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)
Ciana stood between the jet and the waiting car and let it soak her.
The driver had the rear door open. The hotel was twenty minutes away. A dry room, a locked door, a bed she could lie on and stare at the ceiling and tell herself that the note under her door had been a stranger’s presumption, that she owed Anton Almazov nothing, that she owed his brother less, that the smart thing, the safe thing, the Ciana thing, was to get in the car and go.
She didn’t get in the car.
Don’t let him be.
She had carried the note in her jacket pocket all morning. Had reread it twice in the car to the airfield and once more on the tarmac before the rain started. The words were simple. The handwriting was warm. And the instruction cut through every defence she had built in twenty-four years of letting people be, because it was the one thing no one had ever asked her to do: stay. Fight. Refuse to walk away from someone who was walking away from himself.
She had spent her entire life letting people be. Letting her father drift into his disappearances without protest, because protest required hope, and hope required believing he’d come back, and believing he’d come back required a kind of faith she had burned through by the time she was twelve. Letting friends slip when the effort of holding on became heavier than the loneliness of letting go. Letting herself become the woman who counted exits and kept her hands steady and never, under any circumstances, needed anyone enough to be destroyed by their leaving.
Anton’s note was asking her to stop.
She turned away from the car. Turned back toward the jet.
He was at the top of the airstairs.
She saw him before he saw her, or rather, before he let her see that he’d seen her, because she was beginning to understand that Andrei Almazov saw everything and showed nothing, that his stillness wasn’t absence but surveillance, and that the exclusion zone he maintained around her wasn’t the behaviour of a man who didn’t want to touch her but of a man who wanted to so badly he had built an entire perimeter to prevent it.
He was holding his jacket. Not wearing it, holding it, extended in one hand, as though he had been about to descend the stairs and hold it over her head for the rain. She’d think about that later. The jacket. The instinct. The fact that a man who was planning to hand her off to a stranger had come to the top of the stairs with his jacket ready to shield her from the weather, because even in the act of pushing her away he couldn’t stop protecting her.
She walked toward him.
The rain was heavy now. It plastered her blouse to her shoulders and turned her hair from its careful chignon into something wild and loose and not at all cabin-professional. She didn’t care. She climbed the stairs, one, two, three, four, five, counting, always counting, but this time counting upward, toward him, instead of away.
She stopped one step below the top. At this height, their eyes were nearly level. She had never been this close to his face without the mediation of service, without a tray, a bottle, a professional reason to be in his space. There was no professional reason now. There was only the rain and the stairs and the two of them and the jacket he was still holding in one hand as though he had forgotten it existed.
Rain ran along his scar. The silver line caught the water and channelled it down his cheek in a thin, glistening stream that followed the fault line from temple to jaw and dripped from the hinge. She watched a single drop gather at the lowest point of the scar, hang, fall.
He was the most devastating thing she had ever seen.
She kissed him.
Not gently. Not tentatively. Not the way a woman kisses a man when she’s unsure of his response or her own intention. She fisted her hands in his wet shirt, the fabric was slick and warm from the rain and from him, and she pulled herself up the last step and she pressed her mouth against his and it was hard and brief and anguished and it was the first time in her life she had reached for someone instead of letting them go.
His body went rigid. Every muscle in him locked. She could feel it through his shirt, through the rain, through the hands she had knotted in his clothing: the full-body tension of a man who had been bracing for this and had no idea what to do now that it was happening. His mouth was closed. His arms were at his sides. He was a wall, a monument, a man made of stone and discipline and the absolute conviction that he shouldn’t be doing this.