Page 68 of Possessive Mafia Bodyguard

“Why didn’t he stop Tamara from walking away?”

Gianna tilts her head to one side like I just presented her with a mathematical problem to which I already know the answer. “He isn’t their master even though that’s how they worship him. He thinks of himself as their big brother, so he did what a big brother would do to protect her: he gave her an ultimatum. It was a risk. He hoped that she would see his point of view and trust him to bring Ivana home.”

“By taking away her weapons?”

Gianna’s eyes flash a warning as two women enter the kitchen, spot us talking at the table, and falter.

“Sorry,” one says. “We didn’t mean to interrupt. We’re going to the vegetable garden.”

“You’re not interrupting, Claire,” Gianna says softly.

The two women barely look at me as they pass through the kitchen and close the back door behind them.

Once we’re alone again, Gianna returns her attention to me and lowers her voice. “He has an organization to run, just like your boss. Tamara’s recklessness was becoming a liability, so he did what he had to do.”

I nod. I can’t argue with that. “Has he been looking for Ivana?”

“What do you think?” She smiles. “He is tearing the city apart to find her. And now Tamara… I’ve never seen him like this before.”

The small consolation this brings me is short-lived. None of this alters the fact that Tamara is sick.

“Do you love her?” Gianna asks out of the blue.

The question catches me off-guard, landing directly in my chest and stealing the breath from my lungs. It’s the easiest question in the world to answer, and yet the most difficult to find the correct words for how I feel.

“I… I’ve only known her for a short while, but I can’t imagine a world without her in it. I want to keep her safe and set her free all at the same time, and I have no idea where that leaves me, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll follow her around the world if she asks me to. Or I’ll stay right here.”

I peer at Gianna to find her watching me closely, her fingernails tapping the side of her mug. “Do you know why she left everything she has ever known to come to you?”

I blink. I’m not sure if the question is hypothetical or if she expects an answer from me.

“Because,” Gianna continues, “Tamara may not be ready to acknowledge it yet, but you feel like home.”

My face flushes with the heat pumping around my body. This woman sitting in front of me knows Tamara better than I do, and if she’s right about this…

“And I don’t think she is sick.” Gianna is still talking while my heart holds onto the blazing glimmer of hope she just offered me that Tamara and I just might have a future together. “I think she’s pregnant.”

Time stands still.

Okay, maybe time keeps ticking, but it does so without me, because I’m frozen in that moment with the word hanging in the air between us just waiting to change the world when it bursts.

“Finn…?”

Gianna reaches for my hand across the table, and I flinch when her skin touches mine. I pull my hand away and stare at her till she comes back into focus.

“Sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to drop that on you without warning.”

“No, it’s fine, I…”

“You didn’t consider that as an option.” She shrugs. “I get it. Sometimes it sneaks up on you, and you know your life will never be the same again, and you wonder how on earth you’re ever going to deal with it. It happened to me and Leonid too.”

I look at her, and I see Leonid with his two little daughters.

“Twins. Doesn’t get much scarier than that,” she says.

Yet here she is calmly discussing me and Tamara in the women’s refuge that she built and runs with her sister-in-law, while her husband is Pakhan to a ruthless Bratva organization. Scared isn’t a word I would use to describe Gianna Ivanov.

“I…” My brain-mouth coordination is all out of whack, and I can’t find the words to articulate what’s going through my head right now.