by Selena Scott
She slapped the sandwich together. And maybe she was a little rough with the bread, and the turkey was on there crooked. But maybe she also hadn’t needed to use the nice mustard. Or cut up some lettuce and tomato. Or add the carrots and chips on the side.
As she listened to Maxim gently close Linc’s door, Ivy surveyed the dinner she’d just put together for this man. It was messy, looked a little funny, and was full of extra effort. God.
It was her life. In sandwich form.
He stepped into the kitchen and she slammed the plate and the beer in his hands. “It’s too hot to eat inside,” she snapped and slid open the sliding door with, perhaps, more force than necessary.
Maxim followed her outside, his mouth set, his face giving away nothing.
“Boy wants you to know he heard you swear in the driveway. You said ‘shit’.”
“I know what I said,” Ivy glared at him over her beer.
Maxim tilted his head to one side and chomped on a carrot stick. “I take it you are not sure if you are angry with yourself or with me, no?”
Ivy forced herself to swallow. “So, what? You just know everything about me?”
He worked his way through the chips. “No. Because you don’t let me. But I know a few things.”
“Like how I apparently am pretending not to like you?”
“You are mad because I said it to Linc or you are mad because I was right?”
Why did he keep doing that? It was driving her insane. Ivy crossed her legs, one over the other, and was very much obliged to see Maxim’s eyes instantly fall there. Okay. The universe still made sense. “I’m not pretending not to like you, Maxim.”
“Oh?”
She leaned her head back on the deck chair and stared up at the jewelry box of the night sky. “Yeah. I’m trying my hardest not to like you. And it’s not really working.”
“You don’t want to like me. But you make me a sandwich.”
“Exactly.” She pointed a finger at him and sat back up straight. “I have no idea what I’m doing here. I should be picking Linc up and dropping him off and tipping my hat to you in the meantime. My life doesn’t have room for you. Me and Linc have been just fine alone. And then all of a sudden you’re here smelling all good, and sexing me to within an inch of my life, and tucking Linc into bed, with your great family, and your wide-ass shoulders, and I just - God - made you a fucking sandwich.”
Her eyes filled with frustrated tears. Which was ridiculous. Because she didn’t even know why she was crying.
“This doesn’t have to be so hard,” Maxim said before taking a big bite. “Good sandwich.”
She looked up at him. “You didn’t call.”
Ah, he realized, now they were circling the truth of her mood. The real reason. “When?”
“Yesterday or the day before.”
“I did not want to do this. Ignore you. It was painful for me,” he said matter-of-factly around another big mouthful of sandwich.
“What?” Ivy redid her bun so hard Maxim had to bite back a wince. She was all riled up in eight different ways. There was no way to get to the other side of this conversation without some yelling at this point. But the only way out was through.
“If it were up to me, I will come back that next morning, have breakfast with you and Linc. I will text you when I think of you that day. I will make dinner for you. But it was not up to me. You told me you wanted space. After the movie? After the fucking?” He slid his empty plate a few inches away from him across the table and reached for his beer. “You said, again, ‘casual’.” He frowned at the memory. “You said we needed a little space.”
“I meant, you know, emotional space.” She threw her hands up in the air in complete frustration.
Maxim cocked his head to one side, surveyed her closely. “Ivy, I do not think even you understand what that means. I don’t.”
She opened her mouth to argue again, but she clapped it closed, letting her head fall back onto one of the patio chairs. “I don’t understand any of this. My son is a bear shifter and you were a one-night stand.”
He leaned forward, lifting her from her chair and plonking her down in his lap. She stiffened for a second but he was very pleased when she relaxed into his shoulder.
“Ivy, you are in your own way. So for now, I will make decision for us. And later, you can yell at me if it was wrong.”
She lifted her head, her eyes narrowing. “What do you mean?”
He took her beer from her hands and set it on the table. He pinned her with his eyes, laid across his lap like a bouquet of woman. “I mean that this is not so hard. Or so complicated. I will show you now.”
