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I peek open one eyelid to see an irritatingly familiar pair of silver irises grimacing down in my direction. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I wince inwardly. I honestly might’ve preferred to crack my head open on the tile floor, actually. This feels worse.
Dmitri sets me on my feet and keeps scowling down at me like I’m an idiot, to which I want to say, Well… fair point.
“This house is not short-people friendly!” I cry out instead, infusing as much indignation into my voice as I can under the circumstances.
That intense eyebrow pull softens just a little. It’s as close to a smile as he ever gets. “Oh?”
“How is a normal-sized person supposed to reach up there! We can’t all be gigantic ogres like you. Or supermodels with insane, Amazon woman proportions like your fiancée.”
One side of his mouth twists up as he moves toward the cupboard I was trying to open. He pushes into it and it swings outward with a soft click, revealing a rack of glistening glasses.
“You could always ask for help,” he suggests with amused sarcasm, probably because he knows damn well I don’t want to ask him for anything.
“Whatever,” I mumble, face burning. “Those cabinets are stupid. We poor people don’t have fancy shit like that.”
“You’re not poor.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I happen to know how much you earn.”
“But you don’t know what kind of other stuff I have to pay for.”
He looks intrigued. “‘Other stuff?’”
Yeah, “other stuff”—stuff like helping my sister pay for the fancy shmancy fertility clinic that she and Jared could by no means afford on their own. It was definitely worth the loan I’d taken out to cover the cost of testing, fertility medications, and egg retrieval.
Not!
Which reminds me: I’ve gotta speak to Dr. Saeder about a full refund. It is quite literally the least he could do. Not that I won’t be paying for this decision in other ways for the rest of my life.
“That clinic wasn’t cheap,” I mutter under my breath. “There were others we could have gone with, but she had her heart set on this one.”
“You get what you pay for, Wren,” she tried to convince me. “If we go to the best, then we’re bound to get the best result.”
Ahh, the irony.
“‘She’?”
My eyes snap to Dmitri’s. “What?”
“You said that she had her heart set on this fertility clinic.”
I cringe internally, cursing myself for slipping. I have no desire to discuss my sister with Dmitri. It’s one of those sacred relationships that I hold so close to heart that I don’t want to talk about it with anyone I don’t trust.
And I sure as hell don’t trust Dmitri Egorov. I don’t even like him.
(Lust doesn’t count.)
“I… misspoke.”
One eyebrow arches incredulously. He’s not even pretending to believe me, but I’m not about to cave in the face of something as silly as an awkward silence. Hell, I thrive in awkward silences. My whole damn life has been a breeding ground for them.
I fold my arms over my chest. “Are you going to feed me or not?”
Dmitri keeps his eyes on me long enough to make it clear that he’s not letting me off the hook completely. This is just a temporary reprieve. Then he turns to the cabinets and pulls out a loaf of artisan bread and some cutlery.
