Alexei is watching me.
Not the delegates. Not the displays. Not the Bellecourt installation or the Lyccan alpha who bowed or the Fae delegation that’s been trying to secure his attention for the past twenty minutes. He’s watching me, and there is something in his expression that I’ve never seen directed at a junior product designer giving a technical presentation about scent neutralization.
It’s the same look from the plane.
That recognition. That quiet, focused intensity. Like something inside him is confirming an answer to a question I didn’t hear him ask.
Our eyes meet, and the Expo drops away. The noise, the crowd, the hundred conversations happening at the same time in a dozen languages, all of it fades to static. And in the silence that’s left, there is only him looking at me and me looking at him and that pull, that terrifying, undertow pull, dragging me toward something I can’t survive.
Because I’ve been here before.
Not here, not at a trade fair in Miami with the Prince of Atlantis. Buthere,in this feeling, this specific, reckless, hopeful feeling that saysmaybe this is real.I felt it with Billy. I let myself believe it. And the believing was what destroyed me, not the breakup itself but the part before it, the part where I was so certain, so stupidly certain, that someone who looked at me like that couldn’t possibly leave.
I look away first.
I look down at my tablet and pretend to type, and my heart is hammering and my face is warm and I can still feel the weight of his gaze on the side of my face like a hand I can’t brush off.
It’s not real.
It’s not real.
We keep moving.
And I keep telling myself that, even though my body has an entirely different opinion. Even though every time his arm comes near mine as we navigate the crowded aisles, the hair on my skin rises. Even though when he leans down to speak to a shorter delegate and his shoulder brushes mine in passing, the point of contact sends a jolt through me that I feel in my teeth.
A delegate from another shifter race asks about the V-Series Vanish plug-in’s performance in tropical climates: humidity, heat, the dense scent-profiles of equatorial environments. I answer, and I’m good, I’m focused, I’m explaining the climate-adaptive dispersion algorithm with enough detail that the delegate pull out his own tablet to take notes. And the whole time, Alexei stands beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him in waves, and I am acutely, painfully aware of the physical scale of him.
He’s tall, yes. Everyone can see that. But it’s not just height. It’s breadth. Presence. His body takes up space without apology. His shoulders fill the frame of his suit like they were engineered to carry weight, literal, metaphorical, the sort that comes with being the last of a bloodline older than civilization. There is something undeniably animal about him. Not rough. Not brutish. But that thing where you look at someone and yourhindbrain whispers, very quietly,this creature could outrun you without trying and isn’t that terrifying and isn’t that beautiful.
A stallion.
He is a stallion, and I keep forgetting that until moments like this, when he turns his head and the light catches the line of his neck the way he holds himself, that coiled, effortless power, reminds me that underneath the bespoke tailoring and the aristocratic composure, there is something vast and untamed that could level this building if it wanted to.
The delegate finishes his questions and moves on, and Alexei’s hand lands briefly on my elbow to steer me toward the next appointment. Just a touch. Just fingers on fabric. Lasting maybe two seconds.
I feel it for twenty minutes.
We pass the Bellecourt installation again, and I catch a flash of white-blond hair behind the display, one of the brothers, I think, though I can’t tell which one. The Bellecourt booth has drawn a crowd that’s spilled into the adjacent aisle, and navigating around it means the press of bodies forces us closer together. Alexei’s hand returns to my lower back, guiding me through the crowd, and this time it stays.
It stays, and my spine is on fire, and I’m smiling at a Fae delegate who is asking me about fragrance-free environments for winged races and I’m answering intelligently and thoroughly while the Prince of Atlantis has his hand on my back and my entire nervous system is staging a revolt.
When we clear the crowd, his hand drops.
I miss it immediately.
And I want to scream, because missing the touch of a man I barely know is exactly the sort of reckless, self-destructive nonsense that got me into trouble with Billy, and I refuse, Iabsolutelyrefuse, to be that girl again.
Even though I keep catching him. Small things. How his hand hovers near my lower back when the crowd presses close, not touching but almost touching, holding a space that belongs to me. How his body angles between me and the crowd, subtle but consistent, like he’s shielding me from something I can’t see. How, when I finish a technical answer that satisfies a particularly difficult delegate, something in the set of his jaw changes. Not a smile, not even close, but a settling. A satisfaction.
Like I’m passing a test I don’t know I’m taking.
Like he already knows the answer and he’s just waiting for me to catch up.
This is insane, and I need to stop, because I’m at a professional event representing my company and I can’t afford to spiral into a paranoid romantic fantasy about my employer based on a near-miss on a plane and some ambiguous body language at a trade fair.
I take a breath. I refocus. I pull up the next set of notes on my tablet and prepare for the next booth.
And then Alexei steps away to speak with a Lyccan council member, and I’m alone for the first time in hours, standing by a display of our V-Series prototypes, reviewing my notes and breathing actual air that doesn’t smell like mountain water and old forests and whatever it is about him that makes me forget how to be a functional human being.
