Page 93 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

I pull my hand back. “Both of you wait until he stops bleeding through his bandages before you start this,” I say, and it silences the pair of them for all of three seconds.

“Then it is a fair competition,” Maksim says with a cocky, smug-ass smirk. “You have not chosen. So I get the same shot he does.”

I rub my temples, one step away from combusting. “Fine, whatever you want to call it,” I say.

“I didn’t agree to a competition,” Lev says, and the two of them trade a fast, crackling round of low barbs over the bed.

“Everyone out except the patient,” I say. “Now.”

Yuri holds the door open, and Maksim glares at his brother the whole way through it before he leaves in a huff. The room empties.

I don’t understand how foolish the word whatever was until a week later, when the competition truly begins, and there’s no escaping this.

Maksim sends a bouquet of plump red roses so large it takes two men to carry it, with a card inviting me to dinner. The card announces, in his slanted, careless scrawl, day one of fair competition.

An hour later an asymmetric wall of roses and white tulips arrives from Lev, so enormous it will not fit in the elevator, and four of his men have to take the frame apart to get it through my door. His card, in that severe, upright handwriting of his, reads only, don’t say yes to him.

I call him. In the background I can hear Yuri reporting something in a low voice.

“Do you like it?” Lev asks.

“It is blocking the fire exit,” I say. “Are you actually comparing flower sizes with your brother right now?”

“Mine is bigger,” he says, perfectly calm. My mouth parts, and I hear the faint scratch of a smile in his voice that he would never let me see on his face. My mind goes straight to other things of his, thick and heavy against his thigh, and I shove the thought away.

I pinch the bridge of my nose while Yuri coughs somewhere behind him. “Effort and change don’t mean this,” I say.

“Mmm. You don’t like flowers?” he asks.

“You missed the entire point,” I say.

“I’m still learning,” he says, and his learning, expensive and absurd as it is, stops the rest of the lecture in my throat.

Days later Maksim sends a delicate necklace and a dress cut in exactly my size, which unsettles me, because it means he asked someone my measurements, and I wonder if he pictured how hot I would look in it. I’m already rehearsing how to decline it when Lev’s people arrive with a transfer agreement made out in my name. He has bought me the entire boutique the dress came from, storefront and stock and staff, the whole thing signed over as though a shop were a bunch of flowers.

The store counts as change, technically, and still, it leaves me completely untouched. So, I go to the company to find him, preoccupied the whole ride with what I will say.

I walk into his office unannounced, and he sets his documents down the moment he sees me. He is sprawled out in that chair in a dark shirt with the collar open, the gauze still bulking high on his chest under it, and he looks tired in a way he never lets anyone see. He doesn’t question why I’m there, and he doesn’t try to slow me down.

“Take the store back,” I say.

“You don’t want to run it?” he asks.

“I don’t like being treated like an acquisition on your books,” I say. “You cannot buy your way back into my good graces one storefront at a time.”

“You are not a project of mine,” he says.

“Then stop courting me like a merger,” I say.

“I will sell it,” he says.

All the anger I walked in carrying has nowhere left to land. “It is that simple?” I ask, the question popping out of me before I can stop it.

“You told me not to decide things for you,” he says reassuringly. “You don’t want the store, so I will handle getting rid of it.”

“You could have just asked me what I actually like,” I say.

“I can ask you now,” he offers.