Heat swells from him and instantly charges the room.
“First, we need to get a couple of issues straight. One, you’re moving out of my place. Two, you’re never to touch me again. Got it?” I move to cross around the table.
He grasps the side of my waist with one hand, lifts, and easily plants me on the table. “No.”
My jaw drops open, and I set the coffee roughly down. How did he do that with one hand? My breath catches and not in the way I want. So I clear my throat. “I’m not giving you a choice.”
He moves in, his hips spreading my thighs, and leans over me until I fall back onto my elbows. What in the world is he doing? We’re at my office and anybody could walk by the conference room windows.
His eyes glitter. “You might want to rethink your approach. If bringing you to orgasm is the only way to gain your cooperation, I’ll get to it right now.”
I stare up at his onyx eyes, feeling devoured. The man makes up his own rules and society’s be damned. My lungs stutter, and even with my body lighting on fire, a new fear fuels through me.
A light flickers in those eyes. Just for a fleeting second. “You want a choice in this?” he rumbles.
I gape at that statement. “I-I do have a choice in this.” What an asshole.
“You really don’t, but I’ll let you get there yourself.” He steps back and gently tugs my skirt back down almost to my knees. “Nothing goes farther between us until you ask for it.” He moves away, and an irritating coolness washes over me.
I push myself off the table and shove hair out of my face. It’s time to regain control of this situation. “I want to go over your version of what happened the night of David Fairfax’s murder.” My nipples sharpening, I stride around the table and roll out one of the plush brown leather chairs. “Then we need an alternate theory of who killed David.”
“I have a lot of alternate theories.” Alexei pulls out a chair across from me.
Good. So he’s going to be somewhat agreeable.
“Also,” I clear my throat, “since we now understand the agreement between us, and I’ll never make a move, you need to find a different place to stay.”
“I’ve already given you the parameters. I’m staying with you, and when you make the choice, there’s no going back. So take your time,” he says mildly, cocking his head to look at the pictures Eloise taped to a board of him, Blythe Fairfax, David Fairfax, Garik Petrov, Hendrix Sokolov and Cal Sokolov. Off to the side are taped pictures of the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and Miles Molasses from my firm.
I take a deep breath—one fight at a time. “You mentioned that Miles Molasses from my firm was dirty?”
Alexei’s upper lip quirks. “He must’ve been because he sucked as a lawyer.”
Miles had made mistakes in trial, but nothing horrible. “Any other reason you made the accusation?”
“I said Miles worked with the prosecuting attorney and judge to get me convicted. I had a feeling at the time because he didn’t do a very good job, but rumors abound in prison. When the judge and prosecuting attorney were taken down, those rumors flew wild. The three were friends.”
“I’ll need to hire a private investigator to look into this.”
Alexei settles back in his seat as if he owns the room. “First thing we do is release my financial accounts.”
I nod. “I’m having my paralegal draft up the paperwork right now. We have a good argument that you need the funds for a decent defense.”
Apparently, the trust holds a morality clause, and so when Alexei had been convicted, Lillian had been able to freeze the funds. Now that he’s been freed, I should be able to make those available to him.
I reach for a legal notepad. “How much are we talking about?”
He lifts one careless shoulder. “It depends on how well the fund has done while I’ve been in prison. I haven’t received statements. But there were about two billion dollars in it before then.”
I cough and look up, my eyes wide. “Two billion?”
He shrugs as if that kind of money is no big deal. “Yes.”
“Man, we live a different life,” I mutter, making notes on the notepad. “All right, in your own words, tell me what happened from the night before to the morning that David Fairfax was killed.”
Alexei, quite understandably, had not testified, nor had he said a word to the police, according to the police reports I have already read through.
His fingers drum quietly on the heavy mahogany conference table, and he looks up to stare at Blythe Fairfax’s picture. “I worked with Garik at the bar that night. We were drunk. We sang some tunes. Blythe met me there, we went back to her place, and I stayed the night.”
