Chapter 4
ELENA
Roman ends the call, and I stand in the middle of my bedroom in nothing but a towel and stare at my phone like it has personally wronged me.
Forty minutes.
I drop the towel and open my wardrobe.
How. How does he have the energy. The man is fifty-one years old and he hosted a party for three hundred people and then he and I—and then he—and now he is apparently dressed and breakfasting and dispatching cars like it is any other Tuesday morning and I am standing here with my hair still damp and my legs still unreliable and approximately thirty-eight minutes left to become his secretary.
I pull out the first appropriate thing I find. A charcoal pencil skirt, a white blouse, and low black heels.
I dress fast, fingers working buttons from the bottom up, and I don’t let myself think about whose fingers were working them the other direction approximately six hours ago because that line of thinking will not get me out of this apartment on time.
My hair is the most important part.
I sit at the small mirror on my dresser and divide it into sections with the focused urgency of someone defusing something.
Every blonde strand gathered, twisted, pinned flat against the back of my head until the woman in the mirror looks nothing like the woman who stood on that terrace last night with waves loose around her shoulders and a glass of champagne and approximately zero survival instincts.
The bun is tight. It pulls slightly at my temples, and I don’t care because this is what I need.
This is the distance between her and me, and right now I need every inch of it I can manufacture.
I do a full face of makeup in eleven minutes, which is a personal record, and then I reach for my perfume out of pure habit and stop.
I put it down.
I stand there looking at the bottle for a second.
The same perfume I wore last night. The same one that is currently embedded in his pillowcase and probably his memory, and absolutely cannot be anywhere near his nose this morning, while I am trying to be invisible.
I open the top drawer of my dresser and put the bottle in the back behind everything else, and make a mental note to replace it with something entirely different at the first available opportunity.
I grab my bag, my phone, and my keys.
Mara is in the kitchen in an oversized T-shirt, leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee, watching me move through the apartment.
“You’re in a hurry,” she says.
“I have work.”
“I know.” She sips her coffee. “How’d it go last night?”
I look at her for exactly one second. “I’m not a virgin anymore.”
Mara lowers her mug very slowly. “Elena—”
“I have thirty minutes.” I check my phone. “Twenty-six.”
“You can’t say that and just leave.”
“I’ll call you tonight.” I’m already at the door. “Don’t wait up, don’t text me at work, don’t do anything that will make my morning harder than it already is.”
“Who was he?”
“Mara.”
“Was he at least good to you?”
I stop with my hand on the door handle, and the honest answer moves through me from somewhere low in my chest. The way he slowed down. The way he watched my face. The patience of him.
“Yes,” I say. “He was good to me.”
I close the door before she can ask anything else.
The black car is already at the curb when I come out of the building, idling with the quiet confidence of expensive machinery. Viktor, Roman’s driver, gives me the small nod he always gives me, the one that means good morning and nothing more, and opens the rear door.
I get in.
Roman is already inside.
He is looking down at something on his phone with the reading glasses he only wears in the car and in private meetings, and which I find unreasonably attractive.
His silver hair is neat. His jaw is clean-shaven. He looks, in every possible way, like a man who had a perfectly ordinary night followed by a perfectly adequate sleep, and I want to find this deeply irritating.
I find it deeply attractive instead, which is worse.
“Good morning,” I say, settling into the seat beside him. Not too close. The usual distance.
“You’re three minutes late,” he says, without looking up.
“The elevator was slow.”
He makes a sound that is not quite acknowledgment and not quite dismissal, and turns a page on his phone. I open my bag, take out my tablet, pull up his schedule for the day, and tell myself to focus.
Then he inhales.
It is the smallest, most controlled thing, a slight deepening of breath through the nose, the kind you would miss entirely if you were not already on high alert for exactly this. His eyes stay on his phone. Nothing on his face moves.
I stare at my tablet screen.
Every nerve ending I have is screaming. I keep my eyes forward and my face neutral and I think, with considerable feeling, about the perfume bottle sitting in the back of my dresser drawer, and I think, You are fine, you are completely fine, he does not know, he cannot know, a lot of women probably wear similar scents, this means nothing, you are fine.
He turns another page on his phone.
“Where did you get to last night?” he asks.
My stomach drops approximately four floors.
“I finished up around ten,” I say. My voice is even. I am very proud of my voice right now. “Confirmed everything with your kitchen staff and the security rotation, and then I didn’t see much point in staying.”
“Mm.” He scrolls something. “The Rezenkov contract needs to be with their legal team by end of day. I want the amended clause on indemnity reviewed before it goes.”
“I flagged that this morning. I’ve already sent the revision notes to our legal team. They’ll have a clean draft to you by two.”
He glances at me over the reading glasses for a half second. “Good.”
I look back at my tablet.
We fall into the rhythm of it, the one we have built over two years of these car rides.
He talks, I respond, we work through the day’s architecture.
The Sidorov account needs a follow-up call scheduled.
The Thursday board meeting has a room change he needs to be aware of.
There’s a dinner on Wednesday with two council associates that requires a reservation at a restaurant where Roman is known and where the corner table needs to be specifically requested.
I type notes. I answer questions. I am, by every external measure, completely fine.
What I am internally is a different matter entirely.
He is right there. Sitting next to me, and I know things about him now that I did not know forty-eight hours ago, and my body, which has apparently developed a memory of its own overnight, is making that knowledge extremely difficult to manage.
The way his hands look resting on his phone. The line of his throat above his collar. The particular quality of his attention, focused and total, when he is working through something.
I know what that attention feels like, directed somewhere other than a boardroom.
I look at my tablet.
The car moves through midtown traffic, and at some point, turning a corner, my skirt shifts.
It is a small thing. The pencil skirt rides up maybe two inches above my knee, the way fitted skirts do when you are seated, and I reach to smooth it down and catch, in my peripheral vision, Roman’s eyes moving.
Not for long. A second, maybe less. Then back to his phone.
I leave the skirt where it is.
I’m going to go to hell for that.
The office is already running by the time we arrive. I step out of the elevator ahead of him, the way I always do, greet the front desk, collect the stack of morning correspondence from the tray outside my office, and sit down at my desk with my tablet, my coffee, and my completely assembled face.
Roman disappears into his office without a word, and the glass door closes behind him. Through it, I can see him moving to his desk.
I open my emails. I answer three of them before I have to stop and sit back and press my fingers briefly against my closed eyes.
He doesn’t know. I’m certain he doesn’t know.
The perfume was a near thing, but he showed nothing, and the skirt was nothing, just a look, the kind of look men give without it meaning anything specific, and the question about last night was routine, the type of thing he would ask any member of his staff who was responsible for logistics.
He doesn’t know.
I open my eyes and look at the glass wall of his office. He’s on the phone now, standing at the window with his back to me, with one hand in his trouser pocket.
I turn back to my screen, and I do my job, and I am very, very good at it, and nobody in this office knows anything at all.
That’s the only thing I have left to hold on to, so I hold on to it with everything I’ve got.