Page 82 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

He gets his hand into the act, and I lose the thread of everything. The ceiling. My own name. Any argument I have ever made in my life about independence and self-sufficiency.

His fingers glide straight into me, and his mouth mounts my clit. I break on his hand and against his mouth, my whole body pulling tight and then going loose all at once. I lie there for a second in the wreckage of it, breathing. Barely.

He comes back up my body, and I pull him the rest of the way there, both hands in his hair, not interested in waiting another second. He braces above me and looks at my face for a moment before he does anything else. There’s nothing in his expression right now that has anything to do with control or distance or the careful management he keeps over himself in every other context.

He looks like a man who is exactly where he wants to be.

“Hi,” I say, because it is the only word I have.

“Hi,” he says, and his voice is completely wrecked. He brushes my hair back from my face with one hand, and then he moves into me. I exhale like I’ve been holding a breath for weeks.

We move together slowly, the way we did that first tender morning in his bed, except that now there is more weight to it—more history, more of what we almost lost pressing up against the present moment and making the slow nearly unbearable.

I wrap my legs around him, and he shifts and finds a depth that makes me gasp into his shoulder and stay there, my mouth against his salty skin, my hands in his hair.

He says something against my neck. Russian, low, the tone of a man talking to himself about something he has no other language for. I don’t need a translation. I know the tone. I know him.

It builds. The slow becomes less slow, turns urgent. The two of us are moving together like we’re trying to close the distance that the days have put between us. I drag my nails down his back, and he groans against my throat and his hand finds my hip and holds, pulling me to meet his thrusts even faster. I pray his name, and he answers with his own ritual. We go over it together at the same moment. Gasping. Breathless. Elated.

On the verge of madness.

For now, I just hold on.

After, he pulls me against him, and I let my head fall to his chest, and I lie there listening to his heartbeat come down from wherever it went. Steady. He is steady, and his arm is around me. His hand moves slowly up my back.

I lie in the warmth of it and let the basement go—the bulb, the cold, the chair, the lists I made in the dark to keep myself functional. The last thing I added to that list, before I heard the door at the top of the stairs, was his name. I was right to add it. He was always coming for me.

His hand moves slowly up my back.

“Ivan.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t ever let me spend days not answering your texts again.” I pause. “Also, I’m sorry for not answering your texts.”

A pause. Then, low and warm, with the edge of something that is almost a laugh. “I’ll do my best. On both counts.”

I close my eyes. I’m exactly where I decided I wanted to be, and I have decided to stay. The decision feels like the easiest one I’ve made in months. Not because of the baby. Not because of Jaba or fear or the math of what his world costs.

Because I want to. Because I have wanted to since I sent him away, and the relief of being done with that is enormous. I’m going to close my eyes and lie here in Ivan Fedorov’s bed and enjoy it for as long as he’ll let me.

And I suspect he’ll let me for a while.

34

IVAN

Gregor’s manarrives at two in the afternoon, which is earlier than I expected. Gregor said within the month.

It’s been days, which means he worked faster than he said he would. He understood something about the urgency without my having said so. This is one of the reasons I’ve used him for twenty years—he listens to what you don’t say as much as to what you do, and he works accordingly.

The man hands me a small box and leaves without coming inside. I close the door and stand in my entry hall with the box in my hand and look at it for a moment before I open it.

Inside, on a bed of dark red velvet, is the pendant.

Black diamond, deep and dark and lit from within, the kind of stone that looks like it is always doing something even when the light is poor. And through it, set with the kind of precision that requires a man who cares about his work, a single streak of white opal, pale and luminous against the dark, catching the light from the entry hall and throwing it back in colors I was not prepared for.

Soft colors. The kind that shift when you move.