Read Online The Romanov Legacy by Jenni Wiltz - Free Book Online Page B

She leaned her forehead
against his and suddenly, her lips were just inches away.  “You can’t know
that.”
    “I do.”  He held her gaze.  “Somewhere inside, you
do, too.”  He watched her eyes thaw like the ice they resembled, slipping
from something hard and cold into something liquid, something he couldn’t grasp
if he tried.  He closed his eyes and gently brushed her lips with his own,
intending to pull away when she was comforted. 
    But something happened.  Instead of pulling away, she
opened her mouth to him.  Hungry and angry, her tongue swept his in a
honeyed frenzy.  She slipped shaking hands around his neck and pulled him
closer.  The heat from her body swept through him, setting his blood on
fire in an instant.  He kissed her back and imagined pressing her down
into the creaking bed.  “Natalie,” he said, pulling back.  “You
shouldn’t do this.”
    Her heavy breaths moved her hair where it had fallen over
her face.  “You asked me to believe you.  Do you believe me?”
    Her eyes, melted pools of Siberian ice, held more fear and
more pain than he could fathom.  Maybe, he thought, the best way to help
her wasn’t to try and change her.  Maybe the best way was simply to do
what she asked—believe in her.  
    He let her pull him down onto the bed and covered her body
with his. 

Chapter Eleven
    July 2012
    San Francisco, California
     
    Beth Brandon lay in bed with a book in her lap.  On the
cover, a half-naked redhead writhed in the arms of a pirate who looked like
Fabio.  She wished she were the type of professor who read Foucault or
Goethe for fun, but on most days, she could barely manage Jared Diamond. 
Life was already full of guns, germs, and steel.  If there happened to be
a shortage of any of these, Roosevelt filled in with an admirable second-place
trifecta of dog drool, poop, and urine.     
    In the past week alone, she’d picked Seth up from the
principal’s office for fighting, disciplined a grad student for writing sexual
comments on a freshman girl’s paper, badgered Scott into sending May’s child
support, hired a contractor to fix the leak in the second bathroom, and miffed
a speech to the university regents after Natalie hijacked her cue cards. 
    To top it off, someone had prank called the house twice that
night.  Occasionally an enterprising student found her phone number and
begged for an extension on a paper or a higher grade on the final exam. 
These calls weren’t like that.  The other person never said a word—all she
could hear was calm, soft breathing.  She hated to think that someone
might be watching the house, trying to learn her schedule.  Seth was never
home alone, and even if he were, Roosevelt would surely bark at any intruder. 
Still, she couldn’t bear to think of her son being in danger even for a moment.
    She glanced at her nightstand to make sure the phone was in
reach and added another item to her to-do list: test the security system.  Maybe I need to ask for an upgrade , she thought.  Maybe I need
to get Seth a panic button. 
    She turned back to the pirate book and read one paragraph
before a noise in the hallway caught her attention: slippers shuffling on
polished hardwood, making their way to her door.  Seth’s small fist
knocked twice before he turned the knob.  “Mom?” he said, poking his pale
head into her room. 
    “Yeah, baby?” she said. 
    “I’m not a baby,” he said, frowning.
    “I know.”  She patted the empty space beside her. 
“What’s wrong?”  Her heart still hurt when she thought of how often he’d
come to her with questions about his father, why he never called, and when he
would get to go down to L.A. and visit.  She arranged her face into a
smile while her brain formed quick answers to a barrage of dangerous questions.
    He shuffled inside and scrambled up onto the bed.  “I
can’t sleep.  I tried listening to my iPod, but it didn’t work.”
    “Wanna sleep in here