He lowered his mouth to hers and stroked one huge palm all the way down her body, just sort of sliding her into the kiss. It was warm and soft and as easy as falling backward onto a feather bed. Her body was pliant, flexible and melting against his. Her heart, however, was tight and racing inside. Straining against the confines of her ribcage like the dang thing wanted to escape into the thin air.
Ivy gasped into his mouth when his hand reached her bare feet. He went over her arches and heels and it reminded her of the other night. There was no place on her body he hadn’t touched.
Ivy still wore the simple black skirt she’d worn to her first day at the office and it rode up her hips as she straddled him in the deck chair.
Maxim’s hands worked their way up from her ankles until they found the heat between her legs. Groaning, his head fell forward.
How did she do this to him? He’d never felt so protective and so undone at the same moment. It was driving him insane. All he wanted to do was drag her to the ground and fuck her like a maniac. But her scent, her feather-soft skin, the worry in her eyes, the wrinkles in her work blouse - God. It was all making him savor her. He felt as if the two of them were diving deep, trying to find the bottom of a hot spring. They were warm and falling and melting together.
Together. They belonged together. She was withholding her heart from him. And there was nothing he could do about that. But he sure could make their bodies together. Which is the only explanation he had for why he was unbuckling his belt so fast, sliding her panties to the side.
Yes, was all that Ivy could think when he sank a wide digit into her. She arched and let her head fall back, holding him around his neck. Finally, he was moving at a pace that could allow her to keep her heart safely in her chest. He groaned and sunk another finger into her and Ivy ruthlessly ground her hips against him, pressing his fingers further into her. She wanted this. All she wanted was to fuck. She couldn’t handle another night of him making love to her.
She sucked in air through her teeth, gasping out words of relief when he lifted her hips and aligned the thick, heavy head of his cock with her pussy. She sank gratefully down on him, her eyes still pointed to the sky.
Maxim gritted his teeth against the hot velvet pleasure that was currently squeezing the life out of his dick. It was heaven and hell. Because she was the best thing he’d ever felt, and she was so gorgeous, the column of her throat exposed to the night air, her hair skimming backwards as she arched and rode him, her breasts straining at the buttons of her blouse. But she was fucking him like he was a stranger. He frowned, one arm wrapped around her waist as she worked herself up and down.
“Ivy,” he said, taking her chin roughly in one hand. Her eyes blinked groggily open as he brought her to face him. “This is me you are fucking.”
“What?” she asked, rising up and falling back down on him.
“Say it,” he demanded, banding his arm around her hips. “Tell me who you are fucking.”
Ivy’s eyes lit with lust.
“You,” she whispered, hesitating for a second and drawing her lip between her teeth. “Maxim.”
His name on her lips, her eyes on his, it lit a fire in him. Maxim’s hips rose up to meet hers, the wet slap of skin on skin flinging out into the night.
“This is right, rusalka,” he growled. “Say it again.”
“Maxim.” Her cry for him was breathy and strained all at once. He needed her. He needed to taste her breasts, smell her hair. He wanted to lick inside her mouth and bite at her collarbone. He settled for pressing into her so deep they both cried out.
He couldn’t make her stay, he knew this. She was her own person with her own decisions to make. But he was ten inches deep in her right now and nothing was gonna change that. A fire licked up his spine and it wasn’t because he was about to come. It was something else, determination, tenderness, an urgent, rushing need to claim her.
Maxim clamped his hands onto her and stood, spreading his feet wide. She didn’t have much traction in this position so she flung her arms around his neck and clung to him like a vine. His hands dug into her hips as he fucked her onto himself, working her up and down as he stood there and took it.
“Maxim,” she whispered into his ear, biting at him, getting earlobe, hair, the skin at his neck all in the scrape of her teeth. “Maxim. Maxim.”
