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"Don’t worry," I chuckled. "I don’t blame you. I made the exact same mistake."
"The exact same one?”
"Well, the other way around," I admitted. "I went down on her. Last week. We ran into each other in the middle of the night and it just...went from there."
"And you didn’t say anything to me?"
"After the rant, you gave me about keeping it in my pants?" I fired back. "No. No, I didn’t."
Both of us fell silent for a moment. Now we’d come out and said it, something had shifted. Something had changed. We couldn’t just pretend this was work anymore, that we would be done with this and out of here in no time. No, there was something a lot more serious now – and I didn’t know exactly where that left us.
"We need to stop," he muttered, finally.
"Do we?" I replied. I had secretly been hoping that, when he had to admit he had feelings for her too, we could just let whatever happened, happen. I didn’t care if she wanted him too, that didn’t bother me – Alex and I had shared everything for the last year, and a woman wasn’t that much of a stretch compared to everything else.
"Of course we do," he replied firmly. "Shit, if any of this gets back to her father, you know how he’ll handle it?”
I winced. He had a point. Much as I wanted to pretend that this place, this apartment, existed somewhere outside the power and control of Maxim Antonov, I was kidding myself. I knew how he would react if he knew that the men he had hired to take care of his daughter had been...well, taking care of her in ways they really shouldn’t have been.
"But what if this is what she wants?" I asked him. "Do we really get to make that call for her?"
His jaw tightened. I could see how hard it was for him to navigate these feelings, this mess inside of him. He wanted to give in to it, give in to the way that she made him feel, but at the same time, he knew it was dangerous. Knew it would have been putting our hard-earned reputations on the line.
"We have to think about what the right call is for us," he pointed out. "That’s what we need to worry about."
I grimaced. I knew he was right. But, shit, I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t want to have to give up on the chance that something else might happen between Olya and I, not when our first encounter had been so hot. Could I make it the rest of the year here without letting myself get drawn in to something more? Could I live here, be around her all the time, without letting my mind wander to a place it really shouldn’t have been going?
"I know," I muttered, taking another long sip of my coffee. I needed something stronger, really, something to get my mind off of her, but I knew it wasn’t going to work that way. As long as I was living here, she was going to be on my mind. There was just no other way to handle it...
"She said something to me," Alex remarked suddenly, shifting the subject. "When it...happened."
"Oh, yeah?" I prompted him. I was curious to know what it had been like for him to have her like that – not that I was jealous, but I was drawn to the idea of knowing more about the kind of lover she was. If I wasn’t going to get the chance to experience it myself, then I was going to have to live vicariously through Alex, right?
"That she’d never done that before," he continued. "She’d never..."
"Really?" I replied, frowning. It was hard for me to believe that someone like her would never have had the chance to do that if she wanted to, and I couldn’t imagine she would have gone out of her way to save it. She didn’t seem like the type who held back from any experience, who denied herself anything if she wanted it.
"Yeah," he replied, shaking his head. "Did she say that to you, too?"
"No, but I didn’t ask," I admitted. I hadn’t thought to. But now that he’d put that out there, I couldn’t help but wonder – had I been the first guy to do that to her?
"Do you think she might be a...?" I asked, trailing off, letting the question hang in the air between us. And, before Alex could reply, a voice came from behind us to fill in the gaps.
"What, a virgin?”
Alex and I both jumped at the sound of Olya’s voice, our heads snapping around to face her – and there she was, arms wrapped around herself, in the same nightdress she’d been wearing when we’d run into each other a few nights ago.
"Olya," Alex blurted out. "How long have you been...?"
"Long enough," she replied, her eyes darting between us. "I...I think we need to talk."
Alex and I exchanged a look. What the hell was this about? I had no idea what she wanted to say to us, but honestly, right now, maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe what mattered was hearing her out – and figuring out just what the hell she had planned for us.
And just how innocent she really was.
Chapter Fourteen – Olya
Seeing them standing before me like that, discussing what had happened between us as though it was the most normal thing in the world, it had confirmed the decision I had already all but settled on.
