“HEY, BE CAREFUL WITH THAT! It’s an antique!”
After gouging a small hole in the wall while bringing an armchair into my new apartment, two of Ace’s men dropped it none-too-gently on the hardwood floor. They then dusted off their hands, like a good deed done, and stepped out to create more damage from the lobby to here.
The apartment was cool and modern, with a beautiful view of the Manhattan cityscape. There seemed to be nothing wrong with it—I’d even gone so far as to check for leaky faucets—and that made me even more suspicious. Ace rarely concerned himself with my affairs. The club incident must have annoyed him enough there was some punishment involved with this place. I was just waiting to find out what it was.
I wore a pair of faded overalls, and a red bandana kept my hair back from my face as I sat on the floor amidst an overwhelming number of boxes. There’d been no rhyme or reason to what I’d unpacked so far, and the place was beginning to look like a hoarder’s wet dream.
I scratched a nonexistent itch on my cheek and decided to give up and instead bake something for my two new neighbors.
After running to the store to fill my fridge, I spent the next hour in the kitchen, putting a whole lot of neighborly love into some tiramisu.
The sun was just skimming the tops of the skyscrapers when I stepped out of my apartment and knocked on the door at the end of the hall.
My first neighbor was an older lady wearing a Hawaiian-themed muumuu. She squinted at my smile, as if it was so bright it hurt her eyes. Her gaze drifted to the plate in my hand.
“Cake?”
“No, tira—”
“It’s been ages since I’ve had a piece of cake.”
She grabbed the plate from my hand and shut the door in my face.
Well. Not exactly the welcome I’d been looking for, but it could have been worse. Though, everyone knows, when you look on the sunny side of things it begins to rain.
The only other neighbor on this floor lived right across the hall from me. I knocked, smiled brightly, and as the door opened, it slipped off my face like the ice cream on a little kid’s cone.
The dirty fed’s narrowed gaze fell from mine to the plate I cradled with two hands.
Well played, Ace, well played.
Was Allister supposed to be my babysitter until he returned to Seattle? It seemed I was everyone’s joke, but I wasn’t going to let this sour my mood. I was almost a single woman, after all.
I lifted the plate, finding my smile again. “Cake?”
He looked at the dessert, then drew his icy gaze back up to mine. “Are you high?”
I pursed my lips. “Unfortunately, no.”
His eyes swept the hall over my head, as if he thought I might have brought a mariachi band or something as equally ridiculous along. It was then I realized he didn’t know I was his neighbor. Interesting.
His voice was full of impatience. “Why are you here, Gianna?”
I frowned. “Are you saying that, after everything we’ve shared together, I can’t bring you some dessert?”
He ran a hand down his tie, his gaze coasting to the two other apartments in the hall. I could hear the wheels turning in that clever brain of his.
“And here I was,” I muttered, “telling everyone who’d listen that you and I are an item.”
His eyes settled on my door. He ran his tongue across his teeth in thought.
“I’ve already made it Facebook official. I won’t change it back, Christian. The amount of jealousy coming in has brought me closer to world domination than I’ve ever been.”
I knew the moment he figured it out—the mat in front of the door, saying, “Welcome, Bitches”—might have given it away. And it was oh so painfully clear he was not happy about being my neighbor. In fact, it looked like he’d sucked on something sour.
“Don’t tell me you lounge around in a tie, Officer. Goodness, I don’t even wear pants.”
The sudden anger radiating from him gave me the strong urge to back away slowly until I was in the safety of my apartment. I was beginning to think this joke wasn’t all for my benefit.
He let out a sardonic breath as he processed this. Ran his hand across his jaw. Settled his fiery gaze on me. “Are you knocking on my door just to harass me, or do you want something?”
“I want a decent welcoming for one. The muumuu next door was seriously lacking.”
“I’m not eating your cake.”
Frustration rose in me. Didn’t anyone have respect for dessert around here?
“It’s not cake, dammit!”
His stare was drier than the Sahara. “You said it was cake.”
“Yeah, well, I say a lot of things. It’s tiramisu, for goodness’ sake. Give it to one of the women you con into your bed. I promise, she’ll fall madly in love with you, and you won’t have to be lonely anymore.”
“Just fuck her and give her some dessert. Is that all there is to it?”
“Pretty much.”
“And to think I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe, musing, “You seem to have a vested interest in the women I’m with.”
I laughed. Twenty grand, to be exact.
His eyes narrowed as if he’d read my mind.
I batted my eyelashes in innocence. “So, I know this isn’t the most ideal living arrangement—I’d prefer you were back in your frigid homeland, working to sit the next Stalin on the throne, or whatever else it is you do—but we’ll just have to deal with it like two mature adults.”
He was not convinced by his monotone response. “And how do you propose we do that?”
“Easy.” I drew an imaginary line down the middle of the hall with my foot. “I get this part of the hallway, and you can have this part. As for the pool and gym, I get to use them during the day. You can have them once the sun sets, right after you get home from corrupting good Christian women.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Anything else?”
“Sometimes, I run out of eggs and sugar. In exchange, I’ll make sure to keep condoms on hand in case you have company and misplace yours again.” My smile was all teeth.
“You’ve really thought this out,” he drawled.
“I have.”
“And you even baked for me.”
I bristled. “Well, I didn’t know it was you I was baking for, if it’s any consolation.”
He looked at the dessert in my hands as though he’d never tried sugar before. He nodded toward it. “Chocolate?”
