Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
“This isn’t a game.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“You left Whitmore. You abandoned a degree that I—”
“That you chose for me. At a school you chose for me. In a country you chose for me.” Her voice was even. Her hands were shaking, so she put them behind her back. “I didn’t choose any of it, Alexei. Not the school. Not the distance. Not the two years of missing—”
She caught herself. Bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted copper.
Do not finish that sentence. Do not.
His eyes narrowed. “Missing what?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Mia.”
“I said forget it.”
He crossed the room. Not fast. Alexei didn’t move fast. He moved with a purpose that made fast unnecessary, and by the time he stopped in front of her, she had backed up exactly one step, bumped into the kitchen island, and run out of room.
Close. Close enough that she could smell his cologne, which was the same one he’d worn when she was sixteen and had to leave the room every time he leaned over her homework because the scent made her dizzy. Close enough that she could see the tension in his jaw and the line between his brows that meant he was angry, or thinking, or both.
“Two years.” His voice was hard. “I kept you at Whitmore for two years so you could—”
“So you could what?” She was angry now. Good. Anger was better than the other thing, the thing that made her chest ache and her eyes burn. “Forget about me? Hope I’d grow out of it?”
The words hung in the air. She heard herself say them and she wanted to claw them back, because grow out of it was the closest she’d ever come to admitting what it was out loud, and from how his face changed, he’d heard it too.
“Grow out of what?” His voice was too low.
Lie. Say school. Say homesickness. Say anything except the truth.
She opened her mouth to do exactly that, and what came out instead was: “You know what.”
Silence.
His eyes were on hers. Dark and unreadable and so close she could see the ring of grey around the iris, and she realized she’d never been this close to him before. Not once. In two years of living in his house and sitting at his table and falling asleep on his couch while he worked late, he had never let her within arm’s length. There was always a desk between them. A hallway. A continent.
Now there was six inches and a kitchen island pressing into her lower back and the scent of his cologne turning her brain into static.
“I came back for the gap year,” she whispered. The lie tasted wrong.
“No.” Alexei’s voice was certain. “You didn’t.”
And the certainty in it, the resignation, as if he’d known this was coming and had spent the entire flight preparing himself for it, cracked something open in her chest.
“Then why did I come back?” She meant it to sound defiant. It came out raw.
He didn’t answer. His gaze dropped to her mouth. One second. Maybe two. Then it came back up, and the thing she saw in his eyes wasn’t anger anymore.
It was want. Plain and brutal and barely contained.
And then he was kissing her.
She didn’t know who closed the distance. It could have been her, rising onto her toes. It could have been him, bending down. It didn’t matter, because his mouth was on hers and his hands were on her face and every single thing she’d imagined in her dorm bed at 2 AM was nothing, nothing, compared to the actual warmth and pressure of Alexei Almazov’s lips on hers.
Her hands grabbed the front of his coat. Both fists. She didn’t mean to. Her hands just did it, acting on two years of deprivation, and she pulled him closer and heard a sound, small and broken, and realized it had come from her.
He kissed her harder. His thumb traced her jaw. His other hand slid into her hair, and his fingers curled, and the gentle tug at her scalp sent a bolt of heat through her body so intense her knees almost gave out.
Oh God.
Oh God.
His mouth opened against hers, and she tasted coffee and something darker, and she pressed herself against his chest because she couldn’t not, because every cell in her body was screaming closer, closer, closer, and she could feel his heart hammering through his coat and his shirt and the six inches of muscle beneath, and it was the most honest thing she’d ever felt from him.
Then he pulled back.
Not gently. He stepped away from her like she’d burned him, and the absence of his hands on her face was so sudden and so cold that she gasped.
His breathing was ragged. His eyes were dark. And the want she’d seen two seconds ago was still there, but it was being walled off, brick by brick, right in front of her, and she could see him doing it and she wanted to scream.