Chapter 12 Lena
LENA
The sheets smelled wrong.
That was my first thought, swimming up through layers of unfamiliar dreams. Wrong sheets, wrong light, wrong mattress. I blinked at the ceiling, which was too high and painted the soft gray of storm clouds, and for three disorienting seconds I had no idea where I was.
Then the memories hit.
Piano. His mouth on my breast, hot and demanding.
The way he’d sucked my nipple until I’d cried out, the sound echoing off the walls of his bedroom like a confession I couldn’t take back.
His hand sliding down my stomach, stopping just short of where I needed it most. “But not tonight.” My own voice, shaking with frustration: “You’re a bastard.
” His smile, knowing and patient: “Yes. I am.”
I sat up too fast. The room spun, then settled.
A bedroom. Not mine. Twice the size of my apartment at the hotel, with tall windows draped in charcoal velvet and furniture that belonged in a museum.
The bed was a four-poster monstrosity of dark wood, linens that felt obscenely expensive against my bare legs.
Winter light filtered through a gap in the curtains, landing in pale stripes across the Persian rug.
Bare legs. Because I was wearing his robe.
I looked down at the heavy charcoal silk pooling around me, and his scent hit me like a fist to the chest. That particular darkness that was purely him, expensive and masculine and infuriatingly familiar.
It was in the sheets. In the robe. In the very air of this room, as if he’d marked every surface as his territory.
As if even in his absence, he was everywhere.
I pressed my nose to the collar before I could stop myself. Inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with him.
Then jerked back, horrified at my own reflexes.
What was wrong with me? The man had denied me release, sent me away aching and furious, and here I was huffing his robe like some kind of addict. I shoved the fabric away from my face, but the damage was done. His scent clung to my skin, my hair, the inside of my nostrils.
Where was my dress?
I threw off the covers and crossed to the door I assumed led to a closet. The hardwood floor was cold beneath my bare feet, and I wrapped my arms around myself as I yanked the door open.
And stopped.
My clothes. Rows of them, perfectly organized by color, hanging from padded hangers like they’d been there for years.
My jeans. My sweaters. The blue silk blouse I’d bought for the hotel’s charity gala last spring.
Even my underwear, folded in a drawer like museum specimens, arranged by color and style in a way I’d never bothered with myself.
I opened the bathroom door. My toiletries lined up on the counter in perfect formation. My shampoo. My moisturizer. The prescription acne wash I’d been using since I was fifteen, the one I kept hidden under the sink because I was embarrassed that I still needed it at twenty.
Someone had found it. Displayed it.
He’d moved my things.
Not some of them. All of them. Every piece of clothing, every personal item, everything that made my hotel apartment mine. Transplanted here without my knowledge. Without my consent. Without even the pretense of asking.
I walked back into the bedroom, my hands shaking. Found my mother’s sheet music on the dresser, the edges worn soft from years of handling. Chopin. Debussy. The Ballade I’d played last night while he watched me with those dark, unreadable eyes.
The sight of it made my throat close. That was mine. Private. The only thing I had left of her besides memories that grew hazier every year. Not something for his people to rifle through while they packed up my life.
A soft knock at the door made me spin around.
“Miss Hughes?” A woman’s voice, gentle and accented. “Are you awake?”
I pulled the robe tighter, suddenly aware of how little I was wearing beneath it, and opened the door.
Alice stood in the hallway with a silver tray. Steam rose from a china cup, and the smell of coffee cut through my anger like sunlight through fog. Rich and dark and exactly what I needed after a night of barely sleeping, tossing in unfamiliar sheets that smelled like him.
Her kind eyes crinkled at the corners as she took in my disheveled state. The same warmth I’d noticed when I first arrived, so at odds with the cold formality of this house.
“Good morning, miss. Mr. Antonov thought you’d be more comfortable with your own things here.” She set the tray on the small table by the window. “Breakfast is available whenever you’re ready, but I thought you might want coffee first.”
He thought I’d be more comfortable.
“He thought?” My voice came out sharp. “He didn’t ask.”
Alice’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted in her eyes. Sympathy, quickly suppressed. She’d probably seen this before. Other women, other mornings, other violations dressed up as consideration.
“Mr. Antonov is in his study, miss. Down the hall, third door on the left.”
