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)
"You're staring," she told him.
"I'm looking."
"That's the same thing."
"It isn't."
She set the champagne down. Her hands were trembling, and she put them behind her back so he wouldn't see, and the fact that she was trying to hide them from a man who had catalogued every tremor in her body since her first night here was so painfully her that his chest ached.
"I'm nervous," she admitted.
"I know."
"I've never—"
"I know."
"Would you let me finish a sentence?"
"No."
She laughed. The sound filled the penthouse, and it was the same laugh that had cracked the nothing in his chest the first time she called from Whitmore, and it was different now, because she wasn't on a phone two thousand miles away. She was here. Six feet away. His wife.
He crossed the room. Her eyes tracked him, and the brown of them was darker in the evening light, and her pulse was visible in her throat, and she was nervous and brave and his.
"Come here," he told her.
The words. The same ones from the kitchen. The ones he'd spoken for the first time without a reason attached, just come here, just the need for proximity, and she'd stood and come to him and put her hands on his face and the world had rearranged.
She came to him now. Stopped in front of him. Close enough to touch. Close enough to feel the warmth of her through the thin silk.
He reached up. Found the pins in her hair. Pulled them out one by one, and her hair fell in sections, across her shoulders, against his hands, and each pin made a small sound when it hit the marble floor, and she stood still and let him, and the letting was its own intimacy.
"Alexei."
"Not yet."
"I need to tell you something."
His hands paused. The last pin between his fingers. "What?"
"Your hands aren't shaking."
He glanced down. She was right. His hands were still. Not the controlled stillness of a man managing his body. The natural stillness of a man whose body was exactly where it wanted to be.
"Is that bad?" he asked.
"That's everything." Her voice cracked. "That's the whole point. That's what I've been chasing since I was sixteen. Not the kiss. Not the— not any of it. This. Your hands, calm, because you're not fighting it anymore."
The last pin fell.
Her hair was loose. Her face was bare. Her eyes were bright with something that wasn't tears.
He kissed her.
Not the ceremony kiss. Not the slow, reverent press of a man performing for an audience. This was private. This was the sound she made when his mouth opened against hers and the taste of champagne and salt and the way her hands found his chest and her fingers curled into his shirt and pulled, the same way she'd pulled that first night, both fists, the gesture of a woman who had been reaching for him for two years and had finally been given permission to hold on.
His hands found the zip at the back of her dress. One motion. The silk loosened. She pulled back, just enough to meet his eyes, and her expression was nervous and wanting and trusting in a way that leveled him.
"I don't know what I'm doing," she whispered.
"That makes two of us."
"You've done this before."
"Not like this." His voice was raw. "Never like this."
The dress slid from her shoulders. She let it fall. And the sight of her, bare except for the thin fabric beneath, lit gold by the Mediterranean sunset through the windows, hit him in the chest like a fist.
He had seen beautiful things. He owned a casino full of them. Crystal and marble and art that cost more than buildings. None of it had ever done what her bare shoulders did to his ability to breathe.
She shivered. Not cold. The shiver of a woman standing in front of someone for the first time with nothing to hide behind.
"Don't look at me like that," she managed.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm— like I'm something."
"You are something."
"I'm a girl in her underwear in a penthouse. That's a very specific category of something and it isn't the category you're implying."
He pulled her against him. One arm around her waist, his other hand cradling the back of her head, and her body pressed against his chest and the contact, the full-length warmth of her against him with the silk gone and only the thin cotton of his shirt between them, tore a sound from his throat that he didn't recognize.
She made a sound back. Small. Startled. Her face was in his neck and her fingers were gripping his shirt and she was trembling, and the trembling wasn't fear, it was everything, the accumulated weight of two years and a closed door and an opened one and a chair in the dark and a kitchen counter and a proposal that stopped the world.