“A guy like you? I bet you’ve been showered with compliments your whole life. And you obviously like to take care of yourself. It’s not for nothing, right?”
“What about mylaid-back, unshaven, fresh-from-the-beach appearance?”
“Yourcarefully cultivatedlaid-back, unshaven, fresh-from-the-beach appearance. Crucial difference.”
He stepped right up close. She caught the caipirinha scent—sweet and sour, and woven in with aged leather—but resisted the urge to inhale deeply. He’d breached her personal space and he knew it, but no self-respecting teacher backed down from a blatant challenge, so she forced herself to stare up into his eyes, rendered in precise detail by the lenses she wore. He gently removed her glasses and then her cap and, good God, it was like being undressed. She fisted her hands by her sides.
“You thought I was fishing for a compliment because you knew you’d give me a compliment.” His voice had dropped to that sexy rumble. “If you thought I was repulsive, you wouldn’t accuse me of fishing.”
“Unless you were so obviously unaware of how repulsive you were. Or so insecure that you crave approval. Either way, your logic is messed up.”
He leaned in, ever so slightly, and the skin between her eyes prickled. His lips touched together and then separated slightly and even that micro-movement threatened to derail her breathing. “You don’t seem repulsed.”
She flicked her focus back to his eyes, the irises warmed to russet by the low sun. “And you seem … arrogant.” It wasn’t her best-ever comeback.
He chuckled—not his usual giggle but a deep-throated resonance. “And I thought dragging a small-town high school teacher along with me would be a pain in the ass.”
“And?” Her mouth had gone so dry, the word came out croaky.
“And thereyougo, fishing for a compliment.”
“You did that on purpose. You set me up.”
He slowly tut-tutted. “Just like earlier, when you wanted me to say you were memorable. Not craving approval, are we?”
“I liked you better when you were fictional.”
He laughed, properly this time, with all his teeth, and just as Nika had cautioned, it sent Alice’s stomach into backflips. “Come on,” he said, backing away, which gave her a dueling sense of triumph and disappointment. “It’s getting dark. I might struggle to find this cabin at night.”
“Cabin? How do you even know about a cabin around here?”
His smile fell as he returned the glasses and cap to a saddlebag, and sat on the bike, readying his helmet. “Long story,” he said eventually.
One he evidently wasn’t planning to get into. Curious. She climbed on behind him, his backpack putting a little distance between them. Which was just as well—she was getting way too comfortable with cozying up.
And worse, she was about to spend the night with her book boyfriend.
Chapter 13
Carter
Yaroslavsky Station, Moscow
Eighteen months earlier
Carter’s head pounded in time with the trumpet in the brass band on the train platform. The station was noisy enough without a goddamn fanfare, but he suspected the musicians were hired to conceal the hubbub of the peasants boarding regular trains elsewhere. No conductors’ whistles and teetering piles of suitcases here beside the Imperial Princess, just softly spoken attendants in blue and gold uniforms and white gloves handing out welcome champagne.
He sidestepped aprovodnitsacarrying white flowers to the restaurant carriage—a bunch so enormous it looked like a walking bouquet with liveried legs. The last of Carter’s group had been escorted off the platform’s red carpet and into their Royal Carriages, where their luggage had already been unpacked, pressed, and stowed in gleaming walnut dressers. The concierge team at the hotel had, of course, laundered and pressed everything before they’d packed it, but no one dared risk an unsanctioned crease.
The logistics of getting his tourists from the hotel to the train sometimes felt like those of a minor European royal moving palaces. Though their bulkier souvenirs and artworks were airfreighted to the U.S., there were always towers of designer luggage to stow aboard. Not that the One Percent saw any of that. As far as they knew, they swept through life with just a Louis Vuitton carry-on.
Carter rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. The day had felt three times as long as usual, and he’d had to make five times the effort to act as the professional, efficient tour guide when really his thoughts had been consumed by Nika.
Welcome to the rest of his life. Would he ever find out what happened to her? He stepped onto the train through a non-red-carpeted regular door and headed for the staff carriage. That was it. He’d taken his last step on Moscow soil.
Outside his berth, he leaned back on the internal wall of the corridor, staring out the velvet-draped window to the platform, where the band was blasting its last, triumphant notes. The train whistle sounded, breathy and hollow. The second he left Moscow, he abandoned any hope of helping Nika. He let his head fall back onto the polished wood wall. She could well have already gone underground, but his contacts might at least be able to reassure him she hadn’t been picked up by the FSB upon leaving the hotel. He could count on Randolph to be no help—his coded requests for a meeting today had been ignored.
“Are you okay?”
