Chapter 5

Chapter 5Olivia“You done with lunch, sweetie?” I looked across the little cafe table at Michael’s plate, which was bare except for the remnants of his demolished child-sized burger and apple slices. He was eyeing my fries speculatively as I smiled at him.“I want some,” he insisted.“What do you say?” I said, raising my eyebrow at him.“Please.”I gave him a small handful. “Don’t eat too quickly, you’ll get a tummy ache.”He pouted, but munched his way through them while I finished my own lunch. Michael’s appetite was huge, but he wasn’t fat at all. He burned it all off running around. He was lean, quick, and brilliant-eyed, just like his father.Life came at you fast, with plenty of twists you weren’t expecting. I had always lived with this motto in mind, understanding that nothing in the world was fully predictable. Especially when other people were involved.Four years ago, I had spent a wild night with a Russian mobster named Viktor. A man who, God willing, I would never meet again. But he had left me with something unexpected, a gift, even if I had panicked for a while when I had found out.Michael had turned three a little over three months ago. He was a smart, healthy, active kid who had no idea who his father was. Luis, my friend Anna’s brother, was the closest thing he had to a father figure, and he was really more of an unofficial Uncle. After I had spent practically half my childhood with him and Anna, he and his sister treated me like family and took to Michael in the same way. And well, let’s face it, Michael was pretty much the cutest three year old in the existence of all humanity, so how could anyone notfall in love with him?But Luis was always so busy with work, that his visits with my son weren’t near as much as I knew Michael needed.I worried now that as he was getting older, really taking in the world around him, that he would need a more stable father figure in his life, and the thought often riddled me with guilt.“I want to see Auntie Anna later,” Michael said once he’d inhaled the last fry.“Tomorrow, honey, she’s busy today.” Anna was Michael’s godmother, and the only family he knew besides Luis and myself. She worked from home and babysat him half the time. He liked her better than daycare, though the only friend he could visit with at Anna’s house was her dog, Pookie, and now her newborn little girl.I had discovered I was pregnant about a month after my commission from the McDonough auctions had come through and changed my life. There was really nothing else to do that felt right besides seeing it through. I was making enough money to rent a place for myself, and the lack of roommates definitely helped the situation. But even though the single mom thing hadn’t been in my plans, I wasn’t going to chicken out.Michael had shown up a few weeks early, but had still been strong and robust, yelling his head off practically from the moment of birth and wiggling all over even when he was nursing. He had spent his first year dealing with skin allergies and ear infections, colic, and outgrowing clothes faster than I could buy them. Now, he was growing into this energetic, alarmingly quick little guy whom I had to keep my eye on at all times.I finished my sandwich and caught his little fingers reaching for my box of fries again. “Hey. Let me have some too.”He grinned a little. “I like them.”“I know you do, but your tummy isn’t big enough for much more. Remember what happened in the car yesterday?”His smile faded a little. Carsickness and an overfull tummy had not made for a good time for either of us. Or for my new Prius’s upholstery. “I’ll eat slow,” he promised.I sighed and handed him one more long fry, which he did manage to eat more slowly this time. I didn’t mind the wild ride of being a single mom. But it was always strange, thinking where my son had come from, and trying to figure out what I would tell him about his father when he finally asked.After lunch, we walked back to the auction house, where Anna would pick him up in about an hour. The auction house didn’t mind if Michael visited, as long as he kept quiet and there wasn’t an actual auction being held, so he usually spent a few hours around lunchtime with me before I dropped him back at whoever was looking after him that day.“I wish Auntie Anna could come with us for lunch more,” my son chirped on the way back. He had my thumb in his usual death-grip, though he hadn’t needed me to help him keep his balance walking in a while.“Me too, but her daughter’s too young to come out with her to lunch yet. They’ll be able to join us in a few more months.” Anna’s little one, Gina, was still absolutely tiny, and had been even more of a preemie than Michael. With Anna’s husband off on a tour of duty, it fell on Anna to handle all the parenting.“She should leave Gina home. All she ever does is sleep,” he grumbled. “Stupid baby.”