Chapter 12 #3
“This is the women’s restroom,” I said, not turning around.
“There’s no one else in it.”
“That’s not the part that should concern you.”
“It doesn’t.”
He let the door fall shut behind him. The click of it was very quiet and very final, and my body registered it before my brain finished deciding whether or not to be alarmed.
I was not alarmed.
That was the alarming part.
I turned toward him, because I refused to have this conversation facing away from him. He hadn’t come closer. He stood just inside the door with his hands loose at his sides and that contained stillness that made the rest of the world look like it was trying too hard.
“You followed me,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you left in the middle of deciding something.”
“I left because I have a workshop.”
“You walked past the workshop.”
I opened my mouth to argue and found I didn’t have one. He’d been three steps behind me the entire way and I hadn’t heard him, which should have frightened me and instead made my pussy clench with clear blatant arousal.
“You notice a lot,” I said.
“I notice you.”
“This is a mistake,” I told him.
“Probably.”
“You’re agreeing with me.”
“I’m agreeing that it’s a mistake.” He took one step. Just one. “I’m not agreeing to stop.”
He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin to hold his eyes, and far enough that the last inch was mine to close or refuse. He stood there with all that quiet certainty and handed me the choice like it was the most natural thing in the world to let a woman decide what would happen next.
I closed the inch.
His mouth met mine in a kiss that was not gentle, but it was controlled, which was so much worse. He kissed like he’d studied the schematic and found the single input that would take the whole system down, and he used it without hurry, like he had all the time in the world and knew that I didn’t.
His hand came up to my jaw. His thumb brushed beneath my chin, his fingers along the side of my throat.
My back found the cold edge of the sink and his body found the front of me.
And every careful, paranoid system I’d spent my life building stood up, looked at the situation, and quietly excused itself from the room.
I made a sound I’d be denying for years.
One of his hands left my throat and skimmed down in an unhurried descent. I arched into it, which was its own kind of confession, and the low sound he made against my mouth told me he’d understood it perfectly.
“There she is,” he murmured against my lips, like he’d been waiting ages to touch me like this.
For some reason, I felt my cheeks blush bright red.
His fingers found the top button of my slacks and then he was unbuttoning them. The small sound of the zipper going down was so loud that it was obscene. His fingers paused there, tracing the waistband of my panties.
Then he slipped his fingers inside, and I forgot about being ashamed.
I forgot about the conference, the workshop, and my carefully constructed life.
He found me slick, swollen, and soaking wet, and the quiet, satisfied sound he made in the back of his throat vibrated straight through my chest. I was not only wet—I was dripping for him.
“Of course you are,” he said, like he was stating the simplest of facts. His thumb moved, finding my clit with no hesitation or fumbling. He pressed down, circling me gently and my entire world went white.
He didn’t rub me quickly or desperately. He rubbed me with a slow, steady pressure that was more intimate than a frantic rush could ever be. His other hand stayed at the small of my back, holding me still against the sink.
My knees buckled. His arm came around my waist, pinning me to him, supporting my weight as if he had known this would happen.
“Let go for me, Kit. Be a good girl for me,” he murmured into my hair, and the sound of my name from his lips was the final push I needed.
The orgasm broke over me in an inevitable wave that I couldn’t hold back.
I buried my face in the crook of his neck to muffle the cry that tore from my throat.
The scent of him—clean, expensive, with a hint of something dark and masculine—filled my lungs as I came, my body shuddering against his.
He held me through all of it, his thumb slowing its movements. When the shudders subsided, I was left trembling, my face pressed against the fabric of his suit jacket, my breath ragged and uneven. He didn’t let go.
I stayed there for a long moment, leaning against him. The only things that existed were the solid feel of his body against mine, the cold porcelain of the sink at my back, and the faint, distant murmur of the conference continuing on without us outside the room.
He finally lifted my chin with his thumb, forcing me to meet his gaze. His eyes were darker now, the pale blue almost entirely eclipsed by black pupils that promised all sorts of things I wasn’t ready to think about.
“Such a good girl for me,” he praised, and the words, delivered in that calm, gravelly voice of his, sent a fresh wave of heat through me.
He withdrew his hand from my pants and brought it to his lips. His eyes held mine as he slowly licked my arousal from his fingers, one by one. He watched me, gauging my reaction, and when my cheeks burned with renewed heat, a look of deep satisfaction settled on his face.
“Look at you,” he murmured. “So beautiful when you come undone.”
I felt a surge of something that was dangerously close to adoration. It was terrifying enough that I pushed away from him, my hands shaking as I scrambled to refasten my slacks. I couldn’t look at him. If I looked at him, I would do something stupid like beg him to do it again.
He let me go.
He simply stepped aside and watched me with that unnerving stillness.
I smoothed my blouse. I ran a hand through my hair. I tried to find a semblance of the person I’d been ten minutes ago and not the woman who got fingered in the women’s restroom by a Russian mobster with unnervingly blue eyes and too much patience, but she was gone.
“I have to go,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“Yes.”
He said it like nothing had happened.
I opened my mouth and closed it, quickly discovering that there was no arrangement of words that would let me walk out of that restroom with my dignity intact, so I picked up the bag I didn’t remember dropping and left without a single word.
The workshop was fine, but I remembered almost none of it.
For forty minutes, I sat in a chair too close to the front and pretended to take notes while my body replayed what had happened in the restroom.
By the time I left the workshop, Ivan was gone.
I checked the hallway casually, then less casually, then hated myself enough to stop.
The conference continued around me. People moving through professional lives with no idea that mine had just tilted by a few degrees.
I should have felt like I’d met a stranger, but I didn’t.
That was the thing I could not make fit.
Ivan Morozov was new data. A first contact.
A professional introduction facilitated by a researcher I trusted.
A man with a familiar last name, a controlled voice, an annoyingly patient stare and expert hands, and questions intelligent enough to cut through answers I hadn’t even decided to give.
He should have been a file I had just opened.
Instead, he felt like one I had been writing for weeks.
That thought stayed with me all the way back to my apartment.
I walked past shop windows and checked reflections automatically.
I watched dark glass, car doors, polished lobby panels, and the black screen of my phone.
The city looked normal. When I reached my building, the corrected security light above the front door flickered on in the early dusk while Ivan Morozov’s voice moved through my head.
I had let a man I’d known for two hours back me into a corner of a restroom and put his hand down my pants, and I had not stopped him.
That was not the part that frightened me.
The part that frightened me was that I hadn’t wanted to stop him.
I had stood there with every alarm bell I owned going off at once—stranger, unknown, no exit, no read on him—and some quieter system underneath all of them had looked at the situation and voted, decisively, against my own training.
I did not lose control. That was the whole point of me.
I had built an entire life on not being the woman who came apart against a sink in a building full of people, and I had been her anyway, and worse, I had walked out and sat through forty minutes of a workshop on threat modeling like my body wasn’t still humming from the best orgasm I’d had in what was maybe forever.
I knew what I was supposed to do with information like that. Log it. Flag it. Treat the lapse as a vulnerability and patch it.
I stood on the sidewalk for one second too long, then went inside. I did not open the Watcher file immediately, which should have frightened me. Instead, I sat at my desk, opened a new note, and typed one line.
Ivan Morozov—somehow feels familiar.
I stared at it.
Then I added:
Find out why.