The Marriage Ultimatum (City of Dreams Series) (16 page)

“What are you doing?”

“Um, catching up my coursework.”

She was determined to do everything she could to complete the remaining twelve credits of her degree. Now that Alex was in preschool and all of the time-consuming, challenging, and mundane chores of her former life were being completed by Vlad’s willing, cordial, and highly paid staff, Sabrina had the time.

If not the energy.

She wasn’t sleeping. Vlad’s absence from her days and nights was starting to tell on her. Without the worry of making ends meet, working a fulltime job with overtime and caring for Alex, she should have been well rested. She should have been bouncing off the walls. But that wasn’t happening. She was tossing and turning, and she couldn’t figure out what she could do about it. She couldn’t change her situation. But she prided herself on not being a princess. About not whining when her life to anyone on the outside looking in, resembled a dream come true.

“Are your courses preventing you from assisting with the wedding preparations?”

There was a harder edge to his voice now. One she was a bit more familiar with. Vlad the demanding, perfectionist boss.

“No. I’ve done everything on the list.”

“My assistant tells me you sent the planner an email giving him carte blanche on all of the decisions, invitations, music, food, everything. That won’t work.” He sounded put out that she had relied on the planner he had chosen himself.

She smiled to herself. Vlad was a micromanager as well as an overachiever. It would have served him right if she had taken the reins from the staff and chosen a hideous dress or intentionally botched other details. But she was, if she dared admit it, happy he had thought to ask for her input, but she left the experts to it. She had taken a personal interest in her own wedding dress—what woman wouldn’t?—and she had opinions about the flowers, Lacey was a talented if amateur flower arranger, and she had contacted a great photographer. Other than that, she wanted him to have what he considered an impressive event because that was what he was going for—the flash and the splash.

“Just because I gave some of those tasks to your very capable planner doesn’t mean I haven’t worked on the rest. Your Type A is showing, Vlad,” she teased. “You can check them all off your list. I have a dress, flowers are chosen, and I’ve booked a photographer. I can’t promise that I’m gonna look like your perfectly pedigreed red carpet women, or the super-toned mommies from Alex’s preschool, but it’s all done.”

****

Did he detect a hint of insecurity in her tone? That was laughable.

She was just sassing him. He knew she’d look perfect, and the wedding couldn’t happen fast enough. His self-imposed exile from her bed was even tougher than he’d imagined it would be, but necessary if he was to regain and retain some control in this alliance. This was a business arrangement with plusses on both sides. She got to live in the lap of luxury with her son. And he got her, as well as the blessing of the government in his homeland to continue his outreach projects and assistance there.

But he couldn’t just have her. He had discovered he could only have her in her place, in doses. He had it all figured out. They would go on a brief honeymoon where he was sure, surrounded by crew on his yacht, he would be able to re-consummate their relationship without the desperate frenzy that had overtaken him the night of the Gala.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her—naked in his library, eyes wide, her lush lips reddened from his and her skin marked by the strength and excess of his passion. He had lost control and hurt her. From now on, it would be different; he would keep his cool. Their relationship would be on his terms, signed, sealed, and with his passion contained.

She abruptly broke into his thoughts.
As usual.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“I need my phone back. My old one. My cell that you took off me when we were on Long Island in the hurricane.”

“Really? What’s wrong with the one I gave you?”

“It’s great.” It was state of the art everything and had every app preloaded and ready. “It’s just that I have photos on the other one. Photos of Alex, and I want to look at the more recent ones I took and maybe print a few. I’ve been printing photos of him since he was an infant, kind of like a chronicle.”

“Those photos on the wall of your apartment? Of Alex? Those are yours?”

He was astonished.

“Um, yes.”

They’d stood out like gold among the dross of mismatched, dusty furniture and toys all over the place. His penthouse with its designer everything paled against the life in those photographs.

“You have to know they are of professional quality? Exceptional professional quality?”

