3. Lisa
Three
Lisa
His sleeve brushes my bare arm, and my skin prickles where the air moves between us. I don’t flinch, don’t move. I keep my chin up, my arms crossed, and let him pass.
He’s tall. Lord, he’s tall. Standing inside my foyer, he makes the space feel tiny.
The hat rack by the door looks like a child’s toy next to him.
Maksimov turns slowly, taking in the entryway.
The peeling wallpaper, chipped tile, the dust on the chandelier I cannot reach to clean…
and I watch him see it. The truth about this house.
Of me. Of what’s left of the Venn empire.
A fucking joke. But he doesn’t react, just turns back to me.
His eyes meet mine, his sexy mouth pulled up at one corner, just a hint.
Fuck. I am alone in my house with Adam fucking Maksimov.
“The living room’s this way.”
I don’t wait for him to answer. I turn my back on six feet of Bratva problem and walk down the hall on my bare feet, because I am not about to stand in my foyer with this man another second.
Moving is better than staying put. Movement sounds like a plan.
A plan that hopefully distracts me from whatever the fuck my nipples are doing under this dress.
I hear his footsteps behind me, slow and deliberate. Like he’s got all the time in the world. The wooden floor doesn’t creak under him the way it should for a man his size. He moves like a feline . A goddamn predator.
The living room is the least embarrassing room in the house.
Our good couch… good being relative…sits in front of a once-grand fireplace.
The rug is older than Jasmine. And the portrait of Ray’s grandfather still hangs over the mantel because I haven’t worked up the energy to take it down and trash it.
I gesture at the armchair by the window.
But of course, Maksimov doesn’t sit there.
He settles on the couch and takes up about half of it, his jacket falling open, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, one long, muscular arm draped along the back of the cushion like he’s posing for the cover of GQ, watching me.
I sit in the armchair because the alternative is the other side of the couch, and I am not getting anywhere near this man if I can avoid it. I cross my legs, uncross them, and cross them again. Then I cross my arms over my chest for the billionth time since I opened that damn door, chin up.
“Mr. Maksimov.”
“Adam, please.” His voice does that gravelly thing again, combined with his accent… and I feel warmth spread between my thighs. Fuck me…
“Mr. Maksimov.” I repeat. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but the contract my husband signed with your family was never finalized. So there’s no agreement. I’m afraid whatever you came here for, you wasted the trip.”
I deliver the speech the way I’ve been practicing since my asshole husband’s passing. Calm, civil, immovable. The voice of a woman who has options. Ha.
He listens, does not interrupt, and when I’m done, he slightly tilts his head to the side and gives me the smallest smile.
“The contract signature was witnessed by three men; two of them are still alive. The territory and the routes were transferred to my family the day Ray died, lass. The bride is the last term. The only outstanding one.”
My mouth opens and closes.
“Also, the contract promised a Venn.” His blue eyes don’t leave my face. “And you’re a Venn.”
“What?” I squeak out. He can’t possibly mean…
“You took the name when ye married him, aye?”
“Yes, but…”
“Then you’re a Venn… soon to be Maksimov,” he ends with a devastating smirk.
What the fuck…
“That’s not…that’s not what the contract intended,” I say, stuttering. “It was clearly written for Jasmine. Ray and your…Pakhan, or whoever… they had his daughter in mind. Not his widow .”
He drags a hand over his beard, slowly, like he’s studying me. This man is sitting in my living room, telling me calmly, with an arm along the back of my couch, that he’s gonna marry me!
My pulse is beating out of control. Think, Lisa. Think!
“You came here for Jasmine. She…”
“I dinnae want Jasmine.” What?! “She’s a child,” he adds. “I have nae interest in marrying a child. I will not be putting my hands on a twenty-year-old lass. She can keep her life and whatever she’s got going on. I dinnae want her.”
“Then…then you agree there’s no contract.”
“Aye, there is, love. I want you .”
Oh, sweet Lord… I’m going to faint.
My voice is barely audible. “We met ten minutes ago.”
He nods. “Aye.”
“You can’t…you don’t decide something like that in minutes.”
“I dinnae need ten minutes, lass.”
He says it so casually that the air goes out of the room.
Then he stands. He moves like a fucking storm; I felt it the second I opened the door.
He’s quiet, fast, and on me before I’ve registered he’s left the couch.
Three steps and he’s right there, towering over my seat, all beard and shoulders and three-piece-suit menace blocking out the light.
Then he raises his hand, and I hold my breath.
But before I can recoil, he softly runs his knuckles down my cheek.
Slow. Just the lightest drag from my temple to my jaw.
Impossibly tender. His mesmerizing blue eyes never leaving mine.
Standing so close, his spicy scent is all my lungs can inhale; the heat from his massive body reaching mine.
Shit, shit, shit.
His knuckles are warm and rough. And I instinctively think: Ray’s never felt like this.
Ray had the soft hands of a man who paid others to do his dirty work; this man’s hands have done things.
I can feel the calluses on the ridges of his fingers, the slight catch of a healed scar.
Heat radiates down my neck, spreads through my chest, and settles in places I will be answering for later in the privacy of my bed.
Up close, he’s worse . So much worse. The pale blue of his eyes is ringed around the edges, and his lashes are insultingly long, thick, and dark.
The kind of lashes any woman would kill for.
His beard is thick and neatly trimmed, close enough to hint at the cut of the powerful jaw underneath.
