Before I could get in, he cupped my cheek. “You okay?”
I pressed my cheek into his hand. “I think I will be.”
34
ALEKSANDR
I couldn’t takemy eyes off the woman in the passenger seat of my car, so much so that she laughed and said, “I’m not going to disappear if you pay attention to the road.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked to change the subject and take her attention off me while I got my emotions under control. “The reason you called?”
Eva didn’t speak for a long moment. “The team participated in a fundraising banquet tonight,” she began. “Tristan took me as his date.”
I looked at her in surprise—I hadn’t realized they’d reconciled.
“Cole brought his fiancée.”
My look must have been much sharper, because Eva’s shoulders raised like she was trying to curl into herself in the seat of the car.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Well, no, it’s not fine. But I can’t do anything about it. I’m?—"
I waited for her to collect her thoughts and finish.
“He was drinking. He’s always fucking drunk or hungover these days. He was drinking, and she was walkinghim out, and she looked at me and she told me she knew he was mine, and Alek?—”
Her voice broke, and a sob burst out of her.
“That’s so fucking unfair, because he walked away from me, not the other way around. And fucking Jed Carter is escalating and?—”
She scrubbed her face, and it might have been the most vulnerable I’d ever seen her.
“Sorry,” she muttered.
“Don’t be,” I said, keeping my voice calm and confident and even, the anchor she needed me to be.
“Cole doesn’t deserve—” Her voice cracked again. “He doesn’t deserve for my heart to hurt for him. He doesn’t deserve for his teammates to want better for him. He doesn’t fucking deserveme.”
None of us did.
We pulled into my garage, and I made a soft growl of displeasure when she reached for her door.
The sweet smile that peeked out of Eva’s misery filled me with hope.
I opened her door and towered over her. “Malyshka, I need something from you before I take you upstairs.”
She sniffled and looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes but didn’t say anything.
“We’re not going to negotiate tonight, not for real.”
She nodded.
“But I need you to know you can stop any of this with a word. I promise you.”
Eva swallowed and rubbed her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “A safeword.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I told you I’d been reading.”
