“Still this easy for me,” he murmurs against my skin.
I hate him for being right. I also hate that I answer by pulling him closer.
He kisses me again, deeper now, one hand sliding up my back until it tangles in my hair. The other moves over my waist, my hip, my side, not groping, not fumbling, just reacquaintinghimself with a body he has no right to know this well after four years.
My body doesn’t seem to care about rights. It melts.
I can feel his erection against my thigh through his trousers, and the knowledge sends a pulse of heat straight through me. He feels me react and groans once, low in his throat, then bites my lower lip hard enough to make me gasp.
“Roman,” I say again, but now it sounds like begging.
He leans his forehead against mine.
For a second, both of us are breathing too hard in the dim little corridor while the orchestra keeps playing beyond the doors and our children are still in the ballroom with my family.
That thought cuts through the haze first for him.
I see the moment it happens.
His hand leaves my hair. His mouth brushes mine one last time, not soft exactly, but slower.
Then he steps back.
The loss of him is immediate and unfair.
I swallow. “Roman?—”
He cuts across me with one more sentence, even quieter. “I should have remembered you only stay long enough to ruin things.”
He turns and starts toward the ballroom.
Something panicked rises in me.
“I know who you really are,” I say.
He stops.
My heart is pounding so hard I feel sick. “That’s the reason I ran.”
For one second, I think he might turn back.
He doesn’t.
He says nothing at all.
Then he opens the door and walks back into the light.
16
ROMAN
I hearmy own words again the moment I step back into the ballroom, and for once they do not satisfy me.
Katerina’s voice follows them anyway.
I know who you really are.
I keep walking because stopping would have been worse. Stopping would have meant giving her the reaction she earned and I don’t want to give that in public. But by the time the doors close behind me, my heart is hitting far too hard against my ribs for a man whose face is meant to show nothing.