Page 82 of Sinful Blaze

My place setting is next to Pasha’s, not on the other end of the table like usual. Should I move? Is this weird for him? For us?

Pasha pulls the chair out for me. He’s composed, elegant, so I guess this isn’t as weird for him as I thought. I sit down, he pushes me in, then goes back to his own seat and sinks into it slowly.

I wait nervously for him to make the first move. I expect him to zero in on his mother’s perfect pierogies, but he completely ignores them and piles up my lumpy ones instead. “She used to make this for me whenever I had a bad day.”

“Did you? Have a bad day, I mean?”

He pauses, thinks about it, then shrugs. “Things didn’t go like I planned. I guess you could call it a bad day, but…” He raises his eyes to meet mine. “It doesn’t feel like one anymore.”

“Oh?” I take the platter when he hands it to me and pluck the two his mother made for myself. “What made it better?”

“I came home.”

Our eyes lock. He’s smiling—genuinely smiling, which, wheeew, buddy, that is a deadly weapon—and it’s infectious. Beyond infectious.

I can’t help but smile, too.

31

DAPHNE

Several pierogies and a crisp salad later, Pasha and I are laughing over a joke he heard Mak tell one of his men. “It’s even better in Russian.” He sips on his water, still chuckling. “Fuck, I gotta remember that one for Sofi.”

“Do you speak Russian?” Almost immediately, I want to kick myself for asking such a stupid question. “I mean, I hear you say a few words and phrases sometimes, but…”

“But am I fluent? Yes.” He sets his glass back down and smiles at me with all the warmth I wish he’d have every day. Asya was right: his stomach is a direct road to the best version of him. “I was born here in America, as were Sofi and Mak. But our father insisted we go back and visit frequently. He wanted to keep us rooted in both worlds, Old and New.”

“You must have loved it.”

Pasha thinks about it for a moment. “For the most part, yeah. Especially at Christmastime. The lights on the snow… I’d be bundled up so tight, I couldn’t put my arms down below my waist. But it was worth it.”

I try to imagine a tiny version of this man, a sweet little boy, waddling around the frigid snow like a marshmallow. My heart squeezes—in a few short years, I’ll be bundling up a little girl who looks just like him.

Our plates are empty, so I automatically start to get up to clear the table. But Pasha beats me to it.

“We’ve been over this,” he rumbles with a disapproving glare.

“It’s not a big?—”

But then he rises and towers over me. One hand bands lightly around my throat. He’s not smiling, but I can feel a little glimmer of that mischief his mother was talking about in him. Although, when it’s communicated through the form of a six-and-a-half foot tall man with eyes that can commit murder on their own, it’s less ha-ha-hee-hee and more gulp.

My throat bobs against his grasp. “I?—”

“Hush.” He passes a thumb across my lips. I swear he’s also increased the temperature in the room thirty degrees, but that might just be my imagination talking. “You don’t listen to orders very well. Sometimes, I have to put my hands on you to make you understand.”

I gulp again. I nod. I’d do just about anything he asked me right now, truth be told.

With the tiniest amount of downward pressure, he puts me back in my seat. My knees buckle instinctively, those filthy, traitorous whores. I almost gasp when my butt hits the cushion.

“That’s a good girl,” Pasha croons. He teases my lower lip once more with his thumb before he withdraws his touch altogether. I almost moan at the loss of contact.

Then, with one more withering look, he scoops up all the dishes and disappears into the kitchen.

I listen to the sounds of Pasha rinsing off dishes and loading up the dishwasher and coach myself through the steps of inhaling and exhaling again, which requires a little more conscious effort than it usually does. The candles are low, casting a perfect golden glow in the room.

Damn. If I wasn’t pregnant, this would be the perfect moment for a glass of wine.

The water turns off in the other room. Silence.

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