“Hey, now, you were that little not that long ago. And I had to watch you all the time. Even more than now.”He blinked up at me. “I don’t remember. Are you sure?”“Oh yeah,” I chuckled. “I remember all of it.” The health scares, the lost sleep, the cluster-feeding. Finding out what nipple balm was used for. And, of course, roughly a million dirty diapers a week to deal with.Motherhood wasn’t always easy, especially once Michael got into the tantrum stage. Luckily, he was starting to grow out of that now, and I only had to rarely deal with a meltdown. He wasn’t a bad kid, but sometimes his emotions and his appetite were just too big for him to deal with. But the thing was, he was also clever, with a mischievous streak.I’d done my best not to spoil him, but I was always uncertain. I had grown up without a proper family, aside from when Anna and Luis’s dad had taken me in all those years ago. I had no mother figure to use as my example. Only what I had missed and longed for, all those uncomfortable nights on a group home bunk.It would have been a miserable time if not for Anna and Luis, the inseparable siblings who were neighbors to the group home along with their eccentric, often-absent father. We had bonded for life during those days, so close that I’d ended up spending more time with them than in the group home. I remembered getting a lot of odd looks from the rest of her Puerto Rican family. I was a pale, freckly redhead and stood out like a sore thumb among them. But eventually, my story had made the rounds among them, and the odd looks had ceased, replaced only sometimes by pity.“I want a sister,” Michael said suddenly, and I stopped dead in the flow of the crowd and blinked down at him.“Uh…why?”He flashed a grin. “I just want one. Can I have a sister?”“I thought you didn’t like little girls.” I forced myself to start walking again, the confusing shock making my heart beat fast.“No, I just don’t like Gina, she’s noisy and Auntie Anna is always tired. But I want a sister.”“And Gina doesn’t count?” I teased gently as we drew near the auction house.“No, she doesn’t! She’s my cousin. Auntie babies are cousins. You said!”I winced. I had no older relatives to nag me about having more babies, but now Michael was starting up. At three. “Maybe someday,” I reassured him. “I need to find someone to be her daddy first.”“And mine?”You have a daddy, I wanted to say. He just has a job so scary that I can’t have him around.“We’ll see, sweetheart.”Sometimes I still dreamed of Viktor—his eyes, his smile, that silky voice, and most of all, that one wild night we’d had together. I hadn’t been on more than a few dates since then. I used raising Michael and having a busy job as my excuse, but the truth was, Viktor had ruined me for other men.It wasn’t just the fear that the next guy I went to bed with might turn out to be a criminal too. Nobody I had met since then had made my body light up like that. Nobody since had intrigued me, mentally and physically, so quickly after meeting them. And nobody but him had left me craving him, years afterward—even as I prayed I never saw him again.Plus, nobody else was my boy’s father. It felt… It felt odd, when I went out with other men. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was wrong, no matter how much I tried.Was I ever going to meet anyone who turned me on like that, who wasn’t a career criminal? What the hell did it say about my taste in men that a damn Russian mobster was the one who had really done it for me?When we finally stepped out of the crowd into the cool, quiet depths of the auction house, I let out a sigh of relief so intense that Marcie, our receptionist, looked up from her desk and chuckled.“Hey, Marcie. Any messages for me?” I asked as I let Michael go over to her for a hug.She got out of her seat to give him a squeeze, then settled back in with a bemused smile that left me wondering what was up. “Yeah, actually. We had a guy come in looking for you. He’s setting up an auction for his uncle’s estate and insisted you be the one to handle it.”“All right.” I took the sticky note with his phone number on it and glanced at it. I frowned. The name on it was Viktor Ivanov.“Interesting guy,” she went on, as I blinked down at the note. “Polite, suave, kinda hot too, if you like Russians.” Marcie was off the market, and her tastes were totally different, her husband was a giant Black man who looked more like a quarterback than a pediatrician.I was shaking a little, but struggled to keep my voice steady. “Did he have green eyes?”“Yeah, really bright ones, kind of like Michael’s. Why, do you know him?” Her soft brown eyes swept from Michael to me and back again. “Is he bad news? You look a little nervous.”“No, he’s fine. He’s just an acquaintance I have to have an…awkward talk with.” To say the least.I hoped I could trust him not to bring any bad news into the auction house. And maybe he wouldn’t. The whole thing could just be business, instead of him seeking me out after four years.But somehow, I didn’t think so.