“So,” I say after a moment, because while he may be comfortable dwelling in awkward silences, I definitely am not, “do you come here often?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Just my lucky night, then.”
He glances down at my skinned knee. “I’d say the exact opposite. But to each their own.”
I take the chance to inspect his bruised knuckles where they’re lying in his lap. “Yeah, maybe not. What about you? Does this count as a good night or a bad one?”
He bobs a shoulder noncommittally. “Par for the course.”
I have to bite my cheek to stop from grinning. There’s something about the effortlessness he exudes that makes me wild and green with envy. He’s, like, made of Teflon or something. Just cruising through life with zero friction. Even in the middle of that savage fight, it hardly looked like he was trying.
Here, with me, he’s perfectly at ease, as if this is neither the first nor the thousandth time he’s done this.
Sometimes, God gives with both hands—that was another of my mom’s favorite expressions. They sure know how to coin a phrase in the Georgia backwoods where she grew up. In the case of Matvei here, I’d say that God gave with both handsanda shovel.
Because he’s gorgeous, obviously rich, fearless, strong, capable, perceptive, clever… the list goes on and on.
Like he can hear me heaping praise on him in my mind, Matvei smirks. “Something on your mind you’d care to share with the class?”
I shake my head. “No. Nothing worth two cents, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, I suppose not. I figured your thoughts were worth more like fifty grand, give or take.”
My jaw hits the floor as I realize what he’s saying. “Wait—hold the hell up. How did you…?”
“Just a guess,” he says, smirking again. “But a good one, it seems.”
“Were you eavesdropping on me?!” I ask incredulously.
He frowns. “It’s hardly eavesdropping when you announce your intentions to the entire bar. People in there are always listening, Cassandra. You really ought to work on your inside voice.”
I don’t know whether to be angry or impressed. In the end, I decide on neither. All the air goes whistling out of me as I sag back against the alley wall in defeat, eyes fluttering closed with exhaustion. “I’m really bad at this, aren’t I?”
“I’d say it’s not your forte, no.”
He hesitates in an odd way. I crack open one eyelid. “What? What is it?”
“It would be better for both of us if I didn’t ask.”
“Well, now, you’ve piqued my curiosity. You have to.”
“Oh?” he says, eyebrow raising again. “Are you going to make me?”
It occurs to me, sort of out of the blue, that I’m alone in an alleyway with a strange, dangerous man. Yes, he just rescued me from severalotherstrange, dangerous men, but who’s to say he doesn’t have even more nefarious plans of his own for me?
But I just don’t get the same sense of alarm as I did with the Kitchen Implement Crew over there. I mean, yes, I’ve got plenty of alarms going off in regard to the Blue-Eyed Bastard here, most of them situated frighteningly low in my belly and/or between my legs, but they’re not the kind that make me want to get up and run.
On the contrary, these alarms are begging me to stay.
Stay here, with him, for as long as he’ll let you.
… because it’s the first time you’ve felt safe in four years.
“I get the feeling no one makes you do anything you don’t want to do,” I say truthfully.
Matvei pauses, tilts his head to look at me from a new angle, and then nods. “They did once,” he says. “And they’re trying to again. But, you know… fool me twice, and all that shit.”
