Page 39 of Belong to Me
She needed to stop, and she needed a plan.
Option one: walk out there, pretend last night didn't happen, be breezy and casual and adult about the whole thing.
Option two: walk out there, bring it up immediately, force him to deal with it.
Option three: stay in this room forever and let Biscuit bring her snacks.
Mia threw the covers off, jolted Biscuit into a grumble, and went to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth twice. She washed her face. She rehearsed three different opening lines in the mirror, all of which were terrible, and then she put on the sundress from yesterday because her suitcase was still in the hallway and there was no way she was walking past his bedroom door in a towel.
Actually.
No. Bad Mia. Focus.
She opened the guest room door. Biscuit heaved himself off the bed and followed her, his nails clicking on the marble like a very large, very loyal shadow.
The hallway was long and sun-soaked and silent. His bedroom door was closed. She walked past it without stopping, which she considered a personal victory, and turned the corner into the kitchen.
He was already there.
Not at the counter. At the dining table, which she'd never seen him use for breakfast, dressed in a charcoal suit with no tie, reading something on a tablet. His coffee sat untouched. His posture was the posture of a man who had been awake for hours and had used every one of those hours to rebuild every wall she'd cracked last night.
His eyes never lifted when she entered.
Mia's heart did something painful and complicated. Because the refusal to acknowledge her was deliberate. Alexei noticed everything. He'd once caught her sneaking a stray cat into the penthouse from across the living room with his back turned, because he'd heard the difference in her footstep when shewas carrying something. The idea that he didn't hear her now, didn't register her bare feet on the marble, didn't feel the charge between them, the same electric hum it always carried when they shared a room.
He was pretending.
And the pretending was worse than the closed door. Because the closed door at least acknowledged that something had happened. This silence meant nothing happened. Nothing has changed. You are still my ward and I am still your guardian and this morning is like every other morning.
Fine. He wanted to erase last night. She'd make that impossible.
"Morning." She kept her voice light.
"Good morning."
Two words. Eyes still on the tablet. Voice perfectly level.
She went to the coffee machine. Biscuit padded after her and collapsed in his usual spot by the kitchen island, the one he'd claimed two years ago and apparently still considered his, and the solid thump of his body hitting the floor was the loudest sound in the room.
"He remembers his spot." She glanced at Biscuit. "That's sweet."
Nothing.
"I bet you didn't even move his bowl."
He swiped the tablet screen. "I had no reason to."
Four words. Progress.
She poured her coffee. Added too much milk, the same drowning ratio she'd used since she was sixteen, the same one that had made him shake his head once over his laptop and tell her, without glancing up: That isn't coffee anymore, Mia, that's a warm glass of milk that saw coffee from across the room. She'd laughed so hard she'd spilled it on his desk, and he'd sighed, and she'd mopped it up with her sleeve, and his mouth had twitched, and she'd spent the next three hours replaying that twitch in her head.
She brought her mug to the dining table and sat down across from him.
His eyes lifted. Finally.
And there it was. The crack behind the composure. She'd been chasing that fracture since she was sixteen, that half-second where the mask slipped and the man underneath the control was visible, and he wasn't calm, and he wasn't indifferent, and the air between them wasn't the same air.
He killed it. He was Alexei Almazov, and killing feelings was his second language.
