“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.”

“And the older one,” Nadia continued, opening the oven to check her ham. “He has good eyes, too. And they’re on you.”

“Maybe.”

After smacking her daughter’s hand away, Nadia replaced the lid on the pot. “Alex grumbles about them.”

“He grumbles about everything.”

Natasha cut shortening in the bowl and grinned. “I think it’s more to the point that Rachel has her eye on Zack every bit as much as he has his on her.”

“Thanks a lot,” Rachel said under her breath.

“A woman who doesn’t look at such a man needs glasses,” Nadia said, and made her daughters laugh.

When her curiosity got to be too much for her, Rachel opened the swinging door a crack and peeked out. There was Sydney, sitting on the floor and keeping Brandon entertained with a pile of race cars. The men were huddled together, arguing football. Freddie was perched on the arm of the sofa, obviously in the first stages of infatuation with Nick. As for Nick, he seemed to have forgotten his embarrassment and was bouncing Katie on his knee. And Zack, she noted with a smile, was leaning forward, entrenched in the hot debate over the upcoming game.

By the time the table was set and groaning under the weight of platters of food, Zack was thoroughly fascinated with the Stanislaskis. They argued, loudly, but without any of the bitterness he remembered from his own confrontations with his father. He discovered that Mikhail was the artist who had crafted the sculpture on the piano, as well as all the passionate pieces in Rachel’s apartment. Yet he talked construction and building codes with his father, not art.

Natasha handled her children with a deft hand. No one seemed to mind if Brandon created a racket imitating race cars or if Katie climbed all over the furniture. But when it was time to stop, they did so at little more than a word from their mother or father.

Alex didn’t seem like such a tough cop when he was being barraged by his family’s teasing over his latest lady friend—a woman, Mikhail claimed, who had the I.Q. of the cabbage he was heaping on his plate.

“Hey, I don’t mind. That way I can do the thinking for her.”

That earned an unladylike snort from Rachel. “He wouldn’t know how to handle a woman with a brain.”

“One day one will find him,” Nadia predicted. “Like Sydney found my Mikhail.”

“She didn’t find me.” Mikhail passed a bowl of boiled potatoes to his wife. “I found her. She needed some spice in her life.”

“As I recall, you needed someone to knock the chip off your shoulder.”

“It was always so,” Yuri agreed, shaking his fork. “He was a good boy, but— What is the word?”

“Arrogant?” Sydney suggested.

“Ah.” Satisfied, Yuri dived into his meal. “But it’s not so bad for a man to be arrogant.”

“This is true.” Nadia kept an eagle eye on Katie, who was concentrating on cutting her meat. “So long as he has a woman who is smarter. Is not hard to do.”

Female laughter and male catcalls had Katie clapping her hands in delight.

“Nicholas,” Nadia said, pleased that he was going back for seconds, “you will go to school, yes?”

“Ah…no, ma’am.”

She urged the basket of biscuits on him. “So you know what work you want.”

“I… Not exactly.”

“He is young, Nadia,” Yuri said from across the table. “Time to decide. You’re skinny.” He pursed his lips as he studied Nick. “But have good arms. You need work, I give you job. Teach you to build.”

Speechless, Nick stared. No one had ever offered to give him anything so casually. The big, broad-faced man who was plowing through the glazed ham didn’t even know him. “Thanks. But I’m sort of working for Zack.”

“It must be interesting to work in a bar. Brandon, eat your vegetables, or no more biscuits. All the people you meet,” Natasha continued, saving Katie’s glass from tipping on the floor without breaking rhythm.

“You don’t meet a whole lot of them in the kitchen,” Nick muttered.

“You have to be twenty-one to tend bar or serve drinks,” Zack reminded him.

Noting Nick’s mutinous expression, Rachel broke in. “Mama, you should see Zack’s cook. He’s a giant from Jamaica, and he makes the most incredible food. I’ve been trying to charm some recipes out of him.”