Page 115 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Oh! I’ve never been to Cleveland before.”
The awe in her voice shamed him. He said, “It’s pretty big.”
“Chicago is bigger, though. Right?”
“A bit.” Chicago had six times the population of Cleveland, but that was beside the point.
“Wow. Two big cities in one day. They’re going to revoke my country-folk card.”
Blaze chuckled at her joke.
Her head whipped around. “I made you laugh again.”
“Twice in one day. I’m going to lose my grouch card. There’s got to be a decent hotel here, somewhere. Hey, phone—”
“Your name for your phone is ‘phone?’” she grumped at him. “Every bit as imaginative as calling your house ‘House’.”
“—find five-star hotels in Cleveland, Ohio.”
His phone’s voice said, “The Ritz-Carlton in the city center—”
“Call it.”
Ringing chimed in the car as Blaze fought the fuzzy grogginess in his head by jiggling his knee.
After a brief conversation with the reservations associate to ensure he could pay with cash if he presented his military ID, Blaze told the GPS to add the hotel as a via point.
“So, that’s not the real Ritz-Carlton,” Sarah said, looking over at him. “That one is, like, in New York or Paris or something.”
“It’s a chain,” he said. “There are Ritz-Carltons all over the world.”
“But this is one of them,” she said, confirming it.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice lightening. “That’s amazing. I’ve never slept in a hotel before.”
“Never?” he asked.
“We didn’t need to stay overnight when we went to sell cattle in Kalona, and when we went to Russia, we stayed with my cousins’ parents in their apartments and slept on the floor.”
Bing. “You have family in Russia?”
“Yeah, of course. My dad’s Russian. I don’t have a Russian accent because my mom was American, and I went to public school. Logan’s mom and our dad only spoke to Logan in Russian when he was little so he’d be fluent. I wonder if he still has a Russian accent.”
Stupid rolled over Blaze, suffocating him. “You and Logan are half-siblings?”
She laughed. “Why, do you think we look alike? I mean, I don’t even know what he looks like anymore. My dad’s first wife died when they lived in New York City. That’s why he broke ties with his family and moved to Iowa, and then he married my mom. I have dark eyes and hair like my mom because she was an American mutt, but Logan has green eyes and a light skin tone like my dad because they’re both a hundred percent Russian.”
Blaze followed the GPS’s directions into Cleveland’s downtown and tread carefully in their conversation. “Interesting that your last name isn’t Russian.”
“Oh, it is.”
Blaze was a dipshit. He was a filthy, utter dipshit. “Huh. Bell sounds like it’s English, like maybe it was an occupation-based surname like the family were the town bell-ringers. Or maybe you were related to that guy who invented the telephone.”
“No, Bell was originally Bely, and then there were patronymics of it. Like in the Marvel-MCU Black Widow movie, where Florence Pugh’s character’s last name was Belova. That’s the feminine patronymic form of Bely or Bell.”
“But doesn’t it mean a bell?” Blaze prompted, fishing for information.
