Chapter 3 #2
And something in Mia, something reckless and furious and absolutely done with closed doors, moved before she could think.
She grabbed his wrist.
He froze. His entire body went rigid, like she'd touched a live wire, and she could feel his pulse under her fingers. Fast. Too fast for a man who felt nothing.
"Don't walk away from me again." Her voice was raw. "You walked away last night, and I let you, but I'm not letting you twice."
He didn't turn around. His voice was stripped. "Let go."
"No."
"Mia—"
"No." She tightened her grip. Her heart was in her throat.
Her whole body was vibrating, and she didn't care, because she was Mia Robertson and she'd flown two thousand miles and dropped out of college and unpacked her bags in a billionaire's penthouse and she wasn't going to let him retreat into another room and pretend they were guardian and ward when his pulse was a drumbeat under her thumb.
He turned.
She saw it happen. The exact moment the control fractured.
His eyes were wild. Furious. And underneath the fury was something so raw and so desperate that her chest caved.
"You want the truth?" His voice was barely a rasp. "Is that what you want?"
"Yes."
"The truth is I can't think straight when you're in this apartment."
The words hit her like a wave.
"The truth is I haven't thought straight since you called me from the car yesterday.
The truth is I sent you to Whitmore because every day you were here I—" He stopped.
His teeth clenched so hard she heard them meet.
"Every day you were here, you got closer, and I let you, and I shouldn't have.
And now you're back and you're standing in my kitchen with your hair down and your bare feet and that dress, and I—"
His hand came up. His fingers grazed her cheek, and the touch was so gentle it made her want to cry, because everything else about him was clenched and rigid and barely held together but his fingertips on her skin were feather-light.
"You should be at Whitmore," he murmured. "You should be in a lecture hall. You should be meeting someone your own age who deserves you."
"I don't want someone my age." Her voice cracked. "I want you."
His thumb traced her lower lip. Slow. Deliberate. And his eyes tracked the path of it like he was memorizing something he'd already decided to give up.
"You don't know what you want."
"I've known since I was sixteen."
His whole body went still.
She heard it. The catch, the fracture. And she pressed into it because she was brave and terrified and this was the closest she'd ever gotten to the truth.
"I came back for you," she whispered. "Not for the gap year.
Not for Monaco. For you. And you can call me young and you can call me reckless and you can tell me I'm remembering incorrectly, but don't you dare tell me I don't know what I want, because I have wanted you for two years, Alexei, and I am so tired of pretending I didn't."
The sound he made was barely human.
His hands were on her. Both of them. One on her waist, one in her hair.
He pulled her against him and buried his face in her neck, and for one second, she felt the full weight of Alexei Almazov without his armor.
The ragged pull of his lungs against her skin.
His body tight as a wire. His fingers gripping her waist like she was the only solid thing in the room.
"I can't do this." The words were a groan against her throat.
"You already are."
His hand slid from her waist to the small of her back. The press of his palm through the thin cotton of her sundress sent a bolt of heat up her spine, and she arched into him before she could stop herself, and the sound that came out of her, small, startled, hungry, made his grip tighten.
"Mia." A warning.
"Don't stop."
"This isn't—"
"Don't. Stop."
His mouth found the curve of her neck. Not a kiss.
A surrender. His lips dragged up the column of her throat, slow and open and ruinous, and she couldn't think, could only feel the heat of his mouth and the grip of his hands and his body trembling against hers, actually trembling, like the control was costing him everything he had.
She gripped the front of his shirt. Her knees were gone.
The kitchen counter was pressing into her back and she didn't remember moving but none of it mattered because his mouth was on her cheek now, tracing the line of it, and his chest was heaving, and she was making sounds she'd never made before, soft, broken things that she would've been embarrassed about if she'd had any brain cells left to spare.
His hand slid up her side. His thumb grazed the curve of her through the sundress, and the world went white.
"Oh—" She gasped. Her head fell back. Her hands flew to his shoulders, gripping hard enough to leave marks, and the tremor that ran through her entire body was visible.
He froze.
