She was asleep, curled on her side, her dark hair spread across the pillow.The moonlight through the window caught the curve of her cheek, the soft part of her lips.She looked peaceful.Young.Innocent of the violence I’d just committed in her name.
I stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching her breathe.The wolf pressed against my ribs, wanting to crawl into that bed, to wrap myself around her, to keep her safe through the night.
Instead, I went to my own room.Lay down on cold sheets that smelled only of myself.
Tomorrow I would dig deeper.I would find whoever was really behind this, whoever had the access and the twisted obsession to terrorize her like this.
But tonight, she was safe.Tonight, she was sleeping peacefully while I stood guard in the darkness.
That would have to be enough.
22
LENA
His arms were still around me, and I couldn’t make myself move.
The greenhouse air was warm and humid, pressing against my skin like something alive.Somewhere behind us, condensation dripped from a broad leaf onto the tile floor.The sound was soft, rhythmic, like a heartbeat keeping time with my own racing pulse.Or like seconds passing, one by one, while I stood in Raphael Antonov’s arms and tried to remember how to breathe.
I had kissed him.Not because the contract demanded it.Not because he’d backed me into a corner or overwhelmed my resistance with his particular brand of controlled intensity.I had risen up on my toes and pressed my mouth to his because I wanted to.Because he’d stood in this greenhouse full of his dead mother’s art and told me the walls weren’t going to work anymore, and something in me had given way at the raw honesty in his voice.
What I feel for you now has nothing to do with contracts or leverage or games.
The words echoed in my head, tangling with the taste of him still lingering on my lips.That dark, rich scent that was purely him.The faint green sweetness of growing things.Something darker underneath, something that made my pulse quicken even now, even standing motionless in the circle of his arms.
I should pull away.I should thank him for showing me the sculptures, make some excuse about being tired, retreat to my room and lock the door and pretend this afternoon had never happened.That was the smart thing to do.The safe thing.The thing that would protect whatever was left of my heart from the inevitable destruction waiting at the end of this arrangement.
But I didn’t move.Couldn’t move.His chest was solid and warm against my cheek, his heartbeat steady beneath my ear, and for the first time in weeks I felt something other than fear.His scent surrounded me, making my body remember all the ways he’d touched me before.All the ways I’d wanted him to touch me again.
Around us, his mother’s sculptures watched like witnesses.Hope with her arms stretched toward an unreachable sky.The spiral that pulled the eye inward.Frozen flames that would never burn out.All that longing and grief and desperate love, preserved in stone.A whole lifetime of emotion given permanent form.
I understood her now.The woman who had made these shapes.The need to capture something that couldn’t be held, to make solid what was otherwise too vast and terrifying to contain.I understood the impulse to reach for something you knew might destroy you, simply because not reaching felt worse.
I pulled back just enough to look at his face.His eyes were dark, watchful, waiting.Not demanding anything.Not pushing.Just holding me with that steady patience that was so different from the man who had cornered me in hotel lobbies and made me strip for his inspection.This was someone else.Someone who had just shown me his wounds and trusted me not to cut deeper.
“Take me back to the house,” I said.
Something crossed his expression.Hope, maybe.Or fear.Or both tangled together the way they seemed to be in everything between us.
“Are you sure?Because once I have you like this, choosing this, choosing me, I won’t be able to let you go.”
I wasn’t sure of anything.I wasn’t sure that this was real, that he meant what he’d said, that I wouldn’t wake up tomorrow regretting every choice I was about to make.But I was tired.Tired of being afraid.Tired of fighting what my body wanted, what some traitorous part of my heart had wanted since the first night I’d played piano for him in that cold, beautiful room and felt his eyes on me like a physical touch.
“I’m sure I’m tired of being smart,” I said.“I’m sure I want one day where I’m not calculating every move.I’m sure I want…” I trailed off, not quite able to say it out loud.
“What do you want, Lena?”
His voice was low, rough at the edges.Like he was holding himself back by a thread.Like my answer mattered more than he wanted to admit.
“You,” I whispered.“I want you.”
The walk back to the manor took forever.Or maybe it took no time at all.I couldn’t tell.My awareness had narrowed to the space between us, the few inches of cold February air separating his body from mine as we walked side by side down the stone path.
He wasn’t touching me.After the greenhouse, after that kiss, he had stepped back and let me lead.Let me set the pace.His hands were in his pockets, his stride purposefully shortened to match mine, and every few steps I felt his gaze on me like heat against my skin.The anticipation was almost unbearable.Every nerve ending in my body had come alive, hyperaware of the distance between us, of the closing gap between decision and consequence.
My mind was racing even as my body ached to close the space between us.What was I doing?This wasn’t the plan.The plan was to survive the year, save the hotel, walk away with my dignity and my father’s legacy intact.The plan was to give him my body because I had no choice, not because I wanted to.The plan was to hate him.
I didn’t hate him.
