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"Come on, man," I told him sharply. "You know we can’t let anything happen."
"I know that," he fired back. "But it’s not that easy. You’ve seen her. You know how she is-"
"I don’t know how she’s been acting with you," I pointed out. "Has she said something to you? Made a move, or something?"
He shook his head.
"I don’t think so," he replied. "It’s hard to tell, with her. It’s like... it’s like she doesn’t even know what she wants."
"Yeah, so it’s up to us to make sure we do," I pointed out. "And make sure we don’t fuck this up by getting involved with her. You know what Maxim would do to us if he found out that we were even having this conversation?”
He winced. He knew the answer to that as well as I did, even if he didn’t want to admit it. Maxim Antonov wasn’t exactly known for taking well to people messing with his family, and his daughter. Yeah, it would have been more than anyone could be expected to handle.
"You’ve got my back on this, don’t you?" I asked him. I needed him to say yes. I needed him to tell me that he wasn’t going to fuck this up for us, no matter how tempted he might have been. Because, right now, it felt as though I was relying on him, trusting him not to make a mess of things. If he made a move, if he did something we couldn’t take back, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to hold off myself. Even the thought of him touching her brought a flare of jealousy up in my mind, and it hadn’t even happened.
Yet. It hadn’t happened yet.
"Look, man, she’s just toying with us," he protested. "It doesn’t even matter. Nothing’s going to happen. She’ll get bored of us soon enough, and then-"
"And what if she doesn’t?" I demanded. I was well aware that I was asking myself as much as I was asking him – I was pleading with him to tell me what I needed to hear, that it was crazy for either of us to think about her like that, that we would have landed in more trouble than either of us would ever have been able to handle if we weren’t careful. And yet...and yet, despite all of that, despite knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, how messy things would have gotten if I had let myself get drawn into her, I still wanted her. Still couldn’t stop thinking about the way she had flirted with me in the car, the way her eyes gleamed with playfulness in the dark. The way she had looked at me, like she wanted me, like she needed me.
And the knowledge that I needed her right back.
"We’re here to look out for her," he pointed out. "And if she wants something more, that’s on her. I’m not going to deny it if it happens."
I rolled my eyes skyward. This was the last fucking thing I needed. The one person I needed to be able to trust, above all else, looking me in the eye and telling me that he didn’t know if I should even think about it.
"Yes, you are," I growled at him. "You have to. We can’t lose this job. It’ll ruin our reputation-"
"Have you seen her?" he shot back. "You really think anyone in the world would blame us for going after that?"
I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and then opened them, landing my gaze on Solomon once more. I dropped my voice low, making sure she wasn’t going to wake up to the sound of us having this discussion about her.
"You need to forget that you ever even thought about her that way," I told him. "And focus on your job. You hear me?"
He stared back at me. I could see defiance in his eyes like he was daring me to fight him on this.
"It’s time to start your shift," he told me, and he pushed past me and towards his room. The question hung unresolved between us, and I knew, at that moment, it was going to be a serious problem.
I groaned and leaned against the door. Maybe taking this job hadn’t been a good idea in the first place. Maybe I should have turned it down before we’d had a chance to move into this apartment.
Because, right now, I was having a hard time believing that either of us was going to be able to control ourselves. And I didn’t want to find out what was going to happen if we fucked up.
Chapter Nine – Solomon
Turning on the tap, I poured myself a glass of ice-cold water and gulped it down quickly. The cold burned in my throat, the shock of it waking me up, and I let out a sigh.
It had been a long night. A long one. The longest since I had arrived here to start doing this job in the first place, in fact – the first time I had really felt like I was struggling to keep my eyes open, and keep my head in the game.
I was on shift tonight, and Alex was asleep in the room across from me – though I doubted he would have been up for much in the way of conversation even if he had been awake, not after what had happened earlier in the week when he had confronted me about my attraction to Olya.
Shit, all I had done was tell him the truth, right? There was no point trying to deny, the way I felt about her. Better to be honest than play it all uptight like him. That was the problem with Alex sometimes, he got so into his own head, so stuck by the rigid rules he laid out for himself, he had a hard time accepting that sometimes, things didn’t go exactly as you had planned them.
But me? I knew there was no point denying the tension that was hanging in the air in this place. It had been there since we had arrived, but I had just read it as nothing more than her irritation that she had a couple of people watching over her at all times. Now, though? Now, I was starting to see that there was a whole lot more to it, a whole lot more behind the way she treated us. She was clearly enjoying toying with the two of us, making the two of us want her, and knowing there wasn’t a damn thing we could do to indulge it without landing ourselves in some serious trouble.
She knew the effect she had on men, and there was something I found really fucking sexy about that. Seeing the way she carried herself like she was well aware of how much we stared, had my head going in a hundred different directions at once. There was so much I wanted to do to her, so much I wanted her to beg me to do to her...
Fuck. I had to get back to work. I knew Alex would freak out if he woke up to find that I was hanging out in the kitchen instead of keeping watch over the apartment, even though he knew as well as I did that there was no actual threat of danger hanging over our heads right now. Nobody was coming to this place to try and cause trouble, and that was making it harder than ever to keep my mind on the job and not on, well...
