Katia's Promise Read Online Free

she’d glanced out her bedroom window and seen a faint light glowing in one of the carriage houses. She pulled on her boots and coat, and, taking an envelope from under the sweaters in her dresser drawer, she’d clomped through the new-fallen snow to the carriage house.
    She’d found Austin sitting in a blue 1926 Bugatti convertible—Daniel’s favorite. Austin had been sobbing his heart out.
    Katia was careful not to make any noise as she approached the car. Daniel had never allowed her to look at the cars, much less touch them. Austin, however, had gleefully sneaked her into the carriage houses each time his father had acquired a new beauty. Austin had been all too happy to display his extensive knowledge of the features and history of each car. He’d taken pride in the fact that his father would go to great lengths to find authentic chrome bumpers for his Duesenberg or brass and glass headlamps for a 1920 Stutz Bearcat. Katia had loved the romance of the exquisite cars with their leather seats, velvet upholstered doors and sterling silver flower vases. It was her way of living in another era by literally touching objects from bygone times.
    Sometimes Katia would double-dare Austin into sitting in the 1955 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. She liked to pretend she was a movie star or a princess in Monaco. Anyone but who she was—the maid’s daughter.
    Most of the time, Austin obliged her. He’d told her that since she understood his love for antique cars, she had to be his “kindred soul.” She hadn’t known what that meant at the time, so she’d looked it up in one of the books in Daniel’s library. When she’d read the meaning, she’d wondered if this was Austin’s way of telling her that she was special to him.
    She’d just begun to feel as if they were becoming real friends when Daniel had died.
    Katia eased her hand over the side of the door and opened it from the inside so as not to smudge the polished exterior. Usually, touching the precious car would have been an invasion, but Katia felt that the world had somehow changed.
    It was time for Austin to learn that she was more than just the housekeeper’s daughter and his stand-in playmate. Austin’s eyes were swollen. “Katia. I should have known you would find me.”
    “I’m not leaving. Even if you ask me,” she said, climbing into the passenger seat.
    “I won’t,” he said, wiping his tears on his tweed jacket sleeve. He folded his arms across the steering wheel and then laid his face on them. “I can’t believe he’s gone. What will I do?”
    “What you’ve always done. You’ll grow. Learn and become a man,” she said with a tiny shrug.
    “I miss him so much already,” Austin said. He gulped, sounding to Katia as if he’d swallowed something very large. She understood the feeling intensely.
    “I know you do,” she said softly, looking at the round dials on the metal dashboard. “That part never goes away.”
    His face twisted into a grimace of disdain and disbelief. “What do you—” He stopped abruptly. “I’m so sorry, Katia. So sorry. Of course you know how I feel. You know exactly how I feel. None of the people I go to school with have lost their dads. But you have.” Tears filled his eyes, yet he studied her as if he was seeing her for the first time. “It’s been a while since you talked about your father. Do you still miss him?”
    “Every day,” she whispered, a flame igniting at the base of her esophagus and flaring up into her throat. “He—he used to call me Katia
lyubov
.”
    “Louie bov?”
    “
Lyubov.
That’s how you say it.” She nodded. “It means Katia love.”
    “He was a sentimental man, then?” Austin asked.
    “Yes. He worked hard all his life, but my mother said he had the heart of a poet. She always loved fine things, and he wanted to give them to her—that’s why he worked so hard to bring us to America. He told her he would give her the world, but—”
    “He died,” Austin finished for