Beautiful. Desirable. And for the first time in the history of everything between them, no longer forbidden.
She was his. He was hers. There was no guardian clause. No age on a document. No bedroom door between them. No distance he had manufactured to protect himself from the thing he wantedmost. She was his wife, asleep in his lap, in a car driving home from his father’s memorial, and the combination of grief and love and the ordinary miracle of her weight against his legs did something to the inside of his chest that rearranged what he thought he knew about peace.
He needed her.
Not later. Not at home. Not in the deliberate, patient manner he’d learned to need things, the Alexei method, filing desire under strategy and scheduling it for an appropriate moment. He needed her now, in this car, with the coast blurring past and an hour of road left and his father’s name still warm under his palm.
He lowered his mouth to hers.
Mia woke to the feel of her husband’s mouth against hers, and she was already in his lap, knees on either side of his thighs, and the transition from sleep to this was so fast her brain couldn’t catch up to what her body already knew.
His hands were on her hips. His mouth was on hers. And the warmth between them had gone from zero to everything in a single pulse.
She gasped against his mouth and started to turn, needing to check the partition, but his hand cupped the back of her neck and brought her gaze to his.
“Focus only on us, Mia.”
His body moved against hers. Hers followed. And then there was nothing else, just his hands and her hands and how they found each other, his grip tightening on her hips every time she said his name, and the sound he made against her throat, low andrough and wrecked, and her name in his mouth, and the falling, together, as they always fell, as they always would.
WHEN THEY PULLED INTOthe penthouse garage, Mia spent four minutes in the car mirror trying to make herself look like a woman who hadn’t just done what she’d just done in the back seat of an armored vehicle.
It wasn’t working.
Her hair was a catastrophe. Her mascara, already compromised by the memorial service, had now achieved full disaster status. Her dress was wrinkled in places that dresses didn’t wrinkle from sitting, and there was a mark on her neck that she was going to have to address with concealer and possibly a turtleneck and possibly a new identity.
“Stop fussing,” Alexei told her. His voice was calm. His suit was perfect. His tie was straight. He had somehow emerged from the same encounter as though he’d spent the drive reading the Financial Times, and the injustice of this was staggering.
“You don’t have a hickey the size of Monaco on your neck.”
“It’s not the size of Monaco.”
“It’s visible from space, Alexei.”
His mouth twitched. The left-eye micro-twitch, the one she’d been cataloguing since she was sixteen, except now it came faster and lasted longer and sometimes, in private, it became an actual smile. Progress.
“They won’t notice,” he told her.
They noticed.
The penthouse was already full. The brothers and their wives had got there first, because Alexei’s car had taken the scenic route for reasons that Mia was never, ever going to explain, and when she walked through the door with her hair finger-combed and her collar pulled up and what she hoped was a casual expression on her face, the room went still.
Not the wives. The wives were fine. Ciana glanced at her and returned to her wine with the diplomatic composure of a woman who had spent years pretending not to notice things on airplanes. Star caught her eye and blushed and smiled and went back to fussing over Aria in Daisy’s arms. Daisy didn’t even glance up, because Daisy Fletcher Almazov had learned early in her marriage that the best response to anything an Almazov brother did was to not respond at all.
The brothers were a different story.
Anton was first. His eyes traveled from Mia’s face to her neck to her wrinkled dress to Alexei’s suspiciously immaculate suit, and a sequence of emotions crossed his features that could best be described as horror, amusement, and the dawning realization that some things couldn’t be unknown.
“I think I need therapy.” Anton’s voice was hollow.
Andrei was by the window, a glass of water in his scarred hand, and his expression had taken on the particular grimness of a man who had once changed Mia’s tire when she was seventeen and was now confronting information he hadn’t asked for. A stain darkened his cheekbones, his scar standing out more prominently against the flush.
“I think I need an eternity,” Andrei’s voice was grim, “to get past what just happened to our little Mia.”
Artem, from the far corner, hands in his pockets, dark eyes missing nothing: “I think I need to leave the room.”
Mia could feel the heat in her face reaching temperatures that were probably medically concerning. “Guuuuuys...”
But Alexei, who had walked in behind her with the unhurried confidence of a man who had built an empire and married the woman he loved and buried his father and was done, permanently done, apologizing for any of it, simply shrugged.
