6. Lisa
Six
Lisa
The word hits me somewhere it has no business hitting.
It’s the second time he’s said it in two minutes, and I am starting to think he is doing it on purpose, the way a man strokes a dog to see if the dog is going to bite.
The dog is not going to bite. The dog is going to roll over and embarrass itself.
Get your shit together, Lisa! The man asked you a question.
I open my mouth to answer, but then we hear Jasmine exclaim, “ Oh my God! ”
Her voice carrying from the top of the stairs.
I close my eyes for a second.
Adam’s head turns toward the staircase, slow, unbothered, and there she is…my child, leaning over the second-floor banister, peering down at the man in my foyer with her mouth open and her eyes the size of dinner plates.
Adam looks up at her, and his whole face changes. His mouth softens at one corner. His eyes go warm.
Oh, look at that.
“You must be Jasmine,” he says, in a voice that is a full notch warmer.
She nods, struck silent at the sight of him.
“Adam Maksimov.” He inclines his head, doing the tiny bow thing. The terrifying gentleman thing, except recalibrated for someone who does not need to be terrified. “I’m sorry to be turning up at your house without notice, lass.”
Jasmine swallows.
“It’s…it’s okay.”
“Your mother has been very gracious.”
I make a small, strangled sound.
Adam does not turn his head. He keeps looking up at Jasmine with that warm, polite face, but I swear the corner of his mouth twitches like he freaking heard me.
“I’ll be staying for a while,” he tells her. “If ye need anything, you come find me, aye?”
She nods again.
“Use your words, baby,” I murmur.
“Aye,” Jasmine replies with a mischievous smile.
Aye. She just said aye to him. Lord, take me now.
Adam chuckles. “Goodnight, Jasmine.”
She grins wide. “Goodnight, Mr. Maksimov.”
She does not move from the banister. When she finally tears her eyes off him and looks at me, my girl has the look of someone who has just won the lottery and is trying not to scream.
She silently mouths, MAMA. And I shake my head at her.
She nods yes . I shake my head harder. She presses both hands to her mouth, turns on her feet, and runs down the hallway toward her bedroom.
I hear her door shut, then her muffled scream into what is almost certainly a pillow.
Adam waits one beat. Two. Listening for the door to close. Then he turns his head…slow…and brings his eyes back to me, and the polite, warm man from ten seconds ago is gone . The other one is back. The one with the blown-out pupils and ticking jaw.
The switch is so fast I feel my knees buckle.
I cross my arms. Eleven hundred and one .
He picks up his duffel bag.
“The room, Lisa.”
“…right. Yes. This way.”
I hear his boots two steps behind me. And I do not look back. I don’t look back because I know what I’ll see if I do. I will see Adam Maksimov climbing my staircase behind me with his eyes on the back of my dress, and if I see that, I will trip on the steps.
We walk past my bedroom…the small guest room I’ve been sleeping in for years…all the way down the hall to the door at the end. The big one.
I put my hand on the handle and breathe.
God, You and I are going to have a long conversation about all of this later. For now, please just get me through it.
The master bedroom smells of furniture polish and clean sheets. I came in here earlier and stripped the bed, wiped down every surface, and aired the place.
The bed is made with crisp white sheets and the heavy navy comforter I bought the week after the funeral.
It was the first thing in this house I ever picked without Ray’s orders.
Fresh wildflowers from the garden in a mason jar on the dresser.
The curtains, drawn back, the window cracked an inch.
The lamp on the nightstand glowing softly against the light blue walls.
It’s a beautiful room. The kind of room I would have wanted to wake up in for ten years if anyone had asked me what I wanted.
Adam stops in the doorway behind me. His bag going down with a soft thud at his feet.
I do not turn around.
“This was your room.”
“No.”
“You and Ray…”
“…hadn’t shared a room in years.”
A long beat.
“Where’ve ye been sleepin’, love?”
His voice is softer than I have heard it. It’s not the polite voice he used on Jasmine. It’s different, quieter. The voice of a man who is asking the question he actually wants an answer to.
“Down the hall, in one of the guest rooms.”
“Mm.”
That hum. The one I now know he makes when he is filing something away.
I finally turn around.
He’s standing in the doorway with one hand braced on the frame, the bag at his feet, looking at me. Looking at the room. Then back at me. Putting it all together with that quiet, calculating face he had this afternoon when I told him there was nobody in the house.
