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Sweetheart.
His touch is gentle, his voice soft, as he pulls me into an embrace, his touch reassuring.
“You’ll hold our children with the same hands you use to hurt people.”
“Yes,” he says quietly and offers nothing else. Agreement. No explanation and no lies.
“What if I don’t like that?”
“Like what, Renata?”
His heart beats under my cheek.
“This lifestyle. What if I want to… to leave it behind us? Have a life that is normal and pedestrian.”
A beat passes before he shakes his head. “Nyet.You say this now, Renata. You’ve got a tender heart. You’re sensitive. I knew this when I first met you.” He smiles sadly. “Why do you think I bought you a puppy? But you and I both know there is no escape from what’s before us. Not for me. Not for you.”
He’s right; I know he is. I could pack up and leave. Run away. But my brother is alive, and he’ll stop at nothing until he finds me. Everything we are, everything we own, is tied up in the Romanov family line and the Los Sangre Dorada. We’d be penniless and friendless with targets on our backs.
But we’d be free.
“Let’s talk no more of this,” he says, bending to kiss my forehead. It doesn’t feel as tender as it did before. “Are you hungry?”
The apple pie I ate at the diner seems like ages ago. “I’m starving. But I’m not so sure this is the kind of place that has room service.”
He shrugs. “We don’t need room service, and we will skip the continental breakfast. There are four different places nearby that offer delivery, I can order whatever you want with the touch of a button.”
Oh, right.
I sit up. “Sounds great.”
I walk to the bathroom and clean up. The shower is larger than I expect, and the little bottles of toiletries, while not expensive, smell faintly of lemon. I take my time washing up, and by the time I join him, wrapped in a white towel, he’s got several cardboard containers on the bed.
We sit cross-legged on the bed, inspecting each one. Turns out ordering breakfast takeout doesn’t hold a candle to actually going out to a diner, but you can’t eat in a restaurant half-naked, so it’s a good trade-off. The eggs are a bit cold and the toast soggy, but there’s a warm muffin studded with plump blueberries topped with thick sugar.
I take a bite. “Mmm. This is delicious. Do you want it?” I ask.
He shakes his head and eats the cold eggs. “You eat it. I’m fine with the eggs.”
“You do the high protein thing for your manly physique?” I ask, smirking.
He winks. “It works.”
I slather butter on the muffin. “Yes, it does. Do you know how to cook?”
He nods. “I do. I travel a lot, so it helps to know how. You?”
I pick a blueberry out of the muffin. It’s plump and sweet, and still warm. I notice idly that my finger’s stained with berry juice. Silently, he reaches for my hand and licks the juice off the tip. My heartbeat races. Why does everything he does to me turn me on?
“Yeah,” I say, yanking my hand back so I can concentrate on filling my belly and not worrying about sex distracting us. “I had to learn to cook as a matter of survival. My father was absentmore than he was present. My brother used to cook for me when he was younger.”
I remember sitting at the kitchen table, swinging my legs because I was too short to reach the floor. “Carlos learned how to make huevos pericos, a kind of scrambled eggs with tomato and onion, and arepas with cheese.”
But that was when I was little, it feels like a full lifetime ago.
Ollie’s eyes darken. He doesn’t like when I talk about Carlos fondly. How can I help it? He was good to me back then.
“I want to tell you what happened, but you don’t seem to like when I talk about Carlos.”
