She sat back, rested an elbow on the table, and took a long draw on her cigarette. “So vat do you vant to know?”
The fact I put any weight into what she told me should be alarming, but I’d never been able to let her words go. I wanted more than tepid caresses and French conjugations. I wanted more than Sperry loafers and soft hands. What I wanted was someone like this man, with Russian on his tongue and tattoos on his fingers.
He bit his cigar between his teeth and winked at me.
That wink settled into a tight ball of heat in my stomach as I headed back to his office and changed into a pair of shorts. The bowl of soup sat untouched on the side table while I curled up on the couch and pulled the new mysterious blanket over me. It wasn’t how I thought I would spend my first night in Moscow, and I shivered at the idea of how badly it could have gone . . .
If not for a nautical star necklace.
A restaurant.
And a man wearing black with secrets in his eyes.
The scent of cigar smoke woke me. It invaded my senses, mixing with the deep, masculine scent embedded in the walls forever.
I sat up on the couch and met Ronan’s gaze from behind his desk, self-consciously running my fingers through my long hair. I straightened it religiously, but every time I slept, those unruly curls came back with a vengeance. They were too wild, too rebellious to fit the cultured mold I forced myself into.
My skin tightened at the awareness of how short my high-waisted shorts were. I didn’t think I’d be sleeping in a man’s office when I packed my bag yesterday.
He rocked back in his leather chair, tossing a stress ball between his hands.
Toss.
Squeeze.
A small smile. “You’re a heavy sleeper.”
Nobody had to tell him it was inappropriate to watch someone sleep. He knew. That much was evident by the roguish flicker in his eyes.
Maybe not so much a gentleman at heart?
The deep sleep I fell into after the grumpy redhead woke me a little after four a.m. had dulled my short memory of him. His presence was larger than life; a shadow where a shadow shouldn’t be. He was still black from head to toe, no tie, but today his hair was slightly messy, as if he’d run those inked fingers through it, and judging by the twirl of smoke rising from an ashtray on his desk, he was smoking a cigar in what had to be the early morning.
I never had a problem with talking, with pushing words past my lips, but with this man’s full attention on me, I found anything I wanted to say caught in my throat. So, with a blush I deeply resented, I turned my head and said nothing at all.
He chuckled softly, reached for a phone on his desk with a cord, and dialed a number.
I groaned in my mind. He thought I was amusing. Meanwhile, the mere touch of his gaze on my skin warmed me like the heat of the sun. And his voice, lightly accented and holding an experienced edge . . . I could listen to it all day and never tire of it.
I got to my bare feet and folded his wrinkled jacket and the blanket neatly, which evoked a quirk of his lips mid-Russian sentence to whoever was on the other end of the line. His stare slipped over my skin as I padded across the room to view the photos hanging on the wall. One showed a few smirking and smoking men, but the focus was a teenage Ronan with a rifle in his hand and a dead deer at his feet.
I’d never seen a gun in my life.
And I didn’t want to.
Another black and white photo showed two kids, maybe twelve or thirteen, standing in the street. A smudge of dirt marred Ronan’s cheek, his arm loosely around the neck of the other kid, whose unsmiling face was turned away from the camera. But it didn’t hide a sliver of his eyes that were sharp enough to pierce through the picture.
They looked poor. Maybe even homeless.
My gaze slid to Ronan, from his suit to the black watch on his wrist. I always shopped for my papa since he had no care for it and no wife—or so I thought. He would only wear the finest of the finest, so I’d become an aficionado in expensive men’s clothing, and this man was wearing a Dormeuil Vanquish.
From rags to riches . . .
I wondered what he did. He was obviously more than the owner of this restaurant, which was far closer to a hole-in-the-wall than a five-star establishment. I found it surprising, though also endearing, he displayed his past for the world to see.
“Sit down and eat, kotyonok.”
I warmed at the nickname, even knowing he probably came by it because I reminded him of something cute he might pat on the head. I sat on the couch and dug into a bowl of kasha and fresh fruit.
Ronan was still talking on the phone, that cord wrapped around one hand, stress ball in the other, but the heat of his curious gaze warmed every inch of me. I set the half-eaten meal on the side table and received a disapproving look from him. If I’d gotten the look from my papa, I would have forced down every crumb, but I was testing out a sturdier resolve. And I simply didn’t want to finish it.
He hung up, shrouding the room in thick silence. I rubbed my hands on my bare thighs and searched for my voice, as it seemed to lose itself in his presence.
“You didn’t happen to find my coat, did you?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, rocking back in his chair like a newspaper editor lording over his domain. “You’re lucky we found your bag before it was stolen.”
That was a no.
I chewed my lip. “My phone was in the pocket.”
“Was it?” was all he said, not offering to let me use his.
I didn’t feel like being more of a nuisance, and I also wasn’t exactly thrilled at the thought of sharing what happened last night with Ivan, so I pushed the need aside. I’d buy a disposable phone and let him know I was okay later.
Ronan stared at me.
Toss.
Squeeze.
The man was always doing something with his hands, and it was distracting. I swallowed when silence filled the room once again. He seemed perfectly content to just sit in it, but it tunneled under my skin and made me itch to fill it.
I cleared my throat. “This place . . . it’s nice. Very warm and . . . inviting.”
It was far from inviting for a girl like me, and we both knew it.
His slow smile could devastate cities. “What about it makes you feel so comfortable? I shall have to rectify it as soon as possible.” He watched with some form of dark interest as another stupid flush rose to my cheeks. If there was a God, he would have surely taken pity on me and opened a hole in the floor to let me fall through. I felt like Duckie in Pretty in Pink, and we all know how that ended up.
“The music. My papa listens to the same music.”
“What a coincidence,” Ronan drawled. His voice was indifferent, but also laced with something that evoked a shiver beneath my skin.
“Maybe you’ve heard of him?” It was a long shot, but with nothing else to go on, I might as well try to find another breadcrumb. “Alexei Mikhailov?”
Squeeze.
“Can’t say I have.”
Disappointment filled me.
“What does your papa do?”
“He’s an investor.”
That was all I knew. Papa never talked about work around me.
“Huh.” After a moment of studying me, Ronan said, “And what brings an American cheerleader to Moscow, alone?”
I glanced at my bag with “CHEER” across the front. “I was a cheerleader in high school, not anymore.”