When I was still ten feet away, and with him still staring out to sea, he suddenly snapped, “What are you doing out here?”
I caught my breath and stopped where I was. “I just came to talk.”
He shook his head, still not turning around. “Go to bed.”
I took a tentative step towards him. “Luka—”
“Got to bed!” he roared.
I stood stock still in the middle of the freezing deck. He was pushing me away, closing me out. Just as he’d shut out Elena and Natalia and Svetlana, I realized.
I’d thought the same as his guards: that he was a callous womanizer, using them and dumping them. What he’d actually done was break up with them before they could get too close.
This is perfect, a little voice inside me thought. I know about the crates, now. I have the batch numbers. I’ll find out more at the meeting, tomorrow. He’ll dump me when we get back to Moscow, I report to Adam and I can go home. Everything will go back to normal.
All I had to do was turn around and walk back to the stateroom. Mission accomplished.
I stood there for long seconds. And then I said, “No.”
He turned to face me. “What?”
“No.”
He stared at me, his eyes narrowed in anger. I could see the years of rage that had been building up inside him, slowly poisoning him. “Arianna,” he grated. “Go to bed.”
“No.” I walked over to him before he could stop me. He had time for a single angry yell before I threw my arms around him and pressed my face to his chest.
This is it, I thought. If I’m wrong about him, this is where he smashes my head against the rail and throws my body over.
I could feel his chest moving in big, powerful heaves as he fought with his anger. I squeezed him, willing him to pour some of the anger into me, to let me soothe him.
After long seconds, his breathing slowed. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Trying to calm you down,” I said into his chest.
He took a long, strangled breath. “Why?!”
I gently moved back so that I could look up into those big, beautiful, pain-filled eyes. “Because I like you,” I told him. And the knowledge that it was true was like a bomb going off in my chest.
“You know what I am, now,” he said. “I told you at the party that I’m a monster. Now you know what sort.”
I took a deep breath. “You told me the truth for a reason,” I said slowly.
He broke away from me and twisted, staring out to sea. Those massive shoulders were like a wall between us, but I kept talking. “You could have left me in Moscow and I’d never have known. You wanted to tell me what you were.”
His shoulders set even tighter, even harder. He gripped the rail so hard his knuckles went white.
“At dinner...you said I was your spaseniye,” I said. “What does that mean?”
I knew damn well what it meant, but I couldn’t tell him that. And part of me needed to hear him say it.
He shook his head. “I was being weak.”
I pressed close to him and slid my arms around his waist from behind. I could feel the tension in his body again. I molded myself to him, my breasts crushed against his back. “Tell me.”
He let out a long sigh. “Salvation,” he said. “It means salvation.”
I didn’t say anything; I just stood there holding him. When he spoke, his voice was bitter. “When I saw you in New York, so innocent…” He let out a long sigh, his big hands squeezing and releasing the rail. “I am not good with words like you.”
I just waited and let him speak.
“I thought...I thought that maybe you could save me,” he said. And then he snarled and kicked a folding chair someone had left on the deck. It flew thirty feet and splashed into the ocean.
“Maybe I can,” I said softly.
He shook his head and it reminded me of a bull, about to charge. “Eblan!” he cursed savagely. “Eblan Mudak!” Dumbass bastard, he was calling himself. “Stupid!” he snarled in English.
“No,” I said. “Brave, to say what you feel!” His anger scared me, but I stepped closer. “I like you, Luka.”
“Even now you know?” he muttered.
I stepped right up close to him. “Even now I know.”
He gradually calmed and became still. I leaned forward and we touched foreheads. He had to lean down to me to do it, hulking over me like a monster.
“You should not get involved with me,” he said at last. “This is not wise, Arianna.”
“I know,” I whispered. “But I don’t think I can be apart from you.”
He cursed in Russian and then said, “I hurt many people.”
The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. “Would you hurt me?” I asked.
“No.” And he said it with such stony certainty that I believed it. “But I might get you hurt.”
Cold fear welled up inside me, ice water that merged with the ice that was already there. He wasn’t a bad boy as in he might cheat on me or break my heart. He lived in a whole different world to me, one where people who got in the way just disappeared and loved ones were nothing more than leverage.
I felt sick. Another reason he’d always kept his relationships short-term. Being with him would be dangerous as hell, even if I wasn’t secretly spying on him.
The smart thing to do would be to walk away.
Yet I was getting closer and closer to him and the most worrying thing wasn’t that I was doing it, it was that it felt so right. Every time he touched me, every time he kissed me, it felt as if the ice inside me cracked just a little. It was a slender thread, a stupid, childish wish that I could be fixed. But it was one that I didn’t want to give up on.
“I’m not scared,” I said.
A tiny smile touched his lips. “You said that before. And you still are.”
I still was. But I wanted him anyway. I tilted my face up and reached for him, pulling him down to me. We kissed and it was soft and slow, his size only making his gentleness more shocking. A slow-motion bomb went off in my chest. In the warm glow that followed, it felt as if each of us was drawing life from the other. I was filling in the missing parts in him, and he in me.
We’d taken a step. He was opening up to me in a way he hadn’t with any of his other girlfriends. This wasn’t a fling, anymore.
His hand came down to brush my cheek and suddenly he recoiled. “You’re freezing!” he said. He shook his head at his own stupidity. “You’re out here in a dress!”
I’d been so focused on helping him, I hadn’t noticed the cold creeping in. I realized my arms and legs were growing numb. As soon as I thought about it, I gave a violent shiver.
“We need to get you inside and warmed up,” he told me.
“We—” I shivered again. Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. “We need to t—talk about this.”
He shook his head. “Later.” And he scooped me up in his arms, cradled me to his chest and carried me below deck.
***
The stateroom had an attached bathroom and there was a huge corner bath. Luka started it running and then undressed me. I was shivering too much to do anything but stand there as he peeled my clothes off. It was very different to how he’d ripped and yanked at things before, in order to fuck me. This was like watching a giant undress a china doll.
When I was naked, he lifted me and slid me gently into the tub. I gasped as the water covered me, numb skin prickling painfully. But it worked—I could feel the cold receding and I stopped shivering.
We sat there looking at each other and the weirdness of the scene, of him sitting there watching me naked in the bath, made both of us smile.
I glanced down at myself—at my hair, bedraggled and damp from the sex and the sea air and now the bath; at my imperfect body; at all the broken parts he couldn’t see, the nightmares and the fears and the insecurities. What the hell does he see in me? I wondered. And yet I’d glimpsed that need in him and now he’d admitted it. This wasn’t just about sex, anymore. This was definitely turning into something deeper. Maybe, in time—
I suddenly caught myself. I’d completely forgotten who I was and why I was there. The moment we’d had out on the deck had let me get lost in a cozy little fantasy where I was a genuine girlfriend, and not doing all this in order to stab him in the back.
Luka frowned, concerned. “Are you okay? You look worried.”
It felt as if my heart was being wrenched out. The one guy I’d connected with, the one guy who’d made me feel alive again, and I was going to have to betray him.
“Fine,” I said with a smile. “I’m fine.”