Читать книгу The bride of the silver dragon - Dmitry Nazarov - Страница 16

I stare dumbfounded at that damn picture that’s on the TV screen in the middle of the coffee shop where I usually meet my sisters. A small place not in the center, without prying eyes, where there are always free tables, surprisingly tasty inexpensive coffee and a wonderful home-made honey cake for it.

Is that what I’m thinking? – Nana chuckles and nudges Aurora with her elbow, who, as usual, is all over the phone again. – Stop your important correspondence and pay attention to our Margot, who has – for a minute! – an affair with a future senator!

I love Nana very much. Even if it sounds a little bad, but I love a little more than I love Aurora. Probably, this is because Aurora fluttered out of her parental home early and somehow immediately pulled away, went into her adult modeling life. And Nana was not just a younger sister for me – I loved her the way I would love my own children.

But at this moment I am ready to reconsider my attitude towards her and to punch her in the forehead with something noticeably heavy. At least the knob of a teaspoon.

– I don’t have any romance, – I hiss through clenched teeth. – With no one! Especially with this… this…

I’m trying to find the right word – sharp enough, rude, to accurately describe everything that I think about Koryaga and his damned bride. Or an ex-fiancee? The devil will break his leg in their moonlit Santa Barbara!

– With this…? – Nana raises her eyebrows inquiringly and leans forward, as if afraid to miss the words of revelation if I suddenly say them loudly enough.

Even Aurora is distracted from her phone and waits with curiosity to continue.

– I don’t express myself in front of children! – jokingly shout at both.

Meanwhile, the presenter – some very strange guy with crimson dreadlocks – in a strange drawling voice says that they got these pictures “from a trusted reliable source, and that the romance of two opponents may well turn out to be just a fiction to stir up interest in Shad’s fading election campaign “Farah’. I would love to pull out every single hair of his with eyebrow tweezers, and then rinse my mouth with soap so that I remember for the rest of my life that spreading unconfirmed information is equated with lies, and lying is bad.

– It’s all a lie, – I say to the still waiting faces of the sisters. – Lunnik came to negotiate with me, without an invitation and…

– You already cracked it, – Aurora interrupts and turns back to her phone. – By the way, he is very personal, as for the elderly.

– Elderly? – Nana and I ask in unison, and Aurora defiantly winces, as if she is not going to listen to our arguments against.

– Listen. Nana brushes her off and looks back at me. Excitement in her eyes does not bode well. She obviously will not put an end to this conversation just like that. You’re being so negative about him for no reason. Incidentally, before that stripper scandal, Shad’Far had a stellar reputation as a true man, a responsible businessman, and a rather sharp-toothed shark.

– That’s all great, but what have I got to do with it? – I break off a large piece of honey cake with a spoon and send it to my mouth, making a mental notch to “work out” this weakness on an evening jog. – I, you know, do not care deeply what he did for others, because personally I have only problems around him. And this, – I point my finger at the TV screen, on which our photograph is still hanging, – is just one of them.

I was ready for the fact that these photos, sooner or later, but they will definitely pop up somewhere. Lunar’s bride certainly did not give the impression of an adequate and able to soberly assess the situation of a woman. And the more I then twisted that conversation in my head, the more I regretted two things – that I didn’t pour my hot coffee on her head and that I didn’t come to the meeting with the voice recorder turned on. It wouldn’t have saved my reputation, but at least I got moral compensation when, a couple of days later, this weirdo with multi-colored dreadlocks would have sucked on every threat of the damn moon in the same way.