Chapter Five — Isla #2
“You enjoy this,” I said. The accusation from the day before, arriving again with fresh evidence. “The… the knowing. Being ten steps ahead. You look at me like I’m a puzzle you’ve already solved and you’re just waiting for me to catch up, and it is… it is infuriating, and it is not… it’s not—”
I was close to him again. I didn’t know when that had happened.
I was standing at the edge of the table, and he was still seated, and somehow, the distance had collapsed again, the way it always collapsed.
I was pointing at him with more intent than precision, and anger was overriding my vocabulary.
“It’s not a game,” he said quietly. He tilted his head up to hold my gaze. “I don’t enjoy your distress. I find your—” something moved behind his eyes—“your reasoning, when you allow yourself to use it, clarifying. That isn’t the same thing.”
“You find me clarifying.” I nearly laughed. “That’s… what does that even—”
I stepped back, or tried to. My foot found the seam between the rug and the marble floor, that razor-thin edge where the textures met, and my heel hit it at exactly the wrong angle, and my balance went sideways in one lurching, graceless instant.
His hands caught me before I’d finished registering the fall.
He had one arm around my waist, decisive and immediate, pulling me forward and in rather than letting me go back and down.
I slammed into his chest—not gently, not gracefully, but hard and full, my hands flying out and finding the lapels of his jacket and clutching them.
I realized distantly that he must have stood from his chair in the same movement, because he was upright and I was against him.
His grip around my waist tightened.
Not to hold me up anymore—I was up, I was steady, and my feet had found the floor again. The grip tightened anyway. Reflexive, or not. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell anything except that I was pressed against his chest with my hands in his jacket and his arm around me.
We weren’t moving. Neither of us was.
I tilted my head up to say something—I don’t know what, something that would have functioned as a reset, as a restoration of the appropriate distance between two people in this situation—and he looked down at the same moment, and the angle closed the remaining space between us, and—
Warmth.
Brief. Soft. A brush of his mouth against mine that lasted less than a second and felt like considerably more than that. It wasn’t a kiss in any deliberate sense. It was two people moving toward the same point at the same moment and arriving there and then going still.
Neither of us moved for what felt like much longer than it probably was.
Then I gasped and pulled back.
My hands released his jacket—I hadn’t noticed how hard I was holding it until I let go and felt the released tension in my fingers. I took a step back, my heart beating violently.
The control was back in his posture—I could see his jaw tightening, his expression resettling into that unreadable neutrality of his.
His eyes were darker than they’d been thirty seconds ago.
“I—” I started.
“Don’t,” he cut in, his voice quiet and tight.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“I know what you were going to do.” He took a step back on his own, creating the distance I should have created first. “You were going to make it into an argument. That would be a mistake.”
“For which one of us?”
His gaze held mine for a beat longer than necessary. “Both.”
He reached for his jacket, straightening it. Then he looked at me with an honesty that was more unsettling than the control had been.
“Think about what just happened and whether it confirms your argument or complicates it.”
I said nothing.
He moved toward the door.
“Before you say no, if you’re still insisting on saying no, think carefully. Because the world outside won’t be gentle with you the way I will,” he uttered, not turning around to face me again until he walked out the door.
The door closed with a soft, definitive sound, and I stood in the middle of the room in my borrowed clothing, looking at the half-eaten breakfast on the table.
This is the most insane situation you have ever been in, Isla Monroe, and you have been in some genuinely insane situations.
Then my legs gave out like they’d been threatening to do for the last three minutes, and I sat down. On the floor.
My lips still felt warm. They still tingled.
That was the problem. Probably the biggest problem at the moment. My mouth still felt warm from a contact that had lasted less than a second, and my hands could still feel the fabric of his jacket. His heartbeat had been fast against my chest, not the slow, controlled pulse I would have expected.
He’d felt it too.
He hadn’t pretended otherwise. He could have—a man with that kind of control over his expression could have reset and looked at me like it hadn’t happened, like it was a minor physical incident, and I would have had to accept that facade because I had no standing to argue it.
Instead, he’d gone still. Instead, his eyes had gone dark.
I pressed my palms harder against the floor.
What was happening to me was not acceptable. I shouldn’t be wanting a longer, realer version of that kiss. I shouldn’t be thinking of what being his wife would be like, for real.
He’s not gentle.
He’s strategic.
Every single thing he does serves a purpose.
But his pulse had been fast.
You couldn’t fake a pulse. Not like that, not at close range, not against someone who was paying attention. The pulse was real, and the darkened eyes were real, and the word yes yesterday had come out without a single moment of assembly.
Oh, God.
He was not just my captor anymore.
He might not have been just my captor from the moment he looked across a poker room at a woman with zip-tied wrists and got to his feet.
That thought was the most dangerous thing in the room, including the situation outside the building, and I sat with it on the cool floor while Las Vegas went about its indifferent business below, and I tried to decide whether the danger made it something to run from or something to look at clearly.
I’d spent years running from dangerous things.
I was over ten floors up with nowhere to run.
Now, running from Siroc White and the whole situation meant running towards something I should be running away from. The temptation by the name of Alexei Golovin.
Alexei
Alexei…
Oh, I’m doomed.