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)
She brought him a drink he hadn’t ordered.
Scotch. Single malt. She had found it in the drinks cabinet, a bottle of something amber and old that had probably cost more than her first month’s rent. She poured two fingers into a crystal tumbler and carried it to his table and set it down and didn’t leave.
He looked at the glass. Then at her.
“I didn’t order this.”
“I know.”
She sat. In the seat across from him, the one that faced his across the low walnut table, the configuration designed for meetings or negotiations or whatever business a man like Andrei Almazov conducted at altitude. She crossed her legs. Folded her hands in her lap. Looked at him with the steady, unblinking patience of a woman who had spent twenty-four years learning how to wait and had decided, for the first time in her life, to stop.
“You kissed me back.”
The silence was so complete she could hear the engines changing pitch as they met a headwind.
“On the tarmac. In the rain. You kissed me back. And then you called your brother to find me a husband.” She kept her voice even. It took everything she had but she kept it even. “So either you felt nothing, and it was reflex, adrenaline, an accident, or you felt everything, and you’re a coward.”
Coward.
The word impacted him visibly, causing his jaw to harden and his shoulders change angle.
And then he stood.
The cabin was already small. With him standing, it became a space that couldn’t contain him: his height, his width, the sheer physical mass of a man who had been designed for a kind of violence he held in constant reserve. He rose from his seat and the shadows shifted around him and suddenly the dark cabin wasn’t a cabin at all. It was a room with one exit and he was between her and it and she wasn’t afraid.
She didn’t step back. She had stood up when he did, instinct, or defiance, or the refusal to have this conversation with him towering over her, and now they were standing in the aisle, facing each other, closer than the siege had brought them all day. Close enough to feel the heat of him through the air between their clothes.
“You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
Low. Dangerous. Not a threat, a warning. The voice of a man standing at the edge of something he had spent his entire adult life building walls against, and the walls were cracking, and he could hear them, and he was telling her to run not because he didn’t want her to stay but because he wasn’t sure what would happen when the last wall came down.
She looked at him. The scar. The jaw. The eyes that were no longer still but moving, searching her face with a desperation he wasn’t bothering to hide because the dark made hiding impossible and the word coward had stripped away the last pretence.
“Then show me.”
He kissed her.
Not like the tarmac. The tarmac had been her: her hands, her reach, her mouth on his, hard and brief and anguished. This was him. This was Andrei Almazov kissing a woman for the first time without the wall between them, and the difference was the difference between a match struck in wind and a fire that has been burning underground for months finally breaking through to the surface.
Slow. Deliberate. Consuming.
His hands rose to her face. Both hands, the scarred one and the unscarred one, framing her jaw, her cheekbones, the sides of her neck. She felt his fingers tremble. Not a fine tremor but a deep one, structural, the kind of shaking that came from a man holding back a force he was no longer certain he could control. He was shaking and kissing her and the two things together, the violence of his restraint and the tenderness of his mouth, were so contradictory, so impossibly, devastatingly Andrei, that something inside her cracked open and she stopped counting.
She stopped counting.
For the first time since she could remember, since childhood, since before her father’s first disappearance, since before she had learned that the people who are supposed to stay never do, she wasn’t counting. Not seconds, not exits, not the distance between her skin and his. She was in the dark cabin at forty thousand feet with his hands on her face and his mouth on hers and time wasn’t a sequence of numbered moments but a single, continuous, borderless now.
She pressed into him. Her palms flat on his chest, over his shirt, over his heart. She could feel it. Slamming. The heartbeat of a man who had spent months building a three-hundred-million-euro perimeter around the thing he wanted and had just torn through it with his bare hands. His heart was enormous under her palms, she could feel it in her wrists, in her arms, in the vibration that travelled through his ribcage and into her body as though they were sharing the same pulse.