Nighttime Catching Up

Nat nodded as Julian spoke. "I still have a list of donors from the last event, plus a list of benefactors of the MCSS," she informed him.

"It might be a good place to start, and we can add names of those that might be potentially interested in something like this like Malara Tor or one of the other design houses on the island," she suggested as she grabbed a pen and a notebook from her handbag to make a few notes on all they had discussed.

"That'd be great," Natasha exclaimed as she wrote down Julian's ideas in Cyrillic her leather notebook personal agenda. She was still, after all these years, most comfortable using Russian for a lot of everyday things.

"Your sister?" Natasha said as she stopped writing for a moment and looked directly at Julian. "I don't think I have ever met her." She said, now intrigued to know more about her.

"You have mentioned her, and your brother in passing," Natasha told Julian. "But not in any great detail," she said as she looked at the picture of his family and smiled. She could see the family resemblance. Julian obviously got his good looks from his mother.

"I love knowing there are vampires that can procreate and have families," she admitted as she looked up from the phone to look directly at Julian. "Until I met you though, I never knew that such a thing even existed," she confessed, having been turned by a vampire and left to fend by herself, relying then only on the lore that existed to understand what she had become.

"I like that idea, Julian, " Natasha admitted with a warm smile. "I really like the idea that the Vasile coven is my family now," she told him truthfully.

"You know... The only other place I felt truly valued and accepted completely was, strangely enough, in Catherine's court," she told him, referring to her past when she was a lady-in-waiting under Catherine the Great.

"

"Catherine's court was great," Natasha said with a wry grin, very aware of the irony of the statement. "There was always something going on ... group hunts, parties or dinners, stories and games to keep us busy during the long winters. Catherine always tried to keep us engaged. She was very much of the mind that idle hands led to boredom, and boredom often gave way to unnecessary drama."

"I wish you could have met her Julian," Natasha confessed as she thought back to her days at court. "She was not only smart, resourceful and beautiful, she knew how to keep the court intrigue to a minimum."

"I realise now people thought her ruthless and cunning because she did what she needed to do to stay in power. Though I suspect it was because she was a woman in a man's world," she said as she played with her goblet, remembering how eloquent and fascinating Catherine had seemed and how much Natasha had enjoyed waiting on her.