"I slept poorly," I amend.
"Why?"
Because you were fifty feet from my bed and I wanted you in it. Because you told me you've been watching me for six years and I can't stop thinking about what that means. Because you saidchildrenand something inside me cracked open.
"New situation," I say. "I don't adapt quickly to change."
The corner of her mouth curves as Greta slides a plate of scrambled eggs and toast towards her. She smiles her thanks and plucks up her fork. She eats all of it with the focused attention I noticed last night.
"I have meetings today," I say. "If you need clothes, personal items, anything, tell the concierge and it will be arranged."
"I need my things from my apartment."
"Give me the address. I'll send someone," I offer.
"I'd rather go myself."
I consider this. The impulse to say no is immediate and strong. I don't want her out of this house. I don't want her in a cab crossing the city back to whatever remnant of her old life still exists. I want her here, where I can see her, where I know she is safe and present and mine.
But she isn’t mine yet. Not fully. And controlling her movements will destroy whatever this is before it begins.
"Take one of my drivers," I say. "And one of the security team."
"Is that necessary?"
"My name is attached to you now. There are people who would use that against me."
She absorbs this. I watch her process the information, watch the intelligence work behind her eyes as she calculates risk and accepts it.
"All right," she says. "Your driver. Your security."
I nod. She finishes her coffee and sets the mug down. Her hand brushes mine as she reaches for the fruit plate. The contact lasts less than a second. My hand catches hers before I've made a conscious decision to move, and her fingers still in my grip.
We stay like that. Her hand in mine, across the counter, with the remains of breakfast between us. Her pulse is quick against my thumb. She doesn't pull away.
"Rovin," she says, and hearing my name in her voice is something I will never recover from. "You should go to your meetings."
I release her hand. "Tonight. We'll talk tonight."
"What about?"
"The timeline."
"The timeline is yours," she says. “I’m ready when you are.”
I pick up my jacket from the back of the chair while I consider her words. I have acquired assets worth hundreds of millions. I have negotiated with killers and politicians and intelligence operatives. I have never, in my entire professional life, felt this close to losing control.
She is in my kitchen telling me she is ready to be my wife, and I am already thinking about what she will look like carrying my child.
Claudia
Three days pass, and I learn Rovin's rhythms the way you learn the tides. He wakes before dawn. He drinks black coffee and stands at the windows and watches the world assemble itself. He leaves for meetings that he doesn't describe and returns with a tension in his shoulders that dissipates, slowly, over the course of the evening.
He touches me casually now. A hand at the small of my back as I pass through a doorway. Fingers brushing my wrist when he hands me a glass. Once, standing behind me while I looked out the window, he gathered my hair and moved it to one side of my neck, exposing the other. He didn't say anything. He just touched the bare skin with his thumb, one slow stroke from my ear to my collarbone, and walked away.
Each touch is a sentence in a language I'm learning to speak. Each one says:I’m patient, and I’m not patient, and the distance between those two things is getting smaller.
On the third evening, he comes home late. I'm reading on the sofa, another article brandishing me as some kind of villain, and I hear the doors open and his footsteps in the hallway. They're different tonight. Heavier. He carries tension the way some men carry weapons, concealed but affecting everything around it.
