He felt the shiver move through her body. Felt her fingers find his shirt, gripping. Felt her scent shift from amusement to something darker and warmer that made the elevator feel several degrees too small.
“Alexei...we’re at work...”
“I own the building.”
“You keep saying that like it’s a valid...”
He kissed her. She stopped talking. The elevator rose.
Later, much later, after the study door had been locked and unlocked and her blouse had been retucked and his composure reassembled from the wreckage she made of it every time she whispered his name in that breathless, breaking voice, he sat in a meeting with three Lyccan territory leaders and thought about her hands.
How they’d gripped his shoulders. The crescent marks her nails had left on his skin through his shirt. How she’d covered her face afterward and whispered “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry, did I hurt you?” and he’d had to physically restrain himself from showing her exactly how unhurt he was.
The meeting was about water rights. He contributed nothing of value.
The Lyccan territory leader on his left, a woman with sharp features and sharper ambitions, crossed her legs and leaned forward to make a point about border negotiations. She held his gaze a beat too long. Smiled with something that had nothing to do with water rights.
He did not notice.
He genuinely did not notice, and he would not have believed it if someone told him, because the only woman whose gaze registered in his awareness was three floors below him, hunchedover a tablet, probably pleading with a polymer simulation the way she pleaded with espresso machines.
Ruby noticed. Ruby always noticed.
“Councilwoman Varga was quite engaged during the meeting,” she told him afterward, her voice giving nothing away.
“Was she.”
“Extremely. Shall I forward her after-meeting notes? She included her personal number.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Ruby’s expression didn’t change. It never changed. But there was something in the quality of her silence that he chose not to investigate.
It wasn’t only Varga. It was the Fae delegate at last Tuesday’s conference, who had touched his arm while making a point about trade policy. It was the Souris ambassador’s aide, who had held his gaze across a reception hall with an intention so naked it bordered on diplomatic. It was the constant, ambient background radiation of attention that had followed him his entire adult life, preters and humans alike, drawn to whatever it was about his appearance or his presence or his bloodline that made people forget their professional composure.
He had been aware of it the way one was aware of weather. Impersonal. Irrelevant.
Then he had married Zia, and the attention became relevant, because Zia had noticed.
She thought she hid it. She was wrong. He could read her jealousy in the micro-shift of her scent, the set of her jaw, howher fingers tightened on her tablet when a female delegate stood too close to him at an event. She never made a scene. She simply radiated a quiet, dignified displeasure that she clearly believed was invisible and was, in fact, the most endearing thing he had ever witnessed.
At last week’s reception, a Lyccan councilwoman had placed her hand on his forearm while laughing at something he’d mentioned, and Zia, standing three feet away, mid-conversation with Kirsten, had stopped talking. Just for a second. Her eyes had found the hand on his arm, and something had flickered across her face that was gone before anyone else could have caught it.
He had caught it.
He had excused himself from the councilwoman, crossed the three feet, and put his arm around his wife in full view of every delegate in the room.
Zia had leaned into him and her scent had bloomed into something warm and satisfied that he would sell his entire portfolio to smell again.
At 5:47 his phone rang. Zia’s name on the screen.
“Hi,” she told him, and the soft, warm way she said it, how her voice dropped half a register when she spoke to him, as if the wordhiwas something private that belonged only to them, was enough to make the water rights presentation and Councilwoman Varga and every other event of the afternoon dissolve into irrelevance.
“Are you still in meetings?”
“No.” He had been. He was now ending one. The delegate across the table would understand.
“Trish wants to know if we’re free for dinner this weekend. She’s bringing the mysterious boyfriend.”
