Page 71 of The Harbinger
One. Two. Three.
I should be mad at him. After all, he was the reason I fell. If he wouldn’t have put his hands on me. If he hadn’t forced me to recognize the arousal growing inside me with his every touch… I didn’t want to know that my body grew wet for him. I wanted to stay in my safe cocoon of denial. It was comfortable there.
“Close your eyes, Mia.”
His command didn’t send a flash of rage igniting in my stomach and scorching my insides. Instead, a comforting warmth settled in my belly, coiling, and snaking through my body like a deceptive serpent.
Sacha was the devil incarnate, and my foolish naivety had left me enthralled in his web.
Chapter 17
Mia
“Katyatoldmetoask you to show me where the plants are,” I said as though molasses coated my tongue, then nearly palmed my forehead.
How could she read my lips if she couldn’t speak English?
Catherine, a woman in her mid-fifties to sixties, stood before me, covered in dirt with a small three-pronged rake. I’d interrupted her as she tended to the roses, so I could begin my garden.
My strength had returned, but I’d put it off until boredom seeped into my bones. Besides, sticking my hands in the dirt and creating something was better than sitting and reading the Russian dictionary like I’d been for the past week.
Catherine stood with her tools by her side, her face showing little interest in the words coming out of my mouth. I sighed, my shoulders slumping as I glanced around the garden for someone to help me translate, but it was empty.
I reached out for the rose and pointed. “Flower.” Then jabbed my finger in my chest. “I need.”
Why did I sound like a cavewoman? This had to be insulting in some way.
He really needed to teach me Russian since I had no choice but to stay. In fact, I’d said as much the day after the hospital when a female nurse came to the house to draw my blood, but he swiftly shut it down, refusing to hear anything else about it. So I took matters into my own hands, read the dictionary with the transliteration, and practiced with Katya while she laughed at my pronunciations.
Then, Sacha disappeared three days ago, and I hadn’t heard a word from him since, not even a whisper of his muscular frame climbing into my bed. It was as if he’d lost interest and abandoned me.
That was when the antsy itch inside of me flickered to life.
“I speak English,” Catherine said, her heavily accented, gruff tone ripped me from my thoughts. Before I could apologize, she dropped the rake next to the rosebush and walked toward a big greenhouse on the side of the mansion.
My mouth dropped when she opened the door, and we walked inside. Three rows of shelves filled with trays lined the long glass wall. Tiny seedlings and sprouts of various colors, shapes, and sizes were on each tray. The humidity hung heavy in the air, dancing with the musty stench of fertilizers.
Catherine walked down the aisle and handed me four pots with red and orange pom-pom-styled flowers, then shuffled a little further and handed me two more with thorny sticks in the center… roses. She moved on further down the aisle, and despite my arms being full, she opened my fingers and stuck a handle of flower feed on them, then closed my fist around it.
“Thank… thank you.”
How did you say thank you in Russian again?
Catherine left the greenhouse, returning to her space in the garden and leaving me to fend for myself the rest of the way.
What exactly was I supposed to do with all the stuff?
The memory of Lex and I running through our backyard with gardens flooded to the forefront of my mind. If my mother had planted all those flowers, gardening was in my blood.
How hard could it be?I can do this…
I waddled over to the section Catherine had cleared for me when I’d first arrived and placed each pot down with care. I glanced over my shoulder as Catherine used the tiny rake to pull up the weeds that didn’t belong.
Where would I get my hands on a tool like that?
My hands now free, I walked back to the greenhouse and perused through the selection of tools hanging on the side of the glass wall until I found a similar tool, then walked back to my little patch of dirt.
It didn’t take me long to prepare the soft, rich soil for my new plants that were sure to perish in the coming cold weather. The inevitable death of these flowers would approach, and I couldn’t help but doubt why I even bothered. I placed the roses in the middle and placed the red flowers on one side and the orange on the other, forming a circle around them.