Page 53 of Babies for the Boss
The whiner. I never liked him, but a spy? That seems out of his realm. He’s a little pathetic, always complaining, and as I count the reasons why he’d make a bad spy, I realize those are the reasons he’d be a great spy.
He’s a low-level goon who knows he won’t amount to much. What easier way to advance his financial situation than to spy?
“Oh.”
Pavel shrugs. “Yeah. Oh. Now, what will you do with that information? Are you appeased?”
He’s cranky. He’s tired. I know what his life costs him, and I am not without sympathy for that. But I am cranky and tired too. I’m also his wife, and the word means something beyond the protection it provides, and I will not be managed out of my own life by a man who loves me and is wrong about this.
“No, I’m not appeased.” Without meaning to, I find myself standing over him. “I am not one of your men. I am not someone you protect by keeping me in the dark. That is not protection—that is control, and you are smart enough to know the difference, and I think you are good enough to not want to do it to me.”
The room is quiet. He looks at me for a long moment, and I hold the look, and the silence between us has the quality of something that is about to tip in one direction or another.
Then he stands, and I track him with the awareness I always have of his movement in a room, the gravity of him when he’s in motion and has decided something, and I keep my ground because keeping my ground is the whole point of this conversation.
He stops in front of me. Close enough for me to smell his day-old cologne. Those pale blue eyes look directly at me and do not look away. “You’re right.”
My mouth opens, but I don’t know what to say. I was prepared for several versions of this conversation, and that was not one of them. “I—yes. I know.”
“From now on, I will tell you. When there are things you need to know, I will tell you myself. You have my word.”
I look at him for a moment, recalibrating. “That’s it? You’re just—agreeing?”
“You made a sound argument.”
“I had more arguments prepared.”
The corner of his mouth moves, barely, his start of a smirk. “You are welcome to make the rest of it.”
“It loses something if you’ve already conceded.”
“Then perhaps we use the time differently,” he says, and his hand comes up to my face with the careful deliberateness that I know, the touch that is asking before it is taking, and I feel the shift in the room the way you feel a change in pressure—pervasive, immediate, the whole atmosphere of the conversation turning into something else.
Something better.
I should tell him the other parts of the argument. I worked hard on them all day long.
But he kisses me, and the remaining argument evaporates with the completeness of things that are replaced rather than abandoned. I stop thinking about informants and trifles and the frustration of being managed by a man who means well but is also wrong. As his tongue brushes over mine, I think about nothing at all, which is what he reliably does to me and which I have stopped pretending to resist.
Pavel’s hand raises the hem of my skirt. Slowly. “I vow to you, wife, that I will tell you everything directly related and tangentially related to you and anything you care about.” His fingertips graze my inner thighs. “On two conditions.”
I’m nearly breathless. “What’s that?”
“First, you spread your legs for me.”
I’m doing it before I can think to do it.
“Excellent. And you keep wearing these stretchy skirts.” His large hand cups over my underwear. Not yet moving. Claiming. “They make my life better.”
I swallow. “Then I’ll buy every stretchy skirt I can find.”
“Good girl.” His fingers slip past the edge of my underwear and into me.
I bite my lip before the loud gasp escapes, and it turns into a moan. “Your men. They might hear?—”
“Do you think I care?” His fingers hit that spot that makes me weak, and I nearly lose my balance.
But he wraps an arm around me. Pavel would never let me fall. It’s why I can let go with him—I know he has me, no matter what.
