Chapter 8
The storm came in off the Gulf at nightfall.
By ten o'clock the rain was coming down in sheets, the Cedar elm thrashing against the windows, lightning turning the whole estate white in stuttering bursts.
By half past, the power went out. The whole house dropped into darkness between one breath and the next, the hum of a hundred quiet machines falling silent all at once, and somewhere in the dark a generator coughed and failed to catch.
Tanisha was in the kitchen when it happened.
She'd been three hours into a pot of short rib stew, a slow Sunday thing she made when she missed Mama Boone's house, and she was not about to let a little apocalypse ruin it.
She found the candles in the third drawer she tried, lit a row of them along the kitchen island, and went back to her stew by their light, stubborn and unbothered, the storm raging at the glass.
That was how Yegor found her.
He came into the kitchen with a flashlight and the loose, slightly lost air of a man whose enormous house had stopped working and who did not know what to do with himself when there were no markets to watch and no monitors to glow at him.
He was in a soft dark henley and lounge pants, barefoot, his buzz cut catching the candlelight, and he stopped in the doorway at the sight of her standing over a pot of stew by candleflame like the storm was a minor inconvenience.
"The generator's down," he said. "Stanislav's working on it."
"Good for Stanislav." She didn't look up. "Hand me that wooden spoon."
He handed her the spoon.
"You're cooking," he said. "In a blackout."
"I'm finishing. There's a difference." She stirred. "You don't abandon a stew three hours in because the lights went out. That's quitter behavior."
He came to stand across the island from her, in the warm pool of candlelight, the dark house and the screaming storm pressed up against every window, and he watched her work.
"You put the onions in too early," he said.
Tanisha's spoon stopped.
"Excuse me?"
"The onions. You should sear the meat first. Get the color on it. Then the onions. You put them in together; you steam the meat instead of searing it."
She set the spoon down very slowly and looked at him across the candles.
"Yegor Tarasoff," she said. "Are you, a man whose entire culinary résumé is forgetting to eat, telling me how to build a braise?"
"I'm telling you what I observed."
"You observed wrong. You sweat the onions first, low, until they're sweet, then you push them to the side and sear the meat in the same pot so it picks up the fond.
It's called layering. It's called flavor.
It's called; I've done this nine thousand times and you've done it zero.
" She pointed the spoon at him. "Stick to oil, rich man. "
There was a slow change in his face and it was caught in the candlelight. The corner of his mouth tugged.
"You're very sure of yourself in a kitchen," he said.
"It's the one room in this entire palace that's mine."
"Is that so."
"That's so." She stepped around the island toward the spice drawer, and he didn't move, so she ended up closer to him than she'd planned, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep glaring at him properly.
"You can buy the building. You can buy the appliances.
You can buy the chef. You cannot buy knowing when the onions go in.
That's earned." Her voice had dropped without her permission.
"Some things you have to earn, Tarasoff. "
He looked down at her.
The teasing had drained out of the air somewhere in the last sentence, and neither of them had decided to let it.
The storm threw light across his face and took it away.
He was so close she could feel the warmth coming off his chest, the candles guttered, and the whole loud world narrowed down to the few inches of warm dark between his mouth and hers.
"Tanisha," he said. Low.
"Don't," she whispered. "Don't say something real."
"Why?"
"Because I'll believe you."
He kissed her.
Or she kissed him. Neither of them could agree afterward on which, and it didn't matter, because the second their mouths met the argument, the contract and the ninety days all fell away at once.
He backed her against the kitchen island, one hand sliding to the small of her back to pull her in, the other coming up to cradle the back of her head, and she gripped the front of his henley in both fists and kissed him like she'd been starving for months and had only just now realized.
The candles burned. The storm raged.
They made it as far as the pantry, stumbling, mouths still fused, his hands learning the shape of her, before he tore himself back.
He was breathing hard. His forehead dropped to hers. His hands had gone still on her waist, gripping, holding her where she was but not letting it go further.
"If we do this," he said, ragged, "it has to mean something. I don't sleep with women who are working for me."
Tanisha looked up at him in the dark.
"Then stop paying me," she said.
It was meant as a joke.
Neither of them laughed.
He looked at her for one long, suspended second, and then he took her hand, and led her out of the pantry, through the dark house and up the great staircase, into the master suite she had never once set foot in. And she let him.
*****
He undressed her by storm-light and the single candle he'd carried up with unsteady hands.
That was the thing that undid her first. Not the looking, though he looked. It was that Yegor, who closed nine-figure deals without blinking, fumbled the small mother-of-pearl buttons of his own shirt and had to stop and breathe.
"You're nervous," she whispered.
"I haven't done this in a long time." He got the shirt off, and the candlelight slid over the broad muscled chest, the flat stomach, the dark hair arrowing down to the waistband of his trousers. "Not like this. Not where it counted."
"It counts?" she whispered.
"You know it does." He came down over her then, bracing on his forearms, and just looked at her for a long moment, his gaze moving over the dark curves of her body laid bare in the candlelight like she was something he could not believe he was allowed to have.
He laid her back into the pillows and bent to her, his mouth finding the warm brown of her throat, her collarbone, and then the dark peak of one breast. He drew the nipple into his mouth and his tongue swirled around the tightening bud, she arched up off the sheets with a cry, her fingers digging into the short bristle of his hair.
He learned fast for a man who claimed to be out of practice.
He moved to the other breast and suckled it until she was writhing under him, until she was pushing his hand lower.
He went where she pushed him. His palm smoothed down over her belly, parting her thighs, and when his fingers found the swollen flesh of her sex he hissed out a breath against her skin. He almost wept with the wonder of it when he dipped into her and found her wet and ready for him.
"Yegor," His name broke on her lips.