“Well, I…I just have done them since he was born, kind of as a keepsake.”

“As the photographer who created that work, you must know you are very talented.”

“Yeah, well, I like photography. But my mother didn’t think it was practical to get a degree in anything too artsy. So we compromised and I’m almost done getting a graphic design degree.”

“But you’re a natural, an artist photographer. Try to drum up a little more enthusiasm for your obvious talent, Sabrina. Most people would kill for an ounce of what seems to be natural ability in you.” He chuckled. “Okay, you’re getting the graphics degree. But you are an extremely gifted photographer. I can’t believe you took those with a cell phone. Have you ever tried anything but portrait work? Have you ever used a real camera?”

“No, just the cell camera. I like taking photos of people mostly. Actually, I took photos of my friend for her modeling portfolio,” she recalled.

“And?” he persisted.

“And yeah, Lacey, my friend, she got the job. I’ve done some landscapes, and, sometimes, and you know I do fiddle with them once I put them on a computer, they can be enhanced in various ways, that’s technology, not me.”

“Sabrina, don’t devalue your work, they’re good. Your work is exceptional. All of the photos from your place were boxed and brought to the apartment. They’re stored in one of the hall closets. You can set them out around the apartment or have them put up on the walls as you wish.”

“No way. Wow, you have genuine art in there.”

He had a stunning series of modern oils depicting an Italian seascape at various times of the day in the living area. Then there were the Turners in the library.

“I would never want…”

“My designer chose those for me. I didn’t actually select them. Your work belongs there. We’ll live there together. Display them however you choose.”

“I…okay. So we’ll live together? I kind of got the idea lately that we would get married just for, you know, appearances, and Alex and I would live on our own at the apartment.”

“Missing me,
ko’shechka maja
?” His voice turned deeper.

“What does that mean?” Her voice dropped, too.

“It means
little cat
. Your eyes remind me of a cat’s.”

And the way you lick your pink lips with your pink tongue,
he could have said.
Or the way you stretch out those long jean clad legs on the sofa.
But he kept the rest of those observations to himself.

“Oh.” She cleared her throat. “So the phone?”

“It’s in the top drawer of my desk in my office. You can take it. I’ve scrubbed the contacts off but I didn’t erase your photos.”

“And none of those contacts were in any way dangerous or threatening to you.” Her voice turned sharp enough to cut glass.

“Nevertheless, they are erased.” His voice was icy.

Then he ended the call.

****

Sabrina hated that the spell, that brief moment of togetherness was broken with a sentence. Back to square one. It was as if for a moment he’d forgotten he hated her but had all of the sudden been pulled back to reality. She wished she had kept her mouth shut. If she was to be allotted one phone call a day from him, she’d rather not fight during it. No, she’d much rather be in the perpetual state of sexual readiness his calls engendered, where her limbs were languid and her blood ran hot as she simply let his low voice wash over her. At some point in these past few days she realized that for her, these daily check in phone calls had taken on the aura of phone sex.

And wasn’t that completely pathetic? Where was her spirit? Why was she such a drip?
What the hell, Sabrina! Pull yourself together, girl.

Sabrina considered how she had spent these last days without him. Even though Vlad had said they would all live together, that seemed to be a fuzzy, far into the future goal because he’d not yet returned to the apartment. Sabrina found herself needing to fill every waking moment with some sort of activity to stop thinking about him, to keep her mind off what she wanted but couldn’t have.

She had gotten into the habit of spending the entire afternoon with Alex, exploring the city in a way she had never been able to do before the services of Sergei, who whisked them home the moment Alex became cranky or the weather turned on them.

In the mornings and the evenings, she worked for several hours on her college course work, and she was confident she would have her credits approved well before Thanksgiving, way ahead of her snail’s pace schedule of the past two years.

She realized that she could start looking for a job immediately. After more than two years of piecemeal days and nights working and catching up on her studies when she could, it seemed slightly unreal to her that she would finally be finished. She would actually get her degree. It felt good.

