Page 43 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Max—”

“Whatever he’s done now, the first signature on it is mine. This is my fault. All of it.”

I could argue the details. I could say Klaus is thirty-one and owns his own choices, and it would bounce off this man like rice at a wedding. You can’t argue a man out of a verdict he spent decades reaching.

I switch gears. “Can I tell you a weird fact about me?”

The pause has a frown in it. “Certainly.”

“I can’t sleep next to people. Ever. Not once in my life. Boyfriends, girlfriends at sleepovers when I was twelve, my sister on road trips. She came the closest to breaking that streak in me. But still, no. When there’s somebody else in the bed, I lie there rigid until sunrise, wide awake and deeply uncomfortable.”

“Is that right?”

“Your son and I dated for eight months, and I slept over maybe six times and hated all six. Can’t really call it sleeping over if you don’t sleep, right?”

A soft chuckle out of him. “I suppose not.”

“I used to leave at two in the morning and tell him I had early meetings. There were no early meetings, Max. There was just me, needing my own bed like other people need oxygen.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I sleep next to you. I go out like a light when I’m with you. And I wake up hours later, drooling on your scar.”

“Didn’t notice.”

I squint at him.

He gives up with that smirk of his. “Very well. I noticed the drool. Seemed ungentlemanly of me to mention it.”

I snort and prop up on his chest to look him in the eyes. “My body has spent twenty-seven years running a background check on every person who gets near me while I’m unconscious, and everybody failed. Everybody but you. The legitimately scary one.”

He smiles fully now. “Is that my nickname in your head? The legitimately scary one?”

“Sometimes, smart ass. So, you can’t be as terrible as you think you are. I could never in my life fall asleep next to a bad man. Not a truly bad one. My nervous system wouldn’t allow it.”

Silence. Then his chest moves under me, and a sound comes up out of him that I’ve never heard before, low and rusty, and I realize Maxim Vernigora is chuckling. Truly chuckling. In the dark. In my bed. At me.

“I’m unsure of the standards by which your nervous system measures safety, especially considering you tried to escape my estate when you know there is a dangerous man hunting you. But I will take your advice under advisement. Time for sleep, Thea.”

“Hey, I had a good point there⁠—”

“You did. I’m not saying otherwise, merely stating all the facts.” His arm pulls me in tighter, and he presses his mouth into my hair, and the last thing I register is his heart under my ear, slowing toward even. “Sweet dreams.” Darkness swallows me whole.

I wake up alone.

Well, not quite alone, because Potato has taken the warm spot where a pakhan used to be. He’s curled into an unfrosted cinnamon roll with his bent tail over his nose. When I lift my head, he opens one yellow eye, confirms I don’t have food, and closes it.

No Max. No note. Okay. Fine. Wars don’t run themselves.

Then I sit up, and my stomach sits up half a second later, on a delay, like bad video conferencing. Must have overslept. Time for breakfast.

Galina made the good eggs, the soft ones with dill, that I’ve devoured for a week. Two bites in and my body says no. “That’s weird.”

“What’s this weird?” she asks from the kitchen while she cleans up.

“You know how I love your eggs?”

“Da.”