He wondered if she knew she was saying his name like it was a wish over birthday candles. It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was their connection. The wind that was whipping through them. The lightning that struck them both at the same moment. Joining them, twisting them around one another as they strained, and cried out, and fell weakly back to the chair.
A few hours later Maxim kissed fireworks into her at her front door. “Get good sleep, rusalka. For your second day at work.”
Unable to help herself, she went up onto her tiptoes and nuzzled her cheek against his for just a second.
Impossibly endeared to the childlike motion of it, Maxim traced his hands over her face, planted one more kiss on her big-little nose. He loved its presence on her face. So interesting. So lovable. “I will call you tomorrow. Maybe after work. Maybe at your lunch break.”
And there she was, biting at her lip again. “You don’t have to do that. I wasn’t - this wasn’t all about that. I-”
“Rusalka, we tried your way, with the space. It made both of us feel pain. For a while we try my way. I will call you.”
“Okay,” she whispered, refusing to watch him stride through the night toward his truck. But she did hold her breath until she heard his door slam. Smiled when she heard his car radio come on. Oldies.
Somehow that didn’t surprise her, she thought as she walked back through the hallway, picking up a few stray toys as she went. Her one-night stand was turning out to be quite the romantic.
CHAPTER NINE
They did it Maxim’s way the next day. And the day after that. And the week after that. And then pretty soon the summer was three quarters through and somehow, Ivy had wound up with herself a boyfriend.
He was squirrelly, she decided, as she dunked an old sponge into a sudsy bucket and got to scrubbing at the dirt on the side of her car. That was the only explanation for it. He’d sneaked and shimmied his way into her life and she’d never seen it coming.
Well, of course she’d seen the flats of flowers he’d brought to her the other week. And she’d definitely seen it when he’d helped her plant them in the backyard. She was still losing sleep over that chest, sweaty in the sunlight.
And she supposed that she’d admittedly noticed the pattern when Maxim started showing up around dinnertime, dessert in hand and some little something for Linc. Paper for paper airplanes, a top notch skipping stone, a Wonder Woman Frisbee.
And of course, she’d been the one to agree to him picking up Linc from Ilya and Katya’s twice a week. So she couldn’t necessarily say that it had been sneaky for him to carry Linc in from the car or help put him to bed.
Ivy roughly scrubbed the passenger window down and took a deep breath. No. He hadn’t been sneaky at all. He’d been calm and clear and honest about his intentions the whole time.
“You don’t have to do this on your day off,” Ivy had said to him last week as he’d leaned his elbows onto a shopping cart, casually tipping cereal into it.
He’d looked at her with one eyebrow raised as if to say, haven’t we been through this already?
“I do this because you are doing this and I want to be near you. One or other, Linc, not both.” He’d looked down at her son who was holding two different kinds of potato chips up and giving them the puppy dog eyes of a lifetime.
Ivy had started when Linc had returned one bag to the shelf with no argument. How did he do that? How had Maxim just done that?
That phrase was pretty much the story of her life these days. She turned on the hose at the side of the house and dragged it around to spray down her car.
How the hell did Maxim make lentil soup that damn good?
How had Maxim gotten Linc in and out of the bath so fast?
How did Maxim make her body feel like that? Alive and singing and so good she could barely breathe?
He wasn’t Superman. Obviously she knew that. She viciously sprayed the suds off her car. But damn if he wasn’t good at life.
So, he hadn’t been squirrelly, she admitted to herself. But he’d slipped so seamlessly into her life there’d barely been a place for her to tell him to scram. And, God help her, she didn’t want to.
Ivy pressed one of her hands, cold from the icy hose water, to the back of her neck and then over one eye. There was a pressure building inside her. It had been growing since the day Maxim asked her to do it his way. And she wasn’t sure she could ignore it anymore.
“Ivy?”
She spun, hose still blasting, and sprayed Emin’s shoes where he stood at the edge of her driveway.
In typical, nonplussed Malashovik fashion, he merely raised one eyebrow until she redirected the spray, kinked the hose.
