Page 23 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

I turned back to Dmitri, who had not moved, who was watching me with an expression that had given up entirely on staying neutral.

"That's Beckett," I said. "He does seating charts. He's very thorough."

"I gathered."

"He's not wrong, for the record. About the natural habitat comment. This is deeply unlike you. Showing up. Being seen in daylight in someone's actual kitchen instead of a restaurant you've had memorized for fifteen years."

"I know."

"Doesn't that bother you? The exposure. You've spent this entire acquaintance being extremely careful about exactly this kind of thing."

"It should." He crossed the small distance between us, easy and unbothered, the same way he moved through every room, like arriving anywhere he wanted to be was never in question, only the timing. "I stood on your sidewalk for four minutes deciding whether to come up, and every reasonable argument I have built my entire life around told me to get back in the car."

"What changed your mind?"

"I got tired of being reasonable."

"That's very unlike you. You're basically the face of reasonable. They should put you on a poster."

"I have spent fifteen years making sure nothing in my life needed protecting badly enough to be used against me. Somewhere between a folding table and a clipboard, that stopped being a rule I could keep." His voice had none of its usual polish, just the plain weight of a man saying something once and meaning to leave it said. "I sat on that plane for two hours rehearsing reasons to go straight to my office instead of here. I lost the argument somewhere over Pennsylvania."

"Pennsylvania. Very romantic."

"It's a big state. I had time to lose several arguments in a row."

He reached up and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, slow enough that I felt every second of the decision being made, like he had settled the outcome before he ever climbed my stairs. I could have said something. I usually did, filling silences like this one with a stream of nervous commentary before they could turn into something I didn't have a plan for, and I felt the old reflex climb my throat, ready to talk us both right out of the moment.

I let it stay quiet instead.

He kissed me like a man who'd already decided, and I let myself stop making a list of reasons not to.

12

DMITRI

Two weeks had passed since a kitchen in the East Village, two weeks of phone calls that ran later than either of us admitted to anyone else, and I had spent most of that stretch telling myself the ordinary excuses a man tells himself before he does something he has already decided to do anyway. Rosa had Cora's coat off before I finished making introductions, which told me everything about how this evening was going to go before either of us had said a full sentence to each other.

"You're too thin," Rosa said, already steering Cora toward the kitchen by one elbow, the same grip she used on every unfamiliar body that crossed her threshold, guest or delivery driver or, on one memorable occasion, a health inspector. "Sit. I made too much of everything on purpose, in case someone showed up who actually eats."

"I eat," Cora said, laughing, letting herself be steered.

"We'll see."

I had brought exactly four people into this penthouse in the fifteen years I had owned it, and three of them had been contractors. Rosa did not count. Rosa had cooked in this kitchen since before the marble floor existed, back when it belonged to somebody else entirely, and I had simply kept her on, because she worked, and I did not disturb things that worked. Watching her fold Cora into her kitchen like she'd always belonged there, inside of ninety seconds, told me something I filed away without examining too closely.

Cora had flown in that afternoon for a supplier expo two miles from here, a legitimate reason to be in my city that had nothing to do with me and that I had not engineered, though I had thought about engineering it more than once before she mentioned it herself. I met her at the door with more restraint than I felt and less than I meant to show, and she stood in my entryway for a long moment before she said anything at all.

"This is a lot of glass," she said finally.

"The building was built for the view."

"I can tell." She turned in a slow circle, taking in the floor to ceiling windows, the lake going dark and silver past the last light of the afternoon, the marble underfoot that had cost more than most people's houses. "It's beautiful. It's also the kind of beautiful that shows up in magazines right before someone explains why the owner never actually lives there."

I did not have a ready answer for that, mostly because it was accurate in a way I had not expected a first-time visitor to land on this fast.

Rosa fed her before I had the chance to give her the actual tour, which was probably for the best, since Rosa's version of hospitality left no room for a man to get a word in about square footage.

"This is incredible," Cora said, halfway through the first plate, and meant it, the way I could tell she meant most things, by the specific quality of the silence that followed while she chewed instead of talking.