Chapter Four

Alexander Pov

I had only been back in the country for a few hours.

The international trips had stacked one on top of another until the days blurred into airports, conference rooms, and the same carefully measured conversations with men who held the power to keep my company alive or let it drown. Fifty million dollars. That was the number that had followed me across time zones. Fifty million borrowed under terms that would crush most men, secured with signatures that still felt like they had been written in blood. I needed the capital to keep the company standing. One more quarter of weakness and the whole structure would start to crack in public. No one knew how close it already was. Not the board. Not the investors. And certainly not Victoria.

Victoria.

I had married her almost a year ago during one of her business trips. It had been practical. She wanted security and the kind of life my name could still buy on the surface. I needed the appearance of stability, the social connections, the quiet proof that everything was under control while I fought to keep the debt from becoming a scandal. We had spent less time in the same city than most strangers. Calls. Transfers. The occasional carefully worded message. That had been enough. Until now.

I was finally home, or at least in the same state. The flight had landed late. Too late to drive across the city, too late to walk into the apartment I had paid for and face the wife I barely knew and the stepdaughter I had never met. Tomorrow would be soon enough. Tonight I only needed a bed and a few hours of silence.

The hotel had been a last-minute decision. A suite on a high floor, quiet, anonymous. I had taken the key without looking at the number and gone straight up. The connecting door to the next room had been locked from my side when I arrived. I had checked it out of habit and then forgotten it existed.

I left my jacket on the chair, stripped off the rest of the travel-creased clothes, and stepped into the shower. Hot water. Steam. The simple animal relief of washing the hours of recycled airplane air off my skin. I stood under the spray longer than necessary, letting the heat work the stiffness out of my shoulders, already calculating the morning. Meet Victoria. Meet the girl. Keep the smile in place. Keep the debt buried another day.

I turned off the water and reached for a towel.

That was when I heard it.

The soft click of a door opening in the next room. Then footsteps. Light. Unsteady. A bag dropped somewhere near the entrance. I froze, water still running down my chest.

“Who is that?”

No answer.

I wrapped the white towel around my waist in one sharp motion, knotting it hard, and crossed the bathroom floor. The connecting door that should have been locked was no longer fully closed. Someone had opened it from the other side. I pushed it the rest of the way and stepped through.

A woman was lying on the bed.

She had not heard me, or she was too far gone to care. One arm was thrown above her head. Her face was turned toward the opposite wall. The lamp on the nightstand threw a soft gold light across the mattress and the bare length of her legs.

Skinny laps. That was the thought that landed first, stupid and immediate. Her legs were long, slim, shiny under the light as if she had just moisturized or as if the heat of the room itself had kissed the skin. The kind of legs that made a man forget the hour, the city, the fifty million dollars sitting on his shoulders like a second skeleton. It had been a long time since I had looked at a woman and felt anything that clean and sharp. Longer still since something as simple as the shape of a calf and the soft hollow behind a knee had pulled the air out of my lungs.

I stood there longer than I should have.

She shifted in her sleep, or half-sleep, and the movement made the fabric of her clothes ride higher on her thigh. The bruise on her cheekbone caught the light next. Darkening. Fresh. Someone had put hands on her. The knowledge settled in my chest with a cold, familiar weight. I did not like it. I did not like the sudden urge to find out who and make certain they never did it again.

I should have spoken louder. I should have stepped back into my own room and called the front desk. Instead I stayed where I was, towel low on my hips, water still cooling on my skin, and watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing.

She was young. Not a child, but young enough that the difference between us would have been obvious in daylight. Dark hair spilled across the pillow. The curve of her mouth looked soft even in rest. Everything about her was the opposite of the hard, calculated world I had just flown home to. And for one dangerous second I let myself want it.

I had come back to this city for two reasons only: to keep the company from collapsing under the weight of that fifty million, and to finally look Victoria and her daughter in the eye after a year of absence. I had not come back to stand in a hotel suite staring at a stranger’s legs and feeling my blood move in a direction it had no business moving.

Yet here I was.

She made a small sound in her throat, something between a sigh and a protest, and shifted again. The towel around my waist felt suddenly too thin. I exhaled through my nose, slow, controlled, the same way I did when a negotiation started to slip. Control was the only thing that had kept the debt from becoming public. Control was the only thing that had kept the marriage to Victoria from becoming anything more complicated than a signature and a monthly transfer. I had no room left for anything that lived outside that control.

But my body had not received the message.

I took one step closer to the bed before I could stop myself. The light slid over the shiny skin of her thighs again. My hands flexed at my sides. I could still leave. I could still close the connecting door, lock it, and pretend I had never seen her. Tomorrow I would drive to the apartment, meet my wife, meet the stepdaughter whose name I had only read on paper, and continue the careful performance that kept everything standing.

Tonight, though, there was only this quiet room and the woman asleep on a bed that was supposed to be empty.

I was already getting hard.