Memories of his tongue on her tripped through her memories.
Careful to keep a safe distance from him, she fell a couple of paces behind him as he led her deeper into his office.
“Please, take a seat.” He slipped his hand from beneath hers and gestured to one of the chairs across his desk. “Anything you want to share, Ms. Carmichael?”
She swallowed the boulder-sized lump in her throat. Right straight to the point, she supposed. What point that was exactly still eluded her at the moment.
“About? You’re the one who ‘invited’ me here, remember?” She narrowed her eyes at his back as he turned from her to pace toward the wide expanse of windows overlooking the city. He probably missed her air quotes so she made sure to add more snark to her tone. “If you’ve called me up here to play a round of charades you’ll be sorry to find I suck at it, Mr. Volkov.”
His gaze darkened on hers. “Sevastyan. Let me hear you say it.” His voice grew husky and she felt the warmth of her core remember what he sounded like when he commanded she climax for him.
Panic wanted to take over. Out of instinct or her gut reaction to the intense darkness of his eyes, she wasn’t entirely sure. She worked to keep her reaction to him from entering her eyes or tense the muscles in her shoulders. Her brother once told her it was the first clue that tipped him off when making a business deal. She sat on the edge of the chair and opted not to cross her legs in the short skirt that pulled high on her thighs.
Sevastyan strode back to his desk, tossed a folder on the wide expanse of wood between them that caused a piece of paper to flutter.
Her eyes widened. Oh shit. Not paper. Cardboard, she corrected herself. Her gaze narrowed on a familiar matchbook with crinkled edges. Her matchbook. Ice replaced the blood in her veins. Air became heavier than a ton of lead in her lungs. He’d found it. Think Rhia. Could he ID it as hers?
“What’s this?” She passed over the matchbook and picked up the folder, forcing her nerves into submission. She slowly peeled back the front flap of the folder to find a picture of herself staring back. Only not the real her. It was the picture she’d taken in order to apply for her place here as hostess.
“It says here you hold a bachelor’s in political science and another in business. Pretty impressive for a cocktail waitress.”
She stared back at Sevastyan over the top of her fake résumé to see a flicker of challenge in his eyes.
Every word on that resume was a lie written in black and white. She knew accounting forward and backward. When other girls played with dolls and planned fake tea parties, she kicked back in the grass and ran numbers in her head, and solved equations longhand when she got bored. After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in accounting, she’d taken over as head accountant for Crowne shipping. Numbers were her life. Until now.
She was going to kill Adryan and his overzealous attention to the finer details of her name change. His affection for dotting every ‘I’ and crossing every ‘T’ would end with her in more trouble than she’d placed herself in.She’d wanted to stop at high school education and some college, nothing that would set off alarms.
She lifted a shoulder in a shrug and tracked his return to the window. Night had fallen long ago, and light from the surrounding building poured through the windows.
“I was visiting a friend for the summer and decided to earn a little money to help pay off the student loans. They have a way of warping one’s progress in life.” She sighed heavily. “Apparently in today’s society, a degree or two doesn’t mean promised success no matter who you know.”
He stood peering down at her, hands thrust into his pockets. A common sight she’d learned. “And do you know many people, Ms. Carmichael?”
She shrugged the warning bells that went off in her head. Too late to do anything about them anyway. “Much to my disadvantage I do not know many of the right people.” Another truth.
She held his gaze as he shifted his large body toward her, his hands in his pockets, shoulders pinned back.
Her thoughts were in a tangle. She sifted through them quickly and pulled up a universal truth he couldn’t hold against her. “Student loans have a way of making a girl do things she never thought about.” His scent, strong, masculine and pure alpha, twined around her thoughts for a moment, blocking out all but one. Something in him pulled her to him. If that wasn’t enough to send her over the edge of sanity, then the second most prominent thought would.
She wanted the feel of his tongue on her body again.
She cleared her throat and curled her fingers around the folder with a little too much force, but she didn’t care. Focused on the words, she read and reread the first lines on the paper, determined not to let her undeniable and misplaced arousal to the man take the reins.
“You’re right. Money is synonymous with control. Here, out there. Doesn’t matter where or for what.” His voice was a smooth, deep rumble. He spoke as if stating a truth everyone understood and accepted. He wasn’t wrong.
She turned until their gazes connected and held her hands out, palms up. “You’re proof of that.”
Unlike her brothers, when Sevastyan talked—or listened—she couldn’t decipher his mood or the amount of danger he posed. So, she had to go on what she could measure. Fine lines crinkled the skin around his eyes, and faint shadows clung to the skin beneath his eyes.
“This place exists on both. Money and control.” She cast her eyes to the ceiling and chuckled. “It’s the utmost evil commodity this world operates in, only matched by that of sex and its value, wouldn’t you agree?” She measured his reaction. The way his eyes glittered with controlled yet piqued interest in her words. The firm line of his lips and the way his hands stayed relaxed in his pockets. Strike a nerve, did she?
The amount of money that flowed through here had to be in the hundreds of thousands—millions even. Illegal money at that, she would bet her life it was what filled his bank account and paid for those fancy suits he wore and the caviar that no doubt lined their pantries in their million-dollar penthouses. What would he do if someone threatened that profit margin? Murder?
“Sex and money afford the wealthy power over the weak. That you have to agree with, I’d say.”
He looked into her eyes for several long moments, the stark light and shadows of the evening cutting across his face.
He said nothing in his defense, no explanation of his thoughts. Instead, he grunted and it made her hand itch to reach out and knock a few more syllables out of him. The fact his expression was a mask of indifference didn’t help.