She’s cute when she’s inquisitive and I am pretty sure I see a hint of jealousy glitter in the pretty flecks of moonlight white in her eyes.
“It was real estate instead of a bride, but yes.”
I never get caught up in a woman’s scent or the sweet sound of a soft voice. But I admit I’m fascinated by Persia. The way her mouth pulls a little on the right when she speaks. The way she holds your gaze when you speak like she cares about what you have to say. But what truly has me obsessed is her patience and the kind heart she possesses. I’ve watched her for two weeks with Marta and the kindness and respect she shows the woman who has saved my life more than once made me want to thaw my own heart.
Persia straightens my stolen shirt where it’s ripped over the swell of her shoulder, trying to hide the scars there no doubt.
The tear reveals a strip of bare shoulder, unmarked except for the faint silver lines of old scars I have been pretending not to notice for two weeks. The blood on her skirt is not hers, thank God, probably from the cut across Drake’s eyebrow.
I inhale and let the adrenaline fully fade from my system.
She is alive. She is whole. She is here.
The relief that floods through me is so intense it borders on pain.
I move my hand around the back of her elegant neck and draw her in, placing a gentle kiss to her forehead. “Drake mentioned something about a gratitude dinner,” I say, forcing my voice into something resembling calm as I guide her toward the living room. “Before everything went to hell.”
Her laugh is brittle, fractured at the edges. Signs of her entering an adrenaline crash.
“I wanted to do something. Anything. I've been sitting in this penthouse for two weeks with nothing to do except wonder what I'm doing here and why you won't—” She stops herself, pressing her lips together like she's afraid of what might come out if she keeps talking.
I settle onto the leather sofa and pull her down beside me, lifting her feet into my lap before she can protest. The sandals she's wearing are covered in dust from the market parking lot, and I slip them off one by one, setting them aside with a care that feels foreign in my hands. These are hands that have signed death warrants and pulled triggers. They have no business touching something as delicate as the arch of the little dove’s foot.
But I do it anyway, pressing my thumbs into the ball of her foot and working out the tension that has been building there for weeks.
She makes a sound that is half gasp, half moan, and the noise goes straight to my cock. I grit my teeth and keep my movements clinical, therapeutic, anything but the worship I want to lay at this woman's feet.
“What are you doing?” She tries to pull away, but I tighten my grip.
“Taking care of you.”
“No one has ever…” She trails off, her voice thick with something I do not want to examine too closely. She straightens her skirt, pulling up the frilly end to give me better access to her feet despite her objections.
I’ve never wanted to hold and kiss a woman so deeply before in my life. She is the complete antithesis of every woman I’ve allowed into my life.
Thick black lashes narrow over aqua blue eyes. Her chest rises and falls with her heavy breathing.
“Why do I feel like you're buttering me up for something?”
Perceptive little dove. Because I am. Because everything I do has an angle, and she is smart enough to see it even when I wish she could not.
I do not answer. I just keep working her foot, letting the silence stretch between us while I try to find the words for a conversation I have been avoiding for fourteen days.
“Tell me about your parents,” she says finally, filling the quiet with a question I was not expecting.
My hands still on her ankle. “Why?”
She crosses her arms, pushing the fullness of her breast higher. The low neck of her tank top gives me a delicious view of what I want to run my lips over.
“That’s easy,” she counters. “Because I've been living in your home for two weeks and I don't know anything about you. Because you hold me every night like I'm something precious and then disappear before I wake up. Because I'm sitting here letting you rub my feet after someone just tried to kill me and I don't even know your mother's name. And yet you know everything there is to know about me.”
The accusation in her voice is fair. More than fair. I have given her nothing except confusion and mixed signals and a gilded cage that is starting to feel more like a tomb.
“Elena,” I say finally. "Her name was Elena. She died when I was twelve."
“I'm sorry.”
The tenderness in her words shouldn’t throw me off balance, but they do. No one has cared to ask me about the woman who brought me into this world and loved me when my father only wanted to use me.
