Page 49 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

Delaney is standing at the back, both arms wrapped tight around a stack of files. She straightens when she sees me, and the papers press flat against her chest.

She shifts her weight, wary of me, and the movement rides her hem up her thigh, baring a stretch of skin that all but asks to be touched.

The doors slide shut and seal the two of us into a box barely wider than my arms. The air goes thick, and my throat itches, and every foot of distance between us feels like a decision I’m making badly. I should look at the numbers climbing on the panel. I look at her instead.

“I thought you left,” I say. “Why are you still in the building?”

“It is working hours.” Her voice is cool. “An assistant in an elevator, Mr. Volkov, is hardly a mystery.”

“I didn’t give you anything that requires running the whole building in the middle of a workday.”

“No,” she says, and her chin lifts. “Your mind seems fairly full of the woman upstairs. I didn’t want to interrupt the two of you.”

“You have no idea what is happening upstairs,” I say.

“You are right.” Her voice doesn’t shake, and that is somehow worse than tears would be. “I have no idea about anything up there, because you made very sure of that. You threw me out of my own desk so she could cry on you in private.”

The barb slides in clean beneath my ribs. I move toward her, one step, and stop close. “Watch how you speak to your boss,” I say, low.

“Or what?” she says. “You’ll fire me? You already threatened that once today. I’m beginning to think it’s the only card you know how to play.”

Her chest rises and falls fast, and from here I can see straight down the neckline into her cleavage, though her own eyes never once leave my face. She doesn’t drop them. She doesn’t shrink back an inch. Any other person in this building would already be apologizing, would be finding the wall with their spine and the floor with their gaze. She stands her ground in a steel box with a man everyone else is afraid of and looks at me as though I’m the one who should be ashamed. And the maddening thing is that some part of me agrees with her.

“Then go upstairs and comfort your fragile ex,” she says, tilting her chin higher at me. “Don’t let me keep you from her.”

Something aches in my chest that I cannot name and don’t want to. My gaze drops to her mouth, full and flushed and soft, and it keeps throwing knives at me.

I want to close the last step and kiss her hard enough to shove every sharp word back down her throat.

Fuck, I want it so badly that my hand is already lifting toward her jaw.

15

LEV

I close the last step and take her by the throat, and I kiss her hard enough to swallow whatever cruel thing was coming next.

The taunt dies against my mouth. Whatever sharp thing she was about to say goes down my throat instead, and I feel her breath stutter against my lips. I press her back into the elevator wall and slide my palm down the curve of her waist, and for one heartbeat she goes rigid, both hands flat on my chest as if to shove me off.

Then her fury pours straight into the kiss instead of out of it. She fists my shirt, drags me closer, and bites down on my lower lip until it stings. It’s not a soft kiss and neither of us pretends it is. It’s days of silence and cold looks and slammed doors finally catching fire in a steel box.

I want more than this. I want to shove her skirt up to her hips and watch every clever thought fall straight out of her head. I remember exactly how she was on those nights, calling me every name she knew while she clung to me and begged with her body for the opposite.

The box is narrow. There are no witnesses in here, no floor she can escape to. She would be trapped against me with nowhere left to run.

But I make myself step back. I leave a foot of air between us and keep the rest of it in my head where it belongs.

She says nothing. Her chin stays tilted up, stubborn, and every feeling she has is written across her face while she pretends none of this reached her.

Fuck, I think about how swollen her mouth would be right now if I had not stopped when I did.

The nights come back at me anyway, whether I invite them or not. Her hair tangled across my pillow. Her skin burning under my hands. Her voice gone soft and wrecked around my name, the same name she now files away behind Mr. Volkov as though we are strangers who share a hallway. I did that. I sent her cold and I sent her running, and I told myself it was necessary, and I’ve not slept a full night since.

My whole body draws tight. I look away from her and pull my tie loose to let some air into a space that suddenly has none.

I’m not some green boy who cannot govern himself. I’ve not forgotten why I put distance between us, or what it cost me the last time I let a woman get this far under my skin. I fix my eyes on the floor display and wait for the doors to open.

The number doesn’t change. Not after ten seconds, not after a minute, not even after two. There’s no motion under my feet, no chime, nothing at all but the low hum of the vent overhead. I have ridden this elevator a hundred times. It doesn’t stop between floors. It doesn’t hesitate. Something’s wrong with it, and the certainty of that settles in my gut long before the panel confirms it.