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There was only an inch between them, and she felt the magnetic pull of his body.
Undeniable. Inevitable.
She took a deep breath, set aside her anger in the name of resolving this… whatever it was. “I’m… I’m sorry I left the way I did, Lyon. I was… overcome with grief and guilt.” She blinked hard. She would not allow tears. Not in front of this man, this cold, distant version of the man she’d loved. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
He stepped away from her like he thought he might be burned, and for a moment, she thought she might have gotten through to him. But when she searched his face for a trace of the man she’d come to know — the man she’d come to love — she saw nothing.
“Those details are irrelevant to the matter at hand,” he said.
“Irrelevant?” She could hardly believe he’d used such a word to describe the heartbreak of her father’s death, the agony of writing the letter to Lyon, of leaving him while he slept.
“You were correct in your letter.” His voice was crisp. “Ours was a business arrangement. Nothing more. It’s best if we both remember that from now on.”
From now on…
He wasn’t going to kill her after all.
Which meant… what?
“What does that mean?” she asked. “Will our business arrangement be conducted from this room while Alek brings me food on a tray?”
“Of course not. This was merely an interlude. Call it a debriefing period.”
“A debriefing period? We haven’t even spoken until today,” she said.
“There was no need for us to speak,” he said. “I think I’ve made my point.”
He turned and started for the door. She felt the sudden absence of him like a cold wind blowing through the hollows in her body.
She waited for him to shut the door behind him and was surprised when he left the door open as he stepped into the hall.
She hesitated, looking around as if for permission, as if for reassurance, from some invisible source. It only took a few seconds to correct herself. She was Kira Baranov.
Kira Antonov. Still.
Whatever lay on the other side of that door, on the other side of the canyon between her and Lyon, she would meet it.
She crossed the room and stepped through the door.
8
Lyon forced himself to breathe as he left the room. He’d thought he was prepared for the altercation with Kira, had thought all the hours he’d spent watching her on the video feed had numbed him to her.
He’d been wrong. So dangerously wrong.
It had taken every ounce of discipline in his body not to pull her into his arms. Crush her mouth under his. Tear the clothes from her body and drive into her, the only reminder she would need that he still owned her.
But that would have been cowardly. Weak. It would have proven she still had power over him.
He made his way down the hall without checking to make sure she would follow and continued down the stairs. Where else would she go?
Rurik was waiting in the foyer. Lyon stood next to him, listening as Kira’s footsteps sounded in the upstairs hall, hesitating at the top of the stairs. A minute later, she appeared on the staircase.
“What is this place?” she asked, her appreciative gaze sweeping the triple-height foyer, the antique crystal chandelier, cloudy and covered with cobwebs, hovering from a carved medallion in the ceiling.
He’d known Kira would love the house when he’d bought it, had imagined the moment when he would unveil it to her a hundred times. He’d imagined her delighted smile, her arms around his neck when she realized it was hers, a far more appropriate home than the penthouse, which he’d come to see as cold and sterile, especially after she’d left.
But those were things she could never know.
