Connor
I didn't sleep.
I tried. I lay in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, listening to the house settle around me, thinking about brown eyes with gold flecks and a voice that didn't waver.
Eventually I gave up pretending and came down to the gym at four in the morning, because if I can't shut my brain off, I can at least exhaust my body into something resembling calm.
It's not working.
I wrap my hands, pull on my gloves, and go at the heavy bag like it owes me money.
The rhythm helps, left-right-left-right, the thud of leather against canvas, the burn in my shoulders, the sweat running down my back.
I've been at it for over an hour and my arms are screaming but I keep going because every time I stop, I think about her.
I think about the way she said yes.
I think about the way my mother called me out in the hallway, stripped me down to the bone in six sentences, and was right in every single one of them.
I think about Anya Agapova sleeping down the hall from me in the guest room, and how I don't even know what she looks like when she sleeps, and why the hell that thought is in my head at all.
I hit the bag harder.
The gym is in the basement of the estate; a room Liam had converted years ago when he got tired of driving to a commercial gym and having people stare at him.
It's got everything I need. Free weights along the far wall, a bench press, a squat rack, the heavy bag in the corner, and enough space that I can move without feeling caged.
It smells like rubber and iron and old sweat, and at five-thirty in the morning, it's the only place in this house where I know I’ll find peace.
I strip my shirt off after the first hour because it's soaked through and clinging to me in a way that makes my skin crawl.
The gray sweats stay. I move from the bag to the bench and load the bar heavy, heavier than I usually go, because I want the strain.
I want my muscles to shake. I want to feel something that makes sense, something with a clear cause and effect.
You push the weight up. Gravity pulls it down. Simple.
Nothing about last night was simple.
I press the bar up, hold it, lower it. Again.
Again. My chest burns and I breathe through it, counting reps like a prayer.
Somewhere above me, Anya is waking up in a bed that isn't hers, in a house she hasn't been inside since she was a kid, and today Liam is going to sit her down and talk logistics and timelines and all the practical shit that comes with marrying into this family.
And she's going to look across the table and see me, and maybe in the light of a new day, without the adrenaline and the desperation, she'll realize what she actually agreed to.
I rack the bar and sit up. Wipe my face with the hem of the shirt I tossed on the floor. Run my hands through my damp hair and stare at the wall.
She felt safe.
That's what Liam told me last night, after he got off the phone with Diomid.
He didn't tell me everything, said most of it was between him and her brother, but he mentioned that much.
She told Diomid she felt safe when she looked at you.
He said it like it was a good thing, and I wanted to believe him, but the voice in my head, the one that sounds like every woman who's ever looked at my left side and quickly looked away, won't let me have it that cleanly.
She felt safe because I'm big enough to stand between her and the Baron. That's not the same as wanting to look at this face across the breakfast table for the rest of her life.
I get up and move to the dumbbells. Curls. Shoulders. Something to keep my hands busy while my brain does what it always does, which is find the darkest interpretation of anything good and hold on to it like a lifeline.
I'm mid-rep, left arm curled, watching the muscle flex in the wall mirror I try not to look at, when I feel it.
Someone is watching me.
It's the blind side. She's standing at the door on my left, which means I can't see her without turning, but I don't need to see her to know.
The air in the room shifts the way it does when someone's been standing still for longer than a passing glance.
She's been there a minute, maybe two, and she hasn't said anything.
She's watching me.
I finish the rep. Set the weight down. Turn.
Anya is leaning against the doorframe in a T-shirt and leggings that must be Iris's it’s not what she arrived in.
Her hair is loose, dark and messy from sleep, and her face is scrubbed clean of whatever she was wearing yesterday.
She looks younger like this. Softer. And she's looking at me with an expression I was not prepared for.
She's not looking at my face.
She's looking at my chest. My arms. The line of sweat running down my stomach. Her eyes are tracking over me like she's reading a book she doesn't want to put down, hungry, deliberate and not even a little bit subtle about it when her gaze lands on my gray sweatpants.
And then she catches herself, drags her gaze up to my face, and her cheeks flush pink, but she doesn't look away.
Something clicks in my chest like a lock turning.
I've seen women look at me before. The look is always the same: a flash of interest that dies the second it reaches the scar.
They take in the body, the height, the shoulders, and then they get to my face, and whatever they were feeling shuts off like a light switch.
Anya got to my face and the color in her cheeks deepened.
