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“The cellar dates to the sixteenth century. The oldest bottles are from 1892.”
Lukas guides me deeper into the cellar, his hand returning to the small of my back. He doesn’t need it there—the path is clear and the light is adequate—but he keeps it there anyway and I let him. It’s a nice hot plate against the chill seeping through my thin sundress.
“This section is Bordeaux,” he says, stopping at a rack lined with dark bottles. He stands close behind me. Too close. His chest nearly brushes my shoulder blades, and when he speaks, his breath ghosts across the nape of my neck. “1945. 1961. Great vintages.”
I nod as if I understand anything about wine beyond “red” and “white.” To be clear, I do not, and even that much is a struggle some days.
He moves us to another row, still touching me. “These are from Burgundy. More delicate. Temperamental little bastards.”
“You must identify with them.”
He ignores me. We wind through the labyrinth of racks until he stops at a small alcove set apart from the rest. Here, a single bottle sits alone on a stone pedestal, covered in dust so thick it looks like velvet.
“This one,” he says, “is my pride and joy.”
I bend to get closer and squint at the label. The year isn’t immediately legible beneath the grime. But once I rub it with a careful thumb, I read…
2007
I don’t even have to do the math. The answer jumps straight into my brain.2007. Eighteen years ago…
… The same year Elena died.
I turn to face Lukas and realize my mistake immediately.
He’s right there. Inches away. Close enough that I can see the individual threads of silver in his beard, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, the dilation of his pupils in the dim light.
He doesn’t step back.
Neither do I.
The cold of the cellar claws at my bare shoulders, but everywhere Lukas is close, I’mburning. His breath falls warm across my forehead. His chest rises and falls slowly, steadily, while mine stutters like a car that won’t start.
This is it. I know it with absolute certainty. This is the moment everything changes. All that distance, the coldness, it’s all going to boil away. Whatever has been caged in him will break free.
And the shameful truth is that Iwant it to.
I want him to close the gap. To press me back against the cold stone and take what he’s been circling for weeks. I want to stop thinking, stop questioning, stop fighting the pull that’s been dragging me toward him since the first night he walked into Kir’s office.
Because he was exactly right with what he guessed about me earlier: I’m so, so tired of being in charge.
I can’t keep pretending I have everything under control when the truth is that I’m fucking drowning. I’ve been drowning for years, ever since my parents’ car crumpled against that highway barrier and left me holding the bleeding pieces of a life I never asked to inherit.
Gideon’s rehab bills, the apartment I can barely afford, the constant, gnawing terror that one missed payment, one bad day, onesingle fucking mistakewill send everything crashing down around me…
It’s too much for any one person to handle.
And here’s Lukas Lazarev, with his private jets, his French vineyards, and his five million dollars thrown around like pocket change. A man who doesn’t ask permission, who justhandlesthings, the way I’ve been desperately wishing someone would handle things for me for a long, long time.
It’s a fantasy to be cared for like that, least of all by him. I know it is. The idea that someone could sweep in and make all of it go away… that’s fairy tale stuff. It’s not real.
But God, what a fantasy it is.
And if there were ever a place for fantasies to come true, it would be a place like this: the dusty, stone-walled wine cellar of an ivy-choked mansion in the picturesque French countryside with no one even remotely close enough to hear me scream, or moan, or beg for mercy, or beg formore.
His gray eyes bore into mine, darker than I’ve ever seen them. The muscle in his jaw pulses. His hands hang at his sides, fists clenched so tight I can see the white of his knuckles even in the dim light.
I wait.
