Page 10 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I stop with my hand on the door handle, and the honest answer moves through me from somewhere low in my chest. The way he slowed down. The way he watched my face. The patience of him.
“Yes,” I say. “He was good to me.”
I close the door before she can ask anything else.
The black car is already at the curb when I come out of the building, idling with the quiet confidence of expensive machinery. Viktor, Roman’s driver, gives me the small nod he always gives me, the one that means good morning and nothing more, and opens the rear door.
I get in.
Roman is already inside.
He is looking down at something on his phone with the reading glasses he only wears in the car and in private meetings, and which I find unreasonably attractive.
His silver hair is neat. His jaw is clean-shaven. He looks, in every possible way, like a man who had a perfectly ordinary night followed by a perfectly adequate sleep, and I want to find this deeply irritating.
I find it deeply attractive instead, which is worse.
“Good morning,” I say, settling into the seat beside him. Not too close. The usual distance.
“You’re three minutes late,” he says, without looking up.
“The elevator was slow.”
He makes a sound that is not quite acknowledgment and not quite dismissal, and turns a page on his phone. I open my bag, take out my tablet, pull up his schedule for the day, and tell myself to focus.
Then he inhales.
It is the smallest, most controlled thing, a slight deepening of breath through the nose, the kind you would miss entirely if you were not already on high alert for exactly this. His eyes stay on his phone. Nothing on his face moves.
I stare at my tablet screen.
Every nerve ending I have is screaming. I keep my eyes forward and my face neutral and I think, with considerable feeling, about the perfume bottle sitting in the back of my dresser drawer, and I think,You are fine, you are completely fine, he does not know,he cannot know, a lot of women probably wear similar scents, this means nothing, you are fine.
He turns another page on his phone.
“Where did you get to last night?” he asks.
My stomach drops approximately four floors.
“I finished up around ten,” I say. My voice is even. I am very proud of my voice right now. “Confirmed everything with your kitchen staff and the security rotation, and then I didn’t see much point in staying.”
“Mm.” He scrolls something. “The Rezenkov contract needs to be with their legal team by end of day. I want the amended clause on indemnity reviewed before it goes.”
“I flagged that this morning. I’ve already sent the revision notes to our legal team. They’ll have a clean draft to you by two.”
He glances at me over the reading glasses for a half second. “Good.”
I look back at my tablet.
We fall into the rhythm of it, the one we have built over two years of these car rides.
He talks, I respond, we work through the day’s architecture. The Sidorov account needs a follow-up call scheduled. The Thursday board meeting has a room change he needs to be aware of. There’s a dinner on Wednesday with two council associates that requires a reservation at a restaurant where Roman is known and where the corner table needs to be specifically requested.
I type notes. I answer questions. I am, by every external measure, completely fine.
What I am internally is a different matter entirely.
He is right there. Sitting next to me, and I know things about him now that I did not know forty-eight hours ago, and my body, which has apparently developed a memory of its own overnight, is making that knowledge extremely difficult to manage.
