“Do you want to eat?” He waved his hand at the food he’d set out.
I shook my head. “No. Thank you.” My stomach remained tied up in knots, and there was no way I’d be able to keep anything down. Exhaustion weighed on me. Millie would get on a plane soon. My bestie would be a world away from me. I blinked back tears.
“Will you be okay?” Maxim asked.
“Yes. Once I sleep.” I offered him a tremulous smile. Worry tugged at his eyebrows.
“I’ll get you something to wear to sleep in.”
“Okay.”
He turned down a hall off the back of his living room. I meandered into his living space, touching his dining table that was the same gleaming dark wood as his cabinets.
Maxim’s space was uncluttered—some would say sparsely furnished—but the pieces he had were high quality, built to last. I loved the rug sitting beneath his large cube-shaped coffee table. It was a thick, soft material—maybe wool—and set with various colored blue and green dyes in a honeycomb pattern. I’d never seen another like it, just as I’d never seen a cube for a coffee table.
Maxim remained distinct among the men in my life,intriguing. I couldn’t say that about many people. While my father was a lawyer, he would always be a rancher first, and he’d married an even better rancher in my mother. My parents were salt-of-the-earth: hard workers who told it like they saw it. My brothers were similar; in Amos’s case, so focused on football, nothing else fit into his life.
But Maxim read, listened, understood the concepts I wanted to discuss. He was a big bruiser of a hockey player with the knowledge of an ancient philosopher. He was also distinctly an alpha male who preferred to growl than produce erudite commentary on his teammates or the state of the world. No wonder I found him so intriguing.
Marry me.
He hadn’t meant to propose. Hecouldn’thave. No man asked a woman he barely knew to marry him outside of Vegas.
That was shenanigans-levelridiculous. And Maxim was not into shenanigans. Heavy weightlifting, skating, glaring, grunting—sure. In fact, come to think of it, he’d fit in pretty well with the men in my family…minus the skating.
I’d have to make sure he ate steak. My daddy always said he could tell a real man from a poser by how he took his meat.
“The redder, the more of a man,” Daddy said with a wink.
That always made my mama scoff and me giggle. Why? No idea. Just…a happy memory, I supposed.
I wandered over to the mantel that held a few framed photos. All of them were of a much younger Maxim with a woman in her early twenties. His girlfriend?
“My sister. Nadia.”
I turned around, my heart pounding. He stood close behind me, holding a shirt in his hand. With a slight frown, he straightened one of the photos.
“Is she still in Saint Petersburg?”
He dropped his gaze from the photos to me. “Yes.”
“She didn’t want to move here?” I asked. He seemed close to her—the pictures of the two of them were the only ones in the room except for a photo of Maxim with his teammates, still in their gear, on the ice, celebrating some win.
Maxim sucked his lower lip into his mouth, his eyes darkening. I didn’t think he would answer me.
“I think she would have, yes, but she didn’t get the chance. Nadia’s dead.”
* * *
Maxim
“Oh…”she murmured, her eyes soft and filled with sympathy.
I scrubbed my hand up and down my neck. I couldn’t spellwoo. Ida Jane didn’t want more to do with me. She’d shut down as soon as I asked her to marry me.
I got it; I really did. I got Nadia killed, so I didn’t deserve the happiness Coach Whittaker had with Paloma, or Cormac seemed to find with Keelie.
The brittle silence stretched between us. I didn’t know how to cross the crumbling bridge. How could I get her to hear me?
