House of Payne: Rude (28 page)

“Me or the other guy who watched over her while you were off being a war hero, yeah. We’re both glad you’re back to take over watchdog duties,” Scorpio added dryly, glancing back at him. “Everyone’s resting a lot easier now that you’re in the picture, especially my employer. He’s a worrier.”

Sass wanted badly to point out that, considering his chosen profession, Borysko Vitaliev probably had every reason to worry. But at that moment they walked through an open set of French doors and into a semi-circular room filled with bright afternoon sunshine, thriving green plants and white furniture. Faint music played from hidden speakers, something classical and unobtrusive, but all of that faded for Sass as she focused on an elderly man seated at a white table, the top of which was inlaid with a swirling mosaic of mother-of-pearl. She couldn’t see the table’s full design thanks to a folder sitting on top of it. An oxygen tank sat unobtrusively behind the man, but the tubing with the nostril intake was currently hanging on the tank’s handle, unused.

The man himself looked surprisingly robust, even if he was seated. He was dressed rather formally for an at-home meeting in a three-piece dark gray suit, white shirt and royal purple silk tie. Seeing him, she thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t chosen to wear jeans. She had at first, then changed her mind half a dozen times before Rude came in, plucked up an outfit off the bed and told her to get her ass in gear or he’d leave without her. If he hadn’t done that, she’d no doubt still be dithering.

She had to admit, Rude had excellent taste. He’d chosen a form-hugging black sweater dress, purple silk infinity scarf, black tights and purple and black suede stiletto ankle boots. It wasn’t too dressy, but much better than jeans. She’d slicked her dark hair up into a neat, braided bun, added some chunky jewelry and hoped she didn’t look like she was trying too hard to impress the man she never thought she’d meet.

Her father.

Without speaking, Borysko Vitaliev raised a hand and beckoned them forward.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Let’s go, babe.” Rude bent low to whisper the encouragement, his hand gently tugging on hers to get her going. She barely felt it. For some reason her skin had decided to turn to ice, and she could hear the thundering of her heart. This was it. This was the moment every lost, abandoned and orphaned child secretly dreamed of—meeting someone who belonged to them. It was the one thing she’d known she’d never have, and now that it was here she could hardly breathe. With all her strength she tried to not hope for anything. That was the smart thing to do. Life in the system had taught her that hope inevitably led to hurt.

With a breath that shook, she took a step forward.

Please like me. Please, please, please like me.

Another step.

Please be proud. I’m a good person. I’m not much. I’m nothing special. But I always try to do my best.

Another.

Oh no. I’m going to throw up. He’ll think there’s something wrong with me. I’m going to ruin everything.

She didn’t want to be there.

He’s going to hate me.

Somehow she made it to the chair at the table. Dimly she noted there was another chair beside hers, but Rude chose to stand directly behind her at parade rest, his eyes alert and clearly not relaxed. Scorpio stood in a similar manner opposite Rude and farther away, near the edge of the solarium, his gaze missing nothing.

Now that Sass was seated no more than a few feet from Borysko Vitaliev, she was able to get a better look at him. His squarish, bulldog face looked pale under the olive complexion that matched hers, and his dark eyes, the color of black coffee, were the same large, wide-set eyes that looked back at her in the mirror every day. His hair was iron gray and bristly short, and she suspected it had been either lost or shaved completely at some point recently—no doubt due to radiation treatment. And his mouth was again something she recognized in herself—surprisingly full for a man, and at the moment unsmiling.

Why wasn’t he smiling?

Maybe she wasn’t what he’d been hoping for.

Maybe he was disappointed.

Please like me…

“I knew you would wear purple.” Borysko Vitaliev’s lightly accented voice sounded loud in the quiet of the room, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. “You seem to favor that color, yes?”

She tried not to gape at him while her nerves-saturated brain struggled to make sense of the random comment. Purple? What was purple? “Um. I love purple, yes.”

“You have excellent taste. In ancient times, purple was the color of royalty, as it was so rare only rulers could afford it.” He smoothed a hand down his purple tie and tilted his head. “How do you wish for me to address you? By your given name, Sage? Or by the name you prefer, Sass?”

“Sass, please. It’s a pleasure to meet you…” Then she realized to her horror that she had no idea what to call him. Father? Shit, that was what Luke called Darth Vader. Dad? Too informal. Mr. Vitaliev, maybe. But perhaps that would be unintentionally off-putting…

“You have a foster father you’re fond of, I believe. Papa Bolo?”

