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She’d tied her hair back to cook but had loosened it once the meal was finished, and she’d kept her makeup light. She hadn’t wanted to seem like she was wooing him — she wasn’t, she wouldn’t — but she had wanted to look nice.
“You look lovely,” he said.
She wondered if she was imagining the appreciation in his eyes. It belied the dispassion in his voice, the feeling that he was working to control his response to her.
She looked down and realized she was still wearing the apron she’d tied around her waist. “Thank you.” She took it off. “This wasn’t meant to be part of the outfit.”
His eyes roved over her body. She should have minded, maybe even should have been offended by the boldness of it. Instead heat bloomed between her legs.
“I don’t need to change,” he said. “I don’t want your dinner to get cold.”
The Lion concerned about her dinner getting cold? That was… unexpected.
“If you’re sure.” She held up the bottle of wine she’d found in the kitchen’s deluxe wine refrigerator. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Please,” he said.
She poured them both a glass and then lifted hers for a toast. “To home-cooked meals.”
He chuckled, and the sound unfurled like a velvet ribbon, traveling all the way from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.
She was in very, very big trouble.
“To home-cooked meals,” he said, touching his glass to hers and holding her gaze. “And the beautiful women who make them.”
She smiled and drank, then set her glass aside. “Please sit. You’ve been working all day. I’ll dish our food.”
He took a seat at the table and she removed the towel from the plate holding the borodinsky, a dark sourdough rye sweetened with molasses and flavored with coriander and caraway seeds. She’d had to drive to her father’s house to get some of the starter from Lina, but it smelled so heavenly Kira was beginning to think it was worth it.
She sliced the bread and carried it to the table, setting it near Lyonya.
“Is this… borodinsky?” he asked incredulously.
She tried to hide her pleasure at his reaction. “It is.”
“It smells wonderful,” he said.
“I’ve never made it before, so no promises,” she said with a laugh.
She returned to the kitchen, dished food from the pot on the stove into two bowls, and turned out the lights on her way back to the dining room. The apartment was immediately cast into semi-darkness, the dim lights from the adjacent living room and candles on the table the only light besides the city on the other side of the glass.
She placed one of the bowls in front of Lyonya and put the other at the spot next to him that she’d reserved for herself. She’d agonized over the decision, wondering if it would be better to sit at the other end of the table, but what good was a peacemaking gesture if he thought she couldn’t stand to be near him?
She sat next to him and he leaned in and sniffed appreciatively at the steam rising from his bowl. “Plov.”
She looked from the bread to the bowls filled with plov, a Russian dish made of rice, lamb, and raisins. “Now that it’s on the table, it looks too simple. I should have made something nicer.”
Despite her earlier assessment of him, Lyonya was clearly a man of expensive tastes. He’d hid it well all those years as a soldier, then as a brigadier, but one had only to look around the apartment to see that he was a man of refinement.
He looked at her, his eyes bright in spite of the dim lighting. “This is perfect. I haven’t had homemade plov in years, maybe a decade or more. It’s Russian comfort food. My mother used to make it when I was a boy.”
“Oh, I don’t know if it will hold up to your mother’s…”
“Nonsense,” he said curtly. “If the smell is any indication, it’s going to be the best meal I’ve had in a long time.”
It was such a generous thing to say that she was momentarily speechless. Was this another side of her husband, one he’d tucked away because they hadn’t been well acquainted?
Close enough to gain knowledge, close enough to influence. Not to trust.
She took a deep breath and picked up her spoon. This was all part of the game. She didn’t understand Lyonya’s moves any more than he understood the ones she was making in the secrecy of her own heart and mind.
And really, it didn’t matter. There was only one thing that did, one thing she had to remember above all others, and that was that she couldn’t afford to think of him as an ally.
Now or ever.
