Isn't It Bromantic (Bromance Book Club #4) by Lyssa Kay Adams

            “Let me take care of you for a change.”

            Behind her, he widened his thighs to create a cocoon around her. “Scoot back,” he said gruffly.

            Her pulse pounded in her ears as she did so.

            “Where does it hurt?” His voice was a warm, soothing baritone.

            Elena pressed her fingers into the spot on her neck where the cords and tendons were stretched tight. Moments later, his fingers brushed hers aside and began a magical slide across her skin. Elena melted. Instant goo. A low moan escaped from her throat as he spread his fingers wide and wove them up into her hair. Slowly, he massaged her scalp in wider and wider circles, her hair tangling around his fingers. When he slid them down again, he brushed over the source of her pain—a knot in her neck. He paused. “Is that where it hurts?”

            “Yes,” she whispered.

            Vlad pressed his thumb into the knot and rubbed a small circle around it. Elena tilted her head to give him greater access because it felt so good and she was so rarely touched. “You’re going to put me in a trance.”

            “I would settle for putting you to sleep.”

            “I don’t know how to take that.”

            He chuckled, and the warm vibration of it set her heart jumping. “I just mean that I know you don’t sleep much. You need to relax.”

            “How do you know I don’t sleep?”

            “I can hear you at night when you get up and walk around.” He pressed the pad of his thumb into the knot again, and she sighed. “You’re working too hard, Lenochka.”

            “There’s no such thing.”

            “That sounds like something your father would say.”

            “It is. He said it often.” His fingers stalled against her neck, so she plowed forward before he could say anything to match the tension in his hands. “He did the best he knew how to do, Vlad. He never expected to have to raise me alone.”

            Vlad spread his hands down to her shoulders and squeezed the tight muscles there. “People have to make hard choices all the time for the ones they love. He was no different than anyone else.”

            She snorted. “Yes, he was. How many kids are taught a secret code word to know if their father is in trouble?”

            Vlad’s voice sounded like it had been dragged across gravel. “What are you talking about?”

            She picked at the cuff of her shorts. “If he texted me that word, then I knew something was wrong. And we had this whole plan about what I was supposed to do. I had to take his hard drive from the computer, burn his journals in the woodstove. We had a motel room that we would meet at. He changed the location every few months.”

            His hands paused again. “When did this start?”

            She shrugged with one shoulder. “I don’t remember. When I was twelve, maybe.”

            “What was the code word?”

            “Sparrow.” At his questioning silence, she explained. “From the proverb. A word is not a sparrow.”

            Vlad finished the old Soviet-area saying. “Once it flies out, you can’t catch it.”

            “He only used it once. That night.”

            His hands rested against her shoulders, protective and warm, drugging her with their soothing weight. And so she kept talking. About something she swore she never would. “I got home from work around eleven o’clock. He was gone, of course, but that wasn’t strange. He was almost always gone somewhere. I’d been . . . We’d been fighting a lot. I wanted to move out and go to college and be normal for a change, but he wouldn’t let me. He said I was still too young, and he was working on something too dangerous. But he’d been saying that my whole life, and nothing had ever happened. So, I started rebelling and sneaking out when he was gone. Going out and . . .” She sucked in a breath and let it out, sparing him the and part. The part where she sought temporary comfort in the arms of a string of bad decisions.

            “Anyway, when I realized he was gone that night, I went out and left my cell phone at home as if that was some way to get back at him. I got home at four in the morning, and I realized he had texted me while I was gone. It was just that word. Sparrow.”