Chapter 2
chapter
two
An hour later, in the comfort of my suite—“home” for the next six weeks—Luka’s voice still clung to my skin like smoke.
The kettle hissed to life as I rolled my aching shoulders.
My phone chimed.
London number. Not in my contacts.
You left your scarf in my car.
I checked the number against the matte card the he’d pressed into my hand. The digits matched.
Of course they did.
I typed back, partly to shovel the heat off my chest, partly to see if he was fucking with me.
Luka, right? Pretty sure I wasn’t wearing a scarf. Don’t even think I own one. Must be someone else’s. But thanks anyway.
Not sure whose else it could be. Haven’t had any other female passengers tonight.
My pulse beat in my ears as I watched the dots appear, vanish, and reappear.
If you like, I can return it to you at your hotel. I’m not far.
I set my phone face down on the desk, palms damp against its smooth case. The air in the suite felt dense, as if it had thickened around my ribs. It took a full minute before I turned the screen over.
How did you get my number, anyway? I thought the app kept that confidential.
A lag this time. Then:
Not hard to hack.
A small knot tightened in my stomach. I should have found it creepy. Instead, I pictured his hands—steady, sure—the way they’d wrapped around the wheel. My breath snagged, just once, before I forced it steady.
I could report you.
You could.
A pause.
But you won’t.
A shiver rippled up my spine, and the skin at the back of my neck prickled.
You’re pretty sure of yourself. What’s stopping me?
Because you wouldn’t still be messaging. You’d have already blocked me and filed a report.
My fingers curled around the phone until the edge bit into my palm. A grin threatened, reckless and warm, and I fought it down before it could give me away.
The kettle clicked off. I poured steaming water over a tea bag, letting the curl of heat outflank the fire licking up my back.
My phone buzzed again.
I’ll meet you in the lobby. Fifteen minutes.
His confidence worked under my skin, ticklish and aggravating at once. I hesitated just long enough for the steam to cloud my vision, then typed—deliberately slow.
I’ll be there.
Twenty minutes later, my pulse chased its tail as I crossed the lobby’s marble sea.
He was leaning against a pillar like he owned the building, one ankle hooked over the other, thumb scrolling his phone as time bent around him. The scarf was a lie, of course, but he’d wrapped something dark and cashmere around his wrist like a dare.
Even at a distance, Luka pulled focus without effort.
His dark hair was cut close, exposing the clean lines of his skull and hard angle of his jaw.
A dark wool jacket hung open over a fitted charcoal turtleneck, worn jeans skimming the line between casual and deliberate.
His shoulders were built for leaning on doorframes, his arms for bracing someone against them.
When he lifted his head, his gaze locked on me—precise, unhurried, stripping away the rest of the lobby until there was only him. My knees went liquid under my skirt, and for one treacherous second, I forgot to breathe.
I kept walking, heels clicking on marble, pretending I didn’t feel the heat rolling off him in slow, measured waves.
Up close, the scale of him was worse. Taller than I remembered, broader too, with the settled confidence of a man long past proving himself—like the space between us was just an illusion he’d allow me to keep until he decided otherwise.
“Nice scarf,” I said, sidling up, aiming for lightness but hearing the quaver in my voice.
His gaze tracked my face, lingering just long enough to make my pulse trip. “You’re late.”
“And that’s not my scarf,” I said, flicking it with a fingernail. “I’ve never seen it in my life.”
He considered me, then the scarf, then the V of bare skin at my collar. “It is now.”
He stepped in, and I froze. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.
Deep down, I didn’t.
My breath caught high in my chest as he looped the scarf around my neck once, twice, the wool snagging in my hair before he tugged it into place with a slow, deliberate draw. The knot pressed warm against my throat, heat spilling down my spine.
“You don’t know how to dress for this weather. Let’s fix that.”
The scarf smelled of him—spice and darkness, like smoke clinging to velvet.
My thoughts juddered, all the old firewall scripts in my head tripping over each other.
I’d meant to keep things light, to throw the scarf back in his face.
But the moment he touched me, the lobby lost its depth, flattening into light and silence.
He leaned in, a fraction too close.
I looked for a way to take up less space in myself. Found none.
Luka nodded toward the bar. “Drink?” It was intoned as a question. But it wasn’t.
I nodded.
He pressed his hand to the small of my back as we crossed the lobby, not guiding so much as laying claim. The heat of his palm lingered even after he dropped contact, like the aftertaste of a spirit that burned going down.
The bar was a long, lacquered vein of darkness, threaded with ambient jazz that made you feel more expensive just sitting in it.
Luka steered me to a booth at the far end, leather seats sunk into the wall beneath a canopy of ferns.
He let me in first, then boxed me in with his body and the sweep of his arm along the banquette.
His posture was loose but ready. Every inch of me registered that he’d picked the seat with a view of every entrance and exit, and that I was now exactly where he wanted me.
“Vodka,” he told the server, not even glancing at the menu. “Freezer cold. Stolichnaya, if you have it.” His accent sharpened the words, made them linger.
I ordered a glass of Spanish red, letting my voice hover in the gap between us.
He watched the server leave, then tracked his gaze back to my knees, my waist, the scarf. “A skirt? Did you wear that just for me?”
I tried to appear unbothered, but my grip was locked on the table’s edge. “You do this a lot?”
He raised a brow. “Meet women in lobbies?”
