Chapter Seven — Isla #2
“What?” he asked, genuine curiosity seeping out beneath his usual unreadable expression.
“Your space, it’s… I gestured around the parlor, “not as bland as I’d have expected. Still colorless but… not dead.”
He inclined his head a fraction like he was giving what I just said some serious thought. Then he wordlessly led me to the bedroom.
On getting inside, I realized I had no reason to be surprised about the size of the room I had formerly occupied.
The man definitely had something for extra-large spaces.
A king-size bed covered in navy silk sat magnificently against the wall facing the entrance door.
To the right, a bar cart with a high wooden chair took the corner space while a huge dresser that looked and smelled new occupied the other side, with a chair backing the bed.
He pointed to the two doors on the far left. “Closet. Bathroom.”
“Right.”
I moved to the chair facing the dresser as Alexei moved to the bar cart and poured two glasses of something amber.
He set one on the table in front of me and kept one, and then stood near the window looking out at the city that never ran out of light, and for a long moment neither of us said anything.
Then he said, “You don’t owe me anything tonight.”
I looked at him.
He had his back partially to me, profile visible against the window light. “The marriage is protection. Like I told you. I don’t want you to feel that agreeing to one thing commits you to everything.”
His restraint confused me more than his dominance ever could.
“You don’t get to decide what I owe,” I answered, my tone quiet. “And you don’t get to decide what I want.”
He turned from the window.
“I’m not deciding anything,” he said.
“You’re trying to control… to decide this again. You’re trying to…” I pressed my hands flat on my knees. “You’re giving me an out before I’ve indicated I want one, and you’re doing it in that voice you use when you’ve already decided how the situation is going to go.”
Something moved through his expression. “I’m not trying to do anything. This is an inevitable situation except your safety is being taken out of the equation.”
“That’s it right there. You’ll keep throwing the safety card in my face every fucking time, won’t you? What about my life that was thrown upside down in the blink of an eye? What about what it costs me to be somewhere I wouldn’t have dreamed of?” I lashed out, rising from the chair.
He came closer, his gaze on my face.
“I never claimed to be a savior.”
“Like you’re not acting that fucking way already,” I bit out. “You—”
“What do you want, Isla?”
The question came out unarmored. Not a challenge, not a strategy. The flat, genuine version of a question from a man who had been managing information and outcomes for so long that asking without preloading the answer was a skill he’d had to consciously rebuild.
I looked at him. My anger and fury melted into a different kind of heat.
“I’m terrified,” I said, my voice lower than intended.
“I know.”
“Not of you. Of—” I gestured at the room. “Of how fast this moved. Of not knowing what any of it means. How much I don’t hate being here, which makes no sense, and I’m aware it makes no sense.”
“I’m not unafraid,” he said.
I looked at him directly.
“I find that hard to believe,” I said, chuckling despite myself.
His look was steady, like my reaction didn’t make what he said any less factual. I asked, “Of what?”
“Of what it means that I agreed to this for reasons I’d prepared,” he said, “and then discovered somewhere in the middle of it that the reasons were…” He stopped. “Insufficient. As a complete explanation.”
What?
The silence between us was different from the others. It was not hostile, strategic, or charged with the electricity of an argument waiting to begin.
“Alexei,” I breathed.
His name in my mouth was still unfamiliar. I had avoided using it, I realized. Using it felt like something I hadn’t been ready to give.
“What… what do you mean? What happens now?” I questioned.
He looked at me with those blue-grey eyes that had given away exactly nothing since the moment I’d first found them across a poker room. Then, quietly, in a way that felt like the removal of something he’d been carrying, he said, “I don’t know.”
Three words. The most honest thing he’d said to me.
I crossed the distance between us, aware of him watching me the way he watched everything—with that complete, focused attention that made you feel like the only data point in the room.
I reached out and touched his jaw, my fingers against the faint shadow of stubble that hadn’t been there yesterday, a touch that was asking a question rather than stating an intention.
He went very still.
“I told you,” I said quietly. “You don’t get to decide what I want.”
He reached up and covered my hand with his. Not to move it, to hold it there. His thumb traced the inside of my wrist, exactly where the zip tie mark had faded to a thin pink line, and the touch was so careful that something at the back of my throat tightened.
“Isla.” My name in his mouth sounded… tender.