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“Oh, Mila,” he says.
Oh, Mila. The way he says my name makes me tingle all over. There’s a huskiness in his voice, a passion. If he kissed me right now, I wouldn’t complain.
“I’m not Dimitri,” he says, and my belly drops. “I’m Mikhail Sokolov, his younger brother.”
Crap.
CHAPTER 2
MIKHAIL
Ha, ha, ha. Life is a joke. I always knew that fate, God, or just the world—whatever a person wants to believe—had a funny sense of humor. Maybe being thespare, as my father loved to call me, has given me extra time to think and more space to analyze just what a comedic mess the world can be.
Mila Petrov looks up at me, her hair gorgeously dark and curly, her eyes wide and curious, her lips curved into a nervous smile. Her body has me almost forgetting that she’s my brother’s bride-to-be. I nearly grab her hips and pull her right up against me.
“When you meet Dimitri,” I say, trying to keep my voice casual so she can’t hear just how much she’s messing with my head, “you’ll see how different we are. You’ll laugh.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “I bet.”
She looks frightened, making it challenging to keep my usual smirk on my face. That’s usually the best way to deal with the world. Just smirk at it like the big joke it is.
“Do you need anything?” I ask.
“Maybe the Wi-Fi passcode?” she asks.
“I guess you want to check in with your friends,” I reply, nodding.
The way her eyes snap open wide, then quickly narrow as if she should feel guilty for letting her anger show makes me want to hug her. Before my father took his own life, he told my older brother that if he didn’t marry Mila, he had made arrangements to give the city to Nikolai, Mila’s father. Nikolai Petrov doesn’t have a good reputation. Marrying Mila would be the right move. Yet suddenly, the idea sickens me.
“I don’t have social media,” she says after a pause. “I just want to continue with my work.”
“Work?” I ask.
“I’m learning how to make websites,” she says, with an adorable note of pride in her voice.
This is getting funnier by the second. So not only is Mila Petrov the only woman I’ve ever met who makes me feel, well, makes me feel,full stop, but she also has the same passion as me. I can hear the enthusiasm. I can see it. It makes me want to kiss her even more, but that’s not saying much. Everything she does, I bet, will make me want to do that. She lit something inside me the moment I laid eyes on her.
“I’ll give you the password,” I say, walking over to the desk and jotting it down on a notepad. “But I should warn you …”
I trail off when I turn back to her. She’s watching me in a cautious, captivating way. I don’t know what she thinks about me. I want to, desperately, for some reason.
“W-warn me?” she stutters when I don’t go on.
I was going to tell her that if she uses the internet to feed information to her father, we’re going to have a problem. But I can’t bring myself to threaten her. I might be the spare, but every Bratva man sometimes has to do bad things. However, I can’t with Mila.
“The connection can be choppy,” I tell her, bailing out.
“Oh, okay. I’m sure I’ll survive.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then.”
I quickly leave the room, my heart pounding so damn hard, my head swimming with thoughts of Mila Petrov. What if I’d just kissed her right then? What if I’d slid my hand around her waist, down to her thick ass, massaged, and indulged?
“Are you okay?” Ania asks, waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.
My half-sister has always caused a mix of emotions in me. She’s a clear sign Konstantin cheated on my mother. However, as Dimitri has reminded me many times, our father probably cheated on her dozens, if not hundreds of times, and it’s not Ania’s fault. That’s true. Maybe it’s my eighteen-year-old half-sister’s thin build or how she unnervingly stares at whoever she’s talking to.
“Yeah, fine. Why?”
