I already knew I was going to go upstairs with it and find the packing note, and put it on – just to see what it looked like on. What it would have been like to wear. If it hadn’t come from someone I despised.
As I picked the box up again, a handwritten note fluttered to the floor and I picked it up.
For tonight, Sugar.
Shit.
My whole body flushed hot, stuck on the memory of Maxim’s eyes and his large hands and his clever, clever mouth. The way he’d loomed over me in the ring the first time we’d met and how he’d swept me off my feet outside the school gates. Had I been right? He had to be talking about the sugar packet I’d sent back across the road.
Holy hell, I really was flirting with a guy who was stalking me from the building next door, a guy who had at least one gun on him that he could shoot well enough to break a single pane of glass like it wasn’t a bullet at all. A guy who knew my movements well enough to turn up where I was half a city away.
Shit.
If I accepted this, what did that mean?
I didn’t care.
The only thing I was thinking was whether I had the right bloody shoes to match the dress. I wanted to get closer to Maxim Toropov than staring at him from across the street, and maybe he’d come close if he saw me in this. Why else would he have sent it?
He didn’t seem crazy. He was respectful in the ring. He could have grabbed me. Could have tried to make a snatch, or even tried to hurt me. But there was something very controlled about him that I recognised from all the men a the gym, a concise, military way of moving.
He was here because of Pierce’s stupid book.
He could be a Russian spy, a hitman, looking to take my stepfather out for daring to expose all those oligarchs. Maybe Mrs Koskova had sent him to get back at Pierce for being so horrible to her little dog. No way did Sutherland have some kind of protection detail that he’d arranged, watching the house just in case. He was too arrogant to think he could be touched.
Maxim didn’t have James Bond vibes anyway. He was more rugged than that, like he’d do anything it took to get the job done. And I didn’t think he cared whether he was on the right side of the law. It seemed to me he was used to getting what he wanted. I didn’t know what I was going to do if that was me.
Maybe we could work together. I wanted the same thing he did – Pierce Sutherland dead and buried.
My head was spinning with a thousand different questions. The faster the evening ahead came, the better. One way or another, I was going to get some answers before the night was over.
*****
I sat on the bottom step of the staircase, listening to Pierce outline all the rules for the evening.
“You will stand up straight. And you will smile and make polite conversation. And when they ask you you will tell them how lucky you are to have me as your stepfather.”
My gaze set off into the distance, I was doing a pretty good job of filtering him out. By now I knew from the pattern of rise and fall in his voice when it was time to interject with a nod. “I understand.”
“You better you hear me? I want none of your cheek. No clever little comments. You will not ruin this for me you nasty little whore.”
I clenched my teeth, feeling my jaw tense and my cheeks flush at his accusation. It was nothing new, but it always stung more than it should have. He didn’t even care how wrong he was, and for that I was grateful. I couldn’t be a whore and a virgin at the same time. And I’d rather that than him ever think to touch me.
No one wanted the tomboy who never grew up. The spiky girl who was all angles and sharp barbs. There was a running joke at school that I didn’t have a boyfriend because the last boy who tried it with me got nothing but a mouthful of teeth in his dick.
It shouldn’t have mattered to me. I didn’t want to trail through awkward fumbling eighteen year olds who needed an ego boost so they could become real men. Sucking off some teenage boy who was too horny to remember he was supposed to at least try to get me off too didn’t sound like fun. I hadn’t met anyone who’d changed my mind on that.
Call me stupid, but I wanted my first time to mean something. To be with someone who cared about me. Who maybe even might think that we could be together forever rather than just one night. And that was not going to happen with any of the trumped up idiots I came into contact with.