Page 22 of Toxic Temptation
I hope to God I never see him again.
8
KOVAN
I don’t have time for distractions.
That’s what I keep telling myself as I stare at the turquoise file spread across my mahogany desk. 8½ x 11” evidence of my own stupidity.
The text on the pages stares back at me. Two bolded words at the top. Big words. Impudent words.
Vesper Fairfax.
Even her name sounds like trouble when I say it in my head. The kind of trouble that makes smart men do incredibly dumb shit.
The photograph clipped to the inside cover shows her in that pristine white coat, but there’s something untamed in her smile. A hint of a proud dimple that whispers she’s never met a rule she didn’t want to defy. Her dirty blonde hair falls in waves past her shoulders, and those three little freckles on her right cheek look like Orion’s belt—a constellation I used to point out with Luka on the nights he couldn’t sleep because his mother and my brother were arguing too much.
Fuck.
I slam the file shut, but the damage is already done. I can still see her face. Can still feel the phantom heat of her skin when I cleaned that wound on her shoulder. My nose is still full of her perfume and sweat mingling, taunting, teasing, tempting, torturing me.
And that, that right there—that’s the “incredibly dumb shit” I was talking about. I’ve built an empire on focus. On never letting emotions cloud judgment.
I don’t have time for distractions.
But distractions, apparently, have plenty of time for me.
A knock interrupts my brooding. Osip’s bald head appears in the doorway, his boyish grin failing to hide the concern in his hazel eyes.
“Thevoryare assembled,” he says. “Ready when you are,pakhan.”
I don’t look up for a second. As if it has a mind of its own, my hand drifts to stroke the edge of the photograph. I toy with the corner for a second.
Get it the fuck together, Kovan.
“Give me two minutes.”
Osip’s eyebrows lift slightly, but he nods and disappears.
Instead of standing and getting it the fuck together, though, I look for the thousandth time today at the background report. Have I memorized every detail already? Of fucking course I have. But that doesn’t stop me from reading through it yet again.
Dr. Vesper Antoinette Fairfax, thirty-one years old, pediatric surgeon extraordinaire. No husband, no boyfriend, no significant attachments.
She lives alone in a cramped apartment that’s more medical library than home. Her refrigerator contains three bottles of wine, expired yogurt, and enough Folgers to last her through the goddamn Apocalypse. She owns two cooking pans that have never been used and three coffee machines in various stages of exhausted destruction.
The woman has replaced food with caffeine, sleep with work, and any semblance of a personal life with saving other people’s children.
That last part hits too close to home.
What really gets me, though, are the complaints she’s filed against the hospital board. Page after page detailing documented corruption, misappropriated funds, and medical equipment so faulty it’s basically attempted murder. She’s been fighting this battle alone for two years, throwing herself against an unmovable wall over and over again.
When I’ve bothered with women in my life, I prefer the ones who want something I can offer—money, protection, status—and give me something in return. It’s better that way. Clean. Simple. Uncomplicated.
Vesper Fairfax is the exact fucking opposite of uncomplicated.
I close the file and lock it in my desk drawer. But what’s less easy to stow away out of sight is the memory of how she felt pressed against me in that supply closet. Vanilla. Sweat. Blood. Fire in her eyes, black silk on her waist, three birthmarks like distant planets shining on her cheek.
It’s all a blur of color, shape, scent, and light. And it’s distracting the hell out of me.