Her attention swerved back to him, and again she nearly jumped when she found him studying her intently.
Geez, way to make a great first impression, freak
. “Yes, Bolo Panuzzi, Rude’s father. This is Rudolfo Panuzzi,” she added, falling back on rigidly polite manners, because she didn’t know what else to do.

Borysko Vitaliev’s eyes flicked to Rude behind her before returning to his intent study of her. “I’ve heard that you call him Rude.”

“I’m afraid only Sass gets the privilege of calling me by that name, sir,” came the even reply from behind her. “Friends and family generally call me Rudy.”

“I tried calling him Rude,” Scorpio offered from his side of the room. “It didn’t go well.”

A huff of what could have been laughter escaped Borysko before it ended with a cough. Scorpio immediately stepped forward but was waved off. “Such names—Sass and Rude. But these names are strong, and since you’re comfortable with them, this proves you’re as strong as they are. And since you’re also comfortable with calling your foster father Papa Bolo, you should call me Papa. It’s a familiar term for you, yes?”

“Yes.” And with that, she somehow agreed to call this perfect stranger Papa. She would suspect the world couldn’t get any more bizarre, but she didn’t want Fate to think she was offering up a challenge. “Forgive me, but… this thought hadn’t occurred to me until this moment, but are we certain we’re related? I mean,” she rushed on when a frown began to pull his brows together, “there’s a resemblance in our coloring maybe, but… You see, I’m just an ordinary person—a dietitian and food blogger. I’m nothing special.”

Rude’s hand came to touch her back. “Sass, what the hell? You didn’t seriously just say that, did you? You’re the toughest person I know.”

Lord help her, she loved this man, and his unflagging support was beyond fabulous. But he wasn’t helping her make her point. “It’s just that it suddenly dawned on me that we should probably look into genetic testing, or—”

“The tests were performed years ago, little Sass.”

“But… wait. How…?”

“When I first located you, I hired someone to collect your DNA from cups you threw away at the coffee shop you visited every day with your foster sisters. Your name was written on those cups, so it was easy to collect the correct samples and test it against my DNA. You’re definitely my child, and I,” Borysko added, pointing firmly to himself, “am definitely your father.”

“You can say that again,” Scorpio muttered. “I’m sending you the bill for my broken sunglasses, Sass.”

“Goodie. I’ll send you the bill for my broken shoe.”

“How about this,” Rude offered genially without missing a beat. “I beat the shit out of him for daring to touch you, thus kicking off the whole sequence of events where shit got broken, and then I take you shoe-shopping for whatever makes you happy. That way, everyone gets what they want.”

“I still don’t get my sunglasses. And did you say
thus
?”

“You get to live. Why can’t you be grateful?”

“Children, enough.” Borysko tapped his hand down twice on the folder sitting on the table, palm flat and not hard, but there was enough authority in it to make everyone go still. Nodding in obvious satisfaction that he’d regained control, he looked back to Sass. “Do you have any questions for me?”

Only about a thousand, but she figured starting with the most obvious was the way to go. “How did you find me? How did you even know to look for me?”

“Your mother must have had a guilty conscience for not telling me about you, because in the end she reached out and gave me what information she could. You should know,” he added with a softer, more cautious tone, “that your mother became quite ill and passed away some time ago. I’m sorry you have to learn about her passing in this manner.”

Sass waited for something to happen—a wave of grief or regret—then shrugged when the moment passed. “She dropped me like a hot rock in some shady lawyer’s office and didn’t look back, so there’s no need to worry about upsetting me. Though, of course, I’m grateful for the information, so thank you for that.”

A corner of her father’s mouth curled. “I see your young man is right.”

“About what?”

“You
are
tough. Your mother didn’t drop you in the way that you think she did,” he went on when she frowned, because she wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an admonition. “Heather had thought she’d worked out a private adoption for you. She said she even wrote you a note explaining why she wasn’t prepared to care for a baby and that she didn’t believe a child of mine would be safe at that time. Unfortunately, this lawyer
was
shady, and he’d been planning to sell you to the highest bidder. But when he pressed her to find out who the father was to make sure he wouldn’t have any trouble with a paternal claim later on, he discovered that as my child, you would be much too dangerous for him to auction off. So he’s the one who dropped you like a hot rock on the city’s doorstep.”

