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Emerson was short-circuiting right in front of my eyes. Before I could calmly continue to tell her just how serious the situation with Arkadi was, she looked around wildly, like she might actually grab one of the copper pots and smash me in the head with it. Instead, she jumped up, knocking her chair over, and bolted through one of the side doors. It led down a short hallway to an adjoining dining room, which was a dead end, so I only sighed and took another sip of my coffee.

A few seconds later, she hadn’t returned, either to let me finish or try another escape route, so I got up and went to see what she was up to in the dining room. As I was about to enter, an obnoxious siren went off, and I picked up the pace to find she’d gotten the window open and set off the alarm system.

One lithe leg was already flung over the window sill, but I got my hands on her shoulders and pulled her back, slamming the window down to get the incessant siren to shut off. A guard appeared outside, and I gave him the signal that it was a false alarm. Emerson was thrashing like a wildcat, but I managed to turn her around, so she caught sight of him.

“You wouldn’t have made it five feet outside,” I told her. “And there are rose bushes outside, so you would have just scratched yourself up for nothing.”

She went limp in my arms. “Okay, I get it. You can let me go.”

Like a fool, I did. She ducked under my arm and made another break for it, catching her toe on one of the dining chairs. I managed to grab her before she face-planted on the parquet hardwood and hauled her to the corner fireplace. Caging her in with my body, I rested my hands on the mantle behind her, trying to ignore her string of bizarrely creative curses.

“You’re a spitfire,” I said, hoping I didn’t give her the idea of actually spitting in my face. “That’s an impressive vocabulary. I’ll be sure to teach you some Russian swear words to add to it once you run out.”

That got her to smash her full lips together and glare at me with her emerald green eyes, now flashing with rage.

“Are you calm?” I asked when her chest stopped heaving so much.

The top two buttons of her chef coat had come undone, and some enticing cleavage peeked out over the edge of a pink tank top. I kept my eyes up to keep from inciting a new tantrum.

She kicked me in the shin, but it was half-hearted. “How can I be calm?”

“Can you be calm enough to walk by yourself to a comfortable room to sleep, or should I carry you?”

She looked like she was carefully considering this question, but instead of a rational answer, she dropped down and headbutted me in the stomach, reeling back to tumble against the fireplace grate.

“Ouch,” she said, looking offended that she’d hurt herself.

“I mean, it hurt your fist; how was it not going to hurt your head? Come on, Emerson, get some sleep, and we can talk more in the morning.” I couldn’t keep from laughing at her, and the moment of distraction let her slip past me, whizzing back toward the kitchen.

Okay, this was cute and all, adorable, in fact, but enough was enough. I had a lot of shit to get together, and it was clear she was exhausted and frazzled. I caught her before she was at the dining room door and swung her back into my arms. I certainly wasn’t going to complain about the close proximity or her heat melting through our clothes to nearly set me aflame, but she absolutely was.

“Put me down; I can walk,” she said. “I’ll be calm, I promise.”

I breathed in the scent of her hair, a mix of the evening dinner service with a hint of herbal shampoo. The soft strands that had escaped her ponytail in all the ruckus brushed against my cheek, making me tighten my arms around her.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I said. “But I rather enjoy this.”

“Sugar honey iced tea,” she muttered.

“That’s nice,” I told her, glad she was coming around.

“It’s an acronym,” she hissed. “Figure it out.”

It only took me a second to realize she wasn’t coming around at all. “Oh,” I said. “Very creative.”

I made it upstairs, where I put her in the best guest room. As soon as her feet were on the floor, panic really lit up her green eyes, and I blocked the doorway in case she had enough energy left to make another run for it. I was fast running low on fuel. With the mood she was in, there wouldn’t be any explaining or reasoning with her, so I only smiled, ducked into the hall, and slammed the door shut.

Waiting with my hand on the doorknob, I called over one of my security staff, stationing him outside her room. “All night,” I said. “Change shifts if you have to, and tell the perimeter guys to be on alert. I have a lot of faith in her ingenuity.”

“On it, boss,” he said, completely unfazed.

Not because I was in the habit of kidnapping women who worked for me. On the contrary. They were just completely loyal and highly trained for any occurrence. You had to be in the Bratva.

As tired as I was, there was still work to do: find Arkadi and knock some sense into him. My first call was to my brother Ivan, but he wanted nothing to do with it. We were the two youngest brothers, and I felt a bit betrayed that he wasn’t raring for a fight like the old days, before he settled down with his wife, Daria.

“No way in hell,” he said after some futile cajoling. “We’ve worked too hard and too long for this peace, and I like it that way.”

“So you’re getting soft, just like the rest of them,” I said bitterly.

“Looks like it,” he answered, hanging up.

He couldn’t be budged to help me, but speaking to him made me a little more calm, at least enough to stop thinking about bashing Arkadi’s face in. Instead, my thoughts turned to my fiery little chef. She had been foremost in my mind since I hired her, instantly taken by her beauty and determination. From that moment, she was mine and would always be mine, but I hadn’t exactly expected to marry her.

Not so soon, anyway, because I was still working out how to get around my own rules of not dating employees. I was a huge hardass about that because nothing ruined the flow of a kitchen faster than an amazing prep cook getting jealous over a waitress he took out one time flirting with one of the sous chefs.

But here I was trying to throw together an emergency wedding, and there was no way I could fool myself into believing it was solely because of Arkadi’s sudden interest in Emerson.

It seemed like I might be coming down with that pesky virus that had already captured my other brothers. Did I really want to get married? I was the last holdout, since I could hardly count my sister Mila, who was so much younger than us.

Still a little bit older than my own bride-to-be, though. And currently having a pretty shit time of things, which had me veering down a path of worry for my beloved baby sister. Straight out of design school, which was already an odd choice for someone born into the Bratva, Mila had chosen not to go into the family business.

That was all fine and good because our eldest brother Aleks could never say no to her, and our parents had semi-retired back to Russia years ago. Instead of getting a job with an established designer, Mila wanted to go all in on her own boutique. Of course, we all supported her, wanting to do whatever we could to help her succeed, but she wanted to do it on her own, completely legit right out of the gate, and turned down most of our favors.

In the rough financial climate, a brand new upscale boutique with an unknown designer was destined to fail, no matter how hard she worked. When she finally chose to shutter the shop instead of accepting any of our loans, the failure hit her hard.

She was as tough as nails, though, even though Aleks still babied her. His own daughter Nataliye was only a year younger, so it was impossible for him not to think of her in a fatherly way sometimes. What she needed was something to take her mind off things, not coddling.

As much as I still wanted to find Arkadi, there was nothing I could do that night that would take him off his course of threatening Emerson. I understood the tenacity, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. And whether it hindered him or not, my fist was still itching to connect with his face.

Maybe I wasn’t completely sure about marriage, but there was one thing I was deadly certain of. Emerson was mine, and no one was taking her from me. No one was going to harm her. Least of all that degenerate scumbag, Arkadi Mikhailov.

I found my phone and tapped the contact for my baby sister, who needed a distraction as much as I needed to take a shot at my enemy. And she could help me out with some things I had to get for the wedding, as well.

“Hey, Nik, what’s up?” she answered, even though it was close to one in the morning. Her voice had a forced, jolly tone that I could tell was false even if I hadn’t known her from the day she was born.

“Hey, Mila,” I said, grinning from ear to ear at the thought of what lay ahead. “Do you want to go have a little fun?”