Page 91 of Dark King Daddy

Daniil looked at me. At my mouth, swollen from his. At my hands in his coat. At my hair tangled in his fingers.

“Obviously,” he said.

He released me. Slowly. His hand slid from my hair. His arm loosened from my waist. The cold rushed into the space where his body had been.

I turned back toward the railing. I gripped the metal. My hands were shaking. I pressed them harder against the cold steel and waited for the shaking to stop.

It did not stop.

Daniil stood beside me. He did not touch me. He did not speak. He put his hands back in his pockets and looked at the black sea and gave me the silence I needed.

We walked back to the house. Two blocks. The security detail materialized behind us. Ilya said nothing. The second man said nothing.

At the door, Daniil unlocked it and held it open.

I walked through. I climbed the stairs. I entered my suite. I locked the door.

I leaned against it.

My mouth still felt his. My neck still felt his hand. My waist still felt his arm. The ghost of his body against mine was so vivid that I could not separate the memory from the sensation.

I pressed my fingers to my lips.

They were tender.

I closed my eyes and stood in the dark and did not pretend that nothing had changed.

Chapter 7

Daniil

Ihad slept all of forty minutes. If that.

The heavy bag hung from a chain bolted into the concrete ceiling of the basement gym at Dover Street. It was a Title Maize leather bag, hundred pounds, and I had been hitting it since five-twelve. My wraps were dark with sweat. My knuckles ached through the padding. I drove my right fist into the bag, turned my hip, drove the left.

The sound she made when I pulled her hair.

Right fist. Left hook. The bag swung on its chain and I caught it with my forearm and drove a knee into the center.

Her mouth opening under mine. Her fingers in my coat. The heat of her body against my chest through two layers of wool and silk and whatever the green dress was made of.

I hit the bag until my shoulders burned and my breath came ragged through my teeth and the forty minutes of sleep felt like an insult rather than a deficit. The basement smelled of leather and concrete dust and the particular mineral tang of a man’s own sweat in an enclosed space. A single fluorescent tube buzzed overhead. The floor mat was rolled against the wall. I had not used it.

Every time I stopped moving, the kiss came back. The softness of her lower lip. The sound—low, involuntary, pulled from somewhere she had not intended to share. The way her hands had fisted in my coat and pulled me closer instead of pushing me away.

I drove my elbow into the bag. Twice. Three times. The chain rattled.

Footsteps on the basement stairs. Heavy. Deliberate. Arkady’s particular tread—flat-soled shoes, no urgency, each step announcing itself.

He appeared at the bottom of the stairwell wearing a black jacket over a grey henley. He carried a tablet in one hand and a coffee in the other. He looked at me. He looked at the bag. He looked at my wraps.

“Did the bag insult your wife?” he asked.

“I slept badly.”

“You slept badly and came down here to beat the shit out of a hundred pounds of leather. The bag must have insulted your wife.”

“Arkady.”