“Arsenic.”
“My favorite.”
He took the plate from my hand and slammed the door.
I sighed.
My neighbors sucked.
Awareness connected me to the door across the hall like a line of static electricity. He was just over there, probably talking Russian on the phone and lounging around in a dress shirt and tie. My skin buzzed with hypersensitivity whenever I changed my clothes, knowing he was so close. My breath caught whenever I heard the smallest noise from the hall, only to realize it was the air conditioner kicking on or Muumuu’s walker dragging across the floor.
I was frustrated with all of it.
This living arrangement wasn’t going to work out, but I refused to be the one to concede and check into a hotel until he went back to Seattle.
We’d run into each other in the hall twice this week, and he’d made it clear I was on his mind about as much as world peace. He’d even gone so far as to ignore one of my cheery, “Good morning, neighbor’s!” completely.
If he could handle this, then so could I.
I fought with my doorknob and the stupid key that needed the perfect wiggle to turn in the lock, an irritable edge biting beneath my skin at the picture Valentina had sent me earlier. Of course, it had been Aleksandra and Christian. They’d seen each other again last night. I bet he let her take off his stupid shirt.
The sound of a door closing made the hair on the back of my neck rise, and, with a racing heart, I finished locking up and turned around with a contrived smile. It didn’t survive when I saw Christian was only wearing a pair of running pants and a gray long-sleeve shirt. My mouth went dry. I didn’t think I’d seen him without even a tie in all the years I’d known him. And, God, could he ever pull the gym-junkie look off.
I swallowed. “Why, Officer, you’re practically naked.”
I’d been so busy looking at his body, I hadn’t noticed his expression until now. And it was furious.
“Your view on an appropriate amount of clothes is obviously skewed.” His voice was strained. “What are you doing?”
I frowned, looking down at my itty-bitty white bikini. “Is it not obvious?”
“With you, nothing is.”
“I can’t tell if that was a dumb-brunette joke or if I’m so unpredictable it excites you.” I pursed my lips, muttering, “Probably the former, considering you’re as excitable as Jack Frost.”
“Gianna . . .” It was a warning. For what, though, I wasn’t sure.
I rolled my eyes. “Relax. I’m going down to the pool to swim off the entire bag of Hershey’s Kisses I ate last night, not to crash one of your silly meetings.”
He was going to say something—something rude or demanding—but before he could, he gave his head a subtle shake, expression strained, as if he was having to bite his tongue to hold whatever it was in.
He tried to leave me there, but we were headed in the same direction, so . . . we ended up walking side-by-side down the hall. He stared ahead, his posture strained. His jaw ground tight. The tension he put off couldn’t be healthy. He rolled his shoulders. It didn’t seem to help.
He bit out a curse.
His arm wrapped around my waist, he lifted me off the floor, and then he was carrying me back to my apartment like a sack of groceries.
“Hey,” I complained, though it was half-hearted because the heat coming through his cotton shirt scalded my skin.
“You aren’t wearing this downstairs, Gianna. There are kids around.”
“Don’t pretend you’re concerned about traumatized children.” His arm was tight around my waist, his body pressed against my nearly-naked one. My blood was boiling and stealing my breath.
He dropped me to my feet in front of my apartment. Took the keys from my hand and, annoyingly, unlocked the door in a single try.
“Go find a swimsuit that covers your ass.”
I put my hands on my hips defiantly. “Those aren’t in style anymore.”
“We both know you don’t follow fashion trends.”
“Since when do you regulate what I wear?”
“Since you’ve clearly lost the competence to do it yourself.”
I opened my mouth, but before I could protest again, he cut me off with that lord-and-master tone.
“It’s not happening, Gianna.”
“Fine,” I snapped, but I was only listening because the swimsuit was ridiculously risqué, with only a thong for bottoms. Sometimes, I thought I did things just to stir up trouble. Just add it to my list of daddy issues.
Spinning around, I headed to my room, pulling off my bikini top and dropping it in the hallway on the way. His gaze ran down my naked back, cool and electric, like the glide of ice on my skin.
When I returned in a new bathing suit, it was to find him looking around my apartment with distaste. I’d gotten most of the boxes unpacked and put away this week, so I was a little upset I didn’t get Christian’s approval. Not.
“You’ve thoroughly ruined the place, haven’t you?”
“If you mean I’ve given it some life, then yes.” I adjusted my boob in the neon orange one-piece. “Ready?”
He gestured for me to spin around, and, with a roll of my eyes, I did. The suit wasn’t modest either, with slits up the sides, but he seemed to approve—if not a bit reluctantly.
We took the elevator together, and my body played havoc on me, remembering how it’d felt to be touched by him. The dirty things he’d said to me. He was only inches away; it would take nothing to close the space between us. Something electrifying played in my veins. Made me dizzy.
“You look like a traffic cone,” he told me.
As we passed a potted tree in the lobby, I pushed him into it. He hadn’t been expecting it—he actually took a step to the side. Satisfaction filled me at the giant leaf that had the audacity to smack him in the head.
He shot me an annoyed glance.
I rolled my eyes. “Gosh, you’re so stuffy. I bet you’ve never done anything silly in your life. You really need to loosen—”
He shoved me into a towel cart. It was half-hearted because I was able to catch myself before I hit it.
“Close, but no cigarette,” I told him, breathless at the playfulness, before we split off in separate directions.
His eyes lit with amusement. “No cigar.”
