10
LENA
I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine.
For a long, disorienting moment, I couldn’t remember where I was.The sheets were too soft, expensive Egyptian cotton that whispered against my skin.The pillow was too firm.The light coming through the windows slanted at the wrong angle.
My head pounded like someone had taken a hammer to my skull.My mouth tasted like something had crawled inside and died there.
Then it all came flooding back.
Kneeling.Stripping.His eyes traveling over every inch of me while I stood naked and trembling in his cold, beautiful room.The whisky burning down my throat, glass after glass until the world softened at the edges.His lap beneath me, hard and warm.His fingers.
Oh God.His fingers.
I pressed my palms against my eyes and groaned into the empty room.Fragments of memory surfaced like debris from a shipwreck, each one more mortifying than the last.The taste of dark chocolate melting on my tongue.The heat of his thigh beneath my hip.My own voice, slurred and shameless, asking him if he was going to fuck me tonight.
Had I actually said that?Had I actually sucked chocolate off his fingers like some kind of desperate, wanton thing?
The shame was physical, a hot flush spreading across my skin from my cheeks to my chest.I remembered sitting on his lap, boneless and trusting.I remembered wriggling against him, feeling the thick ridge of his erection pressing into my hip.I remembered him telling me I wasn’t ready, that by the time he took me I’d be begging for it, and I remembered the way those words had made something clench low in my belly.
What I did not remember was how I’d gotten to bed.
The gap in my memory was a blank space, a missing puzzle piece that nagged at the edges of my consciousness.One moment I’d been warm and drowsy against his shoulder, his heartbeat steady beneath my ear.The next I was here, waking up alone in a guest room that smelled faintly of white roses and furniture polish.Someone had removed my shoes and set them neatly by the door.Someone had pulled the blanket up to my chin, tucking it around my shoulders.
Him?Or the housekeeper?
I couldn’t imagine Raphael Antonov tucking anyone into bed.The man was ice and edges, all cold calculation behind those dark eyes.And yet someone had been gentle with me.Someone had taken care.
The thought made my chest feel strange.I pushed it away.
I sat up too fast and immediately regretted it.The room spun like a carnival ride.My stomach lurched, threatening rebellion.I breathed through my nose, slow and careful, until the nausea passed and the world stopped tilting.
The room was beautiful, in the same cold way the rest of this house was beautiful.Vaulted ceilings with ornate molding.Heavy velvet drapes in deep burgundy.Antique furniture that looked like it belonged in a museum rather than someone’s home.A vase of white roses sat on the dresser, their petals perfect and slightly unreal.
A note was propped against the vase.I stumbled out of bed on unsteady legs and grabbed it.The handwriting was elegant, feminine.
Miss Hughes,
Breakfast is available in the kitchen until 10 AM.Mr.Antonov has business this morning but requests you remain on the premises until his return.
Alice
Requests.Right.As if I had a choice in any of this.
The bathroom attached to my room was all Italian marble and gold fixtures.The face staring back at me from the mirror looked like a creature from a horror film.Mascara smeared in dark crescents beneath my eyes.Hair tangled into a rat’s nest that would take an hour to brush out.The unmistakable gray pallor of a hangover clinging to my skin.
I looked exactly like a girl who’d gotten drunk and made terrible decisions.
I showered for longer than I should have, letting the hot water pound against my shoulders until my skin turned pink.I scrubbed myself raw, trying to wash away the sense memory of his hands, his eyes, his voice telling me exactly what he planned to do to me and when.
My body refused to cooperate.Every time I closed my eyes, I felt him.The brush of his fingers along my jaw during the interrogation.The heat of his lap beneath my thighs.The way my entire body had hummed with awareness wherever his gaze landed, as if his attention had physical weight.
I’d never felt anything like that before.Not with Joe, whose fumbling, aggressive advances had made me feel like a trophy to be won rather than a person to be desired.Not in any of the quiet, lonely fantasies I’d constructed in the privacy of my childhood bedroom, imagining some faceless romantic hero who would want me for more than my family name.
Last night, standing naked before Raphael Antonov while he catalogued every inch of me like I was an acquisition he was considering, I had felt an awakening I couldn’t name.It was terrifying.Exhilarating.Alive in a way I’d never been before.
Even now, standing alone in this cold marble bathroom with hot water streaming down my back, I could feel the ghost of that charge.The memory of it made me wet, made me ache in places I didn’t want to think about.
