He had to get out of the room.
Instead, he looked at her neck.
Dimitri closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, just long enough to reset. When he opened them again, he sat down on the bed beside her, but he did not lean over to kiss her the way he usually would. Instead, he picked up the jar of salve she'd left on the nightstand and sniffed at it as if he had not made it himself, then set it down again.
"Did you use it?"
"Not yet. I'll do it later." She smiled suggestively at him. "Or you could do it for me."
He swallowed. "Of course, but first, I want to check on Petrov."
She blinked at him. "Why?"
"He's out of sorts because Dave is going to meet Anita tonight. I think he needs some company while the meeting is in progress. Maybe we can invite him for coffee downstairs?"
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Since when are you so considerate?"
He shrugged. "I just imagined how I would feel if it were you meeting with Dave while I had to stay here. I would be going nuts."
Mattie searched his face, but he kept his expression relaxed, and his mouth closed, and he was very aware of the two points behind his upper lip and the distance between his mouth and her neck.
Her expression softened. "All right. Let's have coffee with Petrov."
She stood up, lifted her leggings off the chair she'd left them on, and pulled them over her legs. "That's as dressed as I'm willing to be right now."
"You look adorable." He followed her out of the bedroom and into the hallway.
Petrov's room was the next door down, and Mattie knocked.
There was a sound of something heavy being set down, the creak of a bed frame, footsteps, a muttered curse, and then the door opened.
Petrov stood in the doorway, wearing a white undershirt that had not been white in some time. His belly pushed against thefabric, and a significant quantity of bushy dark hair with some gray in it curled over the neckline.
Looking more plastered than usual, he was holding a nearly empty bottle of vodka in his hand.
"Mattushka," he said, using a new nickname for Mattie. "What is this?"
She smiled at him. "We thought you might want to come down for coffee."
Petrov's eyes moved from her face to Dimitri's and stayed there for a moment. Petrov was not sober, but Petrov was sharper drunk than most men were when clean, and Dimitri had a feeling that his mentor suspected this was not about coffee.
"You knocked on my door to offer me coffee," Petrov said.
"I did."
"I would have preferred an invitation to the bar."
"Sorry, but neither of us can go there. Remember?"
"I do. It's tragic." He started to back into his room, but Mattie lifted a hand to stop him.
"Come on, Konstantin. Why would you want to stay in your room alone when you can have coffee with good company?"
Petrov considered this for a moment longer than the question warranted. Then he shrugged and stepped back into the room. For a moment, Dimitri was sure that the guy was going to close the door in their faces without even saying good night.
Instead, Petrov lifted the crumpled button-down off the back of the chair where he had thrown it earlier, the same one he'd been wearing all day under his lab coat, and shrugged it on.
"Company is acceptable," he said and proceeded to fastentwo buttons in the middle of his shirt, which left the bottom open over his belly and the top open over his chest hair, which Dimitri supposedwasa compromise they were all going to have to live with tonight.