She stared at him. “How do you know all of this?”

“The lawyer in question told me as much.”

“He just told you?”

“Some persuasion was involved.”

Yikes
. “I see.” And, recalling that that lawyer was now dead, she told herself it was no doubt from natural causes, and hurriedly moved away from that particular landmine. “Juvenile records are sealed. I suppose you had to wait for me to age out of the foster care system and find that safe deposit box that my mother had put the letter in, right? You tracked me from that point on?” That was how she would have played it.

His dark eyes sparked with interest. “What a good idea, little Sass. Locating you that way would have worked, certainly, but no. I was much too impatient to find out if you were all right. I had several friends who work within the judicial system who owed me favors. When reminded of these favors, they were more than happy to track down a little girl by the name of Sage Ambrosia Stone.”

She made an involuntary face. “At least I was saddled with a name that stuck out.”

“As it was, you were already at the Panuzzi household and very close to, as you say, aging out of the system when I finally found you. You seemed happy there. Happier than you had been at any of your other foster homes.”

That made her go still, and as her guarded gaze clashed with the watchful probing of his, she recalled Scorpio talking about the Dietrichs. “You know everything.” Then she recalled what had happened to Ron and Deenie Dietrich when she was seventeen, and she knew the cosmic justice that had been visited upon them had come from the same source of cosmic justice that had been visited upon Liam. “Yeah, you know everything.”

From behind her, Rude’s hand closed over her shoulder, his thumb rubbing at the muscle where back flowed into neck.

“I know my little girl is strong.” Borysko’s chest heaved, his breath rattling even as his square, bulldog’s chin jerked upward in a surge of fierce pride. “I know my little girl is ferocious. I know she is determined to survive anything,
anything
life throws at her. I know she can rise above it all, and laugh and have good…friends and have love in… in her life…”

His face went pasty gray, and as he began to slump in his chair both Scorpio and Rude leapt forward. Since he was closer, Rude got there first, reached for the oxygen feed, set it in place and checked the gauges to make sure the flow was good.

“He should have a mask,” he said to Scorpio, who grimaced.

“You’re preaching to the choir. He says shit like that’s for old men. He didn’t even want to have Sass see him with the oxygen tank today, but he needs it.”

Sass hopped to her feet. “Where’s his mask? I can bring it to—”

Her father’s hand snapped out to shackle her wrist. “Sit.”

She looked to him in alarm and battled the urge to argue with him. He didn’t have the breath to argue, so pressing him on it wasn’t fair. In silence she sat on the edge of her seat and watched in wordless alarm as Borysko Vitaliev battled to get air into his lungs. Eventually his color improved, his breathing evened out, and as he sat back in his chair, he glanced over at her. His expression turned mournful.

“Don’t look that way, little Sass. You remind me of my mother with that face. Whenever she was about to lecture me for being a bad boy, she’d have that exact same expression. You look like her, you know. So much like her, it’s eerie.”

He hadn’t let go of her wrist, but she was too worried about upsetting him to point that out. “I’d assumed I favored your side of the family, since the picture my mother left behind of herself looked nothing like me, and her letter… well, that didn’t sound anything like me, either.”

“Every man has a weakness. Mine was cute, bubbleheaded blondes. And the truth of the matter is no man, no matter how strong he is, has any sense in his head when it comes to his weakness.” With a slow intake of breath, he shrugged and released her wrist to reach for the folder on the table. “It is true, there’s very little of Heather in you,
devochka moya
, in looks or in personality. If you take after anyone, it’s your grandmother, my mother. Did you know she ran a restaurant of sorts out of our flat in Donetsk? A restaurant not sanctioned by the government, of course, and we had no tables or chairs for customers. She just loved to cook the most amazing dishes. She would spend hours putting together menus for the week, so happy in this task, and our neighbors would eagerly drop by and pay their hard-earned money to get a taste of her creations. Does this sound familiar to you?”

She stared at him, stunned. “She liked to cook?”

“She
loved
to cook. Like you, so creative. Like you, so happy to make others happy with her food. The people of our building thought she was a saint. I suspect the people you give your food to think similar things about you.”

She had to shake her head. “I doubt it.”

“No, he’s right.” Rude once again had his hand on her shoulder, his hip bumping gently against her. “My colleagues at PSI adore you, and all it took was you feeding them once.”

“I didn’t feed everyone.”