My Funny Valentina Read Online Free PDF

of you and your sisters, the neighbors are like our family now.
    ‘I know you’ve never really had a home of your own, Val,’ Stash said tugging her onto his lap to share the driver’s seat, both staring in awed amazement at the stunning house perched on a hilltop through the windshield.  ‘Just apartments or the run-down old brownstone in Brooklyn you told me about, but this house has everything you could ever dream of – all the amenities you’ll ever need. I designed it myself –’, he dropped a soft kiss on the top of her head, ‘from the seven bedrooms down to the knobs on the kitchen cabinets.’
    Her gaze left the house to whip back to him in shock. ‘ Seven bedrooms,’ she gasped, ‘but, Stash, why in the world do we need so many for just the two of us?’
    Stash gave a boyish shrug, his grin sheepish.  ‘Because we never had enough rooms when I was little, I suppose.  The girls had sets of bunk beds crammed into two tiny rooms and as the only boy, I was put in a glorified closet off the kitchen, barely even big enough to hold my bed,’ Stash replied.  ‘I guess I built us the house we should have had back then.’
    He swung open the driver’s side door and stepped out the car – right into a deep snowdrift pushed to the side of the road. Valentina’s husky laughter echoed in the still silence generated by a new day’s snowfall.
    ‘ Damn, I miss Bora Bora already,’ Stash grumbled, lifting her into muscled arms so she would avoid his same chilly fate.  His tall frame, clad in an expensive dark overcoat and colorful woolen scarf she’d painstakingly knit for him wound loosely around his neck, plowed with effortless ease through the foot-high snow drifts.  He carried his new bride with ease – even in her bulky down-filled coat that added at least ten pounds to her model-slim weight – right up the front steps to the door of their brand new house.
    ‘ You’re twenty-three now, Valentina,’ Stash looked down into her face with a smile that made her feel cherished and loved each and every time he bestowed it upon her, ‘and I’m twenty-nine…my mother and father already had all eight children before she was even thirty.’
    ‘ Ei…eight by thirty?’ Valentina questioned on a stuttering gulp.
    Stash pushed open the front door with one broad shoulder busting through the red ribbon as though he’d finally reached a finish line he’d been racing towards for years. ‘Yup, eight, ’ he confirmed on a throaty chuckle before ceremoniously stepping them over the threshold.  His lips lowered to capture hers in a sensuous kiss lasting several scrumptiously long moments.  ‘And I expect us to have at least half that many in the next few years,’ he made the husky prediction, ‘so let’s get started trying to fill up those seven bedrooms, Mrs. Karas!’
    ~~~
    The first fatal chink had unknowingly been formed in what she’d thought had been their impenetrable bond right then, Valentina reflected with raw hurt darkening her eyes a forest green as she stared up at her estranged husband in the silent studio. 
    Stash’s determination to have children .   And her ambivalence on the subject. 
    He came from a large , close-knit Greek community where family was everything – and she’d understood his longing to duplicate the loud and loving household he’d grown up in.  But her own childhood had been so much different from his.  Unhappy…fractious…an abundance of disinterested relatives.  And an argument-wrought battlefield with her moody, what she now strongly suspected was an undiagnosed, bi-polar, mother.
    A nd if I’m completely honest with myself , Valentina clamped her lips tight on the painful self-analysis – more than a little of my own youthful ego also factored in to compound our marital woes. Yes, Stash’s mother had birthed a large boisterous family – but she also had the body resulting from having eight children emerge in quick succession from it. 
    Valentina