Page 13 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“My,” she laughs right at me, throaty and rich, “you really are bolder without a chaperone, aren’t you, Anton?”

I say nothing. Nothing is the best thing I can say. I pivot on a heel and walk my ass back to the Queen Anne chair I’ve been waiting for her in all along. It’s a much safer perch from which to watch her pour herself a glass of merlot.

It stains her mouth. I swallow thickly at the sight.

Her eyes follow me. Her attention is palpable as a laser, boring holes through the back of my skull.

I look away from her face. I find safety in the decadent trappings of this room. I’ve never wondered where a woman like her would live, because I’ve never let myself. I never let myself do many things.

But there’s nothing nefarious about admiring her white marble fireplace and the obsidian built-in shelves flanking it on either side, as floor-to-ceiling windows flank those. The symmetry of it all scratches an itch in my brain.

So what if I’ve clocked her tastes in literature as expansive, and that she’s potentially fluent in more than three languages? I spotted volumes in Russian, French, and Italian, as well as in English.

It feels like getting away with something to know something about her that she doesn’t realize I’ve learned.

“Tell you what,” Darya adds when I don’t respond, “I’ll let you stay for the next ten minutes. However, you should know that’s purely because this is the most interesting you’ve been since I’ve had the displeasure of meeting you.”

It won’t help my case to tell her it hasn’t helped my life any to meet her, either. It’s easier, for now, to look around her space. Just being here, I’m learning something new about her.

Ten minutes aren’t enough.

To look at her, dressed in a cashmere sweater-dress concoction that has no right to look so fucking good, who would expect the walls of her living room to be lacquered in the deepest oxblood? For her curtains to be a rich, nearly black shade of green? Who else has been privy to the sight of her bare feet padding across a Persian rug, an intricate work in maroons, navies, and an unexpected haunting of gray?

It feels nefarious, though, especially when I have to look back at her and find her looking guarded—as if she is sure that I will have something unkind to say about her marvelous haven.

Fuck, I hate that idea.

It fucks with me, how much I hate that idea.

Whatever my expression betrays, she doesn’t appreciate. I can see that, and I can’t blame her. I just know it isn’t enough to stop the putsch that’s in motion now.

“Well?” Her foot taps impatiently, irascibly, against the ground. “What do you want?”

“For you to marry me,” I blurt.

That isn’t how I was meant to propose this.

I am not a man who blurts anything. But that is what this is.

The way Darya is left staring at me isn’t too much of a departure from the way Uncle Boris looked at me only yesterday, telling me to double-cross the Yuris before they have the chance to do it first. She, too, harbors disgust and detestation in every line of her devastating face.

She chokes on a mouthful of wine. She jabs a finger angrily in my direction when I stand to help her. Don’t you fucking touch me, is the subtext of that finger. I can translate that much when she manages to glare despite her watering eyes.

Eventually, “What kind of sick joke is this?” she manages to spit. Any remnant ounce of her humor is nothing more than a memory now.

“It’s not a joke,” I say woodenly.

“No, you don’t get to scowl at me. Your options are to speak clearly or get out of my house. I am in no mood for—”

“If you want to know, then stop talking and listen.”

Giving a woman like Darya an order is a shot in the dark. I am lucky because she obeys it this time. Of course, the look she shoots me as she does so could kill.

I clear my throat, taking the moment to collect myself.

It doesn’t really work.

Options, I suppose, are as good a place to start as any.