None of this has ever been enough to stop the feeling. It has only ever been enough to stop me from acting on it.
Tonight, though, he doesn’t know I am his secretary.
Tonight, he is just a man at a party who stepped in when he didn’t have to, and I am just a woman in a pretty dress, and the distance between those two things is much smaller than it usually is.
“Lena,” I say without hesitation.
It’s not a lie. My mother called me Lena from the day I was born until she passed. It is my name. It just doesn’t exist in any office, on any contract, in any part of the life I built after her.
He looks at me for a moment before he answers. Like the name is something he’s turning over, weighing.
“Roman,” he says.
I know. I have known every iteration of this man for two years. I know how he takes his coffee, how he runs his meetings, and what his silence sounds like when he’s made a decision versus when he’s still calculating. I know the exact timbre of his voice when he’s displeased and the specific stillness that settles over him when he’s truly angry, which is different and considerably more alarming than when he merely seems it.
I know all of this, and he knows nothing about me, and the imbalance of it should feel wrong.
It doesn’t.
He hands me a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, and when he tilts his head toward the French doors leading to the terrace, I follow him without a single reasonable thought in my head.
The city is spread out below us, and the party noise softens behind the glass, and I think, standing there with the night air on my skin and Roman Petrov two feet away from me, that Mara is never going to let me live this down.
2
ELENA
He asksme what I do.
It’s such a normal question that people ask each other at parties without thinking, and I have exactly one second to decide how to answer before the pause becomes its own answer.
“Finance,” I say. “Mostly numbers.”
Again, not a lie. I manage the financial correspondence of one of the most powerful men in New York. Numbers are absolutely involved.
Roman turns his champagne glass slowly. “You don’t look like someone who finds numbers boring.”
“I never said boring.”
“You saidmostly numberslike it was an apology.”
I look at him. He’s watching me with the particular quality of attention that has made two years of sitting outside his office genuinely difficult.
“What do you do?” I ask, because I need him to talk so I can stop.
“Acquisitions,” he says.
I almost smile. That is one word for it.
“Do you enjoy it?”
“I’m good at it,” he says, which is a very Roman answer. Enjoyment has never struck me as the point for him. Control is the point.
“That’s not the same thing.”
He tilts his head slightly. “No,” he agrees. “It isn’t.”
The city spreads out below the terrace railing, all that stacked light and distance, and I am acutely aware that I’m standing on the terrace of his own estate, having a conversation he has no idea is as strange as it is.