“Make up stories to see if they stick.”
He considered that with what looked like genuine amusement. “Not often. But you seemed worth the experiment.”
The drinks arrived with the softest clink, though I’d barely registered the server’s approach. Luka threw back half his vodka in a single, efficient draw, shoulders rolling loose as he set the glass down. I nursed my wine, keeping the rim at my lips and my eyes on him.
He wasn’t looking at me. Not directly, anyway.
His gaze slid from the mirrored shelves to the slow-rolling cluster of businessmen at the far end of the bar, to the couple in muted argument near the fire exit, to the empty table at our twelve o’clock.
It was a choreography so smooth I’d have missed it if I wasn’t already looking for the wires behind the trick.
“Do you always do that?” I asked, letting the words drop casually.
He blinked. “What’s that?”
“Scan the room. Clock everyone. You’ve mapped this place twice over since we sat down.”
He smiled, not sheepish but pleased. “Force of habit.”
“Military?” I asked, before I could second-guess it.
A beat. He tapped the lip of his glass, eyes narrowing at the word. “All men serve a year in the army where I’m from.”
“And where’s that?”
He cradled his glass, tracing the rim with a calloused thumb. “You haven’t guessed?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
“Then you’ll be waiting a long time, princess.”
Luka drained the last of his vodka in a single swallow, throat working, then set the glass down with an unhurried, final click. He didn’t bother to ask—just signaled to the server with a tilt of his chin and a lifted finger, flicking the empty glass once for punctuation. “Two more vodkas.”
My mouth was already shaped around a protest, but I nodded instead, heat climbing my neck. He saw it and smiled—not friendly, but pointed.
The second round arrived quicker than the first. Luka took both glasses off the tray himself and placed one in front of me, his fingers brushing deliberately across my knuckles. He didn’t remove his hand until I looked up, meeting his gaze.
“Finish yours before I finish mine,” he said. Not a request.
I wrapped my hands around the glass, pulse racing ahead of whatever excuse I might have marshaled. I drank, and the vodka’s burn bloomed in my chest like a struck match.
Luka let me have the silence—just watched, his eyes on my mouth until I set the empty glass down.
The vodka sought out every hollowed channel in me, spreading heat, unlocking doors I’d kept chained. I became acutely aware of the scarf—his scarf—cinched around my neck. With each passing moment, the wool pressed in tighter, a noose of heat and want.
I reached up to loosen it, but Luka closed his hand around my wrist. His touch was gentler than it should have been, but there was no mistaking the grip.
“Leave it.”
“I’m burning up,” I protested, my voice threading between a laugh and a gasp.
His eyes lingered on my mouth, then drifted downward, slow as a drip of honey. “You can take it off…” He skimmed his fingertips along my knee, then up the outside of my thigh. “If you uncross your legs.”
My body went still, muscles and nerves crystallized around that one line. His voice reverberated in my bones. He didn’t look away. Didn’t back down. Everything in me recoiled at the idea of giving in so easily—and yet the urge to comply, to see what would happen if I did, nearly undid me.
I stared at him, pulse wild, until the silence made the room tilt. Then, as if pulled by a wire in his voice, I slid my right knee over my left and let my thighs part under the table. The fabric of my skirt shifted just enough to tell him what he needed to know.
His lips barely moved, but the corners lifted in a small, private smile. Approval. Or perhaps satisfaction at my surrender.
He let the moment bloom, the jazz-drowned bar focused to a point between our knees. Then he sat back, arms loose against the banquette, and nodded toward the scarf at my throat. “Now take it off.”
The wool was already damp at the nape of my neck. I lifted my hands, fingers slow, and unwound it with deliberate care. His stare tracked every movement. I laid it across the seat beside me, hands trembling.
He didn’t touch it—didn’t even glance down. Just watched me.
My breath came shallow. The vodka made me lighter—hollowed. My pulse thrummed behind my ears and between my thighs.
“Good,” he said, voice low, letting the word hang like condensation on a glass. He leaned in, so close I could feel the exhale of his breath curl along my jaw. “But I wasn’t talking about the scarf.”
The world narrowed to the table’s edge, the leather booth, his gaze pinning me in place. Sound dulled, as if I’d slipped underwater.
“What were you talking about?” My voice sounded thin and unfamiliar.
He hooked the inside of my knee, this time with a possessive certainty. “Take off your underwear.”
Heat crashed over me, sudden and feverish. It was such a ridiculous, cinematic command that I nearly laughed. “Here?” The word squeaked. I blinked. “Are you out of your mind?”
He didn’t laugh. His mouth twitched, but his eyes held me, flat and glacial. “Either here…” His hand flexed over my knee, thumb circling just above the hem of my skirt. “Or in your room. Your choice.”
The air thickened, every cubic inch charged as if the city’s power grid ran through the booth. I swallowed, tasting the vodka, the wool, the metallic edge of my own nerves. He waited, so still it made me want to tear something just to see if he’d flinch.
“You’re serious,” I managed.
He slid his hand higher. “Completely.”
I looked around. The bar was a blur of silhouettes, laughter, and glass. The businessmen at the end of the counter were arguing about rugby, the couple by the fire exit had graduated to silent mutual disdain, and the barman’s eyes never rose above his own hands. No one cared. No one watched.
Except Luka.
He brushed his lips against my ear.
“Choose now.”