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“It is.” Ezra’s tone was serious. “I wouldn’t lie to you.” His words felt loaded, and as he looked at me with eyes that were as blue as the sky, I couldn’t help but feel the weight of what he was saying.
“If we are going to do this,” I said, ignoring the bile in my throat, “don’t ever lie to me.” It was a dealbreaker. My entire life the men around me had kept things from me. My father, Nikolai, all of them. In the Bratva, men were superior. I hadn’t known any better until it was too late. “Whether things are good or bad, you need to be upfront with me, or I’m out.”
I ignored the fact that I was keeping something huge from him.
Ezra reached out and took my hand in his. For a moment, I thought about snatching it away. It had been a long time since I had been around a man like this, and I had to remind myself that it was normal.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” he told me. “We are partners in this.”
I looked at him trying my best to gauge if he was telling me the truth. I’d never been a great judge of men, and I prayed that I wasn’t making a mistake.
“My favorite food is French fries,” I told him, pulling my hands out from under his, and placed it back in my lap.
Ezra smiled at me. “French fries aren’t a meal.”
I laughed. “Well, neither is mac and cheese. It’s a side.”
“I guess you are right,” he said. Ezra leaned back in his chair. He’d been tense when I first showed up. I was just starting to see that now that he was relaxing. Seeing his worry made me feel better. Ezra wasn’t completely insane. He knew that what he was proposing was insane.
“What do you want to be when you grew up?” Ezra asked.
The question took me aback. No one had ever asked me what I’d wanted to be. When I was a girl, my father made it clear that I was supposed to marry and raise a bunch of Bratva boys. It wasn’t until I was away from the Bratva that I even considered getting a job, and even then, it had been about survival. “Honestly,” I said, “I don’t know that I was ever in a position to dream that way.”
It was the most vulnerable thing I could have said, but it was the truth. Of course, Ezra probably thought that it was because I’d grown up poor, and not because I’d grown up in the Bratva.
“What about you? Did you always want to be a lawyer?”
Ezra smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in it. I suspected that that question made him think about his father. “I did. The law always fascinated me.”
“I’m not surprised. You know it well.” That was both a compliment and a dig. Despite what Ezra told me about us being partners in all this, I couldn’t help but feel that he was full of shit. He had a vested interest in making sure that I stuck around. I had to remind myself of that whenever I felt myself slipping into the charade that we were about to create.
“Why aren’t you with someone?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“What?”
I sighed. My cheeks were heating up as I thought about the question. It had been one that I’d grappled with last night. “Why me?” I asked once more. “Why not an old girlfriend or someone you already know?”
“I told you…”
“You gave me a half-assed answer about me being perfect,” I told him interrupting. “If you are expecting perfection, you are going to be sorely mistaken.”
I worried that Ezra was going to be sorely disappointed when he realized that I wasn’t the girl he wanted or needed.
“I need to appear more approachable,” Ezra said.
I raised a brow. “What does that have to do with me?” I asked.
He took a deep breath before he spoke. “Well,” he trailed off. It was almost as though he were searching for the words to say.
“Just spit it out,” I told him. “I’m tougher than I look.” It was what I reminded myself whenever things got really bad. I’d survived the worst thing a person could, and I’d come out the other end. Hell, I did better than Nikolai, who was currently rotting away in a prison.
“A lot of the women who I’ve been attached to in the past, especially in a long-term sense, are very…” he trailed off once more, and I waited for him to finish. “Polished.”
“Polished?”
Ezra tapped his fingers on the wood table, and I noticed that as another nervous tick of his.
“Do you mean to say that they have money?” I asked. I nearly laughed at the look on his face. The irony was hysterical. I didn’t know what women he’d been with, but I doubted that they had more money than I’d grown up with.
