She wet her lips, eyes burning with heated curiosity. “So, what are you going to do?”
I let the silence stretch. Let her feel it. Let her want the answer as badly as I wanted to give it.
What I finally said came out rough and barely controlled.
“Tell me to go.” I made it sound like an order. “Right now. Or I won’t.”
Her breath stilled.
She didn’t tell me to go.
She didn’t say a damn word. Instead, she just stared back at me, her eyes burning with challenge.
I flexed my fingers at my sides, holding myself back for one heartbeat, then two, but I couldn’t do it for much longer. Her eyes flicked over my face—my mouth, my jaw, my chest—like she was trying to figure out if I was joking or if this was really happening. She had no idea how close I was to snapping. How thin my control had become.
Finally, she whispered, “I’m not saying it.”
My pulse hammered hard. “You should.”
“I won’t.”
“Katerina.”
She lifted her chin a fraction. “No.”
God help me.
I took another step forward until I stood right at the edge of her bed. The sheet shifted with the motion of her knees drawing instinctively closer together, perhaps preparing a futile attempt to escape. Her breath trembled out of her, soft and unsteady. I could see the fury and desire warring in her eyes.
I reached out, not touching her yet, just hovering my hand above her ankle, close enough that she could feel the heat, but not the contact.
“One more time,” my voice rumbled. “Tell me to leave.”
Her breath caught.
She shook her head.
“No?” I asked softly.
Her one-word answer barely made it out of her pretty mouth. “No.”
I exhaled slowly, the sound heavy with everything I’d been trying to bury since the moment she’d walked into that briefing room with those beautiful green eyes and that fire in her blood.
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Katerina.”
“I know,” she said. “But so are you.”
“Do you even understand what you’re asking for?”
She licked her lips, gaze locked on mine. “I’m asking you to stop pretending you’re going to walk out of here without seeing what I look like underneath this sheet.”
That shattered every last bit of my self-control.
I finally touched her, just my fingers brushing the sheet over her shin, barely there, but enough to feel the contour of her leg underneath.
“Mikhail…” she said.
“Yes?”
