The Master (35 page)

Heart. In. Throat. I stiffened against him.

He could read me so well, and knew something was up. He secured the lace above my knee, then smoothed down my dress. As would be expected, he smiled at me.

For the first time ever, he’d given
me
his fake smile. . . .

“W
ill you please talk to me?” I asked Sevastyan shortly after we took off for Miami.

After we’d made love last night, I’d basically passed out, exhausted from maintaining a happy façade. I awakened briefly in the night and found him at the window, staring out
into the dark, seeming to look at nothing. But that muscle had ticked in his jaw, and I could swear he’d looked . . . wounded.

I didn’t think he’d slept at all. At the breakfast reception, tension had emanated from him. He’d been distant and stiffly courteous, that fake smile in full force.

“You’ve hardly spoken to me today, Máxim.”

“I have a lot on my mind.”

His phone rang, and without a word to me, he answered. I gazed out the jet’s window, waiting for another chance for us to talk. One call turned to two, and then to five. I couldn’t
understand the words, but I had an uneasy feeling he’d been talking about me.

I retired to the cabin, lying down. Instead of making love on this bed again, we stood on opposite sides of a new rift.

My body was still exhausted, and my mind felt sluggish, as if I were shaking off the effects of one of Jess’s drugs.

Maybe all this new stimulation had been too much for me. For three years, I’d lived as a social hermit, then I’d been thrust into a crush of new people. I’d gone from broke and
scraping pennies to a shopping spree worth half a mil. I’d been abstinent, then glutted with sex. I’d been convinced I might not live to see my thirties—much less
remarry—then I’d fallen in love with a man who wanted everything from me.

Confused, I slipped off to sleep. Nightmares of Edward overwhelmed me.

In one, he was covered with blood—
mine
—creeping closer to me. I stood frozen in place, unable to force my body to run—my only defense. In the background, I heard those
ugly, wet sounds Julia had made as she’d strangled on her own blood. Again and again, I struggled to escape, begging Edward to leave me alone, but he kept stalking closer, vowing to me,
“
I will BUTCHER you! I will cut you into pieces while you live!
” My body jolted on the bed. I shot awake, sucking in breaths. Had we just landed? Why hadn’t Máxim
awakened me?

Once we began taxiing on the runway, I went to the lavatory. I’d never had nightmares about Edward this bad. Had I flown right back to him?

I washed my face, peering into the mirror. The relaxed woman I’d beheld days ago was gone, replaced by the Cat I’d seen for years.

When I rejoined Sevastyan in the cabin, I drew back at his expression. His tension had morphed—into seething anger.

I’d never seen him so furious. “What’s happened? What’s going on?” He could hardly look at me. That fury was for me?

I was in love with him, and he couldn’t look at me.

He shot a vodka, saying nothing. His knuckles were white on the glass, that muscle in his jaw ticking.

In a daze, I followed him off the jet into the limo, though he acted as if he could’ve left me there on the tarmac.

We hadn’t even gotten under way before he’d downed his first shot from the Bentley’s bar. Here we were, back in sunny Miami—and it felt like the Arctic in here. He took
another call, his tone clipped. We were closing in on the hotel before he hung up the phone.

“Máxim, I don’t know what’s happened with us, and I need you to explain it to me,” I said. The divider was cracked, and Vasili could hear everything, but I
didn’t care.

“I told you I have a lot on my mind. We’ll discuss it later.” Everything about his demeanor said:
Back off.

“You’re putting walls up between us. Please
don’t.
Talk to me.”

“Very well.” He poured another steep vodka. “Marry me.”

“
Qué?
” I couldn’t get enough air.

“I want you to marry me. Today.”

I was about to throw up. This wasn’t
happening.

“I’ll take that as a
yes.
We’ll go directly back to the airport and fly to Las Vegas.” He said something to Vasili, and the man began to slow the car.

To turn around.

I shook my head. “G-go to the hotel.”

“Give me a reason.”

“I’ve only known you for two weeks.”

“Are you sure there’s no other reason?” he demanded.

“Why are you being like this?”

He snapped something to Vasili, and we resumed our course to the hotel.

Sevastyan turned his infuriated gaze to me. “You didn’t even consider the possibility of marrying me. Not for the briefest second, did you? Last night, when you caught the bouquet,
you looked miserable about it. When I placed that garter on your leg, your body stiffened against me as it
never
has before.”

“Everything was too . . . it was a lot to take in over one weekend. As of Christmas Day, I thought we would be parting on the twenty-eighth.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “You’ve got your claws all in me, and you’re looking for the door! You have never even imagined a future with me.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” How to explain? I’d known I was going to have difficulty revealing my past to him. Now, freaked out and emotional, I could barely find
words. “It’s just that . . . things are complicated.”

“I’ll bet they are.”

“What does that mean?”

He waved that away. “I just told you I’d marry you. A woman in your position should’ve been
tempted.
”

“My position.” As someone who sold sex.

“But then, the problem with all my wealth is that I come with it!”

This argument had taken me completely off guard. Because I’d
lowered
my guard with him.

“What the fuck was I thinking? I told you there’d be no one else. That you were with me. I confided things I’ve never told another soul.” The pain in his eyes rocked me.
“And I don’t even know your real name. I expected things from you I shouldn’t. I can’t force you to change.”

“You want me to change?” I couldn’t disguise the hurt in my voice. “How?”

“For instance, when I inform you that I’m a
former
hobbyist, you might mention to me that you are a
former
escort. Just a thought.”

