the first place. Even when I did, when he made it impossible for me to do otherwise, I knew it was important to keep some distance. I wanted to make sure I didn’t make the same mistakes again. And now…” She made a helpless gesture.
“He isn’t Anthony. This baby isn’t Lily.” When she turned around, her eyes were so drenched with emotion that he rose to go to her. “I loved her, too.”
“I know.”
“You can’t judge by what’s gone, Tash.” Gently he kissed her cheeks. “It isn’t fair to you, your professor or the child.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes, I love him.”
“Does he love you?”
“He says—”
He caught her restless hands in his own. “Don’t tell me what he says, tell me what you know.”
“Yes, he loves me.”
“Then stop hiding and go home. You should be having this conversation with him, not with your brother.”
He was slowly going out of his mind. Every day Spence went by Natasha’s apartment, certain that this time she would answer the door. When she didn’t, he stalked over to harass Annie in the shop. He barely noticed the Christmas decorations in shop windows, the fat, cheerful Santas, the glittery angels, the colored lights strung around the houses. When he did, it was to scowl at them.
It had taken all of his efforts to make a show of holiday spirit for Freddie. He’d taken her to pick out a tree, spent hours decorating it with her and complimenting her crumbling popcorn strings. Dutifully he’d listened to her ever-growing Christmas list, and had taken her to the mall to sit in Santa’s lap. But his heart wasn’t in it.
It had to stop, he told himself and he stared out the window at the first snowfall. Whatever crisis he was facing, whatever chaos his life was in, he wouldn’t see Freddie’s Christmas spoiled.
She asked about Natasha every day. It only made it more difficult because he had no answers. He’d watched Freddie play an angel in her school’s Christmas pageant and wished Natasha had been with him.
And what of their child? He could hardly think of anything else. Even now Natasha might be carrying the baby sister Freddie so coveted. The baby, Spence had already realized, that he desperately wanted. Unless… He didn’t want to think of where she had gone, what she had done. How could he think of anything else?
There had to be a way to find her. When he did, he would beg, plead, browbeat and threaten until she came back to him.
She’d had a child. The fact left him dazed. A child she had lost, Spence remembered. But how, and when? Questions that needed answering crowded his mind. She had said she loved him, and he knew that saying it had been difficult for her. Even so, she had yet to trust him.
“Daddy.” Freddie bounced into the room, her mind full of the Christmas that was only six days away. “We’re making cookies.”
He glanced over his shoulder to see Freddie grinning, her mouth smeared with red and green sugar. Spence swooped her up to hold her close. “I love you, Freddie.”
She giggled, then kissed him. “I love you, too. Can you come make cookies with us?”
“In a little while. I have to go out first.” He was going to go to the shop, corner Annie and find out where Natasha had gone. No matter what the redhead said, Spence didn’t believe that Natasha would have left her assistant without a number where she could be reached.
Freddie’s lip poked out while she fiddled with Spence’s top button. “When will you come back?”
“Soon.” He kissed her again before he set her down. “When I come back, I’ll help you bake cookies. I promise.”
Content, Freddie rushed back to Vera. She knew her father always kept his promises.
Natasha stood outside the front door as the snow fell. There were lights strung along the roof and around the posts. She wondered how they would look when they were lighted. There was a full-size Santa on the door, his load of presents making him bend from the waist. She remembered the witch that had stood there on Halloween. On that first night she and Spence had made love. On that night, she was certain, their child had been conceived.
For a moment she almost turned back, telling herself she should go to her apartment, unpack, catch her breath. But that would only be hiding again. She’d hidden long enough. Gathering her courage, she knocked.
The moment Freddie opened the door, the little girl’s eyes shone. She let out a squeal and all but jumped into Natasha’s arms. “You’re back, you’re back! I’ve been waiting for you forever.”
Natasha held her close, swaying back and forth. This was what she wanted, needed, she realized as she buried her face in Freddie’s hair. How could she have been such a fool? “It’s only been a little while.”
“It’s been days and days. We got a tree and lights, and I already wrapped your present. I bought it myself at the mall. Don’t go away again.”
“No,” Natasha murmured. “I won’t.” She set Freddie down to step inside and close out the cold and snow.
“You missed my play. I was an angel.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We made the halos in school and got to keep them, so I can show you how I looked.”
“I’d like that.”
Certain everything was back to normal, Freddie took her hand. “I tripped once, but I remembered all my lines. Mikey forgot his. I said ‘A child is born in Bethlehem,’ and ‘Peace on Earth,’ and sang ‘Gloria in selfish Deo.’”
Natasha laughed for the first time in days. “I wish I had heard that. You will sing it for me later?”
“Okay. We’re baking cookies.” Still holding Natasha’s hand, she began to drag her toward the kitchen.
“Is your daddy helping you?”
“No, he had to go out. He said he’d come back soon and bake some. He promised.”
Torn between relief and disappointment, Natasha followed Freddie into the kitchen.
“Vera, Tash is back.”
“I see.” Vera pursed her lips. Just when she’d thought Natasha might be good enough for the señor and her baby, the woman had gone off without a word. Still, she knew her duty. “Would you like some coffee or tea, miss?”
“No, thank you. I don’t want to be in your way.”
“You have to stay.” Freddie tugged at Natasha’s hand again. “Look, I’ve made snowmen and reindeers and Santas.” She plucked what she considered one of her best creations from the counter. “You can have one.”
“It’s beautiful.” Natasha looked down at the snowman with red sugar clumped on his face and the brim of his hat broken off.
