Page 126 of Boardroom Ties
For a long, long minute, he just holds me.
I can feel him hard against me, but he isn’t doing anything about it. He’s letting me catch up. He’s letting mearrive in the moment.
“I’m falling in love with you, Mat.”
The confession tumbles out of my mouth before I can stop it. I wish I could shovel it back inside right away, like the Hungry Hungry Hippo with Emotional Problems that I am. I haven’t said those words to anyone since Giana.
And in the silence that follows, I know deep in my soul that I fucked up. We’re good together, yeah, butloveis a different thing entirely. I pushed, stupid me, and ruined it.
Matvei pulls back just enough to look at me. Whatever he sees on my face must be sufficient, because the half-smile that breaks across his is something I will think about for the rest of my life.
“Dikarka,” he whispers, “I have loved you since the moment you walked into that bar.”
Then he moves.
He holds my eye contact the whole time. He doesn’t let me look away, even when my eyes flutter and try because it’s so much, overwhelmingly intense, and I feel like I’m cracking wide open and dissolving into the ether. He keeps me there with him, anchored, witnessed.
I see you, his face says.I see you, I see you, I see you, I see you.
When I cum, it’s so quiet I almost don’t recognize it as an orgasm. It’s a slow, warm collapse from the inside out. I shove my face into his neck and let it move through me, and he holds me through it, murmuring in Russian against my hair, words I don’t understand and don’t need to.
When we’re both spent, he lowers me down to the rug and lies beside me, pulling a blanket off the back of the settee and draping it over us. The fire is low and the light in the room has melted into the soft, dim gold of a sunset. His arm is heavy across my waist. His hand is splayed wide and warm on my belly.
There are so many things I could and should be thinking about right now. Sisters and death, senators and husbands, bruises suffered and scars healed.
But tonight, for the first time in a very long time, I think about none of it. I just lie there, in front of a dying fire with a man who just swore he would crawl through hell on my behalf, and let myself be held.
“Mat,” I whisper, much later, when I’m halfway into sleep.
“Mm.”
“Thank you.”
He kisses the back of my neck. “For what,dikarka?”
“For taking off the ring.”
His arm tightens. His mouth presses warm to the knob of my spine. “Anytime,” he says. “Anytime at all.”
38
CASS
A week can be a very long time.
The Monday after the wedding, Raymond came home from the St. Regis at noon, smelling of someone else’s perfume and his own bourbon-soaked sweat. He kissed my forehead in the kitchen, asked if I’d slept well, ate his soft-boiled egg, and then set off again. For “meetings,” he said.
He didn’t mention Matvei. He neglected to mention the wedding at all, actually. It was as if Tabitha DeMaris and her four-tier buttercream had simply never happened. Like there’d been a glitch in the simulation and Saturday night had vanished from the history books.
Which, of course, scared the hell out of me.
I spend the rest of the week in a panic, but nothing seems amiss. Raymond is more distant than usual, and more absent, but since when is that something I’d complain about?
I try to keep myself busy. Daydreaming of a post-Raymond future is too optimistic for my liking, so I just focus on the next steps.
The plan, as Matvei lays it out in increments over the burner across the week, is brutal in its simplicity. I’ll slip a sleeping pill into Raymond’s nightcap. It guarantees he’ll be soundly asleep before midnight. Once that’s handled, I’ll take a pill of my own and pass out in the guest room. A tox screen will prove my alibi, if it should come to that.
Meanwhile, with both of us unconscious, Matvei will let himself into the penthouse and do what needs doing. In the morning, there will be a flight to the Caymans, but neither of its two key passengers will be on it. The Vainakh people will think their man got cold feet, or that something has gone awry, and they’ll scatter or scramble. Matvei’s uncle Afon will be there to mop up whatever runs.
