RUBY BRINGS US BOTHcoffee before retreating to the forward cabin, and I watch the way Alexei takes his cup without looking up from his tablet. There’s an economy to his movements thatfascinates me in a way I wish it didn’t. Nothing wasted. Nothing accidental. Every gesture unhurried, as if the idea of rushing would be as foreign to him as breathing underwater is to me.
Which is not foreign to him at all, actually, given the Atlantis thing.
I take a sip of my coffee and refocus on my notes.
The problem is that “refocusing on my notes” requires me to look down at the tablet on the table, which means the edge of my vision contains his hands, his forearms, the dark fabric of his suit where it stretches over his shoulders. He’s taken off his jacket and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow at some point, I didn’t see when, I was reading, I wasdefinitelyreading, and the forearms are...
I have no professional reason to be assessing my employer’s forearms.
Moving on.
He speaks for the first time about forty minutes into the flight, and I’m not prepared for what his voice sounds like in a small space.
In hallways and conference rooms, you only catch his voice in passing. A low register. But here, three feet away, with nothing but a table and recycled air, it lands differently. It’s...intimate. Not in a romantic way. In a physics way. The soundwaves have nowhere else to go, so they come straight to me, and I feel them in my chest before I process the actual words.
“The delegate list for this afternoon.” He slides a thin folder across the table without looking up. “Familiarize yourself withthe names marked in blue. Those are the ones most likely to have technical questions.”
I reach for the folder.
Our fingers don’t touch.
They don’t need to.
Because somehow, the two inches of space between his hand and mine when I take the folder is worse than contact would have been. It’s a gap that my body is acutely, almost painfully aware of, like a near-miss that leaves your nerves ringing.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” I say, and my voice is normal. Totally normal. The voice of a woman receiving a document on a business aircraft.
I open the folder and start reading.
And I don’t notice the way his gaze lifts from his tablet for exactly one second and rests on me before returning to whatever he was reading.
I don’t notice it because I’m not looking at him.
Except I am.
I’m watching his hands. Because his hands are right there, holding the tablet, and they’re hands that make you understand why sculptors used to spend years on a single marble figure. Long fingers. Elegant but not delicate. There’s a strength to them that suggests they could be extraordinarily gentle or extraordinarily dangerous depending on what the situation required.
Stop looking at his hands, Zia.
I look at the delegate list.
I memorize every single name on it out of sheer survival instinct, because I need something,anything,to focus on that isn’t the physical attributes of my boss.
TURBULENCE.
Not bad turbulence. Not the sort that makes the oxygen masks drop or sends flight attendants stumbling. Just a brief, sharp jolt that catches me mid-sip of the water Ruby had set out, and my hand jerks, and the water sloshes, and I grab the edge of the table.
His hand is there before I even register that I’m off-balance.
Not on my hand. On my wrist. A quick, firm hold that stabilizes me instantly, the way you might catch a glass before it tips. Reflexive. Efficient.
And warm.
So warm.
His fingers are wrapped around my wrist, and I can feel my pulse beating against his palm, and I know, with the absolute, mortifying certainty of someone whose cardiovascular system has just betrayed her completely, that he can feel it too.
My heart, hammering against his skin.
