10. Cali
CALI
Whoever chose the alarm sound for my fancy new front door certainly knew what they were doing.
I'm awake all at once, sitting up, heart pounding before my eyes even crack halfway open.
In this state of semi-consciousness, I have all the grace and lethal potential of a drunk wombat, but that doesn't stop me from stumbling into the hallway and fumbling around for any kind of weapon I can get my hands on.
I do in fact find something dangerous.
It's hard. It's hot. It's solid.
It is, unfortunately, Ronan's crotch.
I know it right away, but my brain still splutters up excuses and possible alternatives. Hoping—no, praying—that it's not what I think it is. My hand freezes.
A door handle? A flashlight? The banister?
None of those.
I look up. It's dark in the hallway, but there's enough moonlight coming through the window to see him. Ronan. Standing there in nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants slung low on his hips.
I look down at my hand. Then I yank it back like I touched a hot stove.
"Oh my God," I whisper. "This is the worst nightmare I've ever had."
"Good morning to you, too, kotyonok."
"I was looking for a weapon."
"Is that what you'd call this?"
"The door alarm went off. I thought— I didn't— I don't know what I thought."
"It was me. I got up to check the perimeter." He rubs a hand over his face. "The alarm arms when I open the vault door. The crew must have misprogrammed it during the midnight shift change.”
I'm still standing too close to him. I can feel the heat coming off his bare chest. Not that I need any additional heat right now—my cheeks are on fire, and I'm grateful the dark hides most of it.
I tuck my hand behind my back like that might undo the damage that's already been done. "This wasn't on purpose, you know."
"How can I be sure?"
"Shut up. You're not helping. In fact, I'm starting to think this whole thing was a ploy just to get—"
"Shh."
With absolutely no warning, Ronan suddenly pins me against the wall.
He's flush against me, head to toe. His chest presses my chest. His hips press my hips. One of his hands is flat on the wall beside my head, and the other holds a gun down low against his thigh.
A gun.
He's got a gun in his hand and he's shirtless and he's pinning me to the wall and I can feel every hard line of him through the thin cotton of my sleep shirt.
Every hard line.
Including one very specific hard line that has not gone away since I grabbed it by accident thirty seconds ago.
"Ronan," I whisper. "Can you please—"
"Quiet." His mouth is right by my ear. His breath is warm and minty. "I heard something."
I feel the gun against my leg and I feel the other thing against my hip and I don't know which one I'm more afraid of.
That's a lie. I know exactly which one.
But he doesn't take mercy on me quite yet. His body stays pressed to mine, warm and solid and unmoving, while he listens for a threat in the dark.
I have never been so confused in my entire life.
Another thirty seconds drag past. It feels like an hour.
Then his other pocket buzzes, once. He lifts the phone, thumb over the screen, and I see his face lit up blue for a second. His eyes move. Reading something.
"Clear," Ronan murmurs. "Sensor on the back door. A branch."
"A branch," I repeat. "Remind me to burn it first thing in the morning."
"Funny. I was thinking of giving it some water and fertilizer as a thank you for bringing us together."
I roll my eyes, not that he can see. Then, with as little skin-to-skin contact as I can possibly manage, I pry him off of me enough to wriggle free of the hip-to-hip wall pinning thing he had me caged in.
But even when I'm free, one fingertip lingers on the V-line of his ab. It's like it's magnetically stuck there.
"Can I go back to bed now?" I squeak out.
He eyes me, eyes flashing blue and gray. But he doesn't lower the gun all the way. Nor does he step back. He said the threat is gone or that it never existed in the first place, so what are we doing here? I'd like to ask, but my voice has abandoned ship.
I think the issue is that, with no one to fight, there's nowhere for all this adrenaline to go. My body's dumped everything it had into my blood and now it's like, Deal with it.
As if there's any way to deal with this. The two of us, me and the shirtless mob boss, in a black hallway, breathing too hard for the circumstances.
And my finger is still on his stomach.
And his hand is still on my waist.
Now that I have calmed down ever so slightly, it's impossible to ignore.
The heat of it. Five points of pressure right over the waistband of my pajama shorts.
It's dark enough that I can't really see him, but I can absolutely feel him, the size of him, the bulk, the firmness, the closeness, the way the whole hallway has shrunk down to the eight inches of air between us.