"I have you." He kissed the inside of her thigh, the soft skin above her knee. "Tell me what you like."
"That. Slower." She caught his wrist and showed him, and he watched her hand on his with a focus that was almost unbearable, and then he took over and did it exactly as she'd shown him, two fingers sliding into the slick heat of her, the heel of his palm pressed to the swollen bud, until her hips were rocking up to chase his hand and the words were gone.
He could have taken her over right then.
She was close, her thighs trembling around his hand, her hips chasing the slow drive of his fingers.
He felt the walls of her clenching tight and fluttering against him, felt how near the edge she was, and he eased back, and she made a sound of pure outrage that startled a rough laugh out of him.
"Not like that," he said thickly. "Not the first time. The first time I want to be inside you when you come. I want to feel it."
He stripped off the rest of his clothes, and her eyes went to the thick length of his erection, already hard and straining toward her. He rolled on the protection with hands that still shook and settled between her thighs and guided the broad head of his cock to her entrance.
He pushed into her slowly, inch by careful inch, and she felt every part of it, the stretch, the heat and the enormous tenderness of being filled by a man trembling with the effort of being gentle. He stilled when he was buried to the hilt, his forehead dropping to hers.
"Stay there a second," she breathed, and wrapped her legs around him to hold him deep, in no hurry at all for it to be faster.
Then she tilted her hips, and he understood, he began to move.
It was not athletic and it was not smooth.
It was two people learning each other in the dark, his cock dragging slow and full through the tight clutch of her, his low broken Russian spilling into her hair, her heels pressing him deeper.
The pleasure built in her without urgency, coiling tighter and tighter from the place where they were joined, and when it finally broke she pressed her open mouth to his neck and shattered around him, her body gripping his length in long pulses.
He did not finish with her. He held himself still while she came down, his arms shaking, the climax fought back at the base of his cock.
Only when she opened her eyes and nodded did he let himself move again, three deep strokes, his control finally disintegrating, and he spilled with his lips pressed to her temple and her name, just her name, said like it was the only word he had left.
After they lay there, content.
*****
He found the scar in the quiet that came after.
They lay tangled in the dark, the storm finally softening to a steady rain, his fingers tracing idle patterns over her skin, and they drifted over a small ridge of healed skin along her ribcage on the left side, faint and old.
He looked at it for a long moment.
She felt the exact moment he understood what it was.
"This is where," he said. It was not a question.
"Yeah."
His fingers traced it once, gently, as if he could smooth it away.
When he spoke again his voice had changed entirely.
The tenderness was still there, but underneath it was something cold and flat and absolutely certain, the same thing she'd seen flicker across his face in the glass conference room when she'd first said the name Dorian Quincy.
"I want to kill him for you," Yegor said quietly.
Tanisha put her hand over his, where it rested on the scar.
"Don't," she said.
"I won't." His arm tightened around her, drawing her closer against his chest, his lips pressing to the crown of her head.
"But I want to. I want you to know that I want to.
I have spent my whole life learning how to make problems disappear, a man put his hands on you and the only thing stopping me is that you asked me not to. "
Tanisha was quiet for a moment, her ear against his heart, listening to it slow.
"Can I tell you something I've never told anybody?" she said. "Not Renata. Not even Mama Boone."
"Anything."
"The worst part wasn't the ribs." She kept her eyes on the dark ceiling.
"The ribs healed. The worst part was that for about a week after, I kept finding reasons why it was my fault.
I'd left dishes in the sink. I'd been short with him that morning.
I'd worn a dress he didn't like to an event.
My brain just, went looking for the reason, because if there was a reason, then I had some control, you understand?
If it was something I did, then I could just not do it again and be safe.
It took me a long time to understand that there was no reason.
That I could have been perfect and it still would have happened, because it was never about me at all.
It was about him." She let out a slow breath.
"That's the thing he stole that I'm still trying to get back.
Not the year and a half of hiding. The part where I trusted my own read on a person. "
Yegor was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost the cold edge entirely.
"You read me," he said. "In the conference room.
In my office with the sandwich. You've read me right every single time, even when I was performing as hard as I know how.
Your read works fine, Tanisha. He didn't break it.
He just made you afraid to use it." His hand spread warm over the scar. "Use it on me. Tell me what you see."
She tilted her head up to look at him in the dark.
"I see a man who's been alone a lot longer than three years," she said softly. "I see a man who decided being a vault was safer than being a person, and who's terrified that I just talked him out of it."
His jaw tightened. She felt it against her hair.
"Your read works fine," he said again, rougher this time.
She lay there in the dark, in a billionaire's bed, in the arms of a man she had married by accident and was no longer pretending not to want, and for the first time in eighteen months she let herself fall asleep without watching the door.
She should have kept watching the door.
*****
She woke to gray morning light and the sound of her phone buzzing on the nightstand on the wrong side of the bed.
Yegor was still asleep beside her, one heavy arm thrown across her waist, his face younger in sleep than she'd ever seen awake. She slid out carefully, reached for the phone, and saw it: a voicemail, from an unknown number, left at 6:14 that morning.
She knew before she pressed play. Her whole body knew.
She pressed play anyway.
Dorian's voice came through, soft, warm and familiar and worse than any scream could ever be.
"Hey, beautiful. Long time." A pause. The sound of traffic behind him.
City traffic. "Real nice neighborhood your new boyfriend's got.
River Oaks. Took me a minute to find it, but you know me.
I always find you." Another pause. "I'm in town now.
Houston's real pretty this time of year. We should catch up. For old time’s sake. "
The message ended.
Tanisha stood naked in the gray light beside the bed of the man she was falling in love with, the phone shaking in her hand, and understood that the safest she had felt in eighteen months and the most danger she had been in were both, somehow, happening on the very same morning.
He was here.
Dorian was in Houston.