Chapter 15
The day they handed out patience, Milena left because it was taking too long.
— Cutter to Chevy
CUTTER
My eyes peeled open and I stared at the stained roof, my head momentarily offline as I tried to figure out how I’d gotten in the position that I was in.
Then the woman next to me moved, and I was reminded.
Last night, I’d stopped drinking after my fourth beer.
Milena and Dima had not.
They’d both imbibed enough that I knew they’d needed to let off steam.
Some of the brothers got just as shit-faced as them.
Others had kept it mostly sober to protect the lone woman in our midst.
Long hours later, we’d driven back to my place in Dima’s car, and I’d hauled them both inside.
Dima was on my couch snoring— I could hear him sawing logs from the bedroom—and Milena was currently in my arms.
The woman was dead asleep, which was how I’d extricated myself from her embrace.
Last night, she’d dressed in a pair of my sweats and my NAVY sweatshirt that was so big on her that it might as well have been a blanket.
Today , the sweats had ridden up from her ankles to reside around her lower thighs, right above her knee. The sweatshirt was still in place, but half of her shoulder was visible.
And all that black hair was spread…everywhere.
On the pillow. The mattress. My pillow. Under both pillows.
How did she sleep with it unbound?
Okay , so the woman was adorably cute.
Until she went to sleep.
Then she had some terrifying things to say.
At first, I thought the sleep talking was adorable.
But then she started saying creepy things.
For instance, the last thing she’d said that had woken me from a dead sleep was, “ Do you see it? It’s right behind you.”
At one point in the night she’d woken and said, “ What’s that on your dresser?”
From that point on, I’d decided that earplugs might be the way to go the next time I slept with her.
Standing up and stretching my arms up high over my head, I yawned, though I tried to do it quietly as not to wake the woman that definitely needed some sleep.
When I got through brushing my teeth and using the bathroom, I headed out to the coffee pot that I’d set to brew not long ago—which likely had been part of why I’d woken.
The smell of coffee was one of my most favorite things in the morning.
The first was pussy, but that wasn’t in the cards for me right then, so I went with the coffee as a close runner up.
I was taking a sip of the brew when I saw a leg on my front porch.
I moved to the side so I could see better, and saw Shasha Semyonov on my porch, drinking his own cup of coffee—this one from a travel mug.
I walked out the sliding glass door and took a seat in my chair beside him.
“ Did she sleep okay?” he asked the moment I sat down.
“ Other than the creepy comments throughout the night, she slept fine,” I admitted, unsure what I was supposed to do with Milena’s brother on my porch.
“ I had my ear to the ground last night,” he continued.
I waited, not sure that I would like to hear what he was about to say.
“ One , I have a lot of eyes on me after Nastya went through a murder investigation years ago,” he said. “ It’s been lurking under the surface for a long time, meaning, if I kill that motherfucker the moment he gets out of prison—which apparently is supposed to happen soon— I’ll have every goddamn law enforcement agent in the city coming down on my head.”
“ Okay …” I waited for him to add more, and he did moments later.
“ I want you to kill him for me.”
My brows rose.
“ What makes you think I wasn’t already going to do that?” I asked.
“ Because you have a lot to lose,” he said. “ I want to give you an incentive.”
I waited, not sure I liked where this was going.
“ I want you to marry my sister.”
I blinked, not sure I’d heard him correctly.
“ Hear me out.” He held up a hand. “ First , I want you to know that we could have an alliance. Or , more accurately, myself and your club.”
I didn’t respond.
“ I know that you do some illegal shit,” he began. “ I’ve left you alone in this city because your shit doesn’t affect my shit. But I think that we could be better together.”
“ What does that mean?” I asked.
“ It means that if you need help getting your product out of this city, I’m your man. What’s mine is yours. As long as you marry my sister, and you keep her safe,” he elaborated. “ I saw the way you looked at her.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I had looked at her in a way that didn’t need to be explained.
I wasn’t sure, though, that I wanted to start a relationship with this woman on the wrong note. I felt what we had could easily be something that could last a lifetime, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that…
“ He’s going to kill her the moment he’s out,” Shasha snapped. “ I’ve been trying to get her to allow me to have a guard move in with her for years, and she keeps refusing. She wants to seem independent. I don’t know. But the guards that I keep outside her place have intercepted three hits that were taken out on her.”
I blinked, turning my head slowly to stare at him.
“ The latest hit was her own ex-boyfriend,” he fumed. “ Asher accepted the hit in exchange for someone paying off all his student loans. That night you got her off his bike, he was going to push her off into traffic. He’d set it all up.”
My stomach clenched.
“ I need you to be there on the inside. Until I can get to the bottom of this, until Lyle Pennington is nothing but a speck of dust on this Earth , she’ll never be safe,” he insisted.
I swallowed hard. “ And how, exactly, are we going to make this happen?”
His lips curled. “ Leave it to me.”
I looked at him then.
“ I’m not leaving anything to you,” I said carefully. “ Do I think that you coordinating with my club will be a good thing? Yes . Do I think that this is a fucked up situation that I’m going to profit from? Also , yes. But I’m not doing anything to hurt her in any way. I’ll marry your sister. I’ll make her mine. But I don’t want her to leave me later on because she finds out that this was all set up by her brother.”
