Page 51 of Staking His Claim

Too late he realized what he’d said. Silence crackled down the line.

“Dmitri?” No answer. More loudly he demanded, “Dmitri?” He was thankful that the Porsche was soundproof. The woman wheeling a pram past the passenger side didn’t even turn her head.

An angry grunt told him his brother hadn’t hung up.

“I’m sorry.” The words came with difficulty. “That was tactless.” And that instinct to protect his brother had been there all his life, started by his mother calling Dmitri a crybaby.

“Tactless?” This time he heard a laugh. His shoulders sagged with relief as Dmitri continued. “My never-wrong brother admits he has been tactless?”

“That’s how you see me? Never wrong?” Yevgeny knew he sounded incredulous, but dammit, he’d never heard Dmitri going on like this. Like a sullen child. How long had this resentment been simmering?

“You’ve always taken charge of everything—there was never any space for me to do anything—you had it all under control.”

It sure as hell didn’t sound like he had it all under control now! “Dmitri, is everything okay?”

“I’m fine. Better than I’ve ever been in my life.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m discovering what it means to be myself.”

“But you always were yourself.” Yevgeny couldn’t understand any of this. It was starting to feel as if he’d barged into one of those online gaming sites his brother habitually frequented—a dark, confusing alien parallel universe.

“No.” His brother denied. “I was drifting. I wasn’t myself. I was living in your shadow.”

Yevgeny started to take issue with that, and then stopped to consider what Dmitri was saying. Perhaps he had tried to force choices on his brother, but he’d done it for Dmitri’s own good. He had worried Yevgeny with his wild behavior, spendthrift ways, fast cars and equally fast women. Had he unconsciously adopted his mother’s attitude that his brother was weak?

His brother was talking again. Yevgeny forced himself to concentrate—to really listen. “Keira’s calling. I have to go help in the clinic.”

“The clinic?”

“It’s a health clinic. Run by volunteers. A nurse comes once every second week—mostly to attend to vaccinations and refer more serious cases to the nearest doctor two hundred miles away. I did a first-aid course in Auckland, so I’m working there.”

“You’ve done a first-aid course?” Yevgeny couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice. “I didn’t know.”

Dmitri said, “You also don’t know that I’m tossing around the idea of going to university to study to become a doctor.”

“A doctor?” Yevgeny decided that he must be dreaming.

A laugh came down the line. “There’s a whole wide world out there, braht—you should see it one day.”

But right now Yevgeny needed permission from his brother. “So I can tell Ella?”

“Yes. Keira never wanted to keep it from her. But I thought you didn’t want anyone to know your brother was less than a whole man. So I convinced her it was better this way.”

Oh, Christ. “I’ve made a right mess of it, haven’t I?”

It didn’t matter what he had or hadn’t thought. His relationship with his brother was clearly far from healthy.

After a moment his brother came back with, “It’s not your fault alone. We always seem to talk at cross-purposes.”

“That’s going to change,” Yevgeny vowed. And his brother wasn’t the only person with whom he had a communication issue.

The realization, as he ended the call, was not a pleasant one.

But it had to be faced. His interaction with Ella had been based on quick judgments and half-assed opinions from the start.

No wonder he’d stood no chance of gaining her consent to adopt Holly. But he intended to change that. It was time he put all his cards on the table, and told Ella the truth.

* * *

Ella’s last appointment took longer than she’d scheduled.

When her cell phone rang, Ella glanced at the caller ID. Yevgeny. Her fingers hovered over the face of the phone. Finally she pressed the button to kill the call and let it divert to voice mail, then looked back at the man sitting in front of her.

Jerry Foster was at the end of his tether.

Two weeks ago he’d received divorce papers. Like many of Ella’s clients, he hadn’t even known his wife had been unhappy. Yes, Lois had nagged him to change his workaholic habits a couple of years ago; and, yes, she’d asked him to join the tennis club and play doubles two nights a week but he’d been too busy with the business. He’d told her to find another doubles partner. He’d thought the problem was solved.