I rubbed my temples. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know where it’s coming from.” Maybe he regretted revealing his past. I believed talking to me
had
eased something in him—but it still would’ve had to hurt, to leave him raw. Was I getting the backlash from that? “Why are you coming at me like this?”

“You shouldn’t have let me believe you were attainable if you aren’t. You let me believe you could be won.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You lied about that and so many other things. You looked people in the eyes, and the words danced from your tongue. You deceive better than a politician.”

My confusion was turning to anger, my foggy mind clearing. “I get your mistrust. I have reasons not to trust others too. But you need to understand something.”

He shot his glass. “Can’t wait to hear this.”

“I have never—from the first sentence I uttered—lied to you.”

The fury in his eyes almost had me shrinking back into my seat.

“I told you never to deceive me! I’ve revealed why I will never tolerate it. Yet you keep doing it.”

“When? Name an instance!”

“I nearly believed you when you told me you had no other man! You met my gaze and assured me you didn’t—yet you told your friend that you were involved with another.”

“What friend?” Had he misunderstood something I’d said over the weekend?

“Last week, I bugged the penthouse for my meetings. I quite enjoyed your conversation with Ivanna.”

I gasped, reflecting over what I’d said. I’d talked to her about the belt, about walking around in this lust-fueled haze, fantasizing about his body. That conversation had been
private—and humiliating! My face flushed with embarrassment, which just made me angrier.

“Did you think I wasn’t aware a phone got to you? I allowed it in. Later that night, I listened to the recording.”

“Then you knew I never tried to trap you with a pregnancy! And you didn’t tell me? Just like I thought! You
wanted
to keep me there—to keep treating me like a deceitful
prostitutka
! So you could do whatever you wanted with me. You amused yourself with me. You played with me. With
my
life.”

We pulled up to the hotel. Vasili hurried out of the car around to the door, but then he just stood there.

“Just like you played me!” Sevastyan snapped. “You made me believe you felt something for me. So I decided I would win you from him—I would spoil you, immersing you in my
world, while removing you from his. I thought I’d had success until your reactions last night. Now I know that I can’t simply
will
this to happen. Your heart’s taken. By
Edward
. You’re in love with him.”

I could feel the blood leaving my face. Sevastyan had said Edward’s name out loud. I had the impulse to cross myself. “H-how?”

“On the plane, you said his name in your sleep! Moaned it!” He knocked back another vodka. “I now know what you sound like when you fuck the man you actually do give a damn
about.”

Had I said anything else? The need to run overpowered me. My gaze flitted to the door handle.

“Even before the recording confirmed it, I knew you had another. I knew every time you stared off at nothing that you were thinking of him. When you took that goddamned picture for the
escort site, you were thinking of him.”

Sevastyan was right. I had been.

“When you were
with me
—you fucking moaned
for him
.” He was about to shatter his glass. “But then you warned me all along, didn’t you? You told me I
wanted you more than you wanted me.”

He inhaled, as if to rein in his rage. “All of this is moot. I don’t have to trust you or win you. I merely have to
pay
you. Shouldn’t we settle accounts before you come
up?”

“Don’t do this.” He was breaking my heart.

“Do what? Will a ‘donation’ of fifteen thousand a day suffice? Or twenty?” He popped open his briefcase, revealing stacks of wrapped hundreds. With a snide look, he said,
“Perhaps Edward is expecting you to return flush with cash? Do you two have that kind of arrangement?”

Some invisible force was punching me in the stomach, like a fist. It had to be, because I couldn’t breathe.

“Come now, ask me for your payment, little girl.”

When I thought about how close I’d come to revealing to him all my secrets—breaking the rules that kept me alive—I grew queasy. I
hadn’t
learned the lessons
I’d paid so dearly for. “I was planning to tell you everything today, to trust you!
Gracias a Dios
, you showed your true colors—yet again—before I could say anything.
You’re the only one here who’s betraying trust! Go back and review your creepy tapes. I—never—lied.”

Shaking with fury to match his own, I took off my string of pearls and threw it at Sevastyan. “You
don’t
want me more than you want your old ways. You aren’t ready to
cast them aside for me. So I’ve got no time for you. I’m leaving, and this time you won’t stop me.”

In a bored tone, he said, “Enough with the theatrics. You won’t leave.”

“Oh, I won’t?” I nearly ripped my earlobes to get the earrings out. “You are always so wrong about me. Do you know why? Because you have never given me the benefit of the
doubt. Not from the first minute I met you. You always expect the worst of me. ALWAYS.” I threw the earrings and almost flung my purse at him but somehow had the presence of mind to stop
myself. I’d need what was left of that pin money to get a cab back to my apartment.

I would use the seven grand in my safe and get out of town, as I’d always planned. After my exam tomorrow, I’d take the first bus heading west. I’d put this man behind
me—just as I had my husband. I reached for the door.

My leaving seemed to baffle him. “All you have to do is ask for your gifts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth. No escort would walk away from that.”

As I exited the car, I said, “Watch me,
cabrón
.”

“Fucking ask me, Katya, and they’ll be yours.” Just like that first night, he kept talking, still engaging me. “Or is your pride going to get in the way?”

I glared at Vasili standing next to the car, then leaned down to tell Sevastyan, “You have no idea about my pride, Russian. It burns so bright, I hope it fucking blinds you.” I
slammed the door and strode away. With each step my shoulders went back, my chin up.

Going forward? Rule number seven would be never to fall in love.