The lights were dim and she sighed with pleasure as she spotted her bed, quilt turned back and pillows even fluffed. “Dave’s a good guy,” she sighed as Matt lowered her to the bed. He even bent down and pulled her sneakers off.
“He sure is, love. Go to sleep,” he said but he didn’t need to tell her. Darcy had already slid down onto the mattress, jeans and all, her arms curled up under her pillow as she sighed with happiness.
Chapter 3
Sergei Anchova’s cup stopped mid way to his mouth, his concentration broken by the doors to his office bursting open, his baby sister in tears as she stomped up to his desk. He was busy reviewing the latest financial reports on one of his companies and wasn’t amused by the interruption.
“You have to do something, Sergei! This has to stop!”
Sergei considered family most important, until they gave him orders. His little sister was generally a beautiful woman with her blond hair curling softly around her shoulders. That image was distorted at the moment since her brown eyes were tearfully shooting daggers at him. Besides her lovely exterior beauty that could so easily be destroyed by her anger issues, she also possessed a lamentable addiction to being spoiled and a sense of entitlement that he couldn’t seem to break her free of. On more than one occasion, he’d considered cutting off her allowance and forcing her to work for a living, but his mother had always talked him out of it somehow.
Carefully setting the china cup back onto the saucer, he looked calmly at the crazed looking termagant standing in front of him. “Good afternoon, Anya. To what do I owe this…not so unprecedented outburst?”
Anya was a decent sort, tending to be a bit impetuous but he attributed this latest outburst to her upcoming nuptials, assuming something else with one of her vendors had gone wrong and she wanted him to fix it. Again.
“I told you. Get rid of her!”
Sergei leaned back in his chair, noting the color in his sister’s cheeks and the tears artfully dropping from her long, black lashes. She really was a lovely girl, if she would just grow up and gain some perspective. Obtaining employment would be advantageous to her temperament, although he doubted she would follow through on anything.
It was probably his fault though. Being thirteen years older, he tended to see her as more of a child. It didn’t help that she acted like one more often than he cared to admit. But she was getting married, albeit to a man he didn’t fully approve of yet. If Sergei had his way, he’d marry his sister off to someone with a bit more back bone. Anya tended to walk over her fiancée, Nicolai, who did everything she demanded of him.
She claimed to love him though, so he’d allowed the wedding to proceed. Although he was currently tempted to send her to her room rather than indulge in yet another fit of outrage over something probably as trivial as the napkins being rose instead of blush, a detail he couldn’t give a damn about but was apparently of utmost importance to a bride.
“Could you be a bit more specific?” he inquired, nodding to one of the chairs in front of his desk, silently ordering his sister to take a seat and calm down.
Anya didn’t heed the warning, but continued to rant and rave, becoming more agitated when she realized that her big brother, the man who always came to her rescue, was not as outraged at this latest atrocity as she thought he should be. “That woman! She’s stealing Nico from me!”
A napkin was one thing. An insult to his family name and honor was entirely a different matter. With deadly calm, Sergei stared his sister into silence. “Please explain in more detail, Anya,” he commanded.
Now that she had her brother’s full attention, she took a deep breath and sat down in one of the chairs. “That witch! That stupid, vile, fiancé stealer has put some sort of spell on Nico and now he wants to call off the wedding. A month before the date! I’ve already had my final fitting!”
Sergei didn’t give a whit about her dress. A cheating fiancé, on the other hand, was a completely different subject. That implied weakness on his part, something he would not allow to persist. In business, any sign of weakness was considered an invitation to raid.
He wouldn’t allow anyone to consider him, or his family, weak.
“Tell me more,” he said with soft, deadly patience.
Anya hesitated, not sure that coming to her merciless older brother was such a good idea now. “You won’t hurt him, Sergei!” she sniffed.
“I will do what needs to be done. Tell me why you think he’s cheating on you.”
She hesitated once more, but wasn’t willing to let her Nicolai go to this tramp of a woman. She loved him too much and she needed desperately to marry him. Although she couldn’t tell her brother that, or he’d…she shuddered, not wanting to contemplate what he might do if he knew the truth. Sergei was not just merciless, he was terrifying when he put actions into play. She’d seen him crush his competition over the years and even as a small girl, she’d known not to get in his way.
Anya was eternally glad that he was on her side, she thought as she took a deep breath. “Over the past week, I’d noticed that he kept calling one phone number repeatedly, so last night, I stole his cell phone and found the number. After finding out who it was, I was livid. I told him to delete the number from both his cell phone as well as his memory and never see her again, but he refused. He said he was in love with her and had to find out if there was anything between them.”
Sergei raised a thin eyebrow at her words. “Your fiancé is in love with another woman? And you still want him?”
She scoffed. “Nico isn’t in love with that tramp! He’s just having pre-wedding jitters. But it’s humiliating and I want it stopped. You’re the only one I could turn to who wouldn’t blab the news all over the tabloids.”
Sergei acknowledged her assumptions with a nod of his head. “It was wise of you to bring this to me. Although I would recommend that you eliminate him from your life, despite the wedding. He isn’t worthy of your love if he’s going off calling another woman.”
“But don’t you see? He really does love me. And he’s perfect for me. I just know we’ll be happy once he forgets her and comes back to me. It’s all just a silly little crush that he’s using as a way to weasel out of the wedding. He’ll be fine once he understands that.”
“Why don’t you talk to him?”