Page 9 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“Have the car ready,” I say, standing. “We’re picking up Elena on the way in.”
Kostya makes a note. “Of course.”
I take my coffee and walk out of the dining room and into the rest of the morning, and I am almost entirely focused on what is in front of me.
4
ELENA
Roman ends the call,and I stand in the middle of my bedroom in nothing but a towel and stare at my phone like it has personally wronged me.
Forty minutes.
I drop the towel and open my wardrobe.
How. How does he have the energy. The man is fifty-one years old and he hosted a party for three hundred people and then he and I—and then he—and now he is apparently dressed and breakfasting and dispatching cars like it is any other Tuesday morning and I am standing here with my hair still damp and my legs still unreliable and approximately thirty-eight minutes left to become his secretary.
I pull out the first appropriate thing I find. A charcoal pencil skirt, a white blouse, and low black heels.
I dress fast, fingers working buttons from the bottom up, and I don’t let myself think about whose fingers were working them the other direction approximately six hours ago because that line of thinking will not get me out of this apartment on time.
My hair is the most important part.
I sit at the small mirror on my dresser and divide it into sections with the focused urgency of someone defusing something.
Every blonde strand gathered, twisted, pinned flat against the back of my head until the woman in the mirror looks nothing like the woman who stood on that terrace last night with waves loose around her shoulders and a glass of champagne and approximately zero survival instincts. The bun is tight. It pulls slightly at my temples, and I don’t care because this is what I need. This is the distance between her and me, and right now I need every inch of it I can manufacture.
I do a full face of makeup in eleven minutes, which is a personal record, and then I reach for my perfume out of pure habit and stop.
I put it down.
I stand there looking at the bottle for a second. The same perfume I wore last night. The same one that is currently embedded in his pillowcase and probably his memory, and absolutely cannot be anywhere near his nose this morning, while I am trying to be invisible. I open the top drawer of my dresser and put the bottle in the back behind everything else, and make a mental note to replace it with something entirely different at the first available opportunity.
I grab my bag, my phone, and my keys.
Mara is in the kitchen in an oversized T-shirt, leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee, watching me move through the apartment.
“You’re in a hurry,” she says.
“I have work.”
“I know.” She sips her coffee. “How’d it go last night?”
I look at her for exactly one second. “I’m not a virgin anymore.”
Mara lowers her mug very slowly. “Elena?—”
“I have thirty minutes.” I check my phone. “Twenty-six.”
“You can’t say that and just leave.”
“I’ll call you tonight.” I’m already at the door. “Don’t wait up, don’t text me at work, don’t do anything that will make my morning harder than it already is.”
“Who was he?”
“Mara.”
“Was he at least good to you?”
