I didn’t live here.
I couldn’t live here.
At some point, I had to go home.
Viktor found my hands and squeezed them. “You are too good to me.”
“Really?”
“No. You are a menace. But I like it.”
I hummed a low laugh into his neck, keeping it warm, not boiling over like we did in the club most nights. “Does that mean you’ll make something not green or fishy for dinner?”
“It was fish once. Fresh from the sea. You are mad not to eat it.”
“I’m all right with that.”
“You do not have to be. I have a proposition for you.”
Intrigued, I rearranged us enough so I could see his face. “Sounds terrible already.”
Vik’s cheekbones weren’t as guillotine sharp as they’d been a few weeks ago, but they remained a killer blow every time he even thought about grinning. “Yuri told me that Katya put the bacon you keep talking about in the fridge. If we have that for dinner, and stay home tonight, will you come somewhere with me tomorrow?”
Bacon derailed my thoughts, my belly giving up an unholy growl. It took me a second to absorb the rest of it. That we weren’t hitting the town tonightandthat he thought there was a rat’s chance in hell that I wouldn’t follow him to the end of the fucking earth. “Where are we going?”
Viktor took a breath to answer, but one of the kids called him away, and I didn’t mind too much. These little beasts were pretty quiet most of the time, and they didn’t poke me with sticks.
What I did mind was the extra space it gave me to ruminate, and for the first time in a while, my thoughts turned to Jakov. ToJake. I didn’t know much about how war played out for international crime lords, but he’d been out of touch a while now, and I found myself wondering if he’d ever come back. Or if the port fires Cam warned of would burn him to the ground.
Don’t tell Vik.
I almost fell asleep in the sun worrying about that humdinger. But my senses were too attuned to Viktor, and an hour or so later, I felt him return to the house and go inside.
Dazed, I sat up, and the scent of the promised bacon had me scrambling to my feet.
It drew me into the house and to the kitchen to where Viktor had piled it into a pan.
That fucker was cooking itshirtless, and his scarred bare back called to me as much as the pan of magic.
I stepped up behind him, making enough noise that he heard me coming. “If you put anything green near that, I’ll kill you myself.”
Viktor turned his head as I reached him. We almost kissed by accident, but I covered it by dropping my chin to his shoulder.
He chuckled. “I have bread. Butter. And that brown sauce that looks like?—”
I slapped my palm over his mouth. “Don’t say it. I need this butty in my life right now. Not whatever imagery you’re about to flay me with.”
Viktorlickedmy hand.
I let it drop.
He shivered, and a beat of something passed between us.
I frowned. Had I fucked up? Triggered a memory that messed with his head?
Then he leaned back, moulding himself to my front as he poked at the pan, and it passed, leaving nothing but warmth behind, and I gave up fretting to press my lips to his neck.
Viktor made me a bacon sandwich. Three, actually. And watched me eat two, with the cutest smile on his face, before he let me share the third with him. “This is disgusting.”
