Page 38 of Belong to Me
Oh God.
His mouth opened against hers, and she tasted coffee and something darker, and she pressed herself against his chest because she couldn’t not, because every cell in her body was screaming closer, closer, closer, and she could feel his heart hammering through his coat and his shirt and the six inches of muscle beneath, and it was the most honest thing she’d ever felt from him.
Then he pulled back.
Not gently. He stepped away from her like she’d burned him, and the absence of his hands on her face was so sudden and so cold that she gasped.
His breathing was ragged. His eyes were dark. And the want she’d seen two seconds ago was still there, but it was being walled off, brick by brick, right in front of her, and she could see him doing it and she wanted to scream.
“That,” he said, and his voice was wrecked, “shouldn’t have happened.”
Mia stood against the kitchen island with her lips still tingling and her fists still clenched around nothing and her heart hammering so hard she could hear it in her ears.
“But it did,” she whispered.
His jaw locked. He turned away from her. Picked up the bag he didn’t carry and the coat he hadn’t removed and walked down the hallway toward his bedroom, and the sound of his door closing was the loneliest sound she had ever heard.
Mia pressed her fingers to her mouth.
They were still shaking.
She could still feel him.
And if Alexei Almazov thought a closed door was going to stop her after a kiss like that, then the smartest man she’d ever met didn’t know her at all.
Chapter 3
MIA
She woke up to the sound of Biscuit snoring.
The guest room was enormous and white and smelled like laundry that cost more per load than her monthly coffee budget at Whitmore, and the bed was so absurdly luxurious she felt guilty sleeping in it, like she should be doing something more impressive with sheets this soft. But none of that mattered, because Biscuit had wedged himself between her and the headboard sometime around 3 AM, and a hundred-and-ten-pound Rottweiler generated enough body heat to make the Egyptian cotton irrelevant.
"Morning, baby," she murmured into his neck. He grunted without opening his eyes. Classic Biscuit.
She lay there for exactly four seconds before the previous night came back in full.
The kiss.
His hands on her face. Her fists in his coat. The sound he'd made, or was it her sound? She still wasn't sure. The taste of coffee and something darker and the pressure of his mouth and the six inches of muscle she'd felt through his shirt and...
Mia pressed her face into the pillow and made a sound that wasn't dignified.
He kissed me.
She rolled onto her back.
He kissed me and then he told me it shouldn't have happened and then he walked away and closed his bedroom door and I'm in his guest room and my dog is taking up seventy percent of this mattress and I kissed Alexei Almazov last night.
Biscuit opened one eye. Assessed her. Closed it again.
"You're right," she told him. "Panicking helps no one."
She sat up. The clock on the nightstand read 6:47 AM. Alexei would already be awake. Alexei was always awake before the sun, because sleeping in was a moral failing in his world, and she knew this because she'd lived in this penthouse for two years and had never once beaten him to the kitchen.
Which meant he was out there right now. On the other side of that door. Drinking coffee from the matte black mug he used every morning, standing at the counter because he never sat down for breakfast, reading something on his phone with his sleeves rolled to the forearm and his face set in that expression he wore like armor.
She needed to stop.
