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)
“That,” he said, and his voice was wrecked, “shouldn’t have happened.”
Mia stood against the kitchen island with her lips still tingling and her fists still clenched around nothing and her heart hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears.
“But it did,” she whispered.
His jaw locked. He turned away from her. Picked up the bag he didn’t carry and the coat he hadn’t removed and walked down the hallway toward his bedroom, and the sound of his door closing was the loneliest sound she had ever heard.
Mia pressed her fingers to her mouth.
They were still shaking.
She could still feel him.
And if Alexei Almazov thought a closed door was going to stop her after a kiss like that, then the smartest man she’d ever met didn’t know her at all.
Chapter 3
MIA
She woke up to the sound of Biscuit snoring.
The guest room was enormous and white and smelled like laundry that cost more per load than her monthly coffee budget at Whitmore, and the bed was so absurdly luxurious she felt guilty sleeping in it, like she should be doing something more impressive with sheets this soft. But none of that mattered, because Biscuit had wedged himself between her and the headboard sometime around 3 AM, and a hundred-and-ten-pound Rottweiler generated enough body heat to make the Egyptian cotton irrelevant.
"Morning, baby," she murmured into his neck. He grunted without opening his eyes. Classic Biscuit.
She lay there for exactly four seconds before the previous night came back in full.
The kiss.
His hands on her face. Her fists in his coat. The sound he'd made, or was it her sound? She still wasn't sure. The taste of coffee and something darker and the pressure of his mouth and the six inches of muscle she'd felt through his shirt and...
Mia pressed her face into the pillow and made a sound that wasn't dignified.
He kissed me.
She rolled onto her back.
He kissed me and then he told me it shouldn't have happened and then he walked away and closed his bedroom door and I'm in his guest room and my dog is taking up seventy percent of this mattress and I kissed Alexei Almazov last night.
Biscuit opened one eye. Assessed her. Closed it again.
"You're right," she told him. "Panicking helps no one."
She sat up. The clock on the nightstand read 6:47 AM. Alexei would already be awake. Alexei was always awake before the sun, because sleeping in was a moral failing in his world, and she knew this because she'd lived in this penthouse for two years and had never once beaten him to the kitchen.
Which meant he was out there right now. On the other side of that door. Drinking coffee from the matte black mug he used every morning, standing at the counter because he never sat down for breakfast, reading something on his phone with his sleeves rolled to the forearm and his face set in that expression he wore like armor.
She needed to stop.
She needed to stop, and she needed a plan.
Option one: walk out there, pretend last night didn't happen, be breezy and casual and adult about the whole thing.
Option two: walk out there, bring it up immediately, force him to deal with it.
Option three: stay in this room forever and let Biscuit bring her snacks.
Mia threw the covers off, jolted Biscuit into a grumble, and went to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth twice. She washed her face. She rehearsed three different opening lines in the mirror, all of which were terrible, and then she put on the sundress from yesterday because her suitcase was still in the hallway and there was no way she was walking past his bedroom door in a towel.
Actually.
No. Bad Mia. Focus.
She opened the guest room door. Biscuit heaved himself off the bed and followed her, his nails clicking on the marble like a very large, very loyal shadow.
The hallway was long and sun-soaked and silent. His bedroom door was closed. She walked past it without stopping, which she considered a personal victory, and turned the corner into the kitchen.
He was already there.
Not at the counter. At the dining table, which she'd never seen him use for breakfast, dressed in a charcoal suit with no tie, reading something on a tablet. His coffee sat untouched. His posture was the posture of a man who had been awake for hours and had used every one of those hours to rebuild every wall she'd cracked last night.
His eyes never lifted when she entered.
Mia's heart did something painful and complicated. Because the refusal to acknowledge her was deliberate. Alexei noticed everything. He'd once caught her sneaking a stray cat into the penthouse from across the living room with his back turned, because he'd heard the difference in her footstep when she was carrying something. The idea that he didn't hear her now, didn't register her bare feet on the marble, didn't feel the charge between them, the same electric hum it always carried when they shared a room.