“Alexi, bring hot cider. Rachel, take coats upstairs. Mikhail, kiss your wife later. Go tell Mama we have company.”

Within moments, Zack found himself seated on the couch, scratching the ears of a big, floppy dog named Ivan and discussing the pros and cons of running a business with Yuri.

Nick felt desperately self-conscious with a baby on his knee. She didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get down. And the little blond girl named Freddie kept studying him with solemn gray eyes. He glanced away, wishing their mother would come along and do something. Anything. Katie snuggled up and began to toy with his earring.

“Pretty,” she said, with a smile so sweet he couldn’t help but respond. “I have earrings, too. See?” To show off her tiny gold hoops, she turned her head this way and that. “’Cause I’m Daddy’s little gypsy.”

“I bet.” Unconsciously he lifted a hand to stroke her hair. “You kind of look like your Aunt Rachel.”

“I can take her.” Freddie had worked up her courage and now she stood beside the couch smiling down at Nick. “If she’s bothering you.”

Nick merely moved his shoulders. “She’s cool.” He struggled to find something to say. The girl was china-doll pretty, he thought, and as foreign to him as Rachel’s Ukraine. “Uh…you don’t look a whole lot like sisters.”

Freddie’s smile bloomed warm and her fledgling woman’s heart tapped a little faster. He’d noticed her. “Mama’s my stepmother, technically. I was about six when she and my father got married.”

“Oh.” A step, he thought. That was something he knew about, and sympathized with. “I guess it was a little rough on you.”

Though she was baffled, Freddie continued to smile. After all, he was talking to her, and she thought he looked like a rock star. “Why?”

“Well, you know…” Nick found himself flustered under that steady gray stare. “Having a stepmother—a stepfamily.”

“That’s just a word.” Gathering her nerve, she sat on the arm of the couch beside him. “We have a house in West Virginia—that’s where Dad met Mama. He teaches at the university and she owns a toy store. Have you ever been to West Virginia?”

Nick was still stuck on her answer. It’s just a word. He could hear in the easy tone of her voice that she meant just that. “What? Oh, no, never been there.”

Inside the warm, fragrant kitchen, Rachel was laughing with her sister. “Katie certainly knows how to snag her man.”

“It was sweet the way he blushed.”

“Here.” Nadia thrust a bowl into her eldest daughter’s hands. “You make biscuits. The boy had good eyes,” she said to Rachel. “Why is he in trouble?”

Sniffing a pot of simmering cabbage, Rachel smiled. “Because he didn’t have a mama and papa to yell at him.”