Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
His one duty was to keep her safe. But because she made it impossible for Andrei to keep his word…he did the only thing left. He made sure she saw him with someone else.
In Caressed, young, starry-eyed masseuse Star Thornton spent every Thursday evening with Artem Almazov, the unsmiling billionaire who owned the cruise ship she worked on. Her hands would find his scars, and his body told her things his mouth never would. But just as her heart became his…Artem walked away like she had never touched him at all.
Note: Both books are standalone romances previously published under my pen name Martha Ruthie. These books are spin-offs of the Monaco Bratva series
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Captivated
Chapter 1
THE CHAMPAGNE WAS A 2011 Blanc de Blancs, and Ciana Reyes poured it the way she poured everything: without a wasted motion, with the kind of control that came from four years of serving first class at thirty-nine thousand feet and a lifetime of refusing to let her hands betray her.
They were betraying her now.
Not visibly. No passenger in cabin would have noticed the micro-tremor in her wrist as she tilted the bottle over the first flute. She caught it before the pour wobbled, locked her elbow, and let the wine fall in a clean, golden arc. But she knew. Her body had become aware of his presence before her eyes confirmed it, the way a compass needle swings north before the traveler has any idea which direction she’s facing.
Seat 1A. Third time in three weeks.
She set the flute on her tray without looking up. Moved to 1B, which was empty, as it always was when he flew. He bought both seats. She had noticed that the first time and told herself it was a business preference, the way some men needed silence the way others needed scotch. By the second time, she had stopped pretending she wasn’t cataloguing his habits.
He never reclined. He never slept. He never asked for anything beyond what was offered, and he declined half of that. He wore dark suits that fit him the way armour fit, not for beauty, but for containment. He was enormous in the way certain men were enormous: not just tall but dense with stillness, as though his body had been designed for a kind of violence he had chosen, very deliberately, to hold in reserve.
And the scar. A pale silver seam that ran from his left temple to the hinge of his jaw, pulling the skin taut over the cheekbone in a way that should have been disfiguring but wasn’t. It changed his face, made it more dangerous and impossible to look away from.
Ciana looked away.
She delivered the flute to 1A. "Your champagne, sir."
He took it without touching her fingers. He was meticulous about that, his hand always arriving a breath before or after hers, maintaining a margin of air between his skin and hers that felt less like courtesy and more like a perimeter. She had started to think of it as the exclusion zone. Two centimetres of nothing that somehow weighed more than any hand that had ever actually touched her.
“Thank you.” Low. Accented. Russian, she thought, though it had been sanded down by years of something else. French, maybe. The vowels sat differently in his mouth than they would in a native speaker’s.
She nodded. Smiled. Cabin-professional, eyes-neutral, the expression she had perfected at twenty and now wore like a second uniform. She retreated to the galley.
Raven Burnett was already there, leaning against the beverage cart with her arms crossed and one eyebrow doing the thing it did when she had an observation she was going to deliver whether Ciana wanted it or not.
"Three weeks," Raven said.
"Don’t."
"Three weeks, Ci. Same seat. Same flight. Same look on his face like he’s running long division in his head and you’re the remainder that won’t resolve."
Ciana pulled a bottle of still water from the drawer and cracked the seal. "He’s a frequent flyer. We’ve several."
“We’ve several who fly this route. We don’t have several who watch you like you’re a problem they’re trying to solve.” Raven uncrossed her arms and reached for a packet of shortbread, tearing it open with her teeth. “I’m not saying it’s sinister. I’m saying it’s something. And you—” She pointed the shortbread at Ciana. “—are pretending it’s nothing because the alternative would require you to have a feeling, and we both know how you’re about those.”
"I’ve feelings."
"Name one."
"Irritation. With you. Right now."
Raven grinned, wide, unrepentant, the kind of smile that had gotten her out of trouble and into it in roughly equal measure since they’d met in training four years ago. She was Ciana’s closest friend, which wasn’t the same thing as saying they were alike. Raven had opinions the way weather systems had wind: constantly, forcefully, and with no regard for whether you’d brought an umbrella. She dated with cheerful recklessness, had a tattoo she’d gotten in Lisbon that she refused to explain, and kept a running spreadsheet of every airline she intended to fly for before she turned thirty. She wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, a safe harbour. She was a dare. Ciana loved her for it, mostly because Raven never once tried to be anything else.
"His hands," Raven said, quieter now.
Ciana stilled. "What about them?"
"You were looking at his hands when you poured. Not at the glass. At his hands."
That was true, and Ciana hated that it was true, and she hated even more that Raven had seen it. His hands were... she didn’t have the right word. Large, obviously. Scarred across the knuckles the way hands got scarred when they’d met hard surfaces repeatedly and without gloves. But what had stopped her, what had made her pour go unsteady for a fraction of a second, was the way he held the champagne flute. Delicately. With a precision that didn’t match the rest of him, as though the glass were something he could break without noticing and he had decided, with great private discipline, not to.