I've said this to myself before. It never works.
He's standing at the counter with his jacket off, tie undone and hanging loose, sleeves rolled to the forearms. The overhead light is off — just the under-cabinet strip, warm and low, turning the kitchen amber. He has his back to the door and a glass of scotch in his hand and he looks like a man who came downstairs for the specific purpose of not having to be Aleksei Romanov for twenty minutes.
He looks almost human.
I hate him for it.
"Can't sleep?" I ask.
He doesn't turn around. "I was sleeping."
"You were standing in the kitchen with a glass of Macallan at midnight."
"I sleep efficiently." He takes a swallow. "Fifteen minutes and I'm done."
I lean against the door frame. "Is that what you tell yourself."
"Sofia."
"Aleksei."
He turns then. His eyes are slightly less armored than usual — it's the hour, or the scotch, or the fact that we're not in a room that requires him to be something specific. He looks at me theway he occasionally allows himself to look at me when he thinks the moment is too small to matter.
It always matters.
"Go to bed," he says.
"No."
A pause. "No."
"No." I push off the door frame and come to stand on the other side of the counter. "I want to talk about the yacht."
Something shifts in his jaw. "There's nothing to discuss."
"You had your hand up my dress at a poker table in front of Dimitri Drakos."
"Yes."
"And then you walked away."
"Also yes."
"And since then you have been—" I gesture vaguely at him, at the kitchen, at the specific performance of normalcy we've both been conducting for three days. "This."
He sets down the glass. Carefully. The way he does things when he's deciding something.
"I did what I did," he says. "You responded. The evening continued. I don't see the problem."
"The problem," I say, and my voice is dangerously even, "is that you did that in front of people who hate you, while raising a bet to ten million dollars, without asking me, without telling me, without?—"
"You didn't say stop."
"I couldn't sayanything."
"I know," he says. And the way he says it — quiet, deliberate, slightly too knowing — ignites something behind my sternum.
"It's not a game," I say.
