Page 220 of Mile High Ruin

Then I sit down beside the bed with her phone in my hand and begin looking.

36

SLOANE

I wake with heat already pooled low in my body and no idea what dragged me out of sleep. For several confused seconds, I lie still beneath the blanket, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling while my mind slowly catches up with where I am.

My body has apparently decided that months of fear, anger, loneliness and pregnancy have combined into one deeply inconvenient problem, because I’m suddenly so painfully aware of my own skin that even the sheet brushing over my legs feels like too much.

I close my eyes. This is ridiculous.

I’ve spent months without him. I can survive another morning.

Then I open my eyes again and realize Vadim is sitting in the chair beside the window. He has taken off his coat, his shirtsleeves are rolled to his forearms, and there’s something unfair about how composed he looks when I have apparently woken up prepared to make terrible decisions.

His attention shifts from whatever he has been reading on his phone. “You’re awake.”

I swallow. “Yes.”

His gaze moves over my face. “You slept six hours.”

That surprises me enough to briefly distract me. “Six?”

“You needed it.”

I push myself upright, and his eyes follow the movement with an intensity that makes the warmth under my skin spread immediately.

I know that look.

Worse, he knows I recognize it.

“You’ve been sitting there the whole time?” I ask.

“Mostly.”

“That’s creepy.”

“I have been called worse.”

“I know.”

His mouth shifts faintly.

The silence afterward should be awkward, but it isn’t. It becomes something else instead. I become aware that my hair is loose around my shoulders, that I’m wearing only the soft dress I had beneath my coat, that Vadim’s eyes keep returning to my mouth even though he’s pretending they don’t.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I say.

“Like what?”

“You know exactly like what.”

He puts his phone down.

That’s somehow worse.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You don’t have to.”