Page 70 of Babies for the Boss
“You are holding that against me in this?—”
“No. This is different. This is you deciding where I live. Where I raise our children. Whether I get to be beside the man I married or whether I get to be safe in a city that is not mine, with a woman who is wonderful and is not you, waiting for a life to begin that has already begun. Ordering me around like I’m your employee instead of your wife.”
“The safety?—”
“Do you want me for your wife or your employee, Pavel? Which is it?”
“You are my wife?—”
“Then treat me like it. I woke up in a hospital because of the violence of your world. You are not surprising me by telling me it’s dangerous. I know there are more people like Fedor out there. I’m not a fool. I’m here telling you that I know all of it, and I’m choosing a life with you anyway.”
He stares. He just stares at me for a full minute, and I can’t read him right now. “How—how can you pick this life?”
“I pick you. This life is a part of the package.” I shrug.
Tears edge the bottom of his lashes. “You deserve so much more than this?—”
“I love you. Nothing else matters to me.”
Something moves through his expression. He doesn’t speak.
“Vet is gone,” I say, and the saying of it does what it always does, which is press on the place that has not stopped hurting and will not for a long time. “Vladimir is gone. And I will not let what happened to them be the reason I leave, because leaving would mean that Fedor won something from them after he killed them, and I’m not willing to give him that. I’m not willing to let him take me out of my own life.” I look at Pavel steadily. “Are you?”
The room is very quiet. He looks at me for a long moment. “You do not understand what I am afraid of.”
“Then tell me what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m afraid of a morning when I wake up, and you are not in the world. I’m afraid of a version of my life in which the thing I have done by loving you is the thing that ends you. I cannot—” He stops. “I cannot live with being the cause of that. I would rather lose you to Chicago than lose you to this world entirely.”
I get up from the bed. I stop in front of him, and I take his face in my hands, and I look at him from very close, at those pale blue eyes that are not cold at all. “Then we fight. Together. That is what I am asking. Not to pretend the danger isn’t real. Not to ignore the cost. Just—fight for us the way you fight for everything else you refuse to lose. Because I refuse to give something up for fear of losing it.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and then his hands come up to cover mine where they rest on his face. “You are the most stubborn woman I have ever encountered in my life.”
“You should have thought about that before you married me.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. The almost-smile that lives in my heart. “Yes,” he says. “I should have.” And then he kisses me.
He folds me into his arms and lays me onto the bed, and only then do I remember I’m naked. Saved us some time. He peels his layers away, and my heart stops. “Your arm!”
There’s a cut that runs circular around his right forearm, smeared with blood and clasped by butterfly bandages.
“It’s fine?—”
“That is not fine!”
But I know the look in his eyes. He has seen me spread out on the bed before him. Nothing will change his mind now. “When I touch you, the pain is gone. Do you want me to stop touching you?”
I laugh. “That’s manipulative as fuck, and you know it.”
He grins as his hand skims up my left inner thigh. “Do you want me to stop touching you?” Then he touches me there, the barest flick of his thumb on my clit.
“You’re such a bastard?—”
“You say such cruel things, wife.” He finishes undressing, managing to keep his thumb working me over the whole time. “Perhaps I should find a way to silence that cruel mouth.”
“Do it.”
I thought he meant to fuck my face. But he spread my thighs wide instead, propping my legs over his shoulders as he dives into me with his tongue.
