Page 48 of Babies for the Boss
She is my wife. I’m not sure I will stop finding that remarkable. I’m not sure I want to.
The evening was more than I planned for, which is not something I say often, because I plan thoroughly, and the gap between plan and reality in my experience is usually a problem to be managed rather than a gift to be received. But there were moments tonight that existed entirely outside of strategy. Moments that were simply what they were, unmediated and complete.
Carrie Ann stayed for dinner, which I arranged because I know what her best friend means to Molly. Truth is, I like her too. She’s small and bright and possessed of a laugh that fills rooms, and she watched me across the dinner table with those sharp green eyes with the candid assessment of a woman deciding what she thinks of the man her best friend has married. I returned the assessment without disguising it, because I respect directness even when it’s aimed at me, and by the end of the evening, I think I earned her respect, even in all the chaos.
When Molly went to the bathroom, and Vet was preoccupied by the window, Carrie Ann came to me and quietly said through her sweet smile, “I know you’re some big, scary, powerful man, Pavel. I’m sure you have enough money to make any problem disappear with the snap of your fingers, and I respect that you’ll use those powers for Molly.”
“Without hesitation.”
Then she lowered her voice further and smiled wider. “But if you use themagainstMolly in any way whatsoever, I’ll kill you. Not hypothetically, not in some metaphorical way, and I’m not exaggerating. Understand that you’d never see it comin’.”
“I am unaccustomed to threats being quite so direct?—”
“Good. Because my attack would not be. You see, I’m a cook. And I have an extensive garden with all sorts of poisonous plants. Not to mention that I’m a sharpshooter. That’s what growing up in the country does to a girl, Pavel. Or at least, what it did to me. Not Molly—she’s always had her eyes on the city, and she stayed out of all that. But I didn’t. So, be a good boy and treat her right.” She grinned at me. “Or else.” Then she went back to her seat as Molly re-entered the room.
It gives me great comfort to know I’m not the only person who will protect Molly out of love.
Molly glowed through the ceremony and the dinner. With Carrie Ann by her side, she was more herself than she is even in the quiet moments we have carved out in the past months. She shared an incident from third grade that made Carrie Ann cry with laughter, while I watched them from my side of the table, feeling like a man outside a warm room looking through glass, longing to be inside. I want that with Molly. A shared history, stories we can laugh about. The warmth of camaraderie built on love.
Now she sleeps, and I stand at the window, and I think about Igor’s face in the forty minutes before the ceremony.
He found me in the anteroom off the main corridor, and his expression was the one that means he has something I will not want to hear and has decided that delivering it cannot wait. He was right on both accounts.
Fedor has someone inside my organization.
A credible report came from a source Igor trusts, which means I trust it. Such a thing is impossible and all too obvious. Kamila’s sudden unavailability. The timing of Snigir’s pointed knowledge.The speed at which Fedor has been closing routes and mapping vulnerabilities. These things have had the quality of inside knowledge.
Which means a honeymoon is not possible.
Instead, Southampton.
The house there is my real home in the way that the penthouse is not—the penthouse is a position, a statement, a place from which I conduct the business of being what I am. The house in Southampton is the place I go when I want to be a person rather than a function, which is not often enough and has become less often as the years have accumulated.
It’s large and old and set back from the water behind an old tree line that provides the kind of natural privacy that money can approximate but not replicate. More than that, it is safe.
“What—”
I spin and lunge toward the voice in the shadows, only to see the moonlight fall on Molly’s pretty face half a breath later. I freeze midair, hoping not to scare her, before I drop my fist. “Sorry. I am?—”
“Used to living alone,” she says knowingly as she comes to me. She wears a dark blue silken robe and little else—I catch a sliver of cleavage as she comes in for a hug. “Sorry, I scared you.”
“That is my fault. I should have known it would be you.”
“How come you’re up so late?”
“Thinking. Why are you?”
She smiles up at me. “I came to find my husband.”
Those words do something to me, something primal I don’t have an explanation for. It has been only hours, but the word feels… like it has always belonged to me. The same way Molly always has felt in my heart.
“Well, wife. What did you want to find your husband for?”
“This.” She stands on her toes to lean up and kiss me. “And this.” Her hand scoots from my chest to my suddenly hardening cock over my lounge pants.
“Is that right?”
“Mm-hmm.” She grips the elastic waistband and yanks it down, springing my cock out. “Perfect.”
