Page 96 of Taken By My Grumpy Pakhan

“That was hardly a conversation.”

“That was the most I could do, except you have something else you’d like to say.”

The undertone of his statement was not missed on me. He was giving me an out.

When I gathered the courage to look at him, I found him staring at me, his jaw tight.

The elevator climbed past the twelfth floor, the fifteenth, and I tried to look anywhere but at him.

“I’m not avoiding you because I’m scared of you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Something shifted in the air between us, the temperature of it changing in a way I felt rather than saw.

His lips curled like I just presented him with a challenge.

“If that’s true,” he said quietly, “then you wouldn’t mind if I kissed you right now.”

My head turned sharply toward him before I could stop it. “That’s not how that works.”

“Isn’t it? You just told me you’re not avoiding me out of fear. If that’s the case, a kiss shouldn’t be a problem.” His dark eyes held mine, steady and patient and entirely too confident, like he already knew exactly how this was going to go. “Unless there’s a different reason you’d rather not give me.”

“That is reckless. We’re in a building full of cameras and employees who already speculate enough about—”

“This elevator has no cameras.” He took a step closer, closing the distance I hadn’t realized I’d been maintaining until it was gone. “I had them removed years ago. For privacy.”

“Of course you did.” My voice came out breathier than I intended, and I hated how easily he managed to dismantle every argument I tried to construct, hated more how little resistance I actually felt building behind my protests. “That’s not the point, Kazimir, the point is—”

He didn’t let me finish.

His hand came up to cradle the side of my face, his thumb brushing along my cheekbone, and then his mouth was on mine.

It wasn’t hard and fast like our other kisses; this was slow, deliberate and almost as though he was pouring the words he couldn’t say into every stroke of his tongue.

I should have pulled back. Every rational thought I’d been clinging to for the better part of two weeks told me to step away, to remember the gun on the bathroom counter and the blood on his knuckles and how he only gave me answers in bits and fractured pieces.

I didn’t pull back. I kissed him instead, my fingers curling into the lapel of his jacket, and the elevator seemed to tilt slightly off its axis, or maybe that was just me, losing whatever ground I’d been standing on.

His hand slid from my face down to the curve of my waist, pulling me flush against him, and the kiss deepened into something hungrier, something that tasted like the days I’d spent pretending my heart didn’t do the thing any time I got a notification, only to sink when I realized it was not from him.

And the longer days I’d spent convincing myself this thing between us had cooled into something manageable.

And boy was I wrong. It hadn’t cooled by a fraction. If anything, it had built up like lava beneath a rock, boiling and waiting for the slightest bit of pressure to explode.

Kazimir found my boobs, palming the soft mold of flesh through my shirt. “You still owe me that reward.”

He breathed into the kiss, reclaiming my mouth before I could come up with a response.

I moaned into his lips, the last bit of reservation I had falling away when he found my nipple.

The elevator chimed.

We broke apart at the same moment, both of us breathing harder than the situation should have warranted, and I had just enough presence of mind to step back and smooth down the front of my blouse before the doors slid open.

Kazimir’s expression had already rearranged itself into something composed and unreadable while I was fairly certain my own face was doing absolutely nothing to hide what had just happened.

“After you,” he said, gesturing toward the open doors with infuriating calm, like he hadn’t just kissed me senseless thirty seconds earlier.

I walked out without responding, because I genuinely didn’t trust myself to say anything that wouldn’t give away exactly how unsteady my legs felt.