There’s a small scar running through one of his eyebrows, pale skin against thick, inky slashes, and another at the corner of his mouth I want to put my tongue on.
Oh God! And his smell… He smells like cedar and clean cotton and something warm and male that has no business standing this close to me.
His thumb brushes my cheekbone one more time, and my whole body lights up.
I don’t move. I am pinned to the armchair.
“Mr. Maksimov,” I croak out, “I have spent ten years in a marriage I did not choose, to a man I did not love, and I buried him only weeks ago. I am not getting into another one. Especially not with you. And especially not because of a piece of paper Ray signed out of desperation. No one in this house is fulfilling that damn contract. So you can take your I want you and go back to wherever you came from. Because that part of the deal is off.”
I’m breathing hard by the end of my tirade.
Adam Maksimov looks at me for a long time. Then his fucking sexy mouth twitches again.
“No one,” he repeats, nodding.
“That’s right.”
“Mm.”
He doesn’t argue or agree. He just makes that little sound, halfway between a hum and a chuckle, then turns on his heels, apparently ready to leave.
“We’ll see, love.”
We’ll see.
I stand too, because if he’s leaving I want him gone, out of my house and back to whatever hellscape he came from.
I follow him to the foyer. He moves slowly, like a man in no hurry, hands sliding into his pockets.
We walk down the hall and, Lord, I should have gone in front of him and saved myself this.
The view of Adam Maksimov from behind is beyond a problem.
The charcoal suit jacket sits across shoulders so broad they look specifically made to be a threat; then there’s the shift of powerful muscles under the fabric covering his back.
And then. The slacks. The slacks are doing things that should be illegal.
Two thick, muscular thighs in fitted wool, and an ass that fills out the seat of his pants like it was poured in, round and high and firm , the kind of ass that makes grown women walk into walls because they’re too busy imagining how it would feel to bite into that goddamn perfect ass to watch where they’re going…
Lisa Venn, you are a widow and a grown-ass woman, and you are drooling over this man’s ass.
But I keep looking. I look so hard I almost don’t notice he’s slowed down, and now I’m too close to him, and his intoxicating scent is all over me again.
And I notice the back of his neck above the collar of his shirt has more of those dark tattoos creeping out of the white cotton in lines I will be drawing in my head later, whether I want to or not.
Then, just before walking out, Adam Maksimov stops at the door and turns to me.
Oh, no.
“How many lads you got in there, love?”
I blink up at him. The word ‘love’ in his mouth, addressing me, took out half my brain. “I’m sorry?”
“Security. In the house. How many?” He asks casually, almost like an afterthought, while his eyes wander past me, checking toward the hallway and staircase. “Ray’s people… whoever you have on the property.”
I almost laugh. Security. In this house. Like we’re still a family that has people.
“Mr. Maksimov, there’s nobody. Ray’s guys stopped coming the day he died. They worked for him, not us. There’s no security. There’s no…there’s nobody. It’s just me and my stepdaughter.”
He goes still, like every function in him just locked in place.
His jaw, his shoulders, his hands in his pockets.
The blue of his eyes shutters; the warmth gone out of them, and what’s left is cold .
A pale, flat, blue-white, like a flame turned all the way up.
The kind of cold I’ve never seen, in all my years, not in my father’s world, not in Ray’s world.
The elegant tips of his nostrils flare in a deep inhale, but nothing else moves.
His hands stay in his pockets, his full mouth turns flat, his huge shoulders stiff.
There is no fist, no slam, no curse. Only a man going so still that the house itself feels like it’s holding its breath.
The casual storm I followed down the hall is gone, and whatever’s standing in front of me now is something else altogether.
The thing underneath the suit. The thing the suit has been doing me the courtesy of covering.
A muscle twitches at his jaw, and my mouth goes dry.
Run, girl.
I don’t move.
I’ve been around angry men my whole life.
My dad angry was loud, slamming doors, breaking shit, putting his fist through walls…
or people. And Ray angry was a performance , designed to make me feel small and helpless.
This is not that. This is the opposite of that.
This is a man so angry he has gone quiet , and the quiet is so loud I can hear my heart hitting my ribs.
His eyes are not on me. They’re past me, somewhere down the hall, up the stairs, at the doors, then back to the windows of the foyer, the gate visible through the wavy glass, the long open drive nobody patrols anymore.
He’s looking at my house, cataloguing it.
And whatever he’s seeing in his mind’s eye has put that ice on his face.
He’s not going to hurt me. I don’t know how I know this. I have known the man twenty minutes. But I know it the way I know my own name. Whatever he’s furious about, it’s not me. It’s for me.
That should not be making my thighs press together. Traitor body, we will discuss this later; we will discuss this for years.
Then Maksimov blinks. Once. Slow. And the blue comes back into his eyes a bit. Not amused and hot like it was before. Just back to seeing me .
And he says in his low, gravelly burr, “Nobody?”
“Nobody,” I repeat, because I have apparently lost the ability to produce my own words.
“For weeks.”
“…yes.”
“Mm.”
That little hum again. The one he made when I told him no one in this house is fulfilling that damn contract . The one he apparently makes when he’s heard something he has zero intention of accepting.
“Alright, then.”
I blink. “Alright, what?”
“I’m moving in.”
I make a sound. Not a word. Just a sound. Because it’s like the air went out of my lungs.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m moving in.”