Page 206 of Toxic Temptation
“Come on!” Luka grabs my hand, tugging me toward the door. “I want to show you before I forget how to do it.”
As we head outside, I catch Annabelle’s voice behind me. She’s quiet, but it floats to me as if it’s made for my ears alone. “She’s worth fighting for, you know.”
I turn back to find her watching us through the open window, her eyes soft with something that might be hope.
“I know,” I tell her. “I know.”
71
VESPER
The grilled cheese sandwich sits in my hands, a love letter of lactose and rye. Caramelized onions peek out from between perfectly golden bread, and there’s a small container of pickles nestled beside it—the good kind, the dill spears I mentioned liking exactly once, in passing, three weeks ago.
“You brought me lunch.” I look up at Kovan. “You. Brought. Me. Lunch…?”
Kovan leans against the doorframe of the break room. Six-foot-four, Russian, beautiful, mystifying. He looks completely out of place among the institutional beige walls and flickering fluorescent lights of the hospital, but he doesn’t seem to care. I, for one, could get used to seeing him here more often.
Especially when he comes to feed me.
“You’ve been working for eighteen hours,” he says simply. “In case you lost track. And you’ve got at least six more to go. So, yes, I brought you lunch. God knows you need it.”
I want to argue, but we both know he’s right. The pediatric ward has been absolutely crushed since yesterday morning. It’s like every person under eighteen in the whole damn city decided to get sick or injured at once.
But I can’t help being feisty with him. It’s just an instinct. “Who says I haven’t eaten already?”
“Oh, I bet you have,” Kovan agrees, his mouth quirking at the corner. “One piece of burnt toast and ten cups of coffee. Am I wrong?”
I blush. “In my defense, they were small cups of coffee.”
“How many ‘small cups’?”
“It might’ve been ten. Could’ve been nine or eleven. It’s not like anyone was counting.”
He shakes his head as he laughs. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”
I unwrap the sandwich and take a bite. The flavors explode across my tongue—sharp cheddar, sweet onions, butter-crisp bread. It’s perfect. Of course it’s perfect. Kovan doesn’t do anything halfway.
I swallow and look up at him. “Who did you kill to get this?”
“Made it myself, actually.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Youmade this?”
“Don’t sound so shocked. I can do more than intimidate people and look pretty.”
He can certainly do those two things as well as anyone, though. Proof is in the pudding—the nurses at the station behind usare practically drooling. I catch sight of Rebecca from pediatric oncology craning her neck to get a better look, and Sandra from the NICU has abandoned all pretense of working in favor of gawking openly.
I can’t blame them. Kovan Krayev in a hospital corridor is like a Ferrari parked at a bus stop. It’d take a blind woman to ignore him.
“You’re causing quite a stir,” I murmur, nodding toward the growing audience.
He follows my gaze and shrugs. “Let them talk.”
There’s something possessive in the way he says it, something that makes my stomach flip. Like he wants them to know exactly who he belongs to.
I close the lunch container and stand. “I only have thirty minutes before my next surgery.”
“Then eat. You need?—”