I'm the one who tips up.
I don't decide to. It's as magnetic as the fingertip. My chin lifts, my weight rolls forward onto the balls of my feet, and I yearn up toward him.
His hand responds.
It glides up my waist. Skimming over my crop top.
In the valley of my breasts. Up my throat, higher, higher, until his palm is against my jaw and his thumb finds the corner of my mouth and rests there.
His face comes down close enough that his breath plumes over my face.
No sound emerges from his lips, but he's saying one word without saying it.
Kotyonok.
It's coming, I know it is. The inevitable. Any second now, he'll… Or I'll…
But no.
He just holds there, thumb at the edge of my mouth, close enough to kiss, and he waits.
Not even if you beg me to, he said.
Looks like he's a man of his word.
I want to scream. Instead, I do the thing I always do when I get caught. I turn into a stone-cold bitch. It's the only way to protect my heart.
"I haven't forgiven you, you know."
It's meant to come out cold, but "breathless" ends up being a much better adjective. "Shameless" would work just as well, because I'm panting and subtly grinding against his thigh.
His thumb taps once, just barely, against my lip.
"I know," he says. "I'm not asking you to."
And then he lets go.
He steps back. The heat of him pulls away and the hallway gets big and cold again. I'm left just standing there against the wall with my heart going a mile a minute for no reason a measly broken branch could account for.
"Go back to sleep," he says. "I'll make sure the branch gets the punishment it deserves."
Let's be real: I was never gonna fall back asleep.
I lie on top of the covers, staring up at a ceiling I can't see, seething mad.
Not at the scare. The scare I could've handled.
A man on the stairs, a branch on the sensor, whatever.
I've got a reflex for danger now. I know what to do with fear.
Fear is easy. You grab a knife, you put yourself between that scary thing and your babies, and you swing that sharp S.O.B. until something bleeds.
No, I'm mad at the other thing.
I'm mad that he stopped.
Or, more accurately, that he keeps stopping.
No matter how hard I push him, he will not fight me for it.
He will not give me the argument I could actually win.
I keep building him a villain costume, holding it out, saying, Here, put this on, be Todd, be the man who takes and lies and pushes and decides.
And what does he do? He keeps folding it up and handing it back to me and saying, No, you're right, I know, that was wrong of me, until I'm the one standing there holding all the outrage with nowhere to put it.
A man is supposed to push.
Isn't that what defines the whole species?
I guess not. Because Ronan just waits.
He waits with that terrible patience of his, down the hall, in a guest room with a bed too small for him.
I know for a fact he's not sleeping either, because I can't hear him.
The silence coming from down the hall is the silence of a man lying flat on his back with his eyes open.
I would pay dearly to know exactly what thoughts are occupying his mind.
I decide to think about other things. Harmless things. Things like…
Oh, I don't know.
How about slutty little reading glasses?
That's totally safe territory, right?
Spoiler: Not even a little bit.
I don't even know what it is about them that does something to me. Why is something so innocent so extremely not fucking innocent?
It's the contrast, I think. The mob boss in the dark hallway with the gun and the growl and the kotyonok is one man.
The one who slides on those thin black frames at breakfast and squints at legal documents is another.
And my backstabbing brain keeps trying to reconcile them and failing, and the failure comes out as—
Well. As whatever this is.
I flip onto my stomach, punch my pillow into a shape that better represents my rage, then flip back over.
The thing is, I know exactly what would fix this. It's one door down the hall. It—he—is lying flat on its back with its eyes open, being infuriatingly principled.
I could get up. I could walk down there and say something like the branch situation requires further discussion and we could both pretend that's a perfectly plausible excuse.
But it would be my choice to do it. The whole thing would fall on my shoulders.
I'm not so sure I'm ready for that.
I have to find some reasonable outlet, though, because this much steam built up within one woman is a recipe for disaster. As it turns out, the glasses are both the way into this mess and the way out.
Because once I let the glasses in, the rest of him comes pouring through, and there's no stopping it.
I'm not planning my next move. My hand just sort of migrates south under the covers, and by the time I notice what it's doing, it's already too late to pretend I have any intention of stopping.
Fine, I tell the ceiling. If I can't sleep, I might as well.
It's just physiology. Nothing to do with Ronan Akov. Nothing at all.
I close my eyes.