Especially since she’d never wanted the damned graphic design degree in the first place. It had been a compromise. Her mother had balked; no, Lily had gone ballistic when Sabrina had initially expressed interest in pursuing art.

She’d rolled her eyes. “Sabrina, please, painting or whatever you will be doing, that won’t pay the bills. Your father never made any money at it. Unless you mean to paint houses.”

Sabrina’s myriad teachers had encouraged her. In every high school she’d attended, they’d seen promise in her. For Sabrina, the lure of art class and the confidence it was beginning to give her had taken the sting out of the constant moving and lack of friends in her lonely adolescence. But Lily was having none of it. Then when Sabrina had barely begun college, Alex had been on the way, and then they had another mouth to feed.

“Get your degree, honey, and then we’ll see. Get something that’ll let you get a paying job, and then you can do your art on the side, hmm?”

That conversation seemed so long ago now.

Reality today saw her spending all of her time inching her way toward that degree and palling around with a three year old. As a result, Sabrina had seriously let herself go. Lacey would have a fit if she could see her right now with her wild hair and purple smudges under her eyes.

She would be married in a few days and as Tomas, Vlad’s planner had boasted, all aflutter and practically hyperventilating, their wedding was destined to be seen around the world. Vlad wanted it that way, and Sabrina had yet to see something he wanted that he didn’t get.

So, she searched out the number of the full service spa Tomas had recommended and made an urgent appointment for the works.

With that done and the last of her papers and projects submitted, she turned from the college work to her pure indulgence, photography. She couldn’t explain the charge it gave her to capture the emotion of the moment with a camera but it was a fix she knew she couldn’t do without.

She had taken photos of Alex on her new cell, a state of the art device Vlad had bestowed upon her shortly after she had arrived at the penthouse. It had every bell and whistle and was a pleasure to use.

But when she lined up her recent photos of Alex, she realized she had never retrieved some of the earlier photos taken on her old phone back in their former life. Now she would get the latest few snapshots of his life printed and framed.

Sabrina went into Vlad’s office realizing she had been avoiding even looking in through the door. It reminded her of him, it held the faint trace of his scent, and she didn’t need to go in there because it was his space and the penthouse was enormous.

Besides, their last, uncontrolled, never-to-be-forgotten encounter, which had no doubt sounded the death knell on their physical relationship, such as it was, had taken place in his office. She didn’t need to be a pathetic mess and remind herself of that fact by lingering inside of it. She would get her cell and leave his office pronto.

Opening the top drawer of the desk as he had instructed, she didn’t see her cell right away. Had it slid to the back of the drawer? Pulling the drawer out further, she saw her cellphone in the upper right corner, and she reached in for it.

Pulling it out, her hand also caught and pulled out a folder. Emblazoned on the front of it was a photo of…her mother?

Lily’s professional smile beamed up from a real estate brochure, the kind she distributed to clients with the pertinent facts about their residence and her summary of why she and her firm were the company to get the job done, be it a purchase or a sale.

Had Lily been the agent for the purchase of Vlad’s apartment? She recalled he said he had moved in a few years ago. Had Lily met Vlad then? The lower Manhattan area had been her assigned territory.

Paper clipped to the brochure was a separate picture of Lily, a small wallet sized photo. Sabrina pulled it out from under the paperclip, stroking her finger along the surface of it as if she could stroke her mother’s face. Memories flooded of her mother’s bouncy brunette bob, her petite, lithe figure, her boundless energy, her big smile.

It was only recently that Sabrina began to appreciate how lonely her mother must have been for some romance in her life. Sabrina’s father had been totally absent from their lives for ten years before she had met the man who was Alex’s father. In between, there had been a boyfriend here and there, but they hadn’t led to any kind of relationship. Lately, Sabrina found herself wondering about the things her mother hadn’t said, things Sabrina had no patience to hear as an eighteen year old but now wished she knew.