daughter of one of the most notorious Russian mob bosses of all time. She herself was a wanted alleged killer who had tricked her way into Bryce’s employment. He was hardly likely to pat her arm and say it was all going to be okay. She bit back the sob that tried to rise in her throat. It was never going to be okay.
His expression remained carefully neutral. “Go on.”
“I was too young to remember much of my life before his death. Greg told me we moved to America when I was about three. My father was very wealthy, as you can imagine, and he had connections in high places.”
She thought back to that night. To the shouts and running footsteps. To her mother dragging Steffi and Greg from their beds and pushing them up the stairs to the attic, her whispered voice urging them to stay there.
“No matter what you see or hear.” Steffi could still hear the terror in her mother’s tone as she said those words.
They had huddled together, lifting the trapdoor that led from their parents’ bedroom to the attic space an inch or two while they watched the scene below...even though they didn’t want to see. Men had crowded into the room, all of them dressed in black. All of them with the tattooed eye on their right hands. Steffi hadn’t seen what happened to her mother, but she had pressed a hand to her mouth as they beat her father. Then another man had come into the room. A big man with dark hair. The atmosphere changed with his arrival. He didn’t have the tattoo, but he was in charge.
Steffi had known this man. He was her father’s friend. He visited their house often, bringing presents for her, and spending hours playing with her by the pool. Greg used to be jealous of the time this man spent with Steffi. He teased her and said she was the favorite. This man wouldn’t hurt them. Why, only a few days earlier, he had brought Steffi the doll she wanted. She had turned to smile at Greg in relief and saw his eyes widen in horror. A shot rang out and Steffi had looked back in time to see the big man lower his gun as her father’s body crumpled to the floor.
“Find the children.” His pleasant voice with an American accent had sounded different as he strode out of the room.
The men had started to search the house, and Steffi could still recall the choking sense of panic when two of them pointed up to the trapdoor. As one of them pulled up a chair and prepared to stand on it, police sirens could be heard approaching the house, and the other man cursed, pulling his friend by the arm; they both ran off.
“The police found us eventually. Mama had told us not to come down, so we didn’t,” Steffi said as she finished recounting this memory to Bryce. Tears sparkled on the ends of her lashes, but she blinked them away. “We told the police what we saw, but no one was ever convicted of the crime.”
“Didn’t you know his name? The man who pulled the trigger?”
“We knew him as our Uncle Waltz, although we had heard our father call him ‘Big Guy.’ The police couldn’t trace him from either of those names. Looking back, I’m not sure how hard they tried. My father wasn’t exactly a law-abiding citizen. Perhaps they were glad his murderer had put an end to the activities of his criminal organization.” She gave a rueful smile. “I went to my new home, became Steffi Grantham, had counseling, of course, and started a new life. Greg’s adoptive parents and mine tried to keep in touch for a while, but it was hard and eventually we lost contact with each other.”
“Until recently,” Bryce said.
“Yes.” Steffi felt a tiny, reminiscent smile touch her lips. “Our mother was an actress, and I suppose we both inherited the gene. It was all I ever wanted to do and it seems Greg was the same. The chances of us ending up on the same movie together were crazily remote, but we liked to think it was fate’s way of bringing us back together. Once we found each other again, we spent so much time together, the press invented this big romance and we decided it was easier to go along with it than tell the truth.”
A shadow passed over her features and Bryce observed it with a frown. “Tell me the rest, Steffi.”
“We talked about the way our parents died, of course. We were curious to find out why it happened. So we set about discovering exactly who our father really was. It wasn’t easy. Getting information about him from Russia was hard, and he had covered his tracks well, but we managed to piece enough together from a number of sources. It was a shock to learn just what he had been involved in.” Steffi turned to look directly at Bryce. “To learn that the father you loved did some horrible things...that’s not an easy discovery to make. But it got worse.” She covered her face with her hands as the memories came flooding back. “It got so much worse when we realized who the Big Guy was.”
* * *
Bryce fixed more coffee and finally delivered the toast he’d promised hours earlier. When Steffi shook her head, he tried for the authoritative tone Leon had used the previous day. “You have to start taking care of yourself. You’ve been ill and you haven’t eaten properly for days.”
He was worried about her. Those pictures in the celebrity magazines had shown a woman with a stunning figure. The Steffi he knew was thinner than the Hollywood actress they depicted. Now she had lost even more weight and her illness of the last few days had given her an air of fragility. Her cheek and collarbones jutted and her pale skin appeared almost translucent. Whatever ordeal Steffi had to face next, whether it involved the police and the media or more running, Bryce wondered if she would have the strength to deal with it.
Her story so far was a wild one, but he believed it. Although he hadn’t known Steffi very long, his gut told him she wasn’t a liar. That might sound like a bizarre claim to make since she had gotten a job in his company under false pretenses, but he was prepared to stake his honor on it. And his honor meant more to Bryce than anything.
His ribs were aching as he left Steffi begrudgingly nibbling on a slice of toast and made his way to the bathroom. Pulling his T-shirt over his shoulders was a painful process and, when he checked his reflection in the mirror, his sides were a patchwork of marks in varying shades of red, pink and purple. He winced as he felt his way around, but decided there were no bones broken. His body might be hurting, but his mind felt clearer than it had in a long time. When it had mattered most, the nightmares of flames and blood hadn’t intruded. The doubts and fears hadn’t held him back. He had done what he needed to do. He had gone to Steffi’s aid and fought the bad guys. It felt like he had defeated a monster. A monster that had lived inside him for a long time.
Opening the medicine cabinet, he rummaged around for the salve he knew Laurie kept in there. He remembered her talking about the natural remedy she had purchased at the monthly farmers’ market in Stillwater and about how well it worked on bruising and swelling. Taking the salve and a roll of bandage back into the family room, he presented them to Steffi. She regarded him with raised brows.
“I can’t reach all the way around to get this stuff on my back. And, if I try to put my own dressing on, I’ll look like I’ve been engaging in a bondage ritual.”
Although she attempted a smile, Steffi’s lip trembled slightly as she viewed his injuries. “I wouldn’t have dragged you into this for anything.”
“Just tell me you really do have a commercial driver’s license, and you haven’t been driving my trucks around illegally these last few months,” he said, shivering slightly as her fingertips connected with his flesh and she began to smooth the salve over his bruises.
“Of course I have one.” She glanced up from her task, her expression indignant. “Vincente checked out my qualifications when he employed me.”
His curiosity was aroused by her words and he thought again how little he knew of her. “Why would a Hollywood actress need a CDL?”
“I had to play a truck driver in one of my movies and, although the actual driving was done by a stunt driver, I wanted to make the close-ups look realistic. So I got a license.”
That statement summed Steffi up, Bryce decided. It told him more about her than anything else. It epitomized the determined, unyielding, downright bullheaded way she approached the world. Knowing something of