Disturbed, Aleksy followed the man with his eyes while he made a mental note to increase his personal security. The typical paparazzo didn’t care if his target saw him. That kind of surveillance spoke of someone sniffing out skeletons in closets. A suffocating feeling rose like a band to close around his chest.
Clair’s small hand suddenly gripped his down-stuffed sleeve, pouring buoyant lightness into the dark turmoil roiling inside him. Her wonder-struck expression made his heart lurch into a painful, stumbling gallop.
“When you said the streets were dangerous— Am I imagining things or is that a bear?” Clair tore her gaze from the astonishing sight down the block to catch Aleksy watching her with an expression of heartrending struggle on his face.
He turned his face quickly to look. By the time he looked back, the only emotion he expressed was sardonic humor. “Maslenitsa.”
Clair’s nerve endings were still vibrating as she searched for traces of what she had thought she’d seen in his eyes, but whatever had been there was gone. She ducked her head so she wouldn’t give away how dejected his shift in mood made her.
Get a grip, she ordered herself, and released his arm, repeating the word he’d used. “What is it?”
“A festival to welcome Spring. Like Mardi Gras. Except we have bears, fistfights and troika rides.”
“Judging by the first two, I imagine the third is bronco-busting a reindeer? And what makes you think spring has arrived?”
Aleksy chuckled, the rich sound so unexpected Clair had to swallow her heart back to where it belonged. He soon dispelled her misconception by securing them a ride in a sleigh pulled by three horses. Snuggling her into his side, he let the English-speaking driver tuck them under a blanket and educate her on the festival, which was pagan in origin, but also related to Lent. When Clair expressed too much interest in the bear wrestling contest, the old man turned in his seat. “Not for you, malyutka. Wrestling is for old men who only have vodka to keep them warm.” He winked at Aleksy.
The man ended by fetching Clair a plate of blini, round pancakes covered in caviar, mushrooms, butter and sour cream.
“I can’t eat all this. You’ll have to buy me a whole new wardrobe,” Clair protested after a few bites of the deliciously rich food. “Here. Please,” she prompted Aleksy.
“No.” He held up an adamant hand. “I can’t eat pancakes.”
“Too many as a child?” she teased, imagining him as a strapping boy gobbling everything in sight.
“Far too many,” he said grimly. “If you can’t eat it, give it to the dog.”
She followed his nod to where a German shepherd was licking a plate, the owner unconcerned. Clair let the dog wolf down what was left of her blini and disposed of the trash, her mind stuck on Aleksy’s remark.
They moved under an ornately carved archway built of ice to a park filled with ice sculptures. The angels, castles and mythical creatures were beginning to thaw, their sharpest edges blurred, but they were still starkly beautiful, transparent and glinting in the sun.
“The driver said the festival has only been revived recently. You weren’t eating pancakes just for Lent growing up, were you?” she mused aloud, stepping back and hiding behind her camera to keep the question less personal.
“No, we ate them for survival,” he said flatly, gaze focused somewhere beyond the stunning sculptures.
“You weren’t working for Grigori then?”
“I was hardly working at all. My mother wouldn’t let me quit school.”
Clair lowered her camera. “Somehow I can’t imagine you taking orders from anyone, even your own mother.”
“I would have given her anything,” he said with a gruff thread of torture weaving through his tone. “I couldn’t give her what she really wanted—my father’s life back. I worked ahead and was in my last semester when Grigori hired me. My mother still worked at first, and at least we ate something besides pancakes. I gave her that much, at least, before she withered away.”
His bitter self-recrimination caught her off guard, making her want to touch him again, but she was learning. He would talk a little, but only if they kept it to the facts.