“ You actually like her.” He studied my face.
“ Like I’ve never liked anyone else in my life,” I admitted. “ I just got out of a year-long relationship with a woman that I could barely stand to be around. It’s been like that for all of my long-term relationships. And even a few short-term. I like them, but not enough to change my life for.”
“ But not with Milena ,” Shasha said.
I didn’t answer him at first.
I stayed quiet, contemplating my next words, before saying, “ I’ve never felt like this before with anyone.”
“ I thought that when I met Brecken .” He grinned. “ I wasn’t sure that I would ever feel that way about anyone, and then I met her, and she started stalking me, and I couldn’t stop myself from finding it amusing.”
My brows rose. “ She stalked you?”
“ Minutely ,” he answered. “ In a cute, she never quite could figure out how to conceal herself, kind of way.”
I grinned. “ I don’t want her to hate me when this is all done.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “ Sounds like you might love her.”
I grimaced.
“ I don’t know that I’m …”
“ You might not acknowledge it to yourself yet,” he offered. “ But it takes half a second to fall. And when you do, you’ll tell yourself it isn’t what it is. You’ll fight it, because loving women like them is like taking your soul and giving it to some barely capable of taking care of herself person to protect and nurture your very being. You don’t expect them to take care of it as well as they do, and all of a sudden, one day you’ve let them all the way in and never intended to. You think, okay, how bad can it be? She’s a tiny little thing half my size. I’m stronger, faster. She doesn’t have that kind of hold over me. Then she almost dies in your arms, and you’re wondering how the fuck you’re supposed to live without her.”
I swallowed hard.
“ That sounds awful.”
He laughed. “ It’s the best goddamn feeling in the world. You only have to give her everything.”
I didn’t care what he said.
That wasn’t something I was willing to do.
At least, I didn’t think it was.
But the way Shasha looked right then…he made me want what he had.
Could I have that with Milena ?
The sliding glass door opened and Dima walked out, looking rough as fuck.
He had a beer mug full of coffee, and I laughed into the one and only coffee cup I had and took a drink.
“ You need more coffee cups,” he grumbled as he took the last remaining seat on my porch.
I looked out over the water, checking out the very point of the lake where I knew the Semyonovs lived, and said, “ I never needed more than one before.”
When Dorie semi-moved in without me asking, she’d brought extra everything.
When she’d left, she’d taken it all back with her.
I’d had to go out and buy a coffee mug because she’d taken mine with her, as well as the few forks and knives that I’d had.
At least she’d left me my paper plates…
“ Well , my sister likes her coffee, so I hate to break it to you, but you’re gonna have to come up with something,” he pointed out.
I grinned. “ I’d go out and buy her one but…doesn’t she own a coffee shop? She could make a better cup of coffee there.”
“ She’s a bear without her coffee,” Shasha said as Dima said, “ If she doesn’t get her coffee first thing in the morning, she turns into this evil version of herself that grumbles and growls at everyone and everything.”
“ You have a cat,” Shasha said.
I looked toward the water where the stray cat I’d named Mustard came out of the water.
“ I thought it was a rat,” Dima said. “ That’s a cat?”
I whistled and Mustard came running.
“ Hey , isn’t that Rudy ?” Shasha asked as he leaned forward.
I turned to him. “ Who’s Rudy ? That’s Mustard .”
“ That is Rudy !” Dima said as he got up. “ Ru - Ru !”
The cat came walking up, stopped at the base of the steps, and shook himself free of the water clinging to his fur.
I reached behind me and pulled the box of cat food I kept on my porch forward.
Getting a small cup full, I dumped it on the floor of the porch and Mustard came up and started eating.
“ My sister has a cat that looks exactly like this one…like to a T . But there’s no fuckin’ way that the cat would come all the way over here…right?” Dima asked.
“ Cat comes in from the water every day for breakfast.” I shrugged. “ I mean, logically, I guess it could be someone else’s cat.”
The cat ate half, then went back into the water and started swimming.
“ That’s insane,” Shasha said. “ Even in the winter he gets in that water?”
“ Even in the winter,” I confirmed. “ That’s actually why I started feeding him a year or so ago when I first saw him. He came in out of the water and looked freezing-ass cold. I gave him half a chicken leg, he ate it, then got right back in the water and swam off. After he did that a few mornings in a row, I started keeping cat food over here.”
“ That lines up to about when my sister started noticing he wasn’t around for breakfast. But he was always there for dinner.” Shasha shook his head. “ The only reason I even know, or care, is because my daughter loves that fuckin’ cat.”
The sliding glass door opened and a crazy-haired, beautifully sleepy woman walked out onto the porch.
She was still wearing my sweats, but now she had on a pair of my slippers.
She looked ridiculous, but I fuckin’ loved it.
She took a look at all three of us, glaring once at Shasha , then moved past both of her brothers to get to me.
She stared at me for a long second before she said, “ Can I sit in your lap?”
I opened my arms and she crawled into my lap.
And I finally realized what Shasha was talking about.
Between one sip of coffee and the next… I realized that I’d do just about anything to make sure she was safe. Even go along with her brother and possibly piss her off later when she found out what I’d done.