Chapter 6
Her hand found his, and he drew her in with a gentleness she hadn’t believed a man that size could hold.
The mattress dipped on his side when she sat at the edge. The scent of his body, this close, was warm and metallic — blood, cologne, the sweat of a long night. The new wound on his shoulder was still seeping faintly beneath the gauze. Lower on his right flank, the dressing she had applied days earlier was still intact, the line of her stitches visible under the tape.
She recognized her own work on his skin.
He raised his hand to her face. Let it travel slowly through her hair. Brushed the strands that had fallen across her eye.
“Are you sure?” he said. Without making it a question.
“I’m sure.”
“Look at me, Alina.”
She looked.
“If you want to stop — at any point — you say the word and I stop. I don’t have control over much tonight. But that I do.”
“I understand.”
He kissed her.
It wasn’t the kiss she had imagined during the two years she had spent imagining it. It wasn’t rushed. It wasn’t desperate. It was slow. The kiss of a man who had waited too long to risk getting it wrong.
His mouth was warm, sure, and moved with a kind of knowledge that made her feel small and whole at the same time. His hand traveled down her neck, across her shoulder, found the satin knot at her waist. He loosened it without hurry. The robe fell open. He eased it off her shoulders as though peeling away a layer of armor she no longer needed.
The white slip underneath was thin, plain, nothing remarkable — just a tired maid’s nightgown. But the way he looked at her made it feel like silk.
“I have wanted this,” he said against her mouth, “since the morning you walked into my office with a tray of coffee and nearly fell.”
“I know.”
“The morning I caught your wrist.”
“I know.”
“The morning I realized I would rather burn this whole house down than see you leave it.”
She kissed him again. Deeper this time. Her hand found the back of his neck, careful of the wound, and pulled him closer.
He lay back against the pillows, drawing her with him. The mattress accepted them both. The lamp on the nightstand cast their shadows across the wall, tangled together, unrecognizable from the two separate people who had entered this room hours apart.
He was gentle. Hesitant in a way that surprised her. A man who commanded armies of men, who made the city of Chicago go quiet when he walked into a room, asking her with his eyes if each touch was all right before he made it.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Yes.”
He stopped asking after the third time. He started believing.
The night folded around them. The wound on his shoulder was forgotten. The blood on his shirt was forgotten. The woman in the red coat, the guards in the hallway, the house that had held them both prisoner for two years — all of it fell away, and there was only the warmth of his skin against hers and the sound of their breathing, slow and steady and finally, finally together.
When she woke, the light had changed. Gray morning filtering through the curtains. The clock on the nightstand read 6:47.
She was still in his bed. Still wrapped in the sheets. Still warm.
He was awake. Propped against the headboard, his good arm around her, his eyes already on her face.
“Good morning,” he said.
She should have felt embarrassed. She should have felt the weight of what she had done — the maid in the master’s bed, the line she had crossed that could never be uncrossed.
Instead, she felt something she had not felt in two years.
Safe.
“Good morning,” she said.
His hand traced the curve of her shoulder. “You need to go before the house wakes. Mrs. Petrova will notice if you’re not at your station.”
“I know.”
“Tonight. Come back.”
“Tonight.”
He kissed her forehead. A gesture so tender, so domestic, that it caught her breath. “I’ll have the coffee ready.”
She laughed. The sound surprised her. “You don’t know how to make coffee.”
“I’ll learn.”
She dressed in the bathroom, her robe knotted, her hair pinned back. She slipped out of his room and down the service stairs, her feet silent on the runner, her heart full of something she had no name for.
The kitchen was empty. Sloan wouldn’t arrive for another hour. She stood at the counter, her hands flat on the cool surface, and she let herself feel it.
She had crossed the invisible line. She had walked into the wolf’s den. And she had found that the wolf was not the monster she had been told to fear.
May you like
He was just a man. A man who had been alone for a very long time.
And she was not afraid of him anymore.
