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)
His throat worked. His hands tightened on her hips. And the thing she saw in his face was a man standing at the edge of something and choosing not to jump but to build a bridge.
"I'll be yours."
Three words. Spoken against her mouth. His lips brushing hers with each syllable.
"I'll be yours," he repeated, and his voice splintered, "if you marry me."
The world stopped.
Her body was still humming. Still aching. Still pressing toward him with an urgency her brain couldn't override. And he was still there, still close, still hard against her, still one motion away from everything, and he had just said marry me.
"That's—" Her voice cracked. "That's not how proposals work."
"I'm not proposing. I'm telling you." His hands moved to her face. Both palms. Thumbs on her cheekbones. His eyes were so dark they were almost black. "I'll be yours. All of it. The name, the empire, the man underneath. But only if you marry me."
"You stopped." She was breathless and furious and aching and crying and she couldn't sort any of it into an order that made sense. "You were about to— and you stopped to—"
"Yes."
"You stopped making love to me to propose?"
"Yes."
"Who does that?"
"I do." His thumbs caught her tears. "Because if I'm going to have you, Mia, I'm going to have all of you. Not one night. Not the gap year. All of it. And I won't take this from you without giving you everything I have first."
The words hit her like a wave. Because underneath the claim, underneath the possessiveness, underneath the Alexei Almazov who moved the world to get what he wanted, was a man who had just stopped on the edge of the thing he desired most because he couldn't take without offering.
"Are you serious?"
"I've never been less serious about anything in my life."
She blinked at him. "You just said you've never been less—"
"More. I meant more." A flush crept across his cheekbones, and if her heart hadn't been trying to exit her chest through her throat, she would have committed this moment to memory as the first and possibly only time she'd ever seen Alexei Almazov fumble a sentence.
"You're blushing," she whispered.
"I'm not."
"Your cheekbones are pink."
"Irrelevant."
"Alexei Almazov is blushing and proposing while we're both—" She gestured between them, at the state of them, her dress rucked up around her waist and his belt undone and the counter wet with spilled coffee and her underwear on the floor next to his dog. "This is the most ridiculous proposal in the history of proposals."
Biscuit chose that moment to nose at the fallen garment. The humiliation was complete.
She was crying. She hadn't decided to cry. The tears were just there, rolling down her face and over his thumbs, and she was smiling so hard it hurt and crying so hard she couldn't see and his face was blurry and beautiful and closer than it had ever been.
"Is that a yes?" His voice was stripped.
"That's been a yes since I was sixteen, you impossible man."
He kissed her. Hard. His hands in her hair, her legs locked around his waist, her tears on both their faces, and the sound he made against her mouth was her name, just her name, the way he'd said it when she held him in the kitchen, like it was the only word left in a language he'd forgotten.
She pulled back. Just enough to see his face. "I'm going to be the worst wife. I burn risotto. I talk too much. I snuck a cat into your penthouse and I'm probably going to do it again."
"I know."
"And I'm going to make you say it."
His brow creased. "Say what?"
"You know what." She pressed her palm to his chest. His heart was hammering. "Not today. Not now. But someday. You're going to say it, and it's going to cost you everything, and I'm going to be there when it does."
His throat worked. He didn't speak. He pressed his forehead to hers and closed his eyes, and his arms came around her, pulling her against his chest, and she could feel the rise and fall of his breathing and the stillness of his hands, and the stillness was the answer she needed even if the words weren't ready yet.
They stayed like that. On the counter, in the kitchen, with cold coffee on the floor and a dog licking it up and the Monaco sun turning the marble gold. Her face in his neck. His arms around her. Two people who had found each other in the wreckage of closed doors and opened ones, and the wreckage was beautiful, and the silence was full, and somewhere underneath the warmth of his arms and the beat of his heart against her cheek, Alexei Almazov was holding the thing he hadn't told her.
The letter. The chain. The man who was coming.