The Bear’s Mail Order Menage

Chapter 2

Out of all of the places in the whole wide world, Idaho was the last place Alina Kristoff had expected to find herself. Nothing around her looked anything like home, not in the smallest way. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing. For some, home was where the heart resided regardless of how far away a person found herself. That couldn’t have been further from the truth for Alina. For Alina, home didn’t really exist. She spoke of Russia, when she spoke at all (which wasn’t often), as her home because it was the country where she was born.

That was all. There was nothing about the place that she felt drawn to. There was nothing she feared she would miss when she left, no family to pine for her, no lover to bring her back home. There was nothing but the cold and the deeply exhausting poverty, the fear of persecution and the foot of the wealthy on the citizens’ backs. No, all she was leaving behind was a hovel of a home and before that, an orphanage that had never once thought to treat her kindly. Nothing. There was nothing.

“Where you headed, sweetheart? Looking for anything I might be able to give you? I bet I could. I’ve got something stocked down here, something I think you’ll like.”

That was the first thing Alina had heard when she got off the airplane in New York City. New York, the big apple, that iconic skyline that everyone saw when they thought of the United States.  Because she looked it up, she knew New York wasn’t anywhere near Idaho, the state that held the miniscule town of Charlotte that was soon to become her latest place of residence.

For a girl like her with so little advantage and so much need, beggars definitely couldn’t be choosers. She had seen girls like that. They held out for big dreams and rich, prominent husbands, fully believing that they would get everything they wanted. A very few of them did, but for the most – they wound up one step above slaves. Or worse, dead.

Sometimes when Alina daydreamed about America she wondered how many girls from how many cities in her same position had turned up in a ditch somewhere with nobody to identify them and nobody to care. That was something she was most definitely not interested in. What Alina was really looking for, aside from getting out of Russia, was to find a little bit of peace. She was only twenty-three years old, but she felt like she could have been ninety. Not that she looked it, not by any stretch of the imagination.

She had a long, lean body with curves that looked like they belonged on a Victoria’s Secret model, but came to her as naturally as breathing. She had rich chestnut colored hair and striking gray eyes that reflected lights the way that crystals did. Her delicate bone structure made her look like some kind of magical creature and full lips that rarely smiled. She was stunning, heartbreakingly beautiful and incapable of repelling attention. She was used to it. It wasn’t something she particularly enjoyed but it was something she had grown accustomed to. That was why she was surprised when the men in New York caught her off guard.

“Yo! I haven’t fu*ked in days! Whatcha got going on, mamma?”

If she had a dollar for every time she heard a comment similar to that one, she might have been able to make it in America without meeting the strange and beautiful men she was on her way to belonging to. There was no sense of decorum whatsoever, no impulse to hold back.

Somehow, after all that Alina had been through, she had been naive enough not to realize that men in a great city like New York would be that way. Very quickly she began to wonder if she would have been better off had the man who went by the name of Andrew declined her request to take the scenic route to his home.

She had explained to him that she wanted to see as much of America as she could manage as she made her way to Charlotte. She told him that New York was a place she had always dreamed of seeing and he had told her to take as much time as she liked. She’d almost become skeptical then. It was so unusual for a man to be so kind to a woman in her position and it seemed like he might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She was actually on her way to backing out of the deal completely when he said something that struck a chord.

He told her that there were more places than he could count that he had always wanted to see and that he was afraid of never realizing those dreams. Anyone could have said a thing like that and not meant it, but for some reason when he said it the words rang true. She staked her whole life on that, got on her plane with plans to take a bus from there all the way to Idaho. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one she had, so it had better be enough.

“Excuse me, but could you please tell me where the bus to Charlotte would be? I can’t seem to find it and that’s where I must go.”

The man at the transportation depot looked at her like she was an alien. When she thought about it, she supposed she sort of was. She didn’t think s that these people spoke to a whole lot of Russian women right off the boat, so to speak, and perhaps her English wasn’t quite as good as she had made herself believe.

That on its own, was a little bit of a blow to her ego, something she didn’t have a whole lot of to begin with. From the time when she was very small, Alina had always been fascinated with everything United States; their movies, their clothing, their music and their ideals.