A little while? Maybe she should find something to clean. Sitting around waiting for her hair to do . . . well, whatever it was doing felt too unproductive. If she was going to impress Konstantin, she had to make herself useful. Besides, sitting idly around a house made her uncomfortable.
“Maybe you should sit on his lap and call him Daddy.” Everly winked. “He might be into it.”
Into what? She laughed when Everly did, despite not understanding. Americans had a strange way of being funny.
Everly gave her a sidelong glance. “Have you two . . .”
Varushka felt her cheeks burning. It was forward of Everly to ask, but how did a girl make friends if she didn’t confide in people?
“Have we shared a bed? No. I don’t think he looks at me that way. He treats me like a child. Not a wife.”
“He’s protective. Most Doms are.”
Doms? She gave Everly a puzzled look but the girl just smiled. She’d have to ask Konstantin about that word later.
“Did Kon tell you anything?” she asked. “About what he likes?”
Varushka shook her head. She may have been sheltered, but Antonia had told her enough about what men liked. Her cousin was much more brazen. She’d even told her she watched pornography—though Varushka had a hard time believing her.
“You should ask him.”
She bit her lip and Everly smiled. “You’re adorable. No wonder he feels so protective of you. But you don’t have to be embarrassed. Konstantin is . . . well, he doesn’t mind that sort of talk.”
“I couldn’t . . .” Her face felt as though it were on fire. “That would be . . . I just couldn’t.”
“Well, okay.” Everly shrugged. “But you’ll never know what he likes unless you ask.”
According to her mother, it would be Varushka’s wifely duty to learn what her husband liked in bed and provide it. Would Konstantin force her to . . . Flashes of the graphic things Antonia had told her circled in her mind, making her grimace. Would he force her to do things that made her uncomfortable? So far, he’d taken care to make her feel at home. Surely, he wouldn’t push her.
Hopefully sex in the dark under the covers was all he was “into.”
Everly washed Varushka’s hair over the kitchen sink, then dried it. She gushed about how the new color added something called “depth” and “layers.” How could hair be deep? Unless she’d misunderstood the English word.
After she fiddled with it for a long time, Everly finally let Varushka look in the mirror. She almost didn’t recognize herself. The orange mes
s she was used to wrestling into braids was striped with yellow and red, then combed neatly into straight pieces that framed her face. It looked odd and unfamiliar.
Everly moved in behind her. “A little mascara and lip gloss and no one will mistake you for Konstantin’s daughter.” She chuckled. “Is it okay? Do you like it?”
Varushka considered it for a moment. How funny that a simple hairdo could make her look so unlike herself. But she couldn’t deny a tiny bit of giddiness starting in her belly. For the first time in her twenty-one years, Varushka looked . . . sexy.
“Konstantin will like this,” she said confidently, forcing herself to believe it. Added with the new clothing, she looked every bit the part he probably wanted her to play. A cultured American woman.
They talked for a long while before Everly left. The hairdresser was easy to like, and she told her a few amusing stories about Konstantin, but Varushka got the impression she was being tactful in how much she said.
She wondered how much Everly didn’t say.
* * *
They were already falling into a pattern. Varushka would wake when Konstantin’s alarm sounded, make him breakfast, keep him company until he left for work, then wander the massive, empty house, unsure of what to do with her day. Konstantin had shown her how to change the channel on the television, but she generally left it on the channel where people cooked.
She’d dusted every door frame, done the breakfast dishes and prep work for supper, tried to read an English book from Konstantin’s bookcase, inspected the grounds, and gone for a long walk. After more indoor wandering, she came across Konstantin’s basket of laundry. A basket of laundry shouldn’t have caused so much excitement, but she was a desperate woman.
With a feeling of satisfaction, she added her own dirty clothes to the basket, and went into one of the guest bathrooms that had a smaller tub. In the laundry room she found soap, but she didn’t trust the modern washing machine Konstantin had in the basement to do a good job. She had washed everything in the tub and was wringing a pair of Konstantin’s jeans when she felt a gentle hand stroking her hair.
“What are you doing, little bird?”
“Just finishing the wash, Sir.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. He didn’t seem angry, even though he’d told her not to do housework. That was a relief.