All three of them sit at the kitchen table where pasta and tomato sauce are placed in bowls in the middle. There’s also grated cheese in a small dish. I pause for a moment, my pulse kicking in.
Do I even fit here? These people actually sit down for their meals together, like a family.
“Tia?” Victor’s deep voice draws my attention.
I get to the empty chair next to him slowly. My eyes meet Alek’s.
“Dad used to make us pasta and tomato sauce a lot.”
“I know, Twinkle.”
I read in his eyes the same emotion that goes through my body—we miss Dad. He was just as dysfunctional as Mom, but still—before, he was around until he wasn’t.
It was all my fault. I was the surprise child. The accident. The unwanted one.
My heart broke for the first time when I was only ten. Mom and Dad were screaming at each other and one of them brought up how they didn’t want me to begin with. Alek quickly put his earbuds in my ears and cranked up some easy listening music, but it was too late. The last thing I heard was that Dad had found a single woman with no kids, and he was happier now. My heart shatters with pain just thinking what my mom had to go through when the man she thought she loved left her. Us.
Mom even flat-out told me later that Dad had started to withdraw when they first found out she was pregnant with me. That’s when the constant fighting started, before I was even born. Then it got worse after I was, because a baby required constant attention that no one wanted to give, except Alek, who became my anchor.
I push aside these thoughts and pull my filled plate toward me and begin chewing. I try not to look like a person who’s coming out of a dungeon half-starved to death.
There’re only a few simple rules I should follow to survive this dinner.
Slow down and chew. Don’t talk. Keep your eyes on your plate.
I sense his eyes on me and glance at Victor, who’s holding his forkful of salad halfway to his mouth. Wait… salad? Victor’s the only one eating salad? Oh gosh, I probably look like a pig to him. I swallow another mouthful of food.
I need to break his stare before I drop more tomato sauce on my shirt. “Did you make the sauce from scratch?”
He blinks a few times. “Yeah, I learned how to cook from my mom.”
That makes one of us.
I peer at Victor as I swallow another big bite fast, without chewing. Besides being able to cook and helping me and being gentle with me, Victor is definitely not my type. No way. He can’t even compare to Mr. Perfect on my dream board.
Victor doesn’t disconnect his gaze from me.
“I see how you devoured my pasta.” And he winks at me.
If it was one of Mom’s boyfriends winking at me, the act would have sent me running out of the apartment. But Victor’s winks are an invitation promising something delicious in the future and… I like it, damn it. My hand clenches tighter around the fork.
Victor is well aware of the hotness dripping out of him like honey. But the guy I need is Mr. Perfect—the preppy, steady, trustworthy guy from my pictures. A guy who comes from a stable family. A guy who aspires to be a dentist or maybe a doctor. A guy who doesn’t fight.
“Victor, you’re not eating spaghetti?” I ask, my eyes firmly on my plate.
“I don’t eat carbs at night. I have a certain weight I have to be at the time of the fight.”
My eyes fly to his irresistible face. He has a chiseled jaw that I want to trace with my finger, prominent and sharp cheekbones, and a high forehead with thick black brows. His masculine face is perfection except for a faint and short scar on his forehead close to his hairline. Victor has a face that should be sculpted in stone and painted as a male version of the Mona Lisa. But the rest of his body exudes violence.
“What fight?”
His smile is wide and inviting.
“My first professional MMA fight in Las Vegas. November sixth. In about ninety days. So I can’t go above two hundred thirty pounds.”
My food gets stuck in my throat. I take a gulp of water. Two hundred and thirty pounds of pure muscle, primal strength, and alluring sexiness. I wonder how…
Ohmigod. Stop it, Tia. Just stop it.
