Page 80 of Boardroom Ties
I stare at him. “How do youknowthat?”
“I’m a lawyer,dikarka. I know everyone’s prenup.”
I close my eyes. “Does it make me a bad person if that comforts me?”
“I don’t judge. Take comfort where you can get it.”
He bends, retrieves my poor, abandoned ice bucket from the floor, and presses it back into my hand. Then he once more tugs the robe closed around me and reties the belt, double-knotting it like a kindergarten teacher sending a kid out into the snow.
The whole thing takes maybe ten seconds. By the end of it, you would not be able to tell, looking at me, that I’d just been pinned to a vending machine moments ago by my Russian baby daddy.
Well. Aside from the part where I look like I’ve seen the face of God.
“Come on,” he says, and ushers me out of The Ice Room with his hand at the small of my back like nothing from the last ten minutes ever happened.
The hallway is mercifully Susan-free. The piano music is still tinkling from somewhere unseen and the sconces continue to drone softly, throwing pools of amber light onto the green-and-gold pheasant wallpaper. We walk side by side, my slippers shushing on the carpet, his bare feet utterly silent.
“You should put on some shoes,” I whisper. “You never know how often these rugs get shampooed.”
“I assure you that I’ve stepped in far worse,” he says grimly. “Besides, I’m almost at my room.”
“Which one is yours?”
He glances down at me, the corner of his mouth twitching in the way that means he’s enjoying himself at my expense. “Why do you ask, Mrs. Snyder? Are you propositioning me?”
My cheeks burn. “I’m asking a perfectly reasonable question to which I am owed a perfectly reasonable answer.”
“Alright.”
He stops walking.
I do, too. I look up to realize that we’re standing in front of the Honeymoon Suite. The sneering ram glares at us, frozen forever in tarnished brass.
Then, slowly, he extends one long index finger and points.
To the left.
To the door directly next to mine. The one with the wolf knocker. Sleek, with its fangs bared.
“You have to be kidding me,” I whisper. “You arenext door to me?!”
He nods.
“You’re— Matvei,how?! They had a whole list of room assignments. Pre-planned and everything. You can’t just?—”
“There was a partner in his late sixties who had been bumped to the Wolf Suite on account of the Honeymoon upgrade for your husband. A brief conversation with the front desk revealed that he would in fact be quite delighted to have the Badger Room instead of the wolf decor, particularly when accompanied by a complimentary bottle of the hotel’s finest cabernet, which I was happy to underwrite. I wanted to keep you close to me.”
I gape at him. “Sometimes, I find it hard to believe you’re real.”
In response, he reaches down to grab my hand and pull it up to rest flat on his chest, right over his beating heart. “Does this feel imaginary to you,dikarka?”
He waits for me to answer. He’s so good at that, at just standing in the middle of a moment without rushing it.
I’ve never met a man who could be still the way Matvei is still. Raymond can’t be still for two seconds together. Raymond is a foot tap, a phone check, a watch glance, a recurring throat clear.
Matvei is a cathedral.
Matvei is a mountain.
