Page 22 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"It is how this one worked."

I crossed my arms, mostly to have something to do with them, and looked at him properly for the first time since opening the door, past the wrinkled shirt and the gray under his eyes, at whatever it actually was that had put him on a six a.m. flight and then on my stoop instead of in his own bed. "You flew back for a shipment problem. I remember. Your voicemail was very dramatic about crates."

"The shipment's handled."

"So you flew back, handled a crisis, and then instead of sleeping, you came here?"

"Yes."

"Just yes? No elaborate explanation involving logistics?"

"I'm done hiding behind logistics." Something in his voice had dropped the careful, controlled register I had gotten used to, the one that made even a compliment sound like it had been cleared through three levels of review first. "I used it in the beginning because it gave both of us somewhere to look. I don't need it anymore, and I don't think you do either."

The kitchen went very quiet, the kind of quiet where I could hear the radiator ticking and my own pulse doing something unhelpful behind my ribs.

"You're saying the logistics review was never about logistics?"

"You already knew that."

"I had a theory."

"How confident a theory?"

"Reasonably confident. I kept it in the same mental folder as my other reasonable theories, right next to the one where the wine showing up seconds after you mentioned it wasn't actually a coincidence." I made myself hold his gaze instead of looking for something to fold or straighten, which was harder than it should have been in my own kitchen. "I've had a list, if you want to know the truth. Reasons this is a bad idea. You're a client. You're intense in a way that should probably worry me more than it does. There's an entire tabloid ecosystem currently very invested in my hair color. I could keep going."

"Keep going."

"I don't actually want to."

Something crossed his face that was almost a smile, the private kind he rationed like it cost him something. "Say the real one. Not the list. The one underneath it."

I opened my mouth to deflect, out of pure habit, the same reflex that had gotten me through three years of client meetings and one spectacularly unconvincing speech to Naomi about staying strictly professional, and found, for possibly the first time in my adult life, that I did not actually want to use it.

"I'm scared this is the thing that finally slows me down," I said, and hated how true it sounded out loud, in my own kitchen, in sweatpants, without a single rehearsed line to hide behind. "I built this whole company so nothing could stop me from being able to take care of myself. And you make me want to stop moving for entire minutes at a time, which is either the nicest thing that's happened to me all year or extremely inconvenient, and some mornings I genuinely cannot tell which."

"Both," he said. "Frequently."

"You stole that from yourself."

"I'm allowed. I said it first."

The knock at the door made us both turn before either of us could decide what came next, and I heard the scrape of a key in the lock a half second later, because I had given Beckett a spare for exactly this kind of emergency, proofs that needed signing off before the print run, and I had never considered that the emergency might involve me standing in my own kitchen at eight in the morning with Dmitri Zolotov and a coffee grinder I still had not turned on.

"Cora, I've got the seating proofs and Naomi says if you don't approve table nine by noon she's assigning it herself, which she says as a threat but honestly at this point I think we should just let her, she's better at this than..."

Beckett stopped talking. He stood in my doorway with a folder in one hand, and his eyes moved from me to Dmitri to the two mugs I had not yet made coffee in, and something in his expression underwent several visible stages of recalculation.

"I am going to leave these on the counter," he said, very quietly, already backing toward the door he had just come through, "and I am going to go stand in the hallway for a moment, and then I am going to go back downstairs, and none of this happened, and I saw nothing, and I am a professional."

"Beckett."

"A wild Dmitri Zolotov, spotted in his natural habitat, a woman's kitchen at eight in the morning," he narrated under his breath, clearly to himself, clearly not intending to stop, backing through the doorway with the careful reverence of a man exiting a room containing something dangerous and possibly sacred. "Do not make eye contact. Do not startle it. It is a delicate ecosystem and I am simply grateful to have witnessed it."

"I can hear you."

"You were not meant to." He was fully in the hallway now, folder still clutched to his chest like a shield. "I'll tell Naomi table nine is handled. I'll tell her nothing else. I will take this to my grave, Cora, or at minimum to the next four staff meetings, where I will bring it up exactly once per meeting for the rest of recorded time."

The door clicked shut behind him. I heard his footsteps on the stairs, taking their sweet time, and then, faintly, through the old plaster walls, what might have been him narrating the whole descent to nobody in particular, something about migration patterns and the rare, elusive Chicago boss spotted deep within its natural range.