Page 47 of Bratva Baby

He doesn’t answer fast enough.

I put the spoon down. “No. Absolutely not. You don’t get to move me like luggage from one hidden room to another and skip the part where I know where I’m being taken.”

His gaze drops to my mouth when I get heated, and it makes me want to flip the table. “You’re not in shape to run your own route tonight.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

He eats another bite, swallows, wipes his mouth with his thumb, then says, “Somewhere safer than Budapest.”

“That could mean anything.”

“It does.”

I lean forward. “You arrogant bastard.”

“And you are very beautiful when you’re furious and fed.”

I actually laugh at that, short and disbelieving. “Did you hear a word I said?”

“I heard all of them. I’m choosing not to reward your tone.”

“Reward my tone?”

His eyes hold mine. “Be careful, Sofiya. You’re tired, you’re angry, and you’re looking at me like you want me to drag you over this table.”

Heat floods through me so fast I nearly choke on the next breath. “I want to stab you.”

He nods. “That too.”

I stand. The chair legs scrape. “Stop doing this.”

He stays seated for another second, looking up at me from under his brows in a way that makes my whole body remember Prague. “Doing what?”

“Talking like this. Looking at me like this. Acting like being trapped in another room with you is somehow funny.”

His gaze runs over my face, then my throat, then lower and back up again, and I hate that my body still answers every time. “It isn’t funny,” he says. “It’s unfortunate timing.”

“Timing is all you ever talk about when it suits you.”

He comes around the table. “I dragged you out of a burned city,” he says. “One of my men is bleeding downstairs, there are two dead men on a road because your cousin got impatient, and you still can’t stop thinking about what my mouth feels like.”

That lands dead center and my face burns. “You’re out of your mind.”

He stops right in front of me. “Am I wrong?”

“Yes.”

He takes my plate from my hand and sets it down on the table behind me. “Look at me and lie better.”

His face is a little dirtier than it was in the apartment, one curl of hair out of place, his coat off now, sweater stretched across his shoulders, blood on one cuff that isn’t his. He looks like trouble in a form my body understands too well. “You’re unbearable,” I mutter.

His hand comes up and catches a strand of hair stuck to my cheek. “You’ve been aching for me since Budapest.”

I catch the heel of his palm with my teeth before I can think better of it. He freezes for a second, then laughs, and the sound of it goes through me. “There she is.”

He takes my jaw in his hand. Not rough enough to hurt. More than enough to hold. “Tell me to stop.”

Yes, I should tell him to get out, to sleep on the floor, to keep his hands to himself, to remember I’m carrying his child and everything is more dangerous now than it was in Prague. Instead I say, “You first.”