He leaned in, a fraction too close.
I looked for a way to take up less space in myself. Found none.
Luka nodded toward the bar. “Drink?” It was intoned as a question. But it wasn’t.
I nodded.
He pressed his hand to the small of my back as we crossed the lobby, not guiding so much as laying claim. The heat of his palm lingered even after he dropped contact, like the aftertaste of a spirit that burned going down.
The bar was a long, lacquered vein of darkness, threaded with ambient jazz that made you feel more expensive just sitting in it. Luka steered me to a booth at the far end, leather seats sunk into the wall beneath a canopy of ferns. He let me in first, then boxed me in with his body and the sweep of his arm along the banquette. His posture was loose but ready. Every inch of me registered that he’d picked the seat with a view of every entrance and exit, and that I was now exactly where he wanted me.
“Vodka,” he told the server, not even glancing at the menu. “Freezer cold. Stolichnaya, if you have it.” His accent sharpened the words, made them linger.
I ordered a glass of Spanish red, letting my voice hover in the gap between us.
He watched the server leave, then tracked his gaze back to my knees, my waist, the scarf. “A skirt? Did you wear that just for me?”
I tried to appear unbothered, but my grip was locked on the table’s edge. “You do this a lot?”
He raised a brow. “Meet women in lobbies?”
“Make up stories to see if they stick.”
He considered that with what looked like genuine amusement. “Not often. But you seemed worth the experiment.”
The drinks arrived with the softest clink, though I’d barely registered the server’s approach. Luka threw back half his vodka in a single, efficient draw, shoulders rolling loose as he set the glass down. I nursed my wine, keeping the rim at my lips and my eyes on him.
He wasn’t looking at me. Not directly, anyway. His gaze slid from the mirrored shelves to the slow-rolling cluster of businessmen at the far end of the bar, to the couple in muted argument near the fire exit, to the empty table at our twelve o’clock. It was a choreography so smooth I’d have missed it if I wasn’t already looking for the wires behind the trick.
“Do you always do that?” I asked, letting the words drop casually.
He blinked. “What’s that?”
“Scan the room. Clock everyone. You’ve mapped this place twice over since we sat down.”
He smiled, not sheepish but pleased. “Force of habit.”
“Military?” I asked, before I could second-guess it.
A beat. He tapped the lip of his glass, eyes narrowing at the word. “All men serve a year in the army where I’m from.”
“And where’s that?”
He cradled his glass, tracing the rim with a calloused thumb. “You haven’t guessed?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
“Then you’ll be waiting a long time, princess.”
Luka drained the last of his vodka in a single swallow, throat working, then set the glass down with an unhurried, final click.He didn’t bother to ask—just signaled to the server with a tilt of his chin and a lifted finger, flicking the empty glass once for punctuation. “Two more vodkas.”
My mouth was already shaped around a protest, but I nodded instead, heat climbing my neck. He saw it and smiled—not friendly, but pointed.
The second round arrived quicker than the first. Luka took both glasses off the tray himself and placed one in front of me, his fingers brushing deliberately across my knuckles. He didn’t remove his hand until I looked up, meeting his gaze.
“Finish yours before I finish mine,” he said. Not a request.
I wrapped my hands around the glass, pulse racing ahead of whatever excuse I might have marshaled. I drank, and the vodka’s burn bloomed in my chest like a struck match.