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Have I imagined that crinkling at his eyes? The slight twitch of his lips?
Shaking his head, he chides me in that deep rasp that drags over my skin and makes my nipples pebble. “Testing me, Aria? You haven’t learned any lessons at all yet, have you?”
“What? Me?” I ask, holding his gaze, the picture of innocence. “You told me to lose the robe.”
“Fair enough. Lose the slippers as well.”
With a belabored sigh, I step out of the fluffy slippers.
He crooks a finger at me.
When I’m close enough for him to touch me, he reaches for me and draws me onto his lap. He’s still wearing boxers, but nothing else, so when I sit on his lap there’s only a whisper of fabric between us. His large, rough hands slide across the small of my back and lace behind it.
“Why are you up?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I’m starving. Why areyouup?”
“I don’t really sleep. Haven’t for years. Did I wake you?”
I shake my head. It’s almost sweet that he cares. “No, not at all. That was beautiful. Feinberg?”
His eyes widen and his brows rise. “You know Feinberg?”
“I do. I studied composers for a prereq in college.”
“You studied composers years ago in college and yet immediately identified an obscure Russian composer,” he concludes, disbelieving.
“I didn’t just identify the composer. That was Piano Sonata number twelve…Opus forty-eight, no?”
He blinks.
I shrug. “I’m not just good at coding. I have an excellent memory, which is partly what makes me so damn good at coding and hacking. I have perfect recall.”
“Really,” he says, a statement, not a question. He’s thinking this over.
“I told you I had skills you could use, and I wasn’t exaggerating,” I say with a not-so-modest shrug. It’s nice to actually be admired for something for once. “How doyouknow Feinberg?”
Holding my gaze, he seems to be mulling things over. With every question I ask about him, I’m delving deeper into his background — who he is, and how he became this person. Revealing personal details makes him vulnerable, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Mikhail Romanov is hardly someone who allows himself to become vulnerable very easily.
“When I was enlisted, I was under the command of an officer who was obsessed with Feinberg. Whenever we had the chance, he played the music over and over again. I became obsessed, too. It was my lullaby and my comfort. There’s something about Feinberg’s music that makes me…I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Feel emotion?” I whisper. Could it be that he understands this?
He stares at me for a long minute before he finally nods. “Yeah. You could say that.”
I swallow. “Me, too.”
He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “Do you play?”
I don’t answer at first. Do I play? Well, yes, I do, but not well. I always wanted to, but my parents couldn’t afford classes.
“Why the hesitation, little hacker?” he asks softly, then holds my chin and brings my gaze back to his when I look away.
“Hesitation?”
A corner of his lips quirks up and he mutters something unintelligible in Russian.
“That isn’t really fair that you just randomly speak a language I don’t.”
