Page 1 of Sexting the Bratva Beast
1
CARTIER
Holy fuck!
I’m gaping. Am I gaping? I force my brain to engage with my jaw and snap it shut, the sound causing the baby in my arms to startle. A tiny hand wriggles free of the pink blanket the baby is swaddled in. She opens her mouth to bawl, and the sound is so fragile, so utterly gut-wrenching that my demented heart goes into full-on maternal overdrive.
“Shh, shh. There, there.” Because babies only understand words in duplicate. “Naughty Auntie Cartier, making you jump.”
But the baby must pick up on my irregular heartbeat. Or maybe she’s intuitive and she heard my silent cuss when the bad boy dressed all in black walked through the door. Either way, she refuses to settle back in my arms, and I pray that I haven’t destroyed our future relationship by traumatizing her with my rampant thoughts within six hours of her arrival.
I hand her over to her mom, my friend Gianna, and she settles instantly.
The same can’t be said for me, however.
I was three years old when Hurricane Charley hit Florida. Too young to make memories of vacations and trips to the Magic Kingdom and play dates at the park. But I still remember the atmosphere before the hurricane reached land. The tension in the air that you needed a paddle to wade through. The wary eyes. The heightened senses.
That’s how I feel right now. Like the storm is happening before I even realized that I should appreciate the calm first.
Without the baby in my arms, I have nothing to focus on, no one to hide behind, no reason not to make eye contact.
And when I finally psych myself up to glance at the man who just walked through the door, he’s staring straight at me like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. Or maybe he’s simply used to being stared at. I mean, I defy any woman to set eyes on him and walk away from the encounter unscathed.
Or undressed.
Or both.
I mentally shake myself. This kind of meet-cute only happens in steamy romantic novels and every romcom ever made in the history of time. It isn’t the stuff of real life. And even if it were, it doesn’t happen to people like me.
Not that I ever wanted it to.
I’ve seen first-hand how physical attraction can so easily slide from a planned happy-ever-after into a toxic relationship from which the escape route is often more dangerous and volatile than the situation itself.
Gianna, Mika, and I met in Montenegro where we all worked at a women’s refuge. We shared an apartment, which meant thatwe also ate, drank, and socialized together. We knew everything there was to know about one another…
Apart from the fact that Gianna’s family were so super-wealthy that she shouldn’t have been allowed outside the house without a bodyguard. And those thrift store bargains she wore: they were an act of rebellion.
Her life reads a little like aGodfathermovie. She was abducted during her flight home from Montenegro to Chicago by the man who is now her husband. Leonid Ivanov. Because he obviously looked at Tinder and thought that kidnapping was the safer option. Her sister’s husband kidnapped her a second time, and then, the story goes that Leonid threatened to burn Chicago down for the women he loved.
Yay for the amber-eyed Russian prince!
Leonid then bought Gianna a huge property which we’ve been helping her to renovate and transform into a women’s refuge here in Chicago. Today is the opening day. And Gianna has just given birth to beautiful twin girls.
So, I guess some people do find their happy ending.
And I don’t even know how my brain has connected the dots from setting eyes on the hottest man on earth to having babies. Must be something to do with the mountain of romance novels I’ve read since I was old enough to understand how a hero should make me feel, and my ovaries choosing this exact moment to wind up the body clock and turn it up to full volume.
Or perhaps it’s simply down to the fact that my entire body has become untethered from my brain and is preparing itself to be well and truly enlightened by the bad boy in the corner.
“Car?” Gianna’s voice penetrates the drool-fest taking place inside my delusional brain.
I glance up to find everyone watching me as if I just declared out loud that I want to rip his clothes off and ride him till I can’t walk.
My face floods with heat. I feel my cheeks growing hot enough to fry an egg on and try to recall the conversation that I’m supposed to be responding to. Nope. Nothing. I’m a complete blank.
So, I wing it. “She just wanted her mommy.” They were talking about the baby, right?
Wrong.
