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“Let go of me,” she says. “You cannot stop an employee from quitting, you thug.”
“Your resignation is not approved,” I answer drily. “Not by me, and I’m the one who signs the paper.”
“I don’t need your approval for anything.” She shoves me, both palms flat against my chest, and the force of it rocks me back onto my heels and throws her off balance so that she sways and stumbles into me instead.
Her body crashes into mine, flush and yielding, and my breathing goes to pieces. She feels it happen, the bulge pressing into her stomach. I watch her feel it, watch her nipples peak beneath her blouse, and she starts to struggle harder against me.
I loosen my grip, but I don’t let her go. I want nothing more than to take her in my arms and keep her here without hurting her, and in my hands the two things keep blurring into one, and I hate that I can no longer tell them apart.
“Calm down,” I say.
“Ugh, don’t tell me to calm down.” Her voice is shaking, and her hands are shaking against my chest, and I can feel her holding herself together by sheer will. “You don’t get to wreck me and then tell me to be calm about it.” “Do you want me to keep planning your wedding? Or should I just wait around for whatever that bitch Yelena decides to do to me next?”
“There is no wedding,” I clarify. “There never was one.”
Her struggling stops all at once, and she goes rigid in my arms, like I have knocked the air out of her. “What did you just say to me?”
“I didn’t agree to it.” The words come out, and something in my chest loosens as they leave. “There is no wedding, Delaney.”
Something flickers behind her eyes, almost coalesces into recognition, and is gone before I can read it.
Then she pulls her walls back up, brick by brick. “You will say yes eventually,” she says. “You always do whatever suits you in the end. And whatever the two of us did in the throes of passion, it has nothing to do with me anymore. I quit.”
“Stop talking, please,” I say quietly.
“And why is that? Because you don’t like hearing it said out loud?” Her fingers twist into my shirt, holding on even as she fights me, and my desire for her throbs through me. “You used me whenever it was convenient for you, and then you turned around and walked away like I was nothing at all. I let you closer than I have ever let anyone, and you still handed me back the second she snapped her fingers.”
“I’m not playing a game with you,” I say.
“Then what the fuck am I to you?” she demands, and her voice cracks straight down the middle. “Tell me the truth. What am I to you, Lev?”
I freeze. I run through every word I have for her, and not one of them fits in my mouth. She is an employee, my brother’s ex, a woman who first clung to my high-thread-count sheets one drunken night when we were both angry at the world. None of those explains why I cannot breathe when she walks toward that door, or why I moved a whole company to put her desk beside mine, or why I have lain awake every night since she left my desk, or why her cold voice does more damage to me than a knife ever has.
My hesitation lasts a heartbeat too long, and I watch the last of the light go out of her eyes. I’m a man soaked in blood. I have brought grown men who betrayed me to their knees with nothing but a look. I cannot answer one plain question from this exhausted, ravishing woman.
She shoves me off her, and this time I let her go, though everything in me wants to hunt her. She pulls the door open and steps through it without a shred of hesitation.
“You cannot leave,” I blurt, and it’s not a command this time, it’s far closer to a plea. My arm hooks around her waist before I have decided to move. I drag her back over the threshold, jerk her closer, kick the door shut behind her, and turn her around to face me.
Only when she’s back inside my arms, my forehead pressed to hers, does my heartbeat drop out of my throat. She looks up at me with a tired, wrecked disappointment that is worse than any anger she could throw.
“Let go of me,” she says. “There’s nothing left between us.”
My stomach clenches. Don’t use that voice with me, I beg her without a word. Don’t talk to me as though I’m already gone. I will never let you go.
Whatever is left of my reason snaps clean in half. I take her by the back of the neck and kiss her deeply.
20
DELANEY
His palm burns against the back of my neck as he kisses me brutally, and there’s no room left to escape it. Cedar and tobacco press down over me, thick and dark, and for one second I freeze against his mouth, the air going out of me. Then a spark of defiance gets my hands up, and I shove at his chest.
He doesn’t move an inch. His barrel chest is a wall under my palms, and I remember what those arms can do, how he pinned Maksim without effort and lifted me off my feet like I weighed nothing at all. Pushing him is like trying to move a building with my bare hands.
He’s the one who has lost his mind. Minutes ago he was tearing into me across that desk, cold, critical, intimidating, blaming me for a wedding I never asked to plan. Now he’s kissing me as though the room is on fire and my mouth is the only water left in it. The juxtaposition is dizzying. I cannot keep up with which version of him I’m supposed to brace for.
None of this makes any sense, and the gears are turning in my head too fast to catch. My leaving is exactly what he wanted. I would clear the whole board for him and Yelena and their grand reunion. And still, relentlessly, he will not let me go.
