Page 123 of Reckless Obsession

“I understand,” I tell him.

“I hope you do.” His voice shifts as if he’s already bored with the conversation. “Anton and my father are going to be furious when they find out you’ve been fucking Maksim. So unless you want your head removed from your body, I suggest you both figure out what this is before they do.”

The line goes dead before I can respond.

For a long moment, I stand there with the phone still pressed to my ear.

Outside my window, the city glitters in its usual indifferent way. Cars move through the streets below. Lights flicker across distant buildings. Somewhere, people are having an ordinary day and answering the messages of the people who care about them.

My chest tightens with a clarity I have spent far too long avoiding.

“Fuck this,” I mutter.

I cross the office, grab my keys from the desk, and leave before I can give myself another reason not to.

❧

I park across the street from the Armani Grand and turn off the engine, but I don’t get out.

The hotel’s entrance glows gold, valets move in practiced loops, and guests drift in and out beneath the awning with the kind of ordinary ease I haven’t felt in days. Somewhere above it all, on some floor I don’t know, Maksim is hiding from the world.

And from me.

I sit with my hands on the wheel and ask myself, for what feels like the hundredth time this week, why this particular man has managed to unravel me so completely.

I shouldn’t be this affected.

I know that. I’ve built my entire life around not being this affected. Around control, distance, the kind of careful architecture that keeps people from getting far enough in to do real damage. I learned that lesson the hard way once already. I don’t need to learn it twice.

And yet Maksim is in my bloodstream now, and I don’t know how to get him out. Don’t know if I even want to.

That’s the part that frightens me.

It’s why I ignored him after that night in my bedroom. Not because I regretted it. Regret would have been simpler, cleaner, something I could have apologized for and moved past. I ignored him because I woke up and realized what I’d let happen. He was in my bed. In my house. In the one room I have kept sealed off since my divorce, untouched by anyone, empty on purpose.

I haven’t brought another person into that house since Jake left it.

Not once.

When I want sex—and I do, occasionally, in the detached, functional way a body sometimes demands—I find it elsewhere. A bar I visit a few times a month, always the same one, with strangers who don’t ask questions and don’t expect to see me again. It always ends in a hotel room. Never at my home. Never anywhere that could hold a memory of them afterwards.

That was the rule.

The only rule that mattered.

Then Maksim looked at me in that reckless and hungry way, utterly unbothered by the walls I’ve spent years building. And I let him past every single one of them without even noticing I’d done it until it was too late.

Waking up beside him terrified me more than anything has in a long time.

So I ran.

Two weeks of silence, and now an entire week of him returning the favor with a thoroughness that makes my insides ache every time I check my phone and find nothing waiting for me.

I pull my phone out. His name sits at the top of my call log, buried under a string of unanswered calls. I press it anyway, some stubborn part of me hoping this time will be different.

It rings.

Once. Twice. Three times.