Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Mia's hand shot out so fast she knocked over her coffee. The mug hit the marble, the milky dregs spilling across the counter, and she didn't care, didn't even register it, because her eyes were on the screen.
One word.
From Alexei.
I know.
MORGAN
Monaco was smaller than he expected.
Smaller and louder and full of people who confused wealth with taste, which amused him, because Morgan Gurin had both, and the difference between the two was something most people spent their entire lives failing to understand.
He sat at an outdoor café on the harbour and drank his coffee black and let the Mediterranean sun warm the back of his neck. The yachts were magnificent, he had to admit. Row after row of them, white and gleaming, rocking in water so blue it hurt. He appreciated beauty wherever he found it. He always had.
The casino was called Ace Royale. He had found it within hours of reaching the city. It was exactly where the letter's trail had brought him: one body in Saint Petersburg, one folded note in a dead man's lap, one reader.
Alexei Almazov.
He turned the name over in his mind as a jeweller turned a stone, examining it from every angle. Eldest brother. Head of the family. A man who ran an empire from a building on the cliff's edge, who moved through the world with the unhurried menace of someone who had been dangerous for a very long time.
Interesting.
Morgan finished his coffee. The cup was porcelain, thin and white, and he set it down with the care of someone who understood that beautiful things deserved gentle handling. Even temporary ones.
He was in no hurry. Hurrying was for people who feared the outcome. Morgan never feared the outcome. The outcome was always the same.
He left the café. The sun hit his hair, and a woman at the next table turned her head. He smiled at her, because smiling cost nothing and made everything easier, and walked up the hill toward the casino.
He had time. He always had time.
The game would begin when he was ready.
Chapter 4
ALEXEI
He made it to the car before his hands stopped shaking.
The underground garage was cold and grey and smelled like concrete and exhaust, and the leather of the steering wheel was smooth under his palms, and he gripped it with both hands and didn't start the engine. His lungs were still wrong. Uneven. Refusing to obey, which was a problem, because Alexei Almazov's body had always obeyed him. It was the one machine in his empire that never malfunctioned.
Until her.
He had touched her. He had put his hands on her in his kitchen at seven in the morning with her dog sleeping three feet away and the Monaco sun pouring through the windows. He had touched her and she had come apart in his arms and the sound of his name in her mouth was never going to leave him.
A mistake.
He had stood there with the taste of her skin on his lips and the scent of her hair in his lungs and called it a mistake.
It wasn't a mistake. That was the problem. A mistake was something you did by accident, something born of carelessness, and nothing about the last ten minutes had been careless. He had felt her grab his wrist and his body had made the decision his mind had been refusing for two years, and he had turned around and touched her with a deliberateness that made the word mistake a lie.
He'd known exactly what he was doing. Every second of it.
His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
Joshua Robertson had been forty-one when he died. Brain tumour. Three months from diagnosis to funeral. Mia was sixteen and had no one left, and Joshua had gripped Alexei's hand and asked him to take care of his daughter, and Alexei had given his word. Not because of obligation. Because Joshua and Carol Robertson had done something for his father that no one else in the world had been willing to do, and their daughter deserved better than a system.
She deserved better than this, too.
A thirty-seven-year-old man with blood on his ledger and a dead rival in Saint Petersburg and an empire built on decisions that kept him awake at 3 AM. She deserved someone who hadn't spent twenty-two years turning himself into something cold.
She deserved someone whose hands didn't know the things his knew.
He started the engine.
The problem, the real problem, the one he'd been driving away from for two years, was that none of that mattered to her. She didn't care about the age or the blood or the empire. She cared about him. The actual him, the one who poured her orange juice before she asked and remembered her allergies and listened to her voicemails on the plane where no one could see his face.