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I laugh. “I have no interest in your sister.” I grab another cookie and check the time.
He studies me a moment. “You found a woman already.” He grins. “You’ve been here two days and already have a bedmate.”
I don’t like the way he says it. True, when I come to the city, I typically busy myself with a woman or two between jobs and family obligations, but it’s somewhat different with Avery.
“Where’d you find this one? A club, or are you playing around with a single mother in need of solid fucking?”
“Avery is not a single mother.” I find myself hardening my tone. “I needed to keep her safe for a few minutes while my cousins had a conversation with someone. That’s all.” At least, that’s all it would have been if I’d left it at that.
He raises his brow. “Avery?”
I hate the way her name sounds on his lips.
“Leave it alone, Stepan.” I grab another cookie. “Have you told Arman or Nikolai you’re in town?”
“Not yet. I heard Arman has married.” He raises both brows. “To Ivan’s daughter? That has to be pissing off his father.”
“I’m not up to date on everything happening with that, but I don’t think Igor is aware yet. He’s not in town.” I grab a small box from beneath the counter and unfold it.
“What are you doing?” Stepan watches me.
“I’m bringing home cookies.” Avery will like these, I think. I fill the box with a variety of cookies, but go heavy on my favorites. “Here.” I toss a fifty onto the counter. “Put that in the register.”
“She won’t mind you taking some.”
“I mind. This is her business. She deserves to be paid.” I find some tape and secure the box.
“I’ll call Nikolai today. If Arman is newly married, he’ll be busy with his bride.”
“And you? When will you finally get married and give your mama that grandbaby she wants so badly?” The last time I had dinner with him and his mother, she spoke at great length of her many friends who were becoming babushkas.
He grimaced. “Don’t you start too. I hear enough of it when I get home to visit her. Since my father died, she has been on the warpath to get me married and thrown headfirst into fatherhood.”
“Maybe Stepania will find someone soon, and then she can have lots of babies for your mother to fawn over.” It’s too easy to poke his temper.
“She doesn’t need a husband. She’s too young.”
“Ah, better to have lots of boyfriends. She is an American woman now, Stepan. She is fierce and independent. She may never have a husband, just a string of men that she keeps around to satisfy her.”
His face is nearly as red as the cherry filling on the Danishes. “If we weren’t in her bakery, I’d shoot you for saying such things.”
I laugh. “You realize at some point your sister will find a man that wants to marry her, yes?”
“Don’t you have a man to hunt down? A woman to seduce? Something that involves you leaving?” He snatches up the fifty from the counter and hits the register buttons until the drawer pops open and he throws the bill inside and slams the drawer.
“I’m glad I was never given a little sister.” I pick up my box of cookies and head to the door.
“Maybe you’d be less inclined to take a different woman to your bed every night if you did.” I’m sure he’s trying to insult me, but it bounces right off.
“My bed is no fuller than yours,” I shoot back as I reach for the door. Although, until this moment, I never thought much about it. Having different women in my bed every night, never having the same woman in my life for longer than a few nights of fucking—it never struck me as anything other than normal. Exactly as I wanted it to be.
But now, I’m carrying a box of cookies to a woman’s apartment because I think when she tries one, it will make her smile.
Avery
“These are delicious!”I shove a third cookie in my mouth as Luka drives us to his penthouse on the opposite side of the city. “Where did you get these again?” I flip down the lid on the box to find the bakery name.
“A friend owns it,” he says casually while turning southbound on the FDR.
