Page 29 of Royally Romanov
Even before he’d managed to get it all the way unfastened, her cheeks went scarlet. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged, took a step closer and moved onto the next button. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Um.” Her gaze dropped to his fingertips as they continued lower, and lower still, until only two buttons remained. “It looks like you’re undressing.”
For a frenzied second, her attention flitted back and forth between his face and his unbuttoned shirt. When it finally settled on his chest, her pillowy lips parted ever so slightly.
She suddenly looked like a woman on the verge of being kissed. Maxim rather liked it. He liked it a hell of a lot.
He shrugged. “You don’t believe me. I’m offering you proof.”
“Proof?” She blinked. Her voice had gone thick. Honeyed. Maxim could feel it deep in his gut.
He peeled his shirt the rest of the way off and flung it on the kitchen counter. “Why don’t you take a look, Finley? Take a good long look. Then tell me what you believe.”
FINLEY COULDN’T SEEM TObreathe. She knew she shouldn’t be staring at Maxim’s bare chest, but she couldn’t seem to look anywhere else.
It was a nice chest. Awfully nice. Broad and sun-kissed. Solid. The last time she’d seen such a nice chest, she’d been looking at Bouchardon’sBarberini Faun, carved out of marble and situated on a pedestal at Luxembourg Gardens.
She tried not to think about the fact that Bouchardon’s sculpture was also completely naked from the waist down. Or that its head was tipped back and legs casually splayed, offering up its rather impressive manhood right at eye level. Finley did her absolute best not to conjure up that image, but failed miserably. She might have even accidentally let her gaze travel down to Maxim’s fly.
But only for a second.
Her face went unbearably, shamefully hot, and she forced her attention upward. As nice as Maxim’s chest was, it also sported a number of bruises. Deep purple ones, so vividly colored that his body almost looked as if it had been painted by an artist’s brush. But it hadn’t. It had been beaten black and blue.
She tried to speak, but couldn’t. Even if she could, she wouldn’t have known what to say. The words clogged in her throat, along with her heart.
Before she could stop herself, she reached for him, letting her fingertips explore his rib cage, grazing the places where he’d been hurt with butterfly touches.
“Finley.” He caught her wrist in his grasp. Held it.
She swallowed around the lump in her throat, embarrassed to the point of shame.
What was she doing?
He hadn’t been seducing her. God no. He’d been proving her wrong, showing off the physical evidence of his medical disorder to make a point. People with hemophilia bruised easily and were slow to heal. Intellectually, she knew that. But emotionally, Finley was in no way prepared for the reality of what had happened to Maxim. His beating had left him broken. Battered.
And yet somehow unspeakably beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
How had this happened? She’d been so sure of herself when she’d come here tonight. So indignant. Her conversation with Madame Dubois had left her convinced that Maxim was lying. He was obviously a con man intent on using her to lay claim to the Romanov treasure.
Now, though...
Now she didn’t know what to believe. She knew nothing, other than that he’d been telling the truth about having hemophilia. And about being beaten. It was too much. Finley was tired of trying to wrap her head around it. She didn’t want to think anymore.
“Don’t,” Maxim murmured. His voice was deliciously low. She felt it down to the soles of her feet. “Don’t be sorry.”
Then he placed the palm of her hand against his heart. He covered it with his own and held it in place. His heartbeat pounded against her touch, warm and wild. She had the strange sensation that she held his life in the tips of her fingers.
He was going to kiss her. She could see it in his eyes, in the intention shining back at her from his obsidian gaze.
She could have stopped it if she’d wanted to. She knew she should. There were too many unanswered questions, too much at stake.
But she didn’t. Because in the excruciatingly slow moment before his mouth came down on hers, it was no longer Maxim’s identity she questioned. It was her own.
Finley was quickly becoming someone she no longer recognized. She didn’t do things like this.Ever. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been kissed. She most definitely had no recollection of the last time she’d felt the searing heat of a man’s bare chest beneath her fingertips. Her time in Paris had been about self-preservation. About starting over.
