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“I hate the sand.”
“Mountains then.”
“Too cold.”
“Vineyard.”
“Red wine gives me a headache.”
“Well, this won’t,” he assures me—just as a maître d’ appears out of nowhere, bearing a silver tray with a glistening bottle of vodka and two chilled glasses.
“Compliments of the chef,” the man explains as he sets the liquor down on our table and vanishes again before I can ask any questions.
I squint at Sergey. “That was suspiciously smooth,” I tell him warily.
“Things have a way of working out for me,” he explains as he pours two shots and slides one over to me.
I take it reluctantly between my fingertips. It feels like holding onto a glacier, but the liquid in the glass shimmers in a way that seems to have nothing to do with the actual ambient light in here. “Do they now? Must be nice. I have no idea what that’s like.”
He chuckles. “The trick is to relax.”
“That might be true for you,” I say, “but you’re a wealthy, good-looking giant man in a world built to cater to your needs. Try being a five-foot-three female making sixty K a year selling industrial plastic products and tell me how often things just magically ‘work out.’”
“Careful,” he warns with a mischievous spark in his eye. “Keep up that stream of compliments and you might even get lucky.”
I hide my surprised laugh behind the glass before I manage to get control over my facial expressions again. “Who are you?” I ask accusingly when I’m back in charge of myself. “This whole thing is starting to feel staged.”
“Who do you think I am?” he retorts, throwing my own question back in my face.
“I dunno. Hopefully not, like, an ax murderer or something.”
He looks offended, pressing a hand to his chest like I’ve wounded him. “No, of course not.” After a pause, he adds, “Axes are way too messy.”
He keeps a serious face for just long enough that my heart plummets into my stomach acid before it splits into a smile again.
“You’re going to scare girls away when you joke like that,” I advise him.
“Who says I was joking?”
“That’s gonna scare them away, too.”
“You can rest easy,” he reassures me. “No one is dying here tonight.”
“What a relief. I wish this wasn’t true, but the bar for these dates is literally that low.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “How many of these bad setups have you been on?”
I set down my menu and start counting them off on my fingers. “Well, let’s see. We’ve done all the classics: guy was married, guy was wasted before appetizers even hit the table, guy was dead broke and waited until the check came to tell me I was paying.”
“Tales as old as time,” he agrees solemnly.
“Guy who shares a bed with his grandmother was definitely the weirdest of the lot, though.” I clear my throat. “Which of the standard clichés are you?”
Sergey leans over the table and locks eyes with me. He was beautiful from afar, but he’s even more gorgeous up close like this. His eyes dance and shimmer and melt into themselves over and over again. It’s bizarre that his lips are so soft and kissable when they’re framed in such a masculine face.
“I’m like no one else you’ve ever met, solnyshka,” he says in a quiet rumble. “I can promise you that.”
Something about the way he says it sends a shiver down my spine.
