Page 39 of Sexting the Bratva Beast

“No.”

Her one-word answers are already grating on my nerves. “So, why are you here?”

Does she live here? Is she related to Andrej and Leonid? He mentioned a sister, Victoria, but I don’t recall him speaking about Ivana before.

“I wanted to speak to you.”

“Me?” My hand trembles, and it isn’t entirely down to last night’s liquor consumption or the multiple orgasms that I could reactivate with a single touch.

Something about Ivana is making me feel uneasy. The way she watches me without blinking like we’re in a Tim Burton movie. Her sparse responses to my questions. The way she is deliberately withholding information for maximum effect.

“What about? How did you even know that I was here?”

She shrugs. “I know everything about the Ivanov family. It’s my job.”

“You work for Andrej?”

“His brother.” Her eyes flash, and I swear I catch a spark of green from them.

“Okay, so you knew that I was here.” I pause, choosing my words carefully. “I don’t see what business it is of yours.”

“Keeping them safe is my business.”

“You’re a bodyguard?” I fail to smother the shock in my voice, and she knows it.

Her free hand instinctively travels down to her waist, and I fully expect her to pull out a gun and aim it at my head.

“What do you know about them?” she asks. No gun.

Yet.

I don’t want to admit that I know very little. That I don’t even know what line of business they’re in, or how they came to beso wealthy. It wasn’t high on my list of priorities when Andrej entered the hospital room and knocked me out with the weight of his pheromones.

“Precisely,” she says before I can speak. “You have no idea what you’re getting involved in. You have no idea who Andrej Ivanov really is.”

“What I’m getting involved in?” I don’t like where this is going. What has he told her? “I only met him two days ago.”

Less than forty-eight hours of knowing Andrej Ivanov, and it feels like a lifetime.

“Don’t let him worm his way into your life, Cartier.”She knows my name. “Andrej is a dangerous man.”

I’ve heard enough.

I slam my mug of coffee onto the counter, splashing brown liquid across my wrist and the surface.

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with you. I’m not interested in his business affairs or his bodyguards or whatever he does when I’m not with him.”

It’s a blatant lie, and the tremor in my voice is a dead giveaway, but I won’t accept relationship advice from this stranger with green hair and all the warmth of the White Witch fromThe Chronicles of Narnia. Want an iced coffee? Spend some time in Ivana’s company. I don’t even know her last name, and she’s warning me away from the man who has spent the last thirty-six hours mapping my body with his tongue.

I met plenty of abused women when I worked in the shelter in Montenegro. Women who’d experienced, at the hands of men, the kind of abuse that belongs in horror movies. Women fromall backgrounds and walks of life. But the one thing that bound them all was their unflinching support for one another. None of those women would’ve torn down another female, regardless of whether they agreed with their actions or not.

And here’s this woman issuing her warning about Andrej and disguising it as advice.

“He will hurt you.” She’s still fucking talking. “He’s a womanizer. A playboy.”

I throw my hands up in the air and pray that she can’t hear my frantic heartbeat. I refuse to let her know that she’s getting to me.

“I don’t care.” Another lie. My heart already feels like someone is squeezing it until it bursts. “And neither should you. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”