Tsar Peter III Fyodorovich abdicated in favor of his ambitious, power-hungry wife, knowing she might assassinate him, and he died mysteriously less than a week later. He was remembered as a bumbling buffoon for his greed, jealousy, and loving his wife.
She was remembered as Catherine the Great.
Lexi’s fingertips rose, trickling upward in defiance of gravity and logic, tracing the whorls and spirals of my supposedly abstract, vaguely tribal tattoo, and crested along my trapezoids,reaching up my throat, and lingered on my jaw. Her fingers fanned out, cupping my cheek.
It was astonishingly intimate, mesmerizing, like I was the one who’d never been touched.
My eyes drifted shut as I tilted my head, leaning my jaw into her palm.
Her touch was comforting in a deep way that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She could touch me anywhere, anything sexual or depraved, and she’d cupped my cheek in her palm.
I almost fell to my fucking knees.
A discreet knock pattered at the bathroom door.
Lexi’s hands dropped.
The tension stringing me up like a marionette cut out, and my shoulders drooped.
Fuck it all.
A man’s voice said, “The cars are here.”
Ueli always had the worst fucking timing. “We’ll be right out.”
I looked away from the door and back to Lexi, who was cringing against the opposite wall of the minuscule bathroom, her fingers clutched to her chest like she’d grabbed a hot stove.
“He’s going to think we weredoing somethingin here,” she said.
So much for virginal explorations that morning. I wanted to snap at everyone who had interrupted us.
Instead, I turned and found my undershirt in the small clothes bag attached to the hanger and wrestled it over my head. “No, he won’t.”
One of her hands flapped back and forth between us and then the door, a panicked move. “We werealone.The door wasclosed.He’s going tothink.”
I fished around in the canvas bag of toiletries I’d ordered, finding a travel-sized stick of deodorant, which I applied beforeI plucked my dress shirt off the clothes hanger. “We weren’t in herenearlylong enough, and there wasn’t any passionate feminine screaming. He won’t think a thing.”
Ueli absolutely would think such things. He’d been with me too long and knew too much about me. However, he wouldn’t show it or ask about it, which was all that mattered.
Just a few moments later, I was appropriately dressed, my collar open because I hadn’t worn a tie the previous night.
As I was reaching for the doorknob, I looked back at Lexi, who was still plastered against the rear wall of the bathroom.
With all our negotiating and my security’s sudden intrusion, she was still wearing what I’d assumed were pajamas, including a clingy knit tee shirt stretched over her breasts.
Her delectable, round, jiggling breasts.
Yeah, Lexi wasn’t wearing a bra.
A sudden vision drifted through my mind of Ueli and the other menlookingat her, at the slight outline of her pebbled nipples visible through the thin pink cotton, and then me ripping through the security men, slicing the throats of every single one of them with a long, thin saber for laying their eyes on her.
To be clear, I didn’t have a sword, in that I didn’t ordinarily travel with one of my collection, but revenge for any man thinking he could look at my Lexi seemed to call for running someone through with a gladius, or a kopis, perhaps a rapier.
Before that murderous thought could twist my face into some horrifying grimace, I dropped my blank mask over my features.
No tension, no emotion, just a face. It was my only defense against behaving like a raging lunatic with every emotion that crossed my brain on display. “Did you have some other clothes you might want to change into, perhaps, that I could bring to you?”
She glanced down at herself and crossed her arms over her chest. “In my gym bag over on the side. There’s some shorts and a real tee shirt, and my bra.”
