Seduce Me by Jo Leigh Page A

commanding tone were having an effect on him, too. In a way that wasn’t in the same zip code as the friend zone. As the staff retreated, the quiet was like a fresh breeze. Then his grumbling stomach made her smile and he could relax again.
    He poured them each a hefty glass of Shiraz and started filling his plate with one of everything.
    “I know,” she said, lifting her wine. “They’re lunatics. They’re also wonderful, but mostly they’re lunatics.”
    “The holidays must be interesting.”
    “You have no idea.”
    He lifted his own glass but he held off drinking as Natalie leaned in. “To be honest, I don’t come here all that often. I think I scare them.”
    “Hell, you scared me. You probably didn’t notice, but you could have heard a toothache in this place. Impressive.”
    She leaned back, took a sip and traded her glass for a fork. “Thank you. Now. Dinner. I’ll explain the dishes, and we can enjoy what’s left of our time together.”
    He began with the pierogi, which he’d had before, although these were much better. Or maybe it was the company that made them taste so good. She explained about the buckwheat groat that were at the heart of the kasha, and varnishkes turned out to be another word for bow-tie pasta.
    Just as he’d dug in to the kasha, Ivan hurried out of the kitchen, checking behind him before he arrived at the table with two small bowls of condiments. “My idiot brother-in-law forgot these. And listen,” he said, lowering his voice as he spoke directly to Max, “my cousin Joey just passed the bar with a very high mark. He’s going to represent me in this lawsuit, so you might as well not take the case. It would be a waste of your time.”
    “Ivan.” Natalie was getting that look again. He held up both hands and backed away, and Max didn’t blame him.
    “My apologies,” she said.
    “Joey? That doesn’t sound like a very Ukrainian name.”
    “When I said extended family, I meant it. I’ve got cousins and second cousins and cousins twice removed. Joey’s one of the good ones, though. I hope he doesn’t get caught up in all this mess.”
    “That’s okay. It’s interesting. The food is really good. Different, but good, and so is the atmosphere. My family isn’t so extended. I have an aunt, Ellen—”
    “You mentioned her before.”
    “Right. She’s the one who wants me and my brother to be married. She has two kids, daughters. Around my age. We got in a lot of trouble during family gatherings, but that was mostly our fault, not the cousins’. We also have one grandpa who’s still alive. He lives near my aunt Ellen in Vermont.”
    “That’s it?”
    “Yep.”
    “I bet they’re all normal, huh? Don’t yell across restaurants, don’t throw entire turkeys at each other?”
    He had to ask. “Cooked or raw?”
    “Cooked. Stuffed. A twenty-seven-pound turkey. That was a very special Thanksgiving.”
    Max probably wouldn’t have believed the story before he’d seen her family for himself. “I have nothing to top that. You win the weird-family award.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “I get that a lot. Why do you think I got into films and books? I needed the escape.”
    He laughed. “Ah, it all begins to make sense. I grew up in middle-class suburbia. Mike and I were outside every minute we could be. We played all the sports, even the ones we were crap at. I wasn’t much for reading anything but comic books until high school. Dawn Bryan was my high-school girlfriend for a couple of months in tenth grade and she was heavily into books. I thought she was sexy, and she thought I was a reader, and voilà,” he said. “Magic. She had a habit of asking me about the books I’d supposedly read, so I read them.”
    “No CliffsNotes?”
    He shook his head. “I never lost the desire to read, only the time necessary.”
    “That’s a shame.”
    “Life won’t always be this hectic.”
    They ate some more, and he found he liked the deep red borscht a lot. He liked her a