Page 7 of Chosen By the BRATVA Grump

“I just... I have to prepare for the opening,” she stammers, grabbing a pencil from her desk and instantly dropping it. She crouches to pick it up, her back turned to me. “There’s so much to do. Tomorrow is the biggest day of my life, and I need to focus. I really just need to be on my own right now.”

Every muscle in my back tightens. The enforcer in me wants to demand an explanation, to take her by the waist and pull her back against me until she tells me what shifted. But I see the quiet panic fluttering in her chest, the raw overwhelm in her brown eyes. She isn’t angry, she’s spooked.

I force myself to step back. I don’t want to leave her like this, but crowding her won’t help.

I reach into my pocket, pull out my card, and set it carefully on the edge of her desk next to her stack of label cards.

“My personal cell is on there,” I say quietly, keeping my tone gentle despite the knot tightening in my gut. “Call me whenever you want. Or whenever you need to. Anything at all, Kimmie.”

She nods quickly, keeping her gaze glued to the floor. “Thank you, Natan. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Kimmie.”

I walk out into the cool night air, the heavy gallery door clicking shut behind me. My jaw is set tight as I walk to my car. The drive back to my apartment in the city is long, quiet, and entirely too empty, my hands gripping the steering wheel while her soft gasps continue to echo in my mind.

The bridge is almost empty at this hour. The water is black underneath it, the last of rush hour tapered off leaving the roads wide open. I’m halfway across when the thing that’s been prickling the back of my mind surfaces.

I didn’t use a condom.

I’ve never done that before.

I’ve been careful my entire adult life. There is no version of me that gets careless about this, and yet I sat down on the floor of that woman’s gallery and finished inside her without a single word about it first. She wanted me. She lined me up herself, with her hand around me and her thighs shaking. None of that changes the fact that nobody asked her, and that she climbed off me a few minutes later and couldn’t get dressed quick enough.

My apartment is on the eleventh floor and looks like nobody lives in it. I’ve rented it for the better part of the best ten years but it’s just a place I use to sleep.

I shower, then stand in the kitchen with the light off and eat cold chicken out of a container. My phone stays on the counter, face up, doing nothing. Mechislav messages at twenty past nine about the second yard and incoming shipments.

She doesn’t call. I don’t expect her to. I lie on top of the covers until half past one, then give up and get dressed before driving back over the bridge with the heater on and the radio off.

The gallery lights are off and the shutter is down over the door. AT least she isn’t working into the early hours. I continue driving down the road towards the street she lives on. I overheard Sammie saying how Kimmie bought a row house on Linby Road. It took everything ounce of self-control not to stalk her and find out exactly which one. SO now I’m sitting at the end of the street watching the houses like they owe me something.

At five thirty, a door opens, and Kimmie appears, her hair tied up, her glasses pushed onto the top of her head. She turns on the spot just outside the doorway, looking through her purse and patting where she might usually have pockets. Her hand finally goes to the top of her head, finds her glasses, and she pulls them onto her face.

I don’t know why I find it so endearing, but the kick in my chest tells me it’s something I want to see every day.

She is wearing a skirt that hugs her hips tightly and then flares at her knees. It’s a deep shade of gray, and her blouse is cream with ruffles that draw my eye straight to her cleavage. My gut gives a punch as the thought of anyone else seeing her curves like this makes possessive jealousy course through me.

“Get it together, you moron,” I scold myself. But there’s no way anyone looking at Kimmie today isn’t going to want their hands on her. She is the most beautiful woman ever to walk this planet.

I start the car and drive around to the small parking lot nearest the cafe.

Purr & Pour is warm and smells like sugar at seven in the morning. Delilah has her hair tied up and white icing on one forearm. Ten trays are stacked on the end of the counter with wax paper between them.

Jasper is already here, at the end of the counter with his cat mug that was initially a joke by Delilah, and has instead turned into something special between them. I wait for the thought to make me feel queasy. All that love and cuteness. But it doesn’t. Instead, an image of Kimmie, head thrown back, my hand stretched over her hip as she takes me, flashes in my mind.

“You look terrible,” she says when I approach the counter.

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t a compliment, it was a diagnosis.” She slides the top tray a quarter inch to the left. “Did you even sleep?”

“Sleep is for the weak.” I flash her a grin as I reach for one of the cinnamon pastries, but she swats my hand away before I get one.

“She won’t even let me have one,” Jasper laments from the end of the counter.

Lemur appears from the door that leads to the kitchen and sits down directly in front of the pastries with the confidence of an animal who has never once been told no. Delilah moves him. He comes straight back.

“There she is now,” Delilah says, looking past me out of the window. “Looking foxy,” she wriggles her eyebrows, and I fight the surge of jealousy that I’ve already tamped down once this morning. “Right, that’s all of them,” she adds, sliding the last of the pastries onto the top tray. “You two can manage to take these over there without dropping them or eating them, right?”