She felt it. The second of hesitation, the war playing out in the rigid set of his shoulders. He was going to pull back. He was going to stop, just as he'd stopped last night, just as he always stopped.
"Please." Her voice cracked. "Alexei, please—"
His hand closed over her.
The sound that came out of her wasn't a word. It was something raw and undone and desperate, and his teeth clenched at the sound of it, and his eyes when she met them were black.
"Tell me to stop." His voice was gravel. "Tell me to stop and I will."
"No."
His thumb moved. A slow, ruinous circle through the cotton, and she bit her lip so hard she tasted copper, and her hips pressed forward into his without her permission, and the groan that tore from his chest was the most honest sound she'd ever heard from him.
"I didn't—" He pressed his forehead against hers. His voice was wrecked. "I didn't plan this."
"I know."
"This changes everything."
"I know."
His other hand found the hem of her dress. His fingers grazed the bare skin of her thigh, and every nerve in her body caught fire.
"You're shaking," he murmured.
"So are you."
His teeth met. His fingers traced higher, slow, torturous, up the outside of her thigh, over her hip, along the curve of her waist beneath the dress. And everywhere he touched, her skin erupted, and the sounds she was making had become continuous now, small and urgent and begging.
His mouth was at her ear. "If you want me to stop—"
"I swear, Alexei, if you stop—"
His hand slid between her thighs.
Her whole body arched. A cry tore from her throat, sharp and startled, and her nails dug into his shoulders and her eyes squeezed shut and the world narrowed to nothing but the pressure of his hand and the heat of his body against hers and the ragged sound of him in her ear.
"Open your eyes." His voice was barely recognizable. "Mia. Open your eyes."
She did.
His face was inches from hers. His composure was in ruins. Eyes burning, a flush spreading across his cheekbones that she'd never seen before. He was wrecked. He was a man who had spent twenty-two years controlling everything in his world and had just lost control of the only thing that mattered.
"I've got you." His voice was barely a whisper.
And his fingers moved.
She broke.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't gradual. It was a shattering, fast and blinding and so intense that her vision went dark and her body bowed against his and the sound she made was his name, just his name, over and over, and his arm was around her waist holding her up because her legs had stopped working entirely.
He held her through it. Both arms wrapped around her.
His face buried in her hair. His chest heaving against hers, his body rigid with a tension that had nothing to do with control and everything to do with what he'd just done and what it meant and the fact that there was no wall in the world high enough to undo it.
When she came back to herself, she was pressed against his chest with her face in his shirt and his heartbeat hammering against her cheek. Her fingers were still curled in the fabric of his suit. Her legs were still trembling.
"Alexei," she murmured.
He didn't answer.
She pulled back. Just enough to see his face.
He was undone.
Not in the direction she'd feared. Not disgusted, not regretful. Devastated in the manner of a man who'd just proved something to himself that he'd been denying for years, and the proof was standing in his arms with her hair wrecked and her skin flushed and his name still on her lips.
"Tell me that was nothing," she whispered.
His whole body locked. He released her. Stepped back. Ran a hand through his hair, a gesture she'd never seen from him, because Alexei didn't fidget, Alexei didn't falter, and the wildness of it, the sheer uncharacteristic messiness of the motion, made her chest ache.
"That," and his voice was stripped bare, "was a mistake."
The word should have hurt. It should have gutted her.
But his hands were still shaking.
She could see them. Both hands, hanging at his sides, the fingers curling and uncurling like they were trying to find something they'd just let go of.
"A mistake," she repeated.
"Yes."
"Your hands are shaking."
He put them in his pockets. "I have a meeting."
"Alexei—"
"Artem will be here at noon." He picked up the tablet. His movements were stiff, mechanical. A man reassembling himself in real time. "Stay in the penthouse until then. Biscuit needs to be walked. Use the terrace."
"You can't just—"
"I can." His eyes met hers, and the agony in them hit her like a fist. "I have to."
He walked out.
Not to his bedroom this time. To the front door. His shoes on the marble, his keys off the hook, the click of the lock. A different kind of retreat, a bigger one, because this time he wasn't hiding behind a door in the same apartment. He was leaving.
The penthouse was silent.