Page 44

“Hey, I’m not going to complain about what I’ve been blessed with. Thanks to my looks, I’m never hurting for a sweet piece of ass.”

Stas turned his head toward me, narrowing his eyes to icy slits. For a moment, he stared, long enough for the silence to stretch, heavy and uncomfortable.

“Must be nice,” he said finally, voice clipped and cold. “Living your life with your dick doing all the thinking.” He walked faster, boots crunching through the snow like he was punishing the ground for existing. “Guess that’s what happens when you’ve got nothing else going on upstairs.”

His tone was sharp, but his ears were red, and I caught the way his jaw flexed when I didn’t rise to the bait. Poor bastard. He could pretend all he wanted, but jealousy had a scent, and I’d caught a whiff of the perfume on him.

I fought the urge to hurl a snowball at the back of his head to unsettle that perfect poise. To poke until he admitted he wanted me to top him, and he didn’t like me talking about my former conquests, but I’d been at war with Stas for over a decade. I knew him better than his own men. He would never admit it.

I settled for watching him stomp through the white powder until he was a good hundred paces ahead. I didn’t mind the view. His ass was a work of art in those jeans.

Fuck, I couldn’t wait to spread him open again.

We trudged on, the smell of fresh pine thick in the air. Stas would occasionally stop and inspect trees with a critical eye. He dismissed each one like he was appraising diamonds.

“Too thin,” he muttered.

“Too short.”

“Branches too uneven.”

After the tenth rejection, I threw my arms up. “Christ, Stas. If you’re this picky with a damn tree, how do you choose the women who end up in your bed?”

He crouched beside another, brushing snow off the needles. “You don’t rush tradition.”

“Tradition?” I echoed.

He nodded once, still studying the tree. “When Yelena was little, we did this every year. Finding the perfect one was her favorite part. Now that she’s not here and you’re no help, I have to get it right.”

Damn. Just when he was back to irritating the hell out of me, he said something that made him appear less robotic and more human.

“Where was her mother in all that?” I asked before thinking.

“She doesn’t have one.”

“Everybody has a mother.”

“Well, she doesn’t.”

“But—”

“Fucking drop it, Yuriy. You can mouth off about anything else except that. She’s off-limits!”

“Okay.”

But his reaction only made me more curious.

We searched for half an hour until my fingers were numb, my nose stung, and I was beginning to suspect this was less about finding the perfect tree and more about him watching me suffer frostbite.

Stas paused by another fir, circling it with a critical eye. He crouched, ran a gloved hand down the trunk, and shook his head. “Too sparse on this side.”

I groaned. “Stas, you’re being unreasonable.”

He didn’t respond. Just moved to the next one.

I followed, muttering curses under my breath. “You’ve clearly got commitment issues. You’ve rejected twelve perfectly decent trees already.”

“Thirteen.” He nodded toward another pine. “That one’s crooked.”