Everything is quiet luxury. Pale stone floors warmed by thick rugs. Tall windows stretching almost from floor to ceiling. Dark wood shelves built into one wall, lined with books, old photographs, and objects that look too expensive to touch. A low cream sofa faces a black marble fireplace, already lit, the flames moving behind glass. Beyond the windows, Moscow spreads beneath a flat winter sky, cold and silver and endless.
I step inside slowly.
Roman watches me look around.
“You live here?” I ask before I can stop myself.
“When I’m in Moscow.”
“Of course,” I murmur. “Because why would a man like you have only one terrifyingly beautiful home?”
His mouth curves. “Terrifyingly beautiful?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I prefer hearing you say it.”
I glance at him, but immediately regret it because his expression has gone warm with amusement, and apparently I’m weak to that now.
A woman in a black dress appears silently from somewhere beyond the living room, takes my overnight bag from one of the men, and disappears again. No one asks me anything. No one seems surprised to see me. Either Roman brings strange women home from airports often, or everyone in his life has been trained not to react.
I do not like either possibility.
“This way,” he says.
I follow him down a wide hallway. There are more windows, more quiet art, more closed doors. At the end, he opens one and steps aside.
The bedroom waiting inside is larger than my bedroom at home.
A guest room, I assume, though it looks nothing like one. The bed is enormous and dressed in white linen, with a soft gray throw folded across the foot. There’s a seating area near the window, a writing desk, a vase of fresh white flowers, and a bathroom visible through an open door, all marble and glass and silver fixtures. Someone has already placed my bag on a luggage stand.
My bag looks poor and nervous in the middle of all that elegance.
“This is yours,” Roman says.
I turn to him too quickly. “Mine?”
“For as long as you need it.”
“Oh.” The sound comes out smaller than I intend.
I don’t know what I expected. That’s a lie. I know exactly what I expected, and the knowledge makes heat climb up my throat. After the plane, after the bathroom, after the way I fell asleep beside him like a woman who had not just done something reckless enough to alter the course of her life, some part of me thought he would take me to his room.
Maybe I wanted him to. Maybe I dreaded wanting him to.
Roman studies my face, and I hate him a little for being so good at it. “You look disappointed,” he says.
“I look tired.”
“You look disappointed and tired.”
“I’m not disappointed.”
“Of course not.”
I tighten his jacket around myself. “Do you always assign emotions to women you barely know?”
“Only when they’re obvious.”
