Maxim (Carolina Reapers 10)

“I’m always fucking nice.”

Evie, Mila’s best friend, came around the corner, her blonde curls bobbing around the box she carried. The box that was blocking her eyesight.

I moved quickly, taking the box from her hands and setting it on the counter.

“Maxim!” Evie sucked in a breath and then her face flushed the color of a tomato. “You’re home!”

“Why does everyone keep saying that like it’s a surprise?”

Evie swallowed and glanced at Mila, her bright green eyes flying wide. Her eyes had always been a showstopper for me—the kind of green that sucked the breath out of my lungs if I looked too long…not that I noticed my sister’s friends. That was a line I never crossed, and while Evie was a beautiful girl who was curved in all the right places, even if she hid her figure behind giant sweatshirts, I’d never even put my toe over the Mila’s-friend line.

Both women were silent, and I glanced into the box. It was all…food. Cereal and granola bars and Pop-Tarts—the kind of processed shit I never ate. “What the—”

Then I looked past Mila and Evie and saw three suitcases lined up in the hallway and a stack of boxes next to them.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” Evie whispered to Mila.

My gaze swung to my sister’s. “What the hell is going on?”

2

EVIE

The minute I stepped inside Maxim’s house, I was immediately hit with all things him—his intoxicating scent of pine smoke and larkspur hung in the air, filling my head with dizzying fantasies I’d entertained since he helped us move into our dorms our freshman year at Dartmouth.

“If I pull one more box of shoes out of the moving truck, I swear to God, Mila, I’m going to throttle you with one of them,” a deeply masculine voice said just as our dorm room door flung open.

The breath caught in my lungs as a tall, muscled male hugged a large moving box against his chest.

No way. That’s not who I think it is.

“You can’t kill me, Maxim,” Mila said from where she was still organizing her almost non-existent closet space. She spun to face him. “Then you’d have no one left in our family you actually like.”

Something intense and almost painful flashed in his eyes, but it was gone in a blink. He sat the box down on the floor next to the one Mila had brought up. “You’re not wrong,” he said, shaking his head as he offered her the barest hint of a smile. “But don’t push me.”

Mila laughed, returning to her work on the closet.

I’d known Mila since kindergarten, so I knew her family fairly well. They were always traveling and most of the time they were spread across the world at any given time, but I’d met her older brother Maxim more than a few times. I remembered him as a quiet kid who never stopped for a minute to relax or have fun. He was always entirely too focused on hockey, like his dad.

But this man…he was not the broody young boy I remembered. How long had it been since I’d actually seen him? Heard his voice? Six years?

He turned to face me, his eyes widening as if he’d just realized there was someone else in the room, and I swear my heart stopped beating for a few breaths.

God, his eyes.

They were the richest shade of cobalt I’d ever seen, framed with thick lashes, and a strong jaw finished what I quickly decided was the most gorgeous face on planet. He’d grown out of the lanky boy with a scowl and into a fully formed Greek god.

“Who is this?” he asked, glancing from me to Mila.

“No one,” I said faster than I could catch my breath. I hurried to turn around and busy myself with something, anything to stop gawking at him like I was a love-struck girl.

“Omigod Maxim stop,” Mila chided him as she crossed the room and flung her arm around my shoulders. “You’ve known Evie as long as I have.”

Heat rushed to my cheeks and I pushed my glasses up my nose, suddenly finding the floor very, very interesting. I mean, how much more mortification could I possibly take? Maxim didn’t even recognize me. Not that we’d ever been close, but I’d sat at his family dinner table more than a hundred times over the last seventeen years.

“Evie,” he said, drawing out my name as he nodded. Warm chills burst along my spine, butterflies flapping wildly in my stomach.

No one, and I mean no one, had ever said my name like that. Like he was testing it out on his tongue and wrapping nothing but primal dominance around it. But that was just his voice, and from the look of him, that was just Maxim. The determined boy was long gone, and now nothing remained but a grown-ass man with a hell of a lot of muscle and enough anger in his eyes to set our dorm room on fire. Anger that burned blue behind the mask of indifference he wore.