Bluebeard Read Free Page A

wolfish gaze of his. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
     
    “I’ll be on the red-eye home from Chicago tonight.” He was still standing so close. She could barely breathe. “How about I take you to lunch tomorrow at Spago’s ?”
     
    “I would be liking that.” She smiled, glancing down at the dog whining at her feet. He yelped in protest when she reached down and scooped him up into her arms. “Say goodbye to your master, Milyi.”
     
    Blue reached out to pat the dog on the head but he growled violently, baring his teeth. She shook him gently, admonishing him in Russian, then in English. “You bad boy!” She looked at Blue, shrugging helplessly. “He’s a wicked little thing.”
     
    “But he loves his mistress.” Blue looked at the Pug as it licked Petra’s cheek. She giggled, twisting her face away. “I can’t blame him.”
     
    She looked up at him in wonder. Where was all this sudden affection coming from? He was usually so reserved!
     
    “Sir?” Max called from the doorway and they both jumped, moving apart. “The car’s ready.”
     
    Blue glanced at him and then back to Petra, touching her hand briefly. “I look forward to our date.”
     
    Date!
     
    She felt positively giddy.
     
    “Goodbye!” She waved Milyi’s paw at them as she watched her husband follow Max down the hallway. When she heard them turn down another hallway to go through the dining room, she set the Pug on the Italian tile. She dropped a piece of bacon to the floor for him with a forlorn sigh, watching him scarf it up, making distinctly pig-like noises with his mashed-in doggie snout.
     
    She fought the urge to follow Blue—to at least run to the window and watch the car pull out of the long driveway toward the gates. But she had quickly learned restraint with her husband. If she approached him, he would shy away. He might even growl or bark at her, like her pugnacious little puppy. But if she waited, he often came to her. A brief touch of his hand against hers. The press of his palm against the small of her back. A caress of her neck. A kiss on the cheek.
     
    But no further. Why?
     
    She didn’t understand, but she was too afraid to ask him. She sat down at the counter, morosely picking at the eggs she’d been so hungry for just twenty minutes ago. English wasn’t her first language, and the effort it would take for her to broach the subject seemed insurmountable. How could you ask your husband why he didn’t want you? No. It was too humiliating to be borne.
     
    “You made your own breakfast again?” Mrs. Ribya scolded her in Russian as she bustled into the kitchen. The woman was tall, gangly, her dark uniform making her look like a spider—all legs. Her blond hair was always pulled back into a severe bun. She surveyed her younger charge, hands on hips. “What am I supposed to do with myself, if you keep taking on all my duties?”
     
    Petra smirked, chewing on a piece of bacon. “I don’t do windows.”
     
    Mrs. Ribya laughed. They often talked in Russian when no one else was around. Mrs. Ribya had helped all of them communicate over the last three months, when the language barrier broke down. She was fluent in both English and Russian.
     
    “I’m not hungry.” Petra pushed her plate away. “Give it to Milyi. I’m going for a swim.”
     
    The little dog grunted happily when Mrs. Ribya dumped the contents of Petra’s plate into his gold-plated bowl, not following his mistress as she made her way down the hallway, through the dining room where she ate dinner every night with her husband. She missed his shy smile, his deep, booming laugh. She missed the way he teased her about her broken English, the words she often twisted around into mixed up phrases like pretzels. She missed how his gaze followed her around a room, drank her in, as if he couldn’t get enough.
     
    She knew the feeling.
     
    Her room was all the way at the other end of the thirty-room house, and by the time she had her suit on, she