“Fine, I’ll meet up with you in a little bit. I promise,” I say. He doesn’t look too confident in me, shaking his head and shoving his hands in his pocket.
“What are you looking at anyway?” he asks, walking over to the wall of screens. “Jakub got you on babysitting duty?”
I can’t tear my gaze away from Mia. She takes her time with the machine, swiveling in her stool, flagging down waitresses and sucking down cocktails like she’s dying of thirst. I don’t like seeing her out there all by herself. Something inside me still wants to protect her after all these years. Guess it’s better than seeing her out there with a man.
“Is that… holy shit…” Fabian mutters. “I knew she was back in Krakow, but I really never thought we were going to run into her.”
“You knew she was back in Krakow?” I ask, clenching my fist by my side. I never spoke much of Mia after I went to the hospital. I kept waiting for her to show up, Lord knows I was in there damn near a year, but she never did. I figured it was for the best. Still, Fabian knew how much I loved that woman.
“It’s called social media, ya geezer. Maybe if you got a smart phone instead of whatever that is you’ve been carrying around for the last fifteen years you’d know she was freshly divorced and living in an apartment in the city with her best friend Janka.”
“You should’ve told me,” I growl.
“Why? Are you gonna do something about it or are you just gonna shut everybody out for another year while you lick your wounds and bark orders from your house?” He pats me on the back with a twisted smirk on his face. I flick him off because I know he’s right. “Go ask her to come to the party tonight. It’s no big deal. There’s gonna be enough people there if things aren’t going good you can just disappear and she won’t even notice.”
I always had a feeling I would run into her again someday, but dragging her to some sex club filled with sleazy strippers my brothers hired to entertain me for my birthday doesn’t exactly seem like the best place to talk about what happened all those years ago.
Then again, maybe it’s exactly what I need to do to make her feel the hurt she made me feel. Make her feel jealousy or rage, let her see what she lost out on when she walked out on me when I was at my worst. How rich and powerful I am. How I own this fucking city.
Too bad Mia was never the type of woman who fell for that.
“You better go get her,” he says with a nod. “Looks like she’s leaving.”
I breathe a sigh of relief as she moves down a couple seats and sits down at another slot machine.
“This is a terrible fucking idea,” I say.
He winks and zips his jacket up. “That’s what birthdays are for.” He slaps me on the back and walks out the door.
4
Mia:
I dig at the bottom of my purse, hoping to find a couple more random crumpled up bills to stuff in the slot machine, doing everything in my power to resist the urge to just pull out my credit card. I probably should’ve just waited in the lobby for Janka to give me the signal, read a magazine or something to pass the time instead of giving in to my addiction.
The cocktail waitress hasn’t come by in awhile, but she’s probably on to the fact that I’m just here for the free drinks. It’s obvious by the crappy tips I’ve been leaving her that I’m no high roller.
I pull out my cellphone, thinking maybe I should text Janka and make sure everything is going alright, and as I go to pull up her name, I feel a hand on my shoulder. I swivel in my stool and maybe it’s the drinks but it takes my brain a minute to process what my eyes are seeing.
He’s much more muscular than I remember, his arms straining up against his tight black t-shirt. His hair is shorter, stylishly trimmed and spiked just a little bit in the front, like he’s going for the just rolled out of bed look but in a sexy way. He has a five o’clock shadow that only enhances the cut of his jaw. Maybe he wasn’t ‘hot’ back when we were eighteen, but he’s definitely a sight to behold now, and yet, everything in me is telling me to run away.
“Serafin?” I whisper, staring into his eyes, trying to contain my shock. I always knew there was a chance I’d run into him when I moved back to Krakow, but the city is so big, and I rarely go anywhere. I didn’t think it would happen so soon.
“It’s been a long time, Mia,” he says. God, his voice is much deeper than I remembered, much richer and sexier.
“Yes.” I am completely at a loss for words. Everything about this man standing in front of me is overwhelming. Feelings from the past start flooding through me like jolts of electricity, from the way he always cared for me and spoiled me, to the fateful night where I watched him get attacked in an alleyway before my eyes, to the day his parents made me sign a piece of paper saying I’d never come within ten yards of him, and I’d never speak of what I witnessed that
