"You will live in my household. You will carry my name. You will be expected to produce heirs. Soon."
The word hangs between us.Heirs.The clinical frame of it, the transactional surface, doesn't disguise what lives underneath. I want children. I want a son who will grow up in the world I've built and inherit it. I want a daughter who will be fierce and protected and impossible to destroy. I want a family that is mine in every sense of the word, permanent and unbreakable.
Claudia's expression doesn't change, but her fingers tighten slightly in her lap. "I understand the expectation."
"You're twenty-five."
"Yes."
"You have years ahead of you. Other options. Why choose this now?"
"Because I don't have other options. Not real ones. My name is ruined in the legitimate world. Every job application, every introduction, every conversation starts and ends with my father's scandal. I can spend the next decade trying to rebuild a reputation that other people control, or I can build something new. Something that doesn't depend on public opinion."
"Something that depends on me."
"Depends on us." She meets my eyes. "I'm not looking for a protector, Rovin. I'm not looking to be kept. I'm looking for a partnership with a man whose power is real and whose family is permanent. I am offering myself as a wife, as a mother to your children, and as someone who understands exactly what she's walking into."
She stops there, but I can see there’s more.
I lean forward. The space between our chairs is perhaps four feet, and I feel every inch of it like a physical thing, a distance I want to close.
"What do you know about me?" I ask. "Specifically."
"I know you run the operations for the Mostovoi family. I know your wealth is estimated at over six hundred million, though I suspect the real number is higher. I know you have four brothers, two of whom I’ve seen tonight, and that you are the eldest and the decision-maker. I know your mother died when you were twelve and your father when you were twenty-three. I know you do not tolerate disloyalty and that the consequences for it are severe."
She pauses, and when she continues, her voice is different. Lower. More intimate.
"I know you bid forty thousand dollars on a painting at a charity auction three years ago and never collected it. I know you sit in the back of every room you enter and you leave before the end. I know you have been watching me tonight the same way I have been watching you for six years."
There it is.
Six years.
The number lands in my psyche like a fist on a table top. She has been watching me for six years. While I was building empires and attending dinners and dismissing candidate after candidate, this woman was watching me from across rooms, collecting information and waiting.
She chose me before I knew she existed.
It takes me a moment to identify the feeling that unfurls in my chest, because it’s not an emotion I experience often. It is the feeling of being wanted, specifically and deliberately, by someone who has considered her options and decided that I am not one of them.
I am the only one.
"Stand up," I say.
She stands. Her movement is fluid and unhesitant, and she watches me with those amber-hued eyes, waiting.
I stand, and move until I am near enough to see the faint pulse in her throat, the tiny catch in her breathing that she can’t entirely control. She doesn't step back.
"If I choose you," I say, "you will belong to me. Fully. Publicly. Privately. There will be no half measures."
"I don't want half measures."
"You will sleep in my bed. Tonight. You will sit beside me in every room I enter, and everyone in that room will know you are mine."
Her chin lifts. Her eyes blaze. "That's what I came here for."
I raise my hand. I touch her jaw, just the tips of my fingers against the line of it, tilting her face toward the light. Her skin is warm and impossibly soft, and the contact sends electric through my blood.
She doesn't flinch. She leans into the touch, fractionally, just enough for me to feel the pressure of her jaw against my fingers.
