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)
She reached for the phone without opening her eyes, the way she reached for everything, instinctively, with the absolute confidence of a woman who expected the world to hand her what she needed.
She squinted at the screen. The light of it painted her face blue.
"Hm."
"What?"
"Morgan." She smiled, sleepy and warm. "He says congratulations on the wedding."
The name hit Alexei like a bullet.
Morgan. Blond. Blue-eyed. First name only. Leaning against her desk. Making her laugh. Playing roulette in his casino. Coming to appointments at the clinic where Mia worked. And now texting her. On her wedding night. With her phone number, which she gave to everyone because that was who she was, open and trusting and warm, and the warmth was going to—
"That's sweet of him," Mia murmured. She typed a quick reply, put the phone down, and pressed her face back into his chest. "He's a nice guy. You'd like him."
She was asleep in thirty seconds.
Alexei was not.
The sleep was gone. Shattered by a name on a screen, replaced by the cold machinery of the man he'd been for twenty-two years, and the twenty-two-year machine was awake now, fully awake, running calculations behind his eyes while his wife breathed against his chest.
Morgan.
He didn't move. He didn't reach for her phone. He didn't wake her. He lay there with his arms around her and his eyes on the ceiling and the four-month clock hammering in his chest, and the name was in the room now, in the bed, in the space between his heartbeat and hers, and she didn't know what it meant and he couldn't tell her and the holding was no longer just love.
It was a wall.
Chapter 7
ALEXEI
Her mug was in the sink before his.
Alexei stood in the kitchen at six in the morning and let the fact of it settle. The matte black mug, which was his, was still in the cabinet. The white one, which she'd claimed on her second day and which held what she called coffee and what he called warm milk with a memory of caffeine, was already in the sink. Rinsed. Which meant she'd been up. Made her drink. Consumed it. And left the evidence before he'd even crossed the hallway.
In two years of living in his penthouse, Mia Robertson had never beaten him to the kitchen. Not once. She slept like a person who considered mornings a personal affront, and the idea of her awake before six was so foreign to his understanding of her that he stood there for a full ten seconds recalibrating.
His mouth moved.
Not a twitch. Not the involuntary micro-expression she catalogued on her spreadsheet. An actual, sustained movement of his lips that, if anyone had been present to witness it, would have been classified as a smile.
He killed it. Not because he wanted to. Because smiling alone in a kitchen at six AM was a category of behaviour he didn't have a file for, and Alexei Almazov filed everything.
Three weeks. They'd been married three weeks, and the architecture of his life had been gutted and rebuilt without his permission. The penthouse, which had been a machine designed for one occupant, now ran on a different engine. Her shoes by the door, never paired, because Mia didn't pair shoes, she abandoned them wherever the act of removal occurred. Her shampoo in his shower, the scent of it in the steam every morning, coconut and something floral that he refused to identify because identifying it would mean admitting he'd memorised it. Her voice in every room, filling spaces he'd forgotten were empty, and the absence of her voice, on the rare occasions she was out and the penthouse was silent, was louder than any sound she made.
Biscuit had migrated to the master bedroom. Not gradually. The dog had simply appeared on the third night, heaving himself onto the foot of the bed with the territorial certainty of an animal who had been waiting two years for the humans to sort out their situation so he could occupy his rightful position. Alexei had said nothing. He had pretended not to notice, the same way he'd pretended not to notice the cat at sixteen and the Rottweiler puppy at sixteen and a half, and Mia had grinned at him over the dog's enormous body and whispered, "Three weeks. New record. The cat took you five days."
She knew him. She had always known him, and the knowing was no longer terrifying. It was the thing he came home for.
He made his coffee. Drank it at the counter. The counter that held four layers of memory now: her climax against the marble, the burnt risotto, the spilled coffee during the proposal, and last Tuesday, when she'd sat on it eating cereal at midnight because she'd had a dream about a client and couldn't sleep and he'd found her there and stood between her knees and she'd put her legs around his waist and her face in his neck and they'd stayed like that, not talking, just holding, until the cereal got soggy and Biscuit ate it off the counter when they weren't paying attention.