Page 7 of Belong to Me
DAISY
The coffee appears on Monday.
No note. No card. Just a paper cup from a place I’ve never heard of, sitting on my desk early, before the office filled, when the only people here are me and the cleaning crew. The cup is warm. The coffee is black with one sugar, which is how I take it, which is information I have given to exactly one person in Monaco and that person is Blythe and Blythe does not buy people coffee.
I drink it. It’s perfect.
On Tuesday, there’s another.
Same cup. Same place. Same black-one-sugar. I arrive even earlier this time and the cup is already there, which means whoever is leaving it got here before me, which means they are either very committed or very insane.
On Wednesday it rains.
Monaco rain is not Idaho rain. Idaho rain is honest. It falls, it soaks you, it stops. Monaco rain is theatrical. It arrives in a gust of salt air off the Mediterranean and turns the streets into something out of a film, all reflected lights and slick marble, and I’m halfway between my apartment and the office with no umbrella and a cardigan that is absorbing water like a bath towel when a black car pulls to the kerb beside me.
The rear window lowers two inches. A voice I would recognise in a hurricane.
“You walk to work.”
I keep walking. Rain in my eyes, rain down my collar, rain doing its absolute best to destroy the only professional blouse I own that doesn’t have a coffee stain.
The car keeps pace.
“I happened to notice,” Anton Almazov tells me through two inches of open window, “that you walk to work. In the rain. Without an umbrella. This seems like a solvable problem.”
“I like walking.”
“You’re soaked.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shivering.”
I am, in fact, shivering. My teeth are doing a thing. I clamp them together and walk faster, and the car matches me stride for stride, and somewhere behind the tinted glass I can hear him, not laughing, but doing that thing with his voice that is worse than laughing, the warm hum of a man who finds something entertaining and doesn’t feel the need to hide it.
“Miss Fletcher.”
I stop. The rain doesn’t. But everything else does, because he has never called me Miss Fletcher outside of a conference room and the sound of it on a rain-soaked Monaco street does something to my spine that I refuse to examine.
“Get in the car.”
“No.”
A pause. The rain fills it.
“Please.”
The please is what does it. Not because it’s polite but because it’s unexpected, and the unexpectedness cracks something in my resolve, and I open the rear door and slide onto leather that smells like his cologne and money and I’m close to Anton Almazov in a car that costs more than my parents’ house and I’m dripping on his upholstery and his mouth is doing the half-lift thing and I want to scream.
He doesn’t speak for a moment. He lets me drip. He lets the heater do its work. Then:
“Have dinner with me.”
My hands, which have been wringing water out of my cardigan onto his leather seats, go still.
“No.”
“Why?”
