Except she has changed me.
I know that. I’ve known it since the morning after I sent her home and sat in the dark of my suite and told myself I’d done the right thing, but couldn’t make myself believe it.
“You need to eat something.” I move toward the kitchen. The efficient, practical thing. The thing that doesn’t require me to stand two feet from her in a mountain safe house with a year of watching pressing on everything I’m refusing to say. “It was a long drive.”
“I don’twantto eat something—“
“Laura.”
“Don’tLaura me—“
I stop in the kitchen doorway. Don’t turn around. Because if I turn around and look at her properly—at her standing in that dress in my safe house, furious and beautiful and here, actuallyhere—I won’t say the practical thing. I’ll say the true thing, and the true thing will ruin what little control I’m holding onto.
“You’re not a prisoner.” A careful arrangement of accurate words. “You’re a guest. Until I say it’s safe to leave.”
“Safe from what? I wasn't in any danger, and you know that. The only dangerous thing in my life was you. As you've just proven by kidnapping me.”
No answer for that.
“Maxim.” My name. Her voice, saying my name the way she had said it once before, in a hotel suite, in the dark. “Why am I here?"
I've become so proficient at lying that sometimes I even deceive myself.
“Artur’s family wants me dead.” I open the refrigerator. Stocked—Daniil knew, because Daniil knows me too well. “This is the safest location until that changes. There’s a room with a lock that works from the inside. Clothes in the second closet—that should fit. Take the dress off before you ruin it further. Eat. Sleep.”
“And then what?” she quietly asks the real question. A question I haven't had an answer for in over a year.
I close the refrigerator. Turn around. Laura's curls are loose around her shoulders now, veil pins lost, and her chin lifted in the exact way it was in a hotel corridor when she refused to flinch. My little mouse is not a mouse anymore. I hate that. She’s not moving toward me, and she’s not moving away. Just holding her ground the way she always holds her ground—standing in a strange place with everything upended and still finding somewhere to plant her feet.
My chest tightens. Hard.
I cross the room. I don’t decide to. It happens the way things happen when you’ve stacked a heavy block on a shelf every day for a year, and it finally falls. She holds her ground until I’m a foot away, and then her breath changes — her chest rises and doesn’t quite fall, her chin stays lifted even as I take her face in my hands and stop lying to both of us.
The kiss isn’t gentle. I don’t have gentle left. Not after a year of fighting against an iron will. Not after four hundred miles and wedding arrangements that don't involve me. It’s all of it — every morning without her smile to rival the sun. Every night I sat alone in a dark office because going home to an empty bed was unbearable. I wasted a year doing the right thing and ended up here anyway.
She makes a sound against my mouth that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I pull her closer by the back of her neck, and she grabs my shirt in both fists and holds on, and twelve months of controlled, disciplined restraint give out under me as if it was never there.
5
Laura
His mouth is exactly how I remembered. Damn him, nothing has changed. His lips, scent, and taste are replicated so precisely that they drag me out of the denial I built around myself. Yank me out of a year of rebuilding. A year of careful, deliberate correctness. A year of Larry’s patient kindness and the peace of a life that asks nothing of you.
Gone. All of it. In one second of his mouth on mine.
I pull back. Hard. Both hands on his chest. He lets me move — barely — and looks at me with those dark blue, intense eyes. Eyes that give nothing away, yet demand everything in return. No. Hell, no. He doesn't get to do this again. Take me and then how long before he decides he can't keep me.
“I have a fiancé.” The words come out clear and steady, and I mean them.I do mean them. “I was getting married today. You don’t get to—”
“You’re not wearing his ring.”
It's not on my left hand. I'd removed it when I sat staring out the window and seriously considered climbing down a trellis and making a break for it. The ring is on a dresser in Cambridge, in a bridal suite I’ll never go back to, and its absence from my finger feels both heavier and lighter. A contradiction I won't decode. Not now. And definitely not with him. “That doesn’t mean—”
“Tell me you love him.”
I don't respond. He's baiting me, but I'm not falling for it. I don't owe Maxim Ismailov an explanation. He doesn't get to do an autopsy on my relationship.
“Look me in the eye,” he says, “and tell me you love Larry Stevens.”
