The evening would give her time to read through everything and come fully prepared for battle tomorrow. She felt confirmed in one suspicion, at least, and that was that Peter wasn’t only playing both sides against each other. He had a higher stake in what was going on at the gallery, and maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with Sergey’s death.
Peter wetted his lips. He looked like he wanted to say more. Madison returned his helpless gaze with a flat one of her own, trying to ice all the warmth from her brown eyes. Finally, he nodded and turned, brushing by her on his way to the exit. Madison accepted his retreat… for now. As soon as she was finished perusing every correspondence he had sent her father, she would have a better idea of how willing she was to trust him.
With a sigh, she turned to consider the picture mounted on the wall. It hung crooked on its frame… odd. She hadn’t noticed before, and she was always meticulous with how things were displayed. She reached forward to readjust it and was startled when a piece of paper slipped out from underneath it. She bent to pick it up.
“Numbers?” she puzzled. Madison was normally good with figures, but she didn’t understand the arrangement of these. She turned the note over and spotted a name. “Vlad?” she read aloud incredulously.
“You rang?”
Madison jumped and whirled. Vlad was standing behind her, holding a bouquet of… wait, were those roses? Had he seriously brought her flowers? Madison’s heart began to hammer erratically in her chest. There was no way he could have overheard her conversation with Savannah, was there?
“This… has your name on it,” she said. She could only handle one mystery at a time.
“What is that? A love letter?” Vlad asked in amusement as he stepped up beside her. He studied the sequence of numbers briefly; Madison watched as the penetrating quality of his blue gaze sharpened with unmistakable clarity.
The bouquet slipped from Vlad’s hand and fell to the floor, petals scattering like droplets of blood upon impact. Startled by his reaction, she almost relinquished her hold on the note—but then his empty hand was gripping her wrist, and Vlad was half-escorting, half-dragging her out the emergency exit.
“Are you serious?” she exclaimed, clutching her briefcase as he shoved the door open and pulled her after him down the steps. “I didn’t write it! I found it!” she protested as he bundled her into his car. She resisted only minimally; if a man like Vlad Karev was this unsettled by a set of numbers, then she wasn’t dumb enough to protest his urgency.
“Where? Where did you find it?” Vlad demanded. He had his sunglasses on, she noticed, and was reversing them back out of the alley.
Madison lifted the note; the paper trembled in her hand, even though she had promised herself she wouldn’t respond outwardly to let the Russian know she was afraid. After a minute, Vlad snatched it from her and single-handedly crushed it into a ball in his fist.
“Madison O’Connor, please tell me why the fuck it is I always find you holding a note you shouldn’t have?”
Her fear dissipated all at once, and her temper at being spoken to in such a tone of voice threatened to boil over completely. She glared at Vlad’s tattooed hands now gripped around the steering wheel, noticing and simultaneously dismissing the way the flesh beneath the designs that mapped his knuckles bleached as white as bone.
“I was holding it because I found that note behind one of the gallery paintings,” she said. “A painting that Peter Franklin was standing in front of only seconds before. You want to know who wrote that note, you’d have a hell of a lot more luck taking me back to work and kidnapping him instead!”
They were parked outside the apartment building now. Soon enough, they were mounting the stairwell. Vlad pushed her up the steps in front of him like he was escorting her to a prison cell. For all Madison knew, he might as well be.
“On top of what he makes as a lawyer, Peter is paid extremely well by my family,” Vlad argued with her. “Why should I believe that he would write this note?”
“Maybe I can help you figure that out if you’d just tell me what the note means!” Madison snapped. She turned to brace herself in the doorway to her apartment, but she was still holding the briefcase; Vlad easily shoved her the rest of the way in and slammed the door behind them.
“It means there’s a hit out on me!” he exploded then. Madison blinked, the briefcase slipping from her fingers to fall to the floor with a heavy thunk. Its contents seemed less than pressing now in the wake of Vlad’s revelation.
She studied the man in front of her for a long moment. She had rarely seen Vlad’s mask slip, and it was only during sex that the man she couldn’t get enough of let some of his walls come tumbling down.
“I don’t know who to trust anymore, Maddie.” He gave a dark, desperate laugh, and the sound sent chills racing through her. “My family? You?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore if you trust me. I want out.” Tears sprang unbidden into her eyes. “I want out of all this. When you came along, I lost sight of everything. I want my family out from under the thumb of your organization, and I… I want out of this. I’m trapped, Vlad. I’m bound to you, and I… I don’t want to feel this way anymore.”
“What you feel is what I feel, too.” The Russian came toward her, but for once it wasn’t to pursue, wrangle, or catch her up in his arms against her will. Madison fell against him the moment he opened to her, wrapping herself in him, taking what shelter was offered for however long he thought to offer it. Maybe they couldn’t express what was happening between them in words, but understanding came easily here inside Vlad’s arms.
He took her into the bedroom. They didn’t come together in the bed often, which made it all the sweeter that he should take her there now, sliding her out of her clothes and then allowing her to undress him.
He’s making love to me, she thought in wonder as Vlad wrapped one warm, muscular arm beneath her and eased them both down into the embrace of the mattress. Have we ever done this before?
It was a strange series of thoughts to be having in the moment, but Madison couldn’t help it. Where once she had considered the relationship she had with Vlad to be fraught and unnamable, his tender, almost worshipful treatment of her now was enough to make her second-guess what she meant to him… and what he meant to her.
What could this man, this black-clad, tattooed social outlier, really mean to her, if she allowed her remaining walls to come down? Too late, she realized that those walls had come down probably from their first moments together but she’d been too stubborn to acknowledge it.
She felt Vlad’s hand between her legs, caressing her, parting her, and she sighed in defeated bliss. She wanted to be had by him, body and soul. She wanted to be possessed by the man who bent and broke everything that stood in opposition to his will. She let his mouth claim her own and let his masterful touch pleasure her most intimate recesses. When he slipped his length inside her, laying claim to the space between her legs, Madison had never felt more fulfilled.
They moved against each other, burying themselves in one another, until Madison forgot to fear her feelings for her former enemy. Instead, under the cover of darkness, she embraced them wholeheartedly.
The next morning, Madison rose early and got dressed; she checked the time on her cell phone, before pocketing it without a second thought. She had about ten minutes to get down to the gallery to meet Peter, and not a single e-mail read. Sighing in defeat, she moved into the bathroom, careful to carry her shoes and avoid waking the slumbering Russian who had once again found his way into her bed. She couldn’t let herself think about all the ways last night had been different.