Page 91 of Taken By My Grumpy Pakhan

She sat cross-legged on the couch with a mug of tea balanced on her knee, looking at me the way she used to look at the season finale of whatever reality show she was obsessed with that month, like she couldn’t quite believe what she was witnessing and needed to savor every second of it.

“I heard you the first three times.”

“No, I don’t think you’re absorbing the full weight of it, Gen. Kazimir Ivanovich. The man who, by your own account, once made a grown executive cry in a boardroom because he handed him the wrong stamp, stood in your kitchen and made you soup?”

“It was an okay soup,” I lied.

“I don’t care if it tasted like dishwater. He made it. With his hands. The same hands that—”

“Anna.”

She took a deep breath, fanning herself with her palm. “I’m just saying. There’s a pattern here, and the pattern is that he’s completely gone for you, and you’re sitting there acting like it’s a mild inconvenience.”

I pulled my knees up onto the couch and wrapped my arms around them. Kazimir and his doctor left at the same time Anna came in, making it impossible to hide any details from her but also creating a situation where I barely had time to process the events before being bombarded by her.

“I’m not acting like anything. I’m being realistic. He’s done nice things before. He got me out of a debt and gave me a nice job—”

“All of which were situations in his niche,” Anna finished off. “He didn’t need to lift a finger to do either of those, but coming to your house because you were absent for three days, making you soup and bringing a private doctor because you refused to go to the hospital? Come on, Gen.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s anything more than him being thorough.”

“Thorough,” Anna echoed. “Thorough would be him sending his men to make sure everything was fine and possibly asking them to keep an eye on you. There’s nothing thorough about homemade soup.”

I didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because some treacherous part of me had been replaying that same afternoon on a loop since it happened.

The way his frame looked out of place in the kitchen as he moved around to get things done, the way the muscles beneath his white shirt rippled with each movement, kicking my already warm temperature up by a notch, and the way I almost stopped breathing when he tried to feed me.

Obviously, I didn’t give Anna that detail. She would convulse if she found out I could barely finish my meal and Kazimir had to help out.

“I just don’t know what to make of everything,” I finally admitted. “He’s been extra attentive since we came back from Moscow and I don’t know what that means.”

Anna’s features softened and she placed her tea on the table, getting into a more comfortable position. “It means a layer has fallen off your relationship and things have gotten a few inches deeper.”

“He did say he was merely returning a favour so…”

“Of course he would say that. He doesn’t want to scare you away. Or maybe he was ashamed to admit it, too.”

Did men like Kazimir even get embarrassed? I laughed softly. Since taking the medication the doctor had brought and drinking Kazimir’s soup, my fever had broken, and I genuinely felt better. But the weight of the illness had been replaced by something new. Something unsettling.

“I should be scared of him, Anna. I should’ve tendered my resignation the first day I saw him with a gun and ran for the hills and not opened my door for him to make soup. I don’t know if I did something wrong.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’re allowed to be scared and still curious. Those aren’t mutually exclusive, Gen.” She sipped her tea, watching me over the rim of the mug. “I’m not telling you to ignore the dangerous parts. I’m telling you that a man like that doesn’t drive across a city and chop onions for someone he doesn’t care about. That’s not in his nature, based on everything you’ve told me about him. So either he’s changing, or he’s been different with you from the start and you’re only just letting yourself notice. Whatever it is, you have to figure out where you stand and if the much you know is a deal breaker for you.”

“He has killed people, Ann,” I cried. “What does it say about me if I stayed knowing full well he was a man of questionable morals?”

I finally let the part I’d been mulling over drop. While Kazimir’s true identity bothered me, I wasn’t scared of who he was. The majority of my fear lay with who I would become by associating with him, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to confront it.

“I understand, Gen, but I want you to know whatever you decide, I’ll be right behind you.”

I looked at her, really looked at her, her work clothes and steaming mug. I understood being an analyst made her a little less emotional and more in tune with probabilities, but I couldn’t help how calm she was being about the situation.

“Why are you so calm with this? Why are you not advising me to run for the hills?”

A smile touched her lips. “Because in the years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you more alive, and he’s yet to give me a reason to pull out my secret hacksaw.”

Her words struck me like a baton to the head. I had been so focused on the fake diagnosis and failed to realize everything that followed was a result of Kazimir in my life.

But she’d planted something, and it stayed there long after she left, long after I’d gone to bed and woken up the next morning to find a text waiting on my phone before I’d even managed to open my eyes properly.