Maxim went to sit next to her on the couch, crossing his legs and stretching one large arm across the back of the cushions. Dora grinned at the move, rearranging herself so she faced him.
Danil gritted his teeth from the doorway.
“There is no reason to fear bear,” Maxim said, leaning forward to flick an imaginary speck off of Dora’s coat. Her eyes followed his hand with a little, private smile. Danil remembered seeing her pull the same move with Rickford earlier that afternoon. “A bear does not bother you if you do not bother the bear.”
“Brothers?” Dora guessed, asking Danil.
He nodded. “My older brothers, Maxim, and Emin,” he pointed behind him. “And Anton.”
“You’re the baby?” Dora asked, lightly fluttering her eyes.
He heard Anton’s smirking laugh from behind him and ruthlessly ignored it.
“Da,” Danil answered.
Maxim narrowed his eyes at Danil. It was unusual for his lawyerly brother to answer anyone in Belarusian, not when he’d worked so hard to have nearly effortless English. It meant that his brother did not trust this woman. Maxim turned his eyes back to the fragrant little bird sitting next to him on the couch. He cocked his head to one side. She didn’t look suspicious. She looked beautiful. And stylish.
“You are from New York?” Maxim asked Dora, not realizing that he’d interrupted the flow of conversation.
“How’d you guess?” she asked, fluttering her eyes at Maxim in a way he was sure she’d practiced, but he didn’t care. It was working.
Maxim plucked at her coat. “You are stylish and good-looking. Like model. From New York.”
An appreciative smile danced over Dora’s face. Danil noted that she didn’t seem at all flustered by the brazenness of his brother’s compliment. Which must mean that she was used to it. “It’s the haircut,” she replied to Maxim.
Danil watched as Dora turned back to Ilya. She was obviously here for some specific piece of information and she’d realized who she was going to get that information from. Not from scowling Danil, or flirtatious Maxim. She was going to get it from wrinkled, grinning Ilya, thrilled to be speaking to a woman with a model’s haircut.
“Do the bears ever come into people’s backyards?” she asked Ilya. “I’m not normally this scared, it’s just that I heard some rumors from people in the neighborhood.”
“What rumors?” Ilya asked in a soothing voice, obviously wanting to quell the worries of a sweet young woman.
A victorious look swept quickly over Dora’s face. Danil was certain that no one else had noticed it. She knew she’d hit pay dirt in Ilya. Sweet young woman, his ass.
“I’ve heard that there is one bear in particular that’s been spotted in the woods behind the neighborhood. It has scars, and a shock of white hair.”
If Dora noticed the change of tension in the room, she didn’t mention it, her eyes flicking from one brother to the next.
But Danil felt it like a fishing wire pulled tight between the hearts of him and all his brothers. He felt, rather than heard, Anton slip away back down the hall. A moment later the back door slammed and he knew his brother had disappeared into the night. Moments later, Emin wordlessly followed. Even after all these years, they didn’t like for Anton to be alone in moments like this.
Ilya’s smile had saddened. And Danil knew that this was when he had to be the one to protect his family. They were all too sweet. Sometimes Danil had to be the asshole to make sure they were safe. That they were making the right decisions for themselves.
He crossed the room in two strides. He held his hand out to Dora. “Ms. Katsaros,” he said in a tone just teetering on the edge between icily polite and flat out rude.
“Danil!” his mother scolded him from the doorway of the living room, where she’d just entered, drying her hands on a rag. She didn’t like to see him being so abrupt with a visitor. But Danil didn’t care; let her scold him later.
Dora’s eyes narrowed, but she obviously knew that her welcome had officially been worn out. She eyed Danil’s hand for just the breath of a moment, before she wiped the frustration from her expression and gave him a sweet little smile. She rose, taking Danil’s hand as if he were offering it kindly, not as a way of pulling her out of the room.
Both of them froze at the first contact. Something hot and zinging burst between their palms like a child’s Technicolor bubble. Danil’s chest contracted painfully, but it was her breath that whooshed out, between her teeth. She cut it off mid-exhale and covered the noise with a little cough, a bright smile.