“Unless you count ghosts.” A nervous laugh bubbled out of me.
Even though he scowled at me, I still caught a glimmer of amusement in his amber eyes. He shifted his gaze ahead of us, and we walked in silence. Near the back of the cemetery, we stopped by a patch of dirt. I focused on the tufts of dead grass springing from the disturbed earth as Mr. Volkov turned to me.
“Do you remember being here?” he asked.
Everything looked familiar. A tiny divot marked the ground, and I spotted numerous weathered and worn bumps from years of use and exposure to the elements. But I knew that one divot was created by me.
The cemetery had been closed off to outsiders the first time I came here months ago. After completing the construction and fixing the tombstones and other things, they reopened it to the public.
Turning back to Dimitri, I nodded. “Yeah. Why’d you bring me here?” I asked.
Dimitri met my gaze, and I averted my eyes to stare past his shoulder. His white hair shined in the sunlight, looking like freshly fallen snow. It must have been soft to the touch, and my fingers itched to drag through it. I wondered why his hair had turned that color, because he didn’t look any older than me.
I clenched my thighs together. An ache built in me as I remembered my dream from this morning. It had felt so real. Enough so that I came multiple times. There had been a sliver of a moment when I’d worried I made noises while I slept, but Dimitri hadn’t shown that he heard me. When I woke up, I found my sleep shorts on the floor beside the bed and a mess between my legs. At first, I thought it was semen. A lot of it. But that couldn’t have been right.
Wait a minute.
I glanced around the cemetery with scrunched eyebrows before lowering my gaze to look at the ground again. “Wait. Sir?” When Dimitri said nothing, I met his stare and cocked my head. “How do you know about me being here?” My heart thumped faster, and I breathed harder as panic settled in my chest.
The corner of his lip twitched. “Good girl.”
I swallowed a whimper at his praise. I had to squeeze my legs together again to stop the building ache I could no longer ignore.
“I saw you months ago, digging a hole and whispering to yourself. I couldn’t make out what you were saying, but I watched you dig, confused about why you were doing it. I didn’t want to spook you any more than you already were, so I left. Two days later, you showed up at my office as my assistant.”
Where was he going with this?
I shifted my weight onto one foot, then shifted again when that didn’t relieve my building anxiety.
Dimitri broke the eye contact and looked around. His gaze held a faraway look as he remembered the past like he saw it again for the first time. “For a while, when you worked for me, I had no idea why you acted so strange.” He blinked and turned his piercing gaze to me. “Until one day, you told me.”
I held my breath. Blood roared in my ears and muffled everything Dimitri said.
He watched me?
“Oh,” was all I could manage to say.
“Have you remembered anything?”
Licking my lips, I lowered my eyes and shifted on my feet again. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
I gulped. “It’s been hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.” Having schizophrenia and a wild imagination made it difficult to differentiate things. “I don’t know if what I think about is a memory or...”
“Or?” he drawled.
I looked at him, my palms clammy and tingling.
I was so nervous about telling him anything. Especially about the dream I had last night. What would he think of that?
“A fantasy,” I whispered.
Dimitri fully faced me, his dark eyebrows lowered. All of his attention was now on me, and I couldn’t think straight because of how he looked at me. Instead of gazing at me like I was a bug he was about to crush under his shoe, his stare held gentleness and affection, even a little bit of hope.
“Fantasy?” His voice pitched lower. His amber eyes burned with a wildfire of desire that could never be put out. My body responded to him. I knew this man was dangerous—call it gut instinct—but I didn’t care. My arousal dampened my panties, and the ghost of how he felt inside me made me wetter.
“Yes,” I said, then I cleared the husky sound from my throat.
