few years making up for the strictness of her upbringing, the opposite sex still remained on the backburner. None of the boys at university interested her. Nor could a single one of them could ever hope to make her belly impatient and excited all at once, like this man did just by being near. And she had the most pressing urge to see inside of him.
Or push him off balance and see how he handled it.
“What do you expect from a woman?”
It was an odd question to ask a stranger under any circumstances, but especially in the middle of a loud casino. Yet he answered without hesitating, as if he’d anticipated harder than normal questions from her. “I never expect a single thing from anyone, man or woman.”
Interesting. “What do you expect from yourself?”
“Consistency.”
She liked that answer. A lot. But somehow it hadn’t surprised her. Even more than his honest answer, though, she enjoyed how fast he responded. It seemed this was a man who knew himself well and lived with conviction.
“What about you?” he asked. “What do you expect from a man?”
“I don’t know.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “Whatcha got?”
His gaze meandered down her legs, heating, followed by a tic of the vein in his temple. “Name it, baby.”
Damn. If she continued to flash from hot to cold to hot again, she was going to catch pneumonia. Her body was as confused as her mind over her reaction to this man, heat seeming to permeate new spaces inside of her she hadn’t known existed. When she responded, her voice emerged as little more than a breathy whisper. “It’s a good thing I expect sound judgment from myself or I might accept that blatant invitation.”
Skepticism warred with lust on his face. “Is sound judgment really what you expect from yourself?”
“Nyet.” His astuteness made her almost giddy. “I expect adventure.”
Adventure.
At the inadvertent reminder of what she was supposed to be doing, Roksana whipped the phone out of her pocket and winced. “Uh-oh. Only three minutes until havoc time.” She took the shoe he offered, using his arm without asking to stabilize herself while sliding the shoe onto her foot, followed by the other one. “I came in here to cool off and now I’m going to be late.”
“Late for what exactly?”
Oh, what the hell, she was never going to see him again.
That really shouldn’t bother her as much as it did.
Forcing herself to grin, Roksana opened the sides of her cardigan, bathing their immediate area with the pink, blinking lights of her bra. “Dasvidanya, temnota moya.”
Goodbye, my darkness.
She left the man staring into space, her laughter trailing behind her as she jogged out of the casino, cheap heels clacking on the marble, then the baking sidewalk. When she made it down to the strip, she waved at Kira to signal her readiness and got a thumbs up in return. Something strange happened, though. She thought of the man in the casino. His face. The way he’d smelled like pine. Actually, she had an almost giddy urge to turn around and search for him in the entrance of Circus Circus. Maybe he’d followed?
At the very least, she wished she’d asked his name.
What on earth had possessed her to call him her darkness?
That sounded so intimate.
Yet she’d loved the way it felt rolling off her tongue. How the utterance of it had seemed to…lock them together. To solidify something.
“The heat has definitely turned my brain to shit,” Roksana muttered, still experiencing the craving to turn around. To look for him.
She just started to turn her head when her cell phone beeped.
Go time.
She stripped off her cardigan and discarded it on the sidewalk, immediately receiving honks from passing motorists. Whether in annoyance or irritation, Roksana didn’t know or care. As soon as there was a break in traffic, four Russian girls in flashing pink bras dashed out into the thoroughfare, breaking into the dance they’d been choreographing for weeks in between classes. Right on cue, Olga was escorted by her fiancé—who’d been in on the plan—to a stop in front of her dancing bridesmaids.
For a full ten seconds, all she could do was stare openmouthed, but when Roksana stepped to the forefront of the foursome, bending and snapping with her eyes crossed, Olga lost her battle with amusement, her body shaking with laughter.
A new wave of traffic drew closer to them, but the girls continued to dance, hitting their moves in pace with each other. And it was one of those moments