She left before I could respond.
I stood there in his robe, surrounded by my belongings, and felt the walls closing in. The coffee steamed on the tray, untouched. Outside the window, winter gardens stretched toward a high stone wall topped with iron spikes.
No easy way out.
I left the coffee untouched, steeling myself for what had to come next.
I found him exactly where Alice said he’d be.
The study was all dark wood and leather, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a massive desk positioned to face the door.
He sat behind it in a fresh suit, charcoal gray, reviewing papers like this was any other Sunday morning.
Like he hadn’t had his mouth on my body twelve hours ago.
Like he hadn’t sent me away aching and furious and so aroused I’d barely slept.
He looked up when I entered, and his gaze traveled down the length of me in a slow, measured sweep. The robe. My bare feet on his hardwood floor. My hair, which I hadn’t bothered to brush, tangled from a restless night.
Something heated in his eyes. Satisfaction. Possession. Like he enjoyed seeing me disheveled and wearing his things.
“You moved my things.”
I’d meant it to come out calm. Controlled. Instead it sounded exactly like what it was. An accusation.
He set down his pen with measured care. “Good morning to you too.”
“You had people go through my apartment. My personal belongings. My mother’s sheet music.” I crossed my arms over my chest, acutely aware that I wasn’t wearing a bra beneath the silk. “You had no right.”
“You’re contracted to be here every night.” His voice was mild. Reasonable. Infuriating. “Why would you want to commute with a suitcase?”
“It’s about consent. About asking.”
“I don’t ask.”
Three words, delivered without apology. I felt them land like a slap. He rose from behind the desk, and I made myself hold my ground even as he approached. Even as his presence filled the room, sucking up all the oxygen until I could barely breathe.
He was taller than I remembered. Broader.
His shoulders blocked the light from the window as he stopped close enough that I could feel the warmth pouring off him.
His scent was stronger here, cutting through the leather and old paper smell of the study.
Sandalwood and something darker underneath.
Something that made my nipples tighten beneath the silk.
His eyes dropped to the robe again, and his mouth curved. He’d noticed.
“You look better in my things.”
“This isn’t negotiable.” I fought to keep my voice steady, to ignore the way my body was responding to his proximity. “You don’t make decisions about my life without my input.”
“You signed a contract that makes you mine for a year.” He said it like he was explaining something simple to a child. “Your things are an extension of you. Therefore they’re mine too.”
“I’m not a thing.”
“No.” He tilted his head, studying me with that predator’s focus. “You’re something far more interesting. But you are mine, Lena. The sooner you accept that, the easier this year will be.”
“I didn’t agree to have my privacy violated. The contract says nothing about you rifling through my underwear drawer.”
“The contract says you live here. In my home. Under my rules.” He stepped closer, and I had to fight the urge to retreat. “Did you think that meant you’d keep one foot in your old life? Commuting back and forth like this was a job you could clock out of?”
“I thought it meant I’d have some autonomy.”
“You thought wrong.” His voice hardened. “Let me be very clear. You don’t have autonomy. You don’t have privacy. You don’t have boundaries I haven’t explicitly granted. What you have is my protection, my resources, and whatever freedoms I choose to allow.”
“That’s not what I agreed to.”
“That’s exactly what you agreed to.” He moved past me to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and withdrew a familiar document.
The contract. He flipped to a page and read aloud.
“‘The Party of the Second Part agrees to reside full-time at the residence designated by the Party of the First Part, and to comply with all household rules and expectations as determined by the Party of the First Part.’” He looked up, one eyebrow raised.
“Did you read this before you signed it?”
My face burned. I had read it. But the language had seemed so formal, so abstract. I hadn’t imagined it would mean someone going through my things like I was a child being sent to boarding school.
“I read it.”
“Then you have no grounds for complaint.” He set the contract down and pulled a velvet box from the same drawer.
His arm brushed my shoulder as he moved. The contact sent heat racing down my spine, and I hated myself for it.
He opened the box.
The collar was a delicate silver chain, the links fine and intricate, with a small ring at the center studded with diamonds that caught the winter light. It could pass for expensive jewelry. A necklace any woman might wear. But I knew what it was.
And the meaning of it hit me like ice water.