Page 124 of Dirty Grovel

I wink. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”

“My head is not worried. My vagina is.”

I grab her by the hips and pull her onto my lap. The stool complains with a muted creak.

“Oleg,” she whispers, circling my neck with her arms, “thank you.”

“For what?”

“For being honest with me. For telling me the truth without sugar-coating anything.”

“I didn’t scare you?”

“No, you absolutely did,” she giggles. “Just not enough to make me want to back out of this. Not that anything could.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“I think that no matter what, we can overcome anything, so long as we stay honest with each other and stick together.”

She wriggles her head onto the shelf of my shoulder. Her soft, inward smile is worth every exposed secret.

I breathe in her warm, salty scent. She smells of promises, of possibility.

We sit there for a while, inhaling and exhaling in sync, no need for words to ruin the closeness.

“I do have one more question,” she says after a few pleasant minutes have passed.

My stomach drops an inch. “Yes?”

“How many players are on a football team?”

38

OLEG

Well, I’ll be damned.

If it isn’t Matvey fucking Martinek.

It’s been a hot minute since I last laid eyes on the preeningmudakand that gigantic ego he totes around with him wherever he goes.

His hair is longer than I remember, though greasier and stringier, too. He’s as tall as I am but he’s carrying at least fifty pounds of extra padding.

“Where were you?” Artem hisses, appearing out of one of the boardrooms, his eyes wide and frantic. “He’s been here for over an hour. Showed up without warning and demanded to speak to you.”

“About what?”

“Fuck if I know. He refused to say anything about it to any of us.”

I observe him for a while, watching how he intimidates my staff, pulling from a predictable bag of tricks. He sneers at the menand leers at the women, displaying his prominent, sharpened canines in both cases.

“This should be good,” I mutter under my breath before I push through the doors and enter my office suite.

My assistants have never looked more relieved to see me. I notice Abigail praising the heavens while pointedly looking up at the ceiling.

Suppressing a smile, I walk over to Matvey. “Matvey, long time no see.”

“Lucky for you, Oleg,” he barks. “If we’d met sooner, you might not be here at all.”

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