“Eventually,” I muttered.
He stood, turned his chair around, scooted mine so I faced him, then worked his fingers into my thigh, above my knee. I groaned with how good it felt.
“So, tell me something about you,” he said in a voice so sexy my thoughts drifted to his hands moving farther up my leg.
“Do you really expect me to be able to talk while you do that?”
“Come on, Katarina. Talk to me.”
Putain, that voice would be my undoing.
I closed my eyes.“Si tu continues comme ça, je vais te demander de me porter là-haut et de me baiser.”
My eyes snapped open when his fingers stilled.
Blackjack was watching me with a look that made every nerve ending in my body fire at once. Then heleaned forward, his mouth close enough to my ear that his breath hit my skin.
“That can be arranged, Katarina.”
I gasped. “You—how?—”
He tapped his left ear, where a barely visible earbud sat. “Auto-translate. Been on all day.”
All day.
The blood drained from my face and then rushed in again with a vengeance. Every off-handed comment I’d muttered in French this morning flashed through my mind like a highlight reel from hell.
“You could have told me.”
“And miss you saying you want me to take you upstairs and fuck you?” He worked his thumb into my thigh like he hadn’t just detonated a bomb in the middle of the room. “Not a chance.”
“I didn’t say that’s what I wanted.”
He slid the fingers of one hand higher on my leg. “Sure you did.”
Our heads snapped toward the door when Magnolia came into the room. She sat at a table near the rear and opened her laptop.
“So, how does a girl from Lausanne end up on an intelligence council?” Blackjack asked.
“I wasn’t a girl from Lausanne. I was a girl from everywhere. Anna and Polina raised me here, but my education was all over Europe. France, Germany, Austria. Minerva sent me where the work was, and the work was everywhere.”
“When did you know this was what you wanted?”
“I never wanted it. It was what I was born into. My grandfather died for it. My parents died for it. The choice was ‘carry it or put it down,’ and putting it down was never an option. Not for a Stepanov.” I turned the glass in my hand. “That sounds like an obligation. It isn’t. It’s an inheritance I’m proud of. However, I’m not sure anyone asked me if I wanted it before they handed it to me.”
Blackjack worked on my leg but didn’t say much. Magnolia had left the ballroom, and it was quiet enough that I could hear the wind outside and the occasional sound of someone moving in another room, but in here, we were alone, and there was a certain peacefulness to it.
I asked about his parents. His mother was a former State Department diplomat who’d spent most of her career in Latin America. His father was an engineer who’d risen to CTO at a major defense contractor before retiring. He talked about both of them with the easy affection of a man who knew he’d gotten lucky.
“My mother would like you,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you don’t shy away from anything, and she spent twenty years in rooms full of men who expected she would.”
“That’s a generous assumption based on knowing me for less than a month.”
“I’ve seen you drag yourself out from under a crossbeam with a broken arm and refuse to leave a collapsing building. I’ve seen you declare a war that a dozen people signed up for because you said it first.”