She's not embarrassed because she saw the scar. She's embarrassed because I caught her staring.
I don't know what to do with this. I don't have a playbook for a beautiful woman looking at me like she wants to put her hands on me.
But something in the way she's standing there, chin up, flush spreading, pulling at the collar of the T-shirt like it’s choking her, makes me want to try something I haven't tried in a long time.
I want to see what happens when I don't back away either.
"Morning," I say, keeping my voice easy. I grab the towel from the bench and drag it across my chest, slower than I need to. Her eyes follow the movement. "You're up early."
"Couldn't sleep." Her voice is a little rough. Morning voice. I like it. "I heard noise down here."
I toss the towel over my shoulder and lean against the squat rack, letting her look.
I don't cross my arms over my chest the way I usually do, the way that's become a reflex whenever someone's eyes are on me.
I just stand there, sweating and breathing hard, and let her see whatever she wants to see.
"Like what you see?" It comes out before I can stop it, low and teasing, and I brace for the backtrack. The polite denial. The I wasn't looking.
She tilts her head. Considers me. The flush is still there, warm across her cheekbones, but her voice is steady when she answers.
"I'm still deciding."
A laugh punches out of me, genuine and surprised, and her eyes light up when she hears it. Like she wanted to see if she could get that sound out of me and she's glad she could.
"You should go get breakfast," I say, because if she stands there looking at me like that for much longer, I'm going to do something stupid like close the distance between us and find out if her skin is as warm as it looks.
"Kitchen's upstairs, end of the hall on the right.
Ma will already have something cooking."
"And you?"
"I need to shower." I gesture with a nod to the door that leads to a shower room and sauna.
"Do you always work out this early?" she asks.
"Only when I can't sleep."
She nods, and something passes between us that I don't have a name for yet.
An understanding, maybe. That neither of us slept, and maybe it was for the same reason, and maybe that reason is standing in this basement gym looking at each other like two people who just discovered they speak the same language.
"Liam will want to talk to you after breakfast," I say. "About the timeline. Logistics."
"I know." She pushes off the doorframe and I catch the way her eyes drop one more time, quick and involuntary, to my chest and my crotch, before she pulls them back up. She swallows hard, and I swear I see her pupils blow from here.
She turns and walks down the hall towards the stairs that lead up to the foyer of the house. I watch her go, the bare feet on the cold floor, the way she moves like someone who's been careful for so long that she's forgotten what it feels like to take up space.
I wait until I hear her footsteps on the stairs. Then I grab my shirt off the floor, throw the towel over my shoulder, and head to the shower.
The water is scalding and I stand under it with both hands braced against the tile and my head dropped between my arms and I let myself feel it.
She looked at me like she was hungry.
Not hungry for safety, or hungry for a way out.
Hungry for me. For the sweat on my skin and the width of my shoulders and the way my arms looked when I was lifting.
She saw the scar, saw the dead eye, and kept looking.
Kept flushing. Kept standing there with her bottom lip caught between her teeth like she didn't even realize she was doing it.
I close my eyes and let the water run down my back and I stop fighting the thing I've been fighting since she walked through the front door.
I want her.
Not just because she's beautiful or because the Council says I need a wife.
I want her because she said yes. Because she looked at my face and didn't run.
Because she stood in a doorway and watched me like I was something worth watching, and for the first time in years, I let myself wonder if maybe she's right.
My hand drops from the tile. I wrap it around myself and I don't think about strategy or politics or the Baron or Diomid or the Council's mandate.
I think about brown eyes with gold flecks.
I think about the flush on her cheeks and the way her voice sounded when she said I'm still deciding.
I think about where the flush might end and whether her nipples darken when she gets aroused.
How heavy her tits would feel in my hands, how soft they would be in my mouth.
I think about what it would feel like to have her take everything from me like a woman starved, and watching her go wild as she rides me, as she loses herself on the end of my cock.
The release hits me hard, buckling my knees, pulling a groan out of my throat that I muffle against my forearm. I stand there shaking under the hot water, breathing through the aftershocks, and I feel something I haven't felt in so long that it takes me a minute to recognize it.
Hope.
Fragile and unfamiliar and probably stupid, but there it is. Sitting in the center of my chest like a coal that's been dead for years and just caught a breath of air.
Anya Agapova looked at me like she wanted me, and I'm going to spend every day between now and the wedding making sure she wants me more and more.