Page 130 of Nikolay

“I couldn’t find my phone this morning.”

His hands stilled only briefly. “It wasn’t in your room?”

“I looked everywhere. I meant to mention it at breakfast, but got sidetracked by biscuits.”

He laughed, the sound free and easy, and wandered to the counter that held his phone. “Let me text Moriah and get her to have the staff start searching.”

He grabbed his phone, and the screen lit up. Then he glanced up from the screen. “If it’s in the common areas, they’ll find it.”

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it despite myself.

“Of course.”

He set his phone aside and did not immediately reclaim the space behind me. That restraint should have eased something. Instead, it made me aware of the absence of his hands, which was its own sort of insult.

I finished the cocoa in slow swallows, buying time to put my face back together. The warmth remained, low and pervasive. Not enough to make me foolish. Just enough to make caution feel farther away than I preferred.

Sage picked up my jacket and held it for me.

I stood and slipped my arms into it, careful not to let my fingers brush his longer than necessary. He set the collar straight with absent competence, then stepped back.

“We should head in,” he said. “You’ve slept away more of the afternoon than you probably intended.”

“That obvious?”

“Only to me.”

I gave him a look. “That’s not as charming as you think it is.”

“It wasn’t meant to be charming.”

By the time we rode back to the house, the day had gone soft around the edges. The cold still bit, but the light had changed into that pale, slanting afternoon gold that made old stone look almost forgiving. I had just stepped through the front doors and into heat, noise, and the smell of sugar browning somewhere in the depths of the kitchen when a hand caught my arm and tugged me sideways before Sage could say a word.

“There you are,” Sloan said, as if she had been mildly inconvenienced by my temporary disappearance into the woods. “I’ve been waiting.”

I barely had time to laugh before she was steering me away with the bright, unstoppable force of somebody who considered resistance an abstract concept. I looked back once over my shoulder.

Sage had stopped just inside the hall. One of the house staff approached him with the sort of discreet efficiency rich people seemed to breed into the wallpaper, and he inclined his head toward me and Sloan in easy dismissal, as if he had no objection to being robbed of my company the second we returned.

That should have relieved me.

Instead, after the cabin and the cocoa and his hands on my shoulders and that strange, soft heaviness still living under my skin, his immediate composure felt less like generosity and more like another form of control. Not cling. Just that smooth confidence of a man certain he could have me back whenever he got ready.

Sloan kept hold of my sleeve and pulled me deeper into the house before I could stand there dissecting that like it might save me.

She tugged me down the east corridor.

“I’m stealing you,” she informed me.

“So I gathered.”

“You looked like you needed stealing.”

That made me look at her properly.

She was smiling, but not carelessly. There was an alert kindness in it, the kind some women had when they noticed more than they commented on. Not prying. Just ready. I thought about breakfast. Of the way everyone in this place had managed to make room without making a spectacle of me. It was a practiced social grace, and I could not decide whether that made it safer or more dangerous.

“I look that rough?” I asked.