Page 57 of Deception

“Get dressed,” Tomasz tells me before he leaves the sunroom overlooking the forest we’ve explored every night for the last week.

The snow is getting impossibly thicker and the air so cold that even warm clothes struggle to keep you warm. But every night, it becomes a little easier to forget about the world outside of the compound. Every night I see a little deeper into him, and even though I know I shouldn’t, I let him steal more of me. It’s impossible to resist the lure of his charm and the call of his soul to mine. Contrary to all the lies I keep whispering to my heart, we don’t feel like enemies anymore.

“You look worried,” I say as Anton taps furiously at his phone.

With a wry expression, he looks up at me. “Someone is going to die over this, and my job is to make sure it’s not Tomasz.”

“I can help you,” I tell him quickly, the intensity of my words surprising me. “I can help you protect him.”

An incredulous laugh bursts from him. “You? Help me?”

He pockets the phone and comes to stand beside me. He doesn’t touch me in any way—he wouldn’t dare—but the way he’s looking down at me makes it feel as though he’s got me in his grip. “You caused this.”

“He came for me. He came for me in London, and he came for me then too…and you were right there with him.”

“Because he will not get taken out on my watch.”

“Then let me help you. I have good aim, and contrary to this whole…” I shake my head, gesturing around us with my hand to indicate all that’s happened in the last five months. “Despite this whole shitshow, keeping Tomasz safe keeps me alive…it’s in my interest to help you.”

“That would require me to trust you, and I do not.”

Grasping the napkin that’s on my lap, I throw it onto the table before I stand and hold his stare. “Whether or not you trust me, we’re on the same team now.”

The remark doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I keep waiting for the guilt to hit me as I walk back to the bedroom and do as Tomasz instructed me. It never comes, and as I sit in front of the vanity to style my hair, I find it too easy to look myself in the eyes again.

My body is still sore from all the ways we fuck at every given opportunity. And while my breath catches at the memory of his touch heating my skin and making my pulse rush through me, I find that I’m at peace. Not just with myself, but with him and who we are together. For once, I feel as though I belong. Serendipity brightens everything around me as though I’ve finally found my right place at the right time.

Dressed and with my hair tied at my nape by a silk scarf that was with the clothes the maid put in the closet for me, I head back downstairs. The library in this place is well stocked. Mostly Russian literature with a few Latin additions that are clearly worth a lot. But there’s one book that I keep going back to—De Deo Socrates. Running my finger over the spines on the shelf, I pause and pull out the well-loved hardback. It’s surprising that it’s not falling apart.

I flip through Apuleius’s words until I get to the highlighted passage:Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration.

“He was a wise man,” Tomasz states, surprising me from my scrutiny of the passage.

“Is that why you quote him?”

A slow grin cuts across his face as he saunters closer, looking like the cat that got the cream. When he reaches where I’m sitting close to the wood burner, Tomasz pulls me up from the window seat by my arm before sitting down and tugging me onto his lap so that I’m sprawled on him, my back on his front.

“He was trying to find a common ground between Plato’s demons and Socrates’ god.”

“By finding common ground, do you mean argue by any chance?”

“Are you trying to suggest that I like conflict?” he asks in a skewed reply to my question, taking the book from my hand and placing it on the floor carefully. It obviously means something to him with the way he cares for it.

I peer up at him to find him watching me closely. The slightly overgrown shadow of his stubble is thick and dark, making my fingers itch to stroke over it. The scratch of it on the bridge of my nose when he tilts his head a tad closer to mine has me shuddering over him. Such an innocent touch, but it lights me on fire with a need that I can barely hear, let alone think through as he murmurs, “Rarity wins admiration. Do you know what that means?”

“That we always yearn for the unknown.”

“Very logical, but these philosophers were a little more poetic. So, no,” he chuckles over my lips. His hot breath is scented with the tinge of tobacco and coffee, making my mouth water for his kiss. “It means that we often give up on who we are to conform to our surroundings.” With his stare on mine, narrowed and probing, he adds, “It’s what you did for love, isn’t it? You gave up on yourself to please others…but in the end, it’s made you despise them. Conformity, or familiarity as Apuleius said, brought you nothing but contempt and disappointment.”

For a moment, I’m staggered by his words. Was I that obvious that a stranger could see through me? Worse…that my enemy could have a clear measure of my weakness?

“I told you, Red, we’re not all that different,” he tells me, probably reading my internal fret on my face.

“What?” I scoff back. The way he’s looking at me has my gut twisting in a way that cuts me to the core. So deep, intense, and with a silent keening that makes it impossible to catch my breath as I rasp, “You’d do anything for love?”

Tomasz stills. With his lips pursing and his brows drawing together, he swallows, and I’m struck by the way his throat flexes with the movement. My pussy mimics the action when he cups my face, holding my stare hostage as I’m about to look away.

“Sounds like a terrible pop song,” he finally states with a strained chuckle.

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