“You mean our marriage?”
“Yes.”
He leaned his head back against the pillow, folding his arms beneath his head. “I’ll have everything I ever wanted.”
“You mean the land?”
He exhaled with a flare of nostril. “Among other things.”
“But you’re not planning to live in Alaska, are you?”
Live at the old homestead? He inhaled, remembering nights sharing the cold attic room with his brother. Remembering the constant love of his hardworking parents, and how he’d bounded up eagerly each morning to start his chores.
As a boy, Kasimir had felt so certain of what mattered in the world. Home. Family. Loyalty.
“No, I won’t go back,” he said quietly.
“Then why do you want it so badly? Just because of your promise to your father?”
“It was a deathbed vow…” He stopped. He’d told himself that same lie for years, but here in the darkness, lying in bed beside her, he couldn’t tell it again. “Because I don’t want Vladimir to have it. He doesn’t deserve a home. Or a brother.”
“What about you?” Josie said softly. “What do you deserve?”
Kasimir looked away from her, towards his briefcase, which looked distinctly out of place in the corner of the tent. “Exactly what I will get,” he said. Retribution against his brother and the Mata Hari who’d caused their rift. Total ownership of both Xendzov Mining and Southern Cross. That would make him happy. Give him peace.
It would. It had to. Looking at her shadowy form in the darkness, he turned the question back on her. “What will you do? With your life?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed. “Bree always talked about sending me to college, but even if we had the money, I’m not sure that’s what I want.”
“Why not? You’d be good at it.”
She gave a regretful laugh. “Bree should have been the one to go. She’s a planner. A striver. Though she dropped out of high school to help support me.” He could hear the self-blame in her voice. Then she laughed again. “But maybe she was glad. She was impatient with school. She’s always had an eye to the bottom line. If not for those old debts threatening us, she’d be running her own business by now.”
“I didn’t ask about Bree’s dreams,” he said roughly. “I asked about you. What do you want?”
She paused. “You’re going to think it’s stupid.”
“Nothing you want is stupid,” he said, then snorted. “Except maybe stealing my horse and riding off alone into the desert.”
“Not one of my best ideas,” she admitted. For a long moment, they lay silently beside each other in the darkness. Kasimir started to wonder if she’d fallen asleep, then she turned in the darkness. Her voice was muffled as she said, “I never really knew my mother. She died a month after I was born.
She was supposed to start chemo, then found out she was pregnant. She didn’t want to put me at risk.”
“She loved you.”
Her voice trembled. “She died because of me,” she said softly. “When I was growing up, my father and Bree were always away on their moneymaking schemes. I was mostly alone in a big house, left with a babysitter who got paid by the hour.”
Kasimir’s heart ached as he pictured Josie as a child—even more tenderhearted and vulnerable than she was now—feeling alone, unwanted, unloved.
“And from that moment, even as a kid, I knew what I wanted someday. And it wasn’t college. It wasn’t even a career.”
“What is it?” he said in a low voice.
He heard her shuddering intake of breath.
“I want a home,” she whispered. “A family of my own. I want to bake pies and do piles of laundry and weed our garden behind the white picket fence. I want an honest, strong husband who will never lie to me, ever, and who will play with our kids and mow our lawn on Saturdays. I want a man I can trust with my heart. A man I can love for the rest of my life.” She stopped.
Kasimir’s heart lurched violently in his chest. For a moment, he couldn’t speak.