Chapter 3 #3
“Fine. I’m fine. I’m — thank you, Mr. Vasiliev. I’m — I am so sorry.” She made herself look at him.
He was already looking at her. He had not, she suspected, looked away once.
His expression was courteous, attentive, professional — but his eyes spoke volumes.
They stayed locked on her with the same laser precision they’d held while he carried her, as though she were the single most interesting thing he’d encountered in years, as though the forty-million-dollar collection all around them had ceased, quietly, to exist.
“There is nothing to apologize for,” he said quietly. “Are you hurt?”
“No. No, I — I do this constantly. I’m a bit of a klutz. Margaret will confirm.”
“I would prefer not to.” Margaret, making a joke —Nica felt a hysterical bubble of laughter climb the back of her throat.
The man did not laugh. Demetri Vasiliev. Demetri Vasiliev. That is his name.
He gave Margaret’s joke a small, precise smile that didn’t reach his eyes, then turned back to Nica and the smile fell away the instant it reached her, replaced by something heavier, hungrier, quickly leashed.
“Ms. Sokolov.”
“Nica,” she corrected, before she could stop herself. “People call me Nica.”
“Nica.” Her name on his lips sent a jolt of heat straight to her core, and she watched him say it again, almost under his breath, as though confirming a detail to himself.
The way his accent leaned on the second syllable made her stomach tumble.
How am I supposed to concentrate when everything about him overruns my senses — when paying attention to anything else feels like swimming through mud?
“You are fluent in pre-revolutionary Cyrillic.” He tilted his head a fraction, studying her with an intensity that made her fight not to squirm — and made her want, shamefully, to give him something worth studying.
“I — yes. Yes.” Work, brain. You can do this. Make words.
“My understanding is that the Crowe estate contains a number of Russian-language items currently in active cataloging.”
“It does. It — yes, there’s a, um. A few. A few significant ones.”
“I would be grateful if you could walk me through them. Particularly any writings.”
The statement came out casual. The tightness in his jaw said it was anything but. This is the thing he actually came for. Margaret was right. He wants the book. “I — of course. Of course. Now?”
“If it is not an imposition.”
She laughed, a small breathless thing that gave far too much away. “It’s not — no, it’s not an imposition. I’d be — I am happy to. Yes.”
His eyes never left her face.
“Thank you,” he said. “Lead the way.”
She turned, glad she had something to do besides ogle the man in front of her.
The Crowe materials he wanted were upstairs, the book in its lined case at the far end.
She’d walked from the storage bay to that workstation a hundred times in six weeks.
She walked, and he followed, and Margaret fell in behind, and though Nica couldn’t see her, she could feel her steadying presence at her back.
She could feel him too, a steady wall of heat exactly two paces behind her.
She climbed the stairs to the mezzanine and heard his quiet steps behind her, expensive shoes on the metal grate, the faint rustle of a custom suit.
She held the handrail too tightly. Her palms had gone damp.
As she climbed the stairs she allowed herself one more small, ridiculous, private thought .
I need new shoes.
I can’t afford new shoes.
Oh, shut up — I almost died. I can afford one pair of stupid shoes.
Maybe she wouldn’t have died. But the alternatives weren’t much better — a fractured skull, a broken back, a dozen things that could have happened on the way down and didn’t, all because the heels of her shoes were worn through and rubbed her skin raw, which was why she was forever kicking them off, which was exactly what had pitched her off the ladder in the first place.
He caught me. Which was insane on its face; she’d been a good twenty feet up.
He held me longer than he had to. Though that, surely, was only because she couldn’t stand on her own.
Was she imagining all of it — the way he’d stared, the drag of his fingers along her ribs when he finally let go, the glow she’d sworn flashed through the gray of his eyes?
Maybe what she’d taken for attraction had been nothing but horror at her clumsiness.
But — his hand had been shaking when he put her down. It was a small thing, and hadn’t lasted more than a second or two, but she’d noticed.
She reached the top of the stairs and set the thoughts down; there was no time for that kind of nonsense now.
She led them past her workstation, past the long table with the lesser manuscripts stacked in one corner, past the whole ordinary scene of her ordinary professional Tuesday, and into the small lit room where she was about to spend the next several hours showing a strange, unsettling, beautiful man the most important thing she’d ever held in her hands.