Chapter 2
MIA
She had changed outfits four times.
Four. In the span of three hours. Which was pathetic, because this was Alexei, and Alexei didn’t notice what women wore. Alexei noticed security vulnerabilities and financial irregularities and the exact moment someone was lying to him, but he did not notice dresses.
Probably.
Mia threw the fourth outfit on the bed, grabbed the first one off the floor, and put it back on. A white sundress. Simple. Nothing special. A dress a girl wore when she absolutely, definitely, was not trying to impress anyone.
She caught her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse and groaned. Who was she kidding? She was trying so hard it was embarrassing.
Two years. She’d been gone two years, and in that time she’d told herself a hundred different stories about what would happen when she came back.
In some versions, she was cool and composed.
In others, she was devastating in heels and red lipstick.
In the version she’d rehearsed most often, lying in her dorm bed at 2 AM with her phone pressed to her chest after listening to one of his two-sentence voicemails, she walked in and he took one look at her and the walls just.. .came down.
In none of those versions was she standing barefoot in his living room at nine o’clock at night with her hair still damp from the shower she’d taken because she’d sweated through the first outfit.
Get it together, Mia. You’re a grown woman. You’ve been planning this for six months. Stop acting like—
The front door opened.
Her heart slammed into her ribs so hard she was surprised it didn’t leave a bruise.
Alexei walked in. Dark coat. Dark suit beneath it. He was carrying nothing, because Alexei Almazov didn’t carry his own luggage. Someone did that for him, and that someone knew better than to follow him inside.
He closed the door behind him.
And then his eyes found her.
Mia stopped breathing.
She had prepared for this moment. She had literally prepared for it, like other people prepared for job interviews or exams, by standing in front of her bathroom mirror at Whitmore and practicing what she would say. Hi, Alexei. I know this is sudden, but I’ve thought about it and I’m ready to—
All of it vanished. Every rehearsed line, every casual opener, every witty thing she’d planned to say that would make her sound confident and adult and not at all like a girl who had been in love with her guardian since she was sixteen years old and didn’t know how to stop.
Because he was here. And he was real. And he was taller than she remembered, or maybe she’d just forgotten what it felt like to be in the same room as someone whose presence made the air heavier.
“Hi,” she managed.
Brilliant. Two years of preparation and the best she could come up with was hi.
Alexei didn’t answer immediately. His eyes moved over her, and it wasn’t his usual assessment, the quick up-and-down of a guardian making sure his ward was fed and uninjured.
This was different. This was slower. And when his gaze caught on the hem of her sundress, which hit just above the knee, something crossed his face that he killed so fast she almost missed it.
Almost.
Her pulse went haywire.
“You’re in my living room,” he observed.
Despite everything, a smile tugged at her mouth. “You’re very observant.”
His jaw tightened. Not in anger. In something else.
Something she’d been chasing since she was sixteen and had never quite caught, because Alexei Almazov was better at hiding than anyone she’d ever met, and every time she thought she’d glimpsed something real behind those eyes, he’d shut the door before she could get through it.
Not tonight. She hadn’t come two thousand miles to be shut out again.
“Are you hungry?” she blurted. “I made pasta. Well, I tried to make pasta. Your kitchen is terrifying, incidentally. Everything is black marble and I couldn’t find a single pot that cost less than my tuition, so I may have panicked and ordered takeout instead, but I put it in one of your fancy pots so it would look homemade, and if you don’t inspect it too closely—”
“Mia.”
She stopped talking. Her mouth was dry. Her palms were wet.
She was doing the thing she always did around him, which was talk too much and too fast because the alternative was saying the thing she actually meant, and the thing she actually meant was I missed you so much I couldn’t breathe some nights, and I came back because being away from you is worse than being near you and wanting what I can’t have.
But she wasn’t going to say that. Not yet. Not when he was standing by the door with his coat still on, like he hadn’t decided whether to stay.
“Sit down,” she told him. “Eat something. You just flew from Saint Petersburg. You must be—”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
The words hit like a slap.
She flinched. She couldn’t help it. Two years of distance, two years of three-word voicemails and birthday checks that came with no note, and the first full sentence he gave her in person was you shouldn’t be here.
But Mia Robertson had not flown to Monaco, dropped out of college, and unpacked her bags in a billionaire’s penthouse to be undone by four words from a man who couldn’t even say hello first.
She lifted her chin. “And yet here I am.”
