Dangerous Passion (d-3) by Lisa Marie Rice

Author:Lisa Marie Rice [Rice, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: love_detective
Published: 2009-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Ten

Fifty thousand dollars. So much, for so little. Andrew Peters, born Andrei Petrov, continued peeling potatoes while thinking it through.

Peeling potatoes as the kitchen commis was not where he wanted to be, in his tenth year out of cooking school. By rights, he should have been the chef, or at least the sous-chef, in a decent restaurant, socking money aside for his own place.

And he knew exactly what he wanted. He’d had his eye on the place for a while. A small place, a thousand square feet, in Chelsea. It would be decorated like the dining room in Tolstoy’s town mansion, serving pre-Revolutionary Franco-Russian haute cuisine, what the czars and barons ate before the Soviet monsters came and ransacked Mother Russia.

The Petrovs had been aristocracy in St. Petersburg, the family fortune and nearly all the family members wiped out by Stalin.

But books and photographs had somehow survived the monsters, ah yes, and had come down to the last Petrov. Andrei had an entrée into the lives of his forebears. Though he read the books and pored over the photographs in a small room with plyboard walls which hid nothing his drunken neighbors said or did, though he lived in a small, cramped fourth-floor walk-up in Brighton Beach, that wasn’t his life. His life was in another place and another time. In his imagination, Andrei was Prince Petrov, a grandee in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg.

He lived on Nevsky Prospekt in a palatial Italianate mansion, which had been his great-great-grandfather’s town house. As a young boy, before his parents emigrated, he used to stand in the street, small hands clutching the bars of the elaborate wrought-iron fence guarding the building, and imagine that the building now housing the state archives was still his. The mansion of Prince Petrov.

He knew every detail of his great-great-grandfather’s life. The number of servants, the coaches and the horses, each horse with its own groom. The social calendar filled with balls and concerts and parties. The elaborate meals with fifty guests eating off the one-thousand-piece gold-trimmed set of Limoges china.

And the food! He’d come across a set of menus for meals during the Christmas season of 1904 and his boy’s mind swam with the grandeur of it all. Borscht and kvass, kholodets, pelmeny, twenty different types of pirozhki, kebabs from woodland game hunted on Petrov land, sudak fished from the well-stocked ponds of the country dascha. Fruits and berries collected by the serfs, an enormous Sharlotka carried in on a two-foot-long silver serving tray borne by four servants. Washed down by the finest imported French champagne. Fifty guests, one hundred servants.

Andrei’s young heart thrilled at the images. Russia’s finest, at the Petrov table by candlelight, a quartet playing Mozart on the balcony overlooking the immense mirrored dining hall, an army of servants in livery, quietly serving the ton.

His parents applied to emigrate to Amerika when he was eleven, and he thought yes, perhaps Amerika would be the place where he would make his money and return in triumph to Russia, where the Petrovs would take their rightful place amongst the rich and mighty.

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