Page 44 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"No promises."

We fished for precisely as long as it took me to understand I was catastrophically bad at it, which turned out to be about forty minutes, most of them spent untangling a line I had somehow managed to wrap three times around my own wrist. Dmitri stood a few feet down the dock, calm and competent and infuriatingly patient, reeling in an actual fish within the first ten minutes while I was still arguing with a knot.

"How is this fair?" I said, holding up my wrist like evidence in a trial. "You've probably fished since you were four. I've held a rod exactly zero times before today, and now I'm basically wearing it as jewelry."

"You're doing fine."

"I am doing the opposite of fine. I am doing a hostage situation with a fishing pole."

"Here." He came up behind me, close enough that I felt the words land against my ear more than heard them, and guided my hands into a better grip, patient in a way that had nothing to do with fish and everything to do with him simply liking having a reason to stand this close to me in daylight, in public, with no reason to look over his shoulder first. "Wrist loose. Let it do the work."

"You say that like my wrist and I are currently on speaking terms."

"Cast."

I cast. The line went approximately four feet and dropped into the water with all the grace of a dead bird.

"That was better," he said, perfectly straight faced.

"You're lying to me. On our very first work free day, you're already lying."

"I'm encouraging you."

"Those are different things and you know it."

He caught two more fish over the next half hour. I caught a stick, a very determined piece of algae, and, at one point, what I am fairly sure was my own line looping back around and hooking itself out of pure spite. By the time we gave up and headed back toward the house, I had decided fishing was a sport invented for the sole purpose of humbling people who were used to being good at things, and I told him so, at length, the entire walk up from the dock.

"I built a company from nothing," I said. "I have negotiated with caterers who have made grown men cry. And I have just lost a fight to a stick."

"The stick had home field advantage."

"This is not the reassurance you think it is."

Breakfast for dinner had been his idea, some old habit from a childhood he didn't say much about, and I had agreed instantly, mostly because pancakes felt like exactly the kind of unserious, low stakes activity a day like this one called for. I had not accounted for the fact that Dmitri Zolotov, a man who ran an empire with terrifying precision, apparently had extremely specific and entirely wrong opinions about pancake technique.

"You flip too early," he said, standing far too close to my elbow at his own stove, supervising like this was a hostage negotiation and not breakfast food. "Wait for the bubbles."

"I know about the bubbles. I invented the bubbles."

"You didn't wait for them."

"I waited for a reasonable amount of bubbles. You want an unreasonable amount of bubbles. There's a difference, and honestly, the fact that you don't see it concerns me a little for the future of this relationship."

"I want it cooked properly."

"It is cooked properly. It's golden. Look at it. That is a beautiful pancake, and you are standing there disrespecting it."

"It's pale on one side."

"It has character on one side."

"Cora."

"Dmitri."

We stood there, both fully committed, both absolutely aware that neither of us actually cared about pancakes even a little, and somehow that only made it funnier, the sheer, ridiculous intensity we were both bringing to a breakfast food at six in the evening, in a kitchen with no windows facing anything but trees, no phone buzzing on the counter, nobody waiting on either of us to be anything other than this particular kind of petty about batter.

"I'm flipping it," I said.