“No one,” he repeats, nodding.
“That’s right.”
“Mm.”
He doesn’t argue or agree. He just makes that little sound, halfway between a hum and a chuckle, then turns on his heels, apparently ready to leave.
“We’ll see, love.”
We’ll see.
I stand too, because if he’s leaving I want him gone, out of my house and back to whatever hellscape he came from. I follow him to the foyer. He moves slowly, like a man in no hurry, hands sliding into his pockets. We walk down the hall and,Lord,I should have gone in front of him and saved myself this. The view of Adam Maksimov from behind is beyond a problem. The charcoal suit jacket sits across shoulders so broad they look specifically made to be a threat; then there’s the shift of powerful muscles under the fabric covering his back.And then.The slacks. The slacks are doing things that should be illegal. Two thick, muscular thighs in fitted wool, and an ass that fills out the seat of his pants like it waspouredin, round and high andfirm, the kind of ass that makes grown women walk into walls becausethey’re too busy imagining how it would feel to bite into that goddamn perfect ass to watch where they’re going…
Lisa Venn, you are a widow and a grown-asswoman,and you are drooling over this man’s ass.
But I keep looking. I look so hard I almost don’t notice he’s slowed down, and now I’m too close to him, and his intoxicating scent is all over me again. And I notice the back of his neck above the collar of his shirt has more of those dark tattoos creeping out of the white cotton in lines I will be drawing in my head later, whether I want to or not.
Then, just before walking out, Adam Maksimov stops at the door and turns to me.
Oh, no.
“How many lads you got in there, love?”
I blink up at him. The word ‘love’ in his mouth, addressing me, took out half my brain. “I’m sorry?”
“Security. In the house. How many?” He asks casually, almost like an afterthought, while his eyes wander past me, checking toward the hallway and staircase. “Ray’s people… whoever you have on the property.”
I almost laugh.Security. In this house.Like we’re still a family thathaspeople.
“Mr. Maksimov, there’s nobody. Ray’s guys stopped coming the day he died. They worked for him, not us. There’s no security. There’s no…there’s nobody. It’s just me and my stepdaughter.”
He goes still, like every function in him just locked in place. His jaw, his shoulders, his hands in his pockets. The blue of his eyes shutters; the warmth gone out of them, and what’s left iscold. A pale, flat, blue-white, like a flame turned all the way up. The kind of cold I’ve never seen, in all my years, not in my father’s world, not in Ray’s world.
The elegant tips of his nostrils flare in a deep inhale, but nothing else moves.
His hands stay in his pockets, his full mouth turns flat, his huge shoulders stiff. There is no fist, no slam, no curse. Only a man going so still that the house itself feels like it’s holding its breath. The casual storm I followed down the hall is gone, and whatever’s standing in front of me now is something else altogether. The thingunderneaththe suit. The thing the suit has been doing me the courtesy of covering.
A muscle twitches at his jaw, and my mouth goes dry.
Run, girl.
I don’t move.
I’ve been around angry men my whole life. My dad angry was loud, slamming doors, breaking shit, putting his fist through walls… or people. And Ray angry was aperformance, designed to make me feel small and helpless. This is not that. This is the opposite of that. This is a man so angry he has gonequiet, and the quiet is so loud I can hear my heart hitting my ribs.
His eyes are not on me. They’re past me, somewhere down the hall, up the stairs, at the doors, then back to the windows of the foyer, the gate visible through the wavy glass, the long open drive nobody patrols anymore. He’s looking at my house, cataloguing it. And whatever he’s seeing in his mind’s eye has put that ice on his face.
He’s not going to hurt me. I don’t know how I know this. I have known the man twenty minutes. But I know it the way I know my own name. Whatever he’s furious about, it’s not me. It’sforme.
That should not be making my thighs press together.Traitor body, we will discuss thislater;we will discuss this for years.
Then Maksimov blinks. Once. Slow. And the blue comes back into his eyes a bit. Not amused and hot like it was before. Just back toseeing me.
And he says in his low, gravelly burr, “Nobody?”
“Nobody,” I repeat, because I have apparently lost the ability to produce my own words.
“For weeks.”