“Emin! I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “Nothing to worry for.”
He was Glory’s husband, and the brother that Ivy knew the least well so far. Apparently he’d been busy these last few weeks on a series of paintings. He was dark and handsome and wild-looking standing on the edge of her driveway with a puddle forming around his feet.
Not for the first time and not for the last, Ivy marveled at the Malashovik genes.
Emin stepped over the puddle and slipped the hose from her hands, casually chased away a few more suds over the top of her car. “This is nice car. You are over the trauma of your accident?”
Ivy winced as she remembered the car accident. It was another classic Malashovik trait, to bring up a subject like that so easily.
She pressed her cool hand to the back of her neck again and shrugged. “For my part, yeah, I’m over it. But for Linc’s part, I don’t know if I’ll ever be over it. I’ll never forget the way he looked when he was lying in Maxim’s arms.” She looked back at the house; they were in there right now, Maxim and Linc, playing a little after dinner. They were safe.
“Maxim’s arms is the safest place in the world,” Emin called as he turned off the hose at the edge of the house and wound it back up.
“What do you mean?”
“Ah,” Emin sauntered back over, picked up a few of the dry rags she had in a box on the lawn and handed one to her, then started drying the car alongside her. “I am, how do you say, biased. Because he is my big brother. But he is always taking care of us.”
“I kind of got the impression that was Danil’s job,” Ivy said, thinking back to the mounds of paperwork Danil was having to do to get Glory and Serena their social security cards, passports, citizenship. She’d also watched him go over and over some health insurance mumbo jumbo with Ilya for at least an hour.
“Da,” Emin agreed. “In different way. Danil makes sure all Is have dots and all Ts have crosses, no?”
Ivy smiled, nodded. They companionably bumped shoulders as they dried the car.
“But Maxim, he was always the one with the hugs,” Emin said with a smile. “Bad dream? Go to Maxim. Have a fear about asking a girl on date? Go to Maxim. It was not typical brother relationship, because Maxim is not typical brother. He is very…”
Emin trailed off
, looking for the English.
Ivy didn’t need him to find it, she already knew. “Loving,” she sighed. “He’s incredibly, no-strings-attached, loving.”
“Da,” Emin nodded immediately. “No strings. He knows no other way. Especially after Anton was taken.”
“What do you mean?”
“When my family still lived in Belarus, Anton was taken by Navuka. You know this?”
Ivy nodded. She’d heard bits and pieces of the story, and she’d seen the emotional scars that Anton so obviously still bore.
“Did you know that Maxim was there that day?”
“No,” she whispered, her blood like ice in her veins.
Emin’s eyes became very dark, almost blurry as he told the story, his hand methodically wiping down the car. “They were throwing ball in a field outside our home. We knew Navuka was eyeing us, so we had moved many places and stayed far away from cities, where we heard they did the most abducting. A helicopter came from the sky and men grabbed Anton. Maxim ran the length of the field, shifted, tried to attack, but they shoot him with - with something to make him sleepy. When he wakes up, they are gone. And so is Anton.”
“Oh, God.”
“We spent year tracking down their facility and understanding how to take Anton back. Danil and I, we wanted very bad to destroy the facility as well. But Maxim, all he wanted was Anton. He made us have focus. All that mattered was Anton. And the night we went, the night we infiltrated the lab… I will never forget him. The way he was.”
Ivy wasn’t even pretending to wipe the car anymore. She was turned completely to Emin, gripping the rag in her hands like a lifeline.
“He was calm,” she guessed. “He was competent and calm and I’d bet my next paycheck that he carried Anton out of there like a baby.”
Emin was staring at her now. “Da. Anton was very sick, mad with the chemicals they put in him. He tried to fight us, everyone. Maxim held him close, like baby. Like brother. Anton was wild animal, I would not have gotten close yet. Maxim just held him close and drag him out of there. How did you guess that?”