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I’d meant it as a move. It was meant to prove I could rattle him the way he’d rattled me. Then I could take back some scrap of control before I walked out the door. For half a second it worked exactly like that; his mouth was still under mine, and I felt something like triumph flare hot in my chest.

Then his hand came up to my jaw, and everything I’d planned dissolved.

He kissed me back like he’d been waiting for exactly this and had simply been too disciplined to reach for it first. There was nothing hesitant in it. His other hand found my waist and pulled me in until there was no space left between the lie I’d told myself and the truth my whole body was suddenly shouting. I forgot the hallway. I forgot the cameras I’d spent a week avoiding. I forgot, for several long seconds, exactly why I’d started this in the first place.

When we finally broke apart, I was breathing like I’d run up six flights of stairs, and even in the low light I could see his composure had slipped—his jaw was tight, his eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them, and his stillness felt less like control and more like restraint.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth like that might undo it. It didn’t.

Four months of careful, patient work, and I’d just turned the most dangerous man in Las Vegas into something personal. I didn’t know yet whether that made me more likely to get what I needed from him or less likely to survive finding it.

Either way, I’d crossed a line I couldn’t uncross, and some small, terrified part of me wasn’t entirely sure I regretted it.

Chapter Six

Nikolai

For one full second after her mouth left mine, the casino didn’t exist. Not the floor two levels down, not the men still circulating drinks and lies among high rollers, not the ledger sitting open on my desk with numbers that needed my attention before dawn. There was only the taste of her on my mouth, and the unfamiliar sensation of wanting something badly enough that logic had briefly gone quiet.

I didn’t like it, but I kept going anyway.

Every relationship in my life had been built on the same basis—transactional, bounded, and understood by both parties to end the moment it stopped serving a purpose. Even the women I’d taken to bed over the years had understood that arrangement without needing it explained, the same way Yuri understood loyalty and my brothers understood family. I had never once lost the thread of a negotiation mid-conversation. I had never once let a single kiss unravel years of discipline in the space of a heartbeat—and with her, I found I couldn’t locate the thread at all.

She still hadn’t stopped watching me the way she had in my office that first night. Her look was steady, too steady. She had the stillness of someone holding something back even in a moment that should have stripped every defense down to nothing. Logic told me to let her walk. Logic told me the smarter move was distance and more surveillance. I’d built an entire career on trusting exactly that kind of logic over the impulses that tried to override it.

But I took her wrist and led her toward my office.

She didn’t pull away. I felt her pulse jump under my fingers and the slight hesitation in her step before she matched my pace. I filed away the hesitation with everything else I still didn’t trust about her. She was quite nervous, but not enough to stop. Frightened, but not of me exactly—of herself, maybe, or of whatever she’d just set in motion by grabbing my jacket in the hallway, a decision I suspected she hadn’t fully thought through before making it.

The office door closed behind us with a quiet click, and for a moment neither of us moved while our eyes were on each other.

The room had always been the one place in the building that reflected exactly who I was—glass walls, bare desk, nothing soft enough to hold a memory. But it didn’t feel like that the second the lock caught. It felt charged; the air between us was thick with something I hadn’t allowed myself to want for longer than I could remember. Whatever discipline I’d built my life around simply disappeared.

I crossed the space between us in two steps and had her against the edge of the desk before either of us said another word.

“Nikolai—”

“Don’t,” I said in a low tone, my hand at her jaw, tilting her face up to mine.

She didn’t argue. Whatever she’d meant to prove in that hallway, whatever calculation had put her hand on my jacket in the first place, none of it mattered the moment my mouth found hers again. She kissed like she argued—sharp, unwilling to yield an inch she hadn’t chosen to give, and it undid something in me that years of careful control had kept bolted shut.

I stripped my jacket off and let it fall behind me without caring where it landed. Her hands moved with the same confidence she’d used all week to unsettle me, except now there was nothing hidden in it at all. I lifted her onto the edge of the desk, papers scattering beneath her, financial records I’d care about in the morning but didn’t give a damn about in the moment. She pulled me closer, and I let her, because for the first time in longer than I could remember, wanting something outweighed every reason I had not to take it.

She matched me at every turn—never shrinking, never soft in the way I’d have expected from someone who’d spent the last week feigning charm for my benefit. There was nothing careful in the way she touched me, and it drew something out of me I hadn’t let surface in years.

Even then, I noticed things I shouldn’t have had the presence of mind to notice. The flicker of hesitation before she let her guard down completely when I lifted the lower half of her dress. The half-second where her eyes went somewhere distant and guilty before she pulled herself back into the moment.

I didn’t stop for any of it. Later, I would tell myself it was instinct overriding strategy. But it was simply that I didn’t want to stop.

I undid my belt and zipper, releasing my hard and aching cock impatiently. I followed her eyes down to my hard length, and then she lifted them to meet mine. I held her gaze as she nodded.

I entered her in a long, deep thrust that made her throw her head back and let out a low moan. I started moving as she sat back up a bit, our eyes locked on each other’s. Her chest heaved, and she covered her mouth with her hand, trying to suppress the sounds she was making. Her other hand supported her weight on the desk even though I was holding her too. For me, there was no thinking beyond the pleasure and hunger of moving in and out of her. I liked that she was finding it hard to control herself. I began moving even faster as I felt her tighten around me.

“Come for me,” I murmured as her body started to quiver.

She let go with a moan she couldn’t hold back, and I exploded into her as she came down from her high.

Afterward, the office was quiet except for the distant hum of the casino floor two levels below, muted through glass thick enough to keep every secret this room had ever held. I straightened my collar, buttoned my shirt, and told myself the encounter had settled whatever had been building in me for days.