He places his hand on the small of my back and guides me into the room, and his palm is warm against my bare skin because the navy dress has no back and his hand is on my spine and every nerve ending in my body recalibrates to the point of contact and I forget how to walk for half a step.
He introduces me to people.
That’s the part I wasn’t prepared for. Not the casino, not the marble, not the chandeliers or the rose petals or the diamond crest. The people. He walks me through the room with his hand on my back and he introduces me to men in suits who cost more than my education and women in dresses that cost more than my apartment, and every single one of them gives me the same expression: a smile, warm and knowing and faintly amused, that says they understand something I don’t.
A man with silver hair and a Swiss accent shakes my hand and holds it a beat too long and his eyes drop to the navy dress and back up and the knowing smile widens and he tells Anton something in French that makes Anton’s jaw tighten before the charm snaps back.
A woman in red touches my arm. “You’re the new one,” she tells me. “From the firm.” Her voice is kind. Her eyes are not. “He has good taste.”
I don’t understand. I smile and I shake hands and I stand beside Anton Almazov in his casino with his hand on my bare back and I’m introduced as his paralegal and everyone nods and no one believes it, and I can’t figure out why until a woman across the room catches my eye. She’s standing alone, holding champagne, her dress cut lower than mine. She gives me a look that is neither kind nor unkind. It’s the look of a woman who used to stand where I’m standing.
My stomach turns.
I excuse myself. I find the bathroom. I grip the marble counter and run cold water over my wrists and I stare at my reflection and I’m a girl from Idaho in a backless dress in a Bratva casino and everyone in the room thinks I’m something I’m not and the man who brought me here is the reason they think it.
I go back out.What else is there to do?
HE DANCES WITH ME.
Not in the main room. There’s a smaller space beyond the casino floor, a lounge with dim lighting and a band playing something slow and European that I don’t recognise, and Anton takes myhand and leads me to the floor and I follow because refusing would draw more attention than accepting, and because his hand is warm and sure around mine and my body is a traitor.
His right hand settles on my waist. My left hand finds his shoulder. We are close. Closer than the conference room, closer than the file room, closer than any distance we’ve maintained since the day he walked into Keyes and the air left my lungs. His chin is above my head. His cologne is cedar and smoke and the darker thing underneath that I’ve never been able to identify and that I suspect is just him, just the scent of Anton Almazov’s skin, and I am breathing it in and I can’t stop.
We don’t speak for a while. The band plays. His thumb traces a circle on my waist, absent, and the circle sends heat through the fabric and into my hip and down my leg and I close my eyes because if I keep them open I’ll have to see his face this close and I’m not strong enough for that.
“You’re tense,” he murmurs. His mouth is near my ear. I can feel the shape of the words against my temple.
“I don’t dance.”
“You’re dancing now.”
“I’m standing in proximity to a man who’s moving.”
His chest vibrates against mine. A laugh, barely there, swallowed before it forms. “Is that what this is?”
“That’s what I’m telling myself.”
His hand tightens on my waist. Not a grip. A gathering. He pulls me a centimetre closer and the centimetre is the entire distance between professional and something else, and I let him, and Ihate that I let him, and my hand on his shoulder curls into the fabric of his jacket and holds on.
“Daisy.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
Like it belongs to you.But I don’t say that. I can’t say that, because saying it would make it true and it isn’t true, itcan’tbe true, because this man propositioned me at a restaurant and every person in this room thinks I accepted.
The song ends. Another begins. We don’t stop.
THE BALCONY IS HISidea.
“You need air,” he tells me, and I do, I need air so badly that my lungs are making decisions my brain hasn’t approved, and he takes my hand and leads me through a door I didn’t notice and we’re outside.
Monaco at night from the balcony of Ace Royale is obscene. The harbour is a bowl of light, yachts strung with gold, the water black and still and reflecting everything twice so the city appears to go on forever, above and below, real and mirrored. The air is warm and salted and carries the faint bass thrum of the casino behind us, and we are alone, and his hand is still holding mine, and I haven’t pulled away.
