I toss the towel over my shoulder and lean against the squat rack, letting her look. I don't cross my arms over my chest the way I usually do, the way that's become a reflex wheneversomeone's eyes are on me. I just stand there, sweating and breathing hard, and let her see whatever she wants to see.
"Like what you see?" It comes out before I can stop it, low and teasing, and I brace for the backtrack. The polite denial. TheI wasn't looking.
She tilts her head. Considers me. The flush is still there, warm across her cheekbones, but her voice is steady when she answers.
"I'm still deciding."
A laugh punches out of me, genuine and surprised, and her eyes light up when she hears it. Like she wanted to see if she could get that sound out of me and she's glad she could.
"You should go get breakfast," I say, because if she stands there looking at me like that for much longer, I'm going to do something stupid like close the distance between us and find out if her skin is as warm as it looks. "Kitchen's upstairs, end of the hall on the right. Ma will already have something cooking."
"And you?"
"I need to shower." I gesture with a nod to the door that leads to a shower room and sauna.
"Do you always work out this early?" she asks.
"Only when I can't sleep."
She nods, and something passes between us that I don't have a name for yet. An understanding, maybe. That neither of us slept, and maybe it was for the same reason, and maybe that reason is standing in this basement gym looking at each other like two people who just discovered they speak the same language.
"Liam will want to talk to you after breakfast," I say. "About the timeline. Logistics."
"I know." She pushes off the doorframe and I catch the way her eyes drop one more time, quick and involuntary, to my chest andmy crotch, before she pulls them back up. She swallows hard, and I swear I see her pupils blow from here.
She turns and walks down the hall towards the stairs that lead up to the foyer of the house. I watch her go, the bare feet on the cold floor, the way she moves like someone who's been careful for so long that she's forgotten what it feels like to take up space.
I wait until I hear her footsteps on the stairs. Then I grab my shirt off the floor, throw the towel over my shoulder, and head to the shower.
The water is scalding and I stand under it with both hands braced against the tile and my head dropped between my arms and I let myself feel it.
She looked at me like she was hungry.
Not hungry for safety, or hungry for a way out. Hungry forme.For the sweat on my skin and the width of my shoulders and the way my arms looked when I was lifting. She saw the scar, saw the dead eye, and kept looking. Kept flushing. Kept standing there with her bottom lip caught between her teeth like she didn't even realize she was doing it.
I close my eyes and let the water run down my back and I stop fighting the thing I've been fighting since she walked through the front door.
I want her.
Not just because she's beautiful or because the Council says I need a wife. I want her because she said yes. Because she looked at my face and didn't run. Because she stood in a doorway and watched me like I was something worth watching, and for the first time in years, I let myself wonder if maybe she's right.
My hand drops from the tile. I wrap it around myself and I don't think about strategy or politics or the Baron or Diomid or the Council's mandate. I think about brown eyes with goldflecks. I think about the flush on her cheeks and the way her voice sounded when she saidI'm still deciding.I think about where the flush might end and whether her nipples darken when she gets aroused. How heavy her tits would feel in my hands, how soft they would be in my mouth.
I think about what it would feel like to have her take everything from me like a woman starved, and watching her go wild as she rides me, as she loses herself on the end of my cock.
The release hits me hard, buckling my knees, pulling a groan out of my throat that I muffle against my forearm. I stand there shaking under the hot water, breathing through the aftershocks, and I feel something I haven't felt in so long that it takes me a minute to recognize it.
Hope.
Fragile and unfamiliar and probably stupid, but there it is. Sitting in the center of my chest like a coal that's been dead for years and just caught a breath of air.
Anya Agapova looked at me like she wanted me, and I'm going to spend every day between now and the wedding making sure she wants me more and more.
Anya
My skin is still buzzing when I reach the top of the stairs.
I press my back against the wall of the hallway and close my eyes and take a breath that does absolutely nothing to calm the heat rolling through me like a slow wave. My heart is hammering. My cheeks are on fire. And between my thighs there's a pulse that has nothing to do with adrenaline and everything to do with what I just saw in that basement gym.