“This isn’t a game.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“You left Whitmore. You abandoned a degree that I—”
“That you chose for me. At a school you chose for me. In a country you chose for me.” Her voice was even. Her hands were shaking, so she put them behind her back. “I didn’t choose any of it, Alexei. Not the school. Not the distance. Not the two years of missing—”
She caught herself. Bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted copper.
Do not finish that sentence. Do not.
His eyes narrowed. “Missing what?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Mia.”
“I said forget it.”
He crossed the room. Not fast. Alexei didn’t move fast. He moved with a purpose that made fast unnecessary, and by the time he stopped in front of her, she had backed up exactly one step, bumped into the kitchen island, and run out of room.
Close. Close enough that she could smell his cologne, which was the same one he’d worn when she was sixteen and had to leave the room every time he leaned over her homework because the scent made her dizzy.
Close enough that she could see the tension in his jaw and the line between his brows that meant he was angry, or thinking, or both.
“Two years.” His voice was hard. “I kept you at Whitmore for two years so you could—”
“So you could what?” She was angry now. Good. Anger was better than the other thing, the thing that made her chest ache and her eyes burn. “Forget about me? Hope I’d grow out of it?”
The words hung in the air. She heard herself say them and she wanted to claw them back, because grow out of it was the closest she’d ever come to admitting what it was out loud, and from how his face changed, he’d heard it too.
“Grow out of what?” His voice was too low.
Lie. Say school. Say homesickness. Say anything except the truth.
She opened her mouth to do exactly that, and what came out instead was: “You know what.”
Silence.
His eyes were on hers. Dark and unreadable and so close she could see the ring of grey around the iris, and she realized she’d never been this close to him before.
Not once. In two years of living in his house and sitting at his table and falling asleep on his couch while he worked late, he had never let her within arm’s length.
There was always a desk between them. A hallway. A continent.
Now there was six inches and a kitchen island pressing into her lower back and the scent of his cologne turning her brain into static.
“I came back for the gap year,” she whispered. The lie tasted wrong.
“No.” Alexei’s voice was certain. “You didn’t.”
And the certainty in it, the resignation, as if he’d known this was coming and had spent the entire flight preparing himself for it, cracked something open in her chest.
“Then why did I come back?” She meant it to sound defiant. It came out raw.
He didn’t answer. His gaze dropped to her mouth. One second. Maybe two. Then it came back up, and the thing she saw in his eyes wasn’t anger anymore.
It was want. Plain and brutal and barely contained.
And then he was kissing her.
She didn’t know who closed the distance.
It could have been her, rising onto her toes.
It could have been him, bending down. It didn’t matter, because his mouth was on hers and his hands were on her face and every single thing she’d imagined in her dorm bed at 2 AM was nothing, nothing, compared to the actual warmth and pressure of Alexei Almazov’s lips on hers.
Her hands grabbed the front of his coat. Both fists. She didn’t mean to. Her hands just did it, acting on two years of deprivation, and she pulled him closer and heard a sound, small and broken, and realized it had come from her.
He kissed her harder. His thumb traced her jaw. His other hand slid into her hair, and his fingers curled, and the gentle tug at her scalp sent a bolt of heat through her body so intense her knees almost gave out.
Oh God.
Oh God.
His mouth opened against hers, and she tasted coffee and something darker, and she pressed herself against his chest because she couldn’t not, because every cell in her body was screaming closer, closer, closer, and she could feel his heart hammering through his coat and his shirt and the six inches of muscle beneath, and it was the most honest thing she’d ever felt from him.
Then he pulled back.
Not gently. He stepped away from her like she’d burned him, and the absence of his hands on her face was so sudden and so cold that she gasped.
His breathing was ragged. His eyes were dark. And the want she’d seen two seconds ago was still there, but it was being walled off, brick by brick, right in front of her, and she could see him doing it and she wanted to scream.
“That,” he said, and his voice was wrecked, “shouldn’t have happened.”
Mia stood against the kitchen island with her lips still tingling and her fists still clenched around nothing and her heart hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears.
“But it did,” she whispered.
His jaw locked. He turned away from her. Picked up the bag he didn’t carry and the coat he hadn’t removed and walked down the hallway toward his bedroom, and the sound of his door closing was the loneliest sound she had ever heard.
Mia pressed her fingers to her mouth.
They were still shaking.
She could still feel him.
And if Alexei Almazov thought a closed door was going to stop her after a kiss like that, then the smartest man she’d ever met didn’t know her at all.