“You prepared this room for me,” he says.
“I prepared it for whoever your family sent.”
“Mm.”
“It wasn’t…it wasn’t for you. Specifically. I just…I knew somebody might come, eventually, and…”
“Lisa.”
The sound of my name in his mouth stops me dead. He hasn’t said it like this before. Not once. He’s said Mrs. Venn and lass and love and Lisa, but this Lisa is something else. This Lisa is intimate.
“Adam.”
“You prepared this room for me.”
I open my mouth to argue.
I close it.
“…I prepared this room for you.”
He steps into the room, pushes the door shut behind him with the side of his boot, slow, deliberate; the click of the latch the loudest sound I have ever heard in my life. The bag stays in the hall. He doesn’t bring it in, doesn’t fucking care.
He is in front of me in two steps. O n me in three.
His hand comes up to my jaw. Warm. The pad of his thumb resting on my chin. He tilts my face up.
“You wanna leave?” His voice is gravel . Low and rough and right at my mouth.
I should leave. I open my mouth to tell him.
What comes out is… “Adam.”
“That’s not what I asked.” His thumb drags across my lower lip. Slow. Torturous. “I asked if you want to leave .”
I whisper, “I can’t.”
“Aye.” Something dark and pleased moves across his face. “ Good .”
His mouth comes down on mine, and the entire world freaking ends.
He kisses me like he’s been thinking about it for years instead of hours.
There is no warm-up, no soft beginning. His mouth opens mine on the first contact, and his tongue is in my mouth before I have finished gasping.
His hand fists my hair at the base of my neck, tilts my head where he wants it, and takes .
An arm slides around my waist, huge palm cupping my ass, and hauls me into him so my hips hit his, and there is not a single doubt about what he is feeling for me.
I feel him pressed against my belly through our clothes, hot and hard and huge , and I make a noise into his mouth that I have never made before in my life.
He makes one back. Lower. Rougher. Almost a growl.
He kisses me until my knees give, and his hand on my ass is the only thing keeping me upright.
He kisses me until I forget that my daughter is down the hall.
And I am gripping his henley in two fists like I am drowning, until my chest is heaving against his, until I am making little broken sounds I cannot stop.
Adam Maksimov kisses me until I am fucking ruined, any other man forgotten in a single minute.
Then he stops, pulls back just enough to look at me. And I imagine what he’s seeing: mouth swollen, eyes blown, breath wrecked…His eyes drop to my throat then lower, to my chest heaving against the thin cotton. And his mouth twitches.
“There she is.”
Then he goes down, dropping to his knees in front of me.
So tall that his face is level with my chest. He grips the hem of my dress and pushes it without ceremony, baring my thighs to the bedroom air and my belly to the light, until the cotton is bunched up around my waist. And I am standing in the bedroom my dead husband used to sleep in, in front of a kneeling Bratva boss only wearing a pair of plain cotton panties from the waist down.
He looks at me. He looks at my body, and his pupils are huge; his full lips parted , his chest heaving.
Then he says, very quietly, “ Look at ye. ”
I am going to cry. I am going to cry from this. From a man on his knees in front of me, looking at my thighs like they are the answer to a question he’s had his whole life.
He hooks his fingers into the sides of my panties. But he doesn’t pull them off. He drags them down, slow, all the way to my knees, and lets them stop there. Doesn’t take them all the way off. He leaves them at my knees so I can’t open my legs any wider.
I make another noise, his mouth twitches again, and he says, “Hands on the wall, love. Behind ye.”
I obey before my brain catches up. My back hits the wall by the door. My palms press flat against the cool paint. The hem of my dress is in my mouth, where I have, at some point, grabbed it to keep it out of his way.
Adam nudges my legs as far apart as the panties at my knees will let them go, which is not much.
Then he puts his mouth on me.
Sweet . Sweet . Sweet baby Jesus .
His mouth is hot . His mouth is certain .
His mouth knows exactly what it is doing because of course it does, because of course Adam Maksimov knows what he is doing with his mouth between a woman’s legs, because Adam Maksimov is eating me out like it’s the only meal he’s ever wanted and he’s been starving .
First, he licks me in one long, slow drag, from base to top, like he is fucking tasting me . He hums against my pussy. The vibration traveling straight up my spine.
“Christ,” he breathes against my skin, “Aye, love.”