Page 23 of Brooklyn Bratva

“Sit.”

I didn’t argue. The frown on his face as he jabbed at the folded over omelet in the pan suggested that cooking wasn’t his forte, but he’d still taken it upon himself to feed me.

I tucked myself in at the table, folding my arms in front of the place he’d set for me. He turned away from the stove and slid the gigantic mound of egg onto my plate.

From the second pan, he slid the even larger one onto his plate, and pulled his chair close in to the table, hunched over his plate with his fork poised.

I forked off a little corner, watching the steam curl up, and took a bite, while he liberally spooned sour cream on top of his.

Suddenly, he set his fork down, and reached towards me with a swift, purposeful hand. My heart thundered as he picked up the coffee pot next to me instead of setting his large hand over mine like I’d hoped he might.

“You want some?”

“Oh, yeah. Please.”

He poured me coffee, and I tried to calm the hell down. This was never going to work if I couldn’t even talk to the man properly.

Chastising myself, I dosed my mug with milk and sugar and took a deep gulp. Perfect. How could I expect to do anything sensible before my first cup of coffee? This was where I was going wrong. I couldn’t expect to be irresistible to anybody without any caffeine surging through me. I practically lived on the stuff. Everything would be fine once I’d got through my first mug.

“This is really good.”

Ivan squinted at me like he didn’t entirely believe I was telling the truth. Maybe I would have said that about just about anything he’d give me, but it was. There was dill mixed into the egg and lots of vegetables in the middle. I’d grown to love the slightly aniseed taste over my years of demanding Dad feed me only Russian foods.

Ivan took a mouthful of his own and chewed for a moment.

“You really like Russian food?”

“Yeah. I told you. I like everything Russian.”

Ivan

Back out on the boardwalk, the breeze from the ocean was a lot better for the pounding in my head than the warmth of Mama’s apartment. Used to be I could drink for days without feeling it, but I was in the wrong half of my thirties to be able to sink a whole bottle of vodka on my own without any impact. The drinking had never been the problem, and compared to most of the Americans I knew, spirits didn’t affect me at all, but last night had been a mistake.

Contemplating the life I had and the life I wanted from the bottom of an empty glass was a stupid thing to do. But I couldn’t have forced myself back into Mama’s apartment and I wasn’t going to sit around like some love-sick fool just to be close to Becca. That wasn’t the kind of man she deserved and it wasn’t the kind of man I was.

Seeing Becca at the breakfast table in that uniform shouldn’t have been the shock that it was, but I wasn’t prepared for my reaction. The running clothes were bad enough, but I was hard on sight with her sitting there, like a perfect little nurse, all dressed in white.

I was like some horny teenager all over again. The urge to pull her to me and kiss her to within an inch of her life, to sweep the table clean of all the breakfast things and make her mine was nearly too strong for me to fight against.

The prospect of Mama turning up to make an audience in the middle of it all was the only reason I held myself back

Now Becca was walking along side me, hurrying to keep up with my large strides and I could smell the freshness of her shampoo in her slightly damp hair. It soothed me as much as it made me think about her in the shower. Water dripping down her naked body, droplets clinging to her mound, spilling over her pert breasts.

I swallowed hard and tried to exert some mental control. Otherwise I was going to do something that could get me arrested.

“What are you going to be doing at the clinic?”

“Oh, I’m not really sure yet. I bet it’ll be a lot of filing patient records and typing up notes and things like that. I mean, I’m not really qualified to do anything yet. They might let me sit in on some appointments when they need an extra pair of hands. I can’t wait.”

I grunted.

“What time do you finish?”

“A bit after six I guess. The last appointment is at five thirty. I checked that already.”

“I’ll meet you and walk you back.”

Becca’s smile widened, but then she stopped dead in the street and when I looked back she was frowning at me and the happiness that had flooded into her face had vanished.

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