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I step into the shower with my trousers still on.
She stares. “You’re insane.”
I kiss her again, and the argument leaves both of us.
“Yes,” I murmur. “Apparently, when it comes to you.”
She tries to warn me we don’t have time. She tries to remind me where we are.
I put her thigh over my shoulder, and she forgets the rest.
She tastes warm and clean and already wanting. I hold her hips while I lick her, slow at first, then harder when her fingers twist in my hair and her body begins to shake. She presses one hand to the tile and the other over her mouth, trying so hard to be quiet that it makes me want to ruin her.
“Nikolai,” she whispers, and the word breaks in the middle.
I look up.
Her head is tipped back, water running down her face, lips parted around the sound she won’t let out.
I could live a long time on that sight.
She comes against my mouth, her hand clamped over her lips, her whole body trembling. I have to hold her up afterward. She glares down at me as if this is somehow my fault.
When I stand, she shoves at my chest weakly. “You are out of your mind.”
“Yes.”
“You say that like it’s charming.”
“It seems to be working.”
“It’s not.”
I kiss her, letting her taste herself on my mouth. She stops arguing.
After that, the days lose their edges.
We stay careful where it matters. Anya sees nothing. Days blur together, becoming weeks. Elara sits across from me and talks about handwriting practice, vegetables, whether eight-year-olds can negotiate bedtime as a constitutional right. I answer like a civilized man. I drink my coffee. I keep my hands to myself.
Mostly. Then she passes behind my chair, and her fingers brush my shoulder where no one can see.
That’s all it takes.
Later, in the upstairs sitting room, she comes to get a book Anya left behind. I am already there. She stops in the doorway when she sees me.
“No,” she says, but it is too soft.
I close the book in my hand. “No?”
“We’re not doing this again.”
“You came to me.”
“I came for a book.”
“Which book?”
She looks at the shelves. I wait.
