Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(41)

“Forgive my foolishness. I must immediately see your townhouse since I cannot properly admire it from here. After all, you have a very special mantelpiece that I have wanted to see from the moment you described it to me. I want to see the daunting steam radiators you learned to operate and where you taught yourself to boil an egg.” He leaned over to whisper in her ear. “And I would like to see you wear one of your Russian sarafans.”

A gorgeous flush bloomed on her cheeks. A spark of attraction flared to life, but he tamped it down. He wanted much more than to see Natalia in a sarafan. He wanted her alone back on the train, huddled in their compartment together, indulging in an embrace. . . . But he’d vowed he would not pressure her into any form of intimacy until she was ready, and he forced his hands into his pockets.

Natalia smiled up at him. “We’ll have to hurry. My father is expecting us for cocktails before dinner, and it will take at least twenty minutes to get there. The sarafan will have to wait.”

It took a while to receive confirmation regarding the transfer of his funds, but within the hour they were ready to go, and he was in a better frame of mind. He could become accustomed to this. He could.

“We can walk to my townhouse,” Natalia said as they stepped out onto the street. “I feel quite proud of myself, walking to and from work each day, just like every other normal New Yorker.”

He grabbed her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. “You must show me how to be a normal New Yorker. I want to see the Statue of Liberty and shop at the grand emporium you talked about.”

“Macy’s?”

“Yes! I want to go shopping at Macy’s and ride in a trolley, even though they appear to be a horse-drawn deathtrap to me. I must experience all things New York. I want to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and climb to the top of the Washington Monument.”

“The Washington Monument isn’t here. It’s in Washington, DC.”

“So? I still wish to see it.” When she cautioned him that Washington, DC, was far away, he scoffed. “Don’t try to tell me about long distances.” He then launched into an ode about the mightiness of the Russian taiga.

He was still waxing poetic as they mounted the steps leading to Natalia’s townhouse. “Don’t be too critical,” she said. “It’s nothing grand, but I am ridiculously proud of it.”

She turned the key in the lock. The interior was dim because the drapes had been drawn across the window. The wooden floors creaked when she stepped inside, and she stopped, blocking his entrance so he could not follow. Even from the porch, the house smelled odd.

Natalia darted into the front room to yank the drapes open and gasped when sunlight filled the space.

It was chaos. The ceiling had caved in, and water dribbled through the ruined plaster. Strips of wet wallpaper curled away from the wall. The fireplace mantel had fallen down, lying at a haphazard angle in the middle of the floor. It was split in half.

“Oh no,” Natalia moaned, staring in horror at the ceiling. Everything looked and smelled wet. Water gurgled through a pipe overhead.

“I will go upstairs and find the problem,” Dimitri said, then vaulted up the steps two at a time. He followed the sound of water to a washroom, where water gushed from an old pipe beneath the pedestal sink. He squatted down to examine a corroded joint on the copper pipe. Water had pooled on the wood floor and seeped into the plaster ceiling below, probably for days. Maybe even weeks.

He was no plumber and couldn’t fix this, but downstairs Natalia was heartbroken. He returned to her quickly. She knelt on the floor beside the fireplace, looking at the hand-carved mantel that lay split down the center.

“It’s ruined,” she said, her voice bewildered and despairing. “Everything I’ve done is ruined. The wallpaper, the mantelpiece. Did I leave the water running upstairs? How could I have been so stupid?”

“Shh,” he soothed. “There was corrosion on the pipe beneath the sink, and it cracked open. This can happen with old pipes.”

She glanced up at the ceiling, where water still dribbled, soaking the walls. It had damaged the plaster and caused the mantel to fall away from the wall. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Stay here. I will go outside and find a way to turn off the water to your house. It is going to be all right, Natalia.” After the horrors he’d seen and endured in Russia, a leaky pipe was not a problem, but it had destroyed something Natalia valued, and that meant he cared too.

She drew a ragged breath and nodded. He hurried to the alley behind the house, where a pipe and a valve were low to the ground. He cranked the iron lever, which took a few twists before he was confident it had been turned off. He entered the house and hurried back upstairs, relieved to see the jet of water was dribbling to a halt. He turned the knobs on the sink faucet, which caused a short spurt, and then all the water stopped.

“The water is turned off,” he said, rejoining Natalia where she still knelt with slumped shoulders amidst the damp plaster and sodden floorboards.

It was his fault this had happened, for if she had not spent weeks traveling to San Francisco and back, she could have stopped the leak before the damage got this bad. He ran his hands across the cracked mantel, seeing the carved ivy patterns she had told him about. The floor and the plaster could be repaired. New wallpaper could be bought and hung. But he did not know what could be done for this mantel. How proud she had been about this humble house, but it was not fit for habitation in its present state.