"So what are we thinking?"
I had never been more anxious to be in a hotel room in my entire life. I might as well have ten billion dollars in my pocket right now because that's what the drive hidden in a Russian kopeck was worth. It was like we were sitting ducks but there wasn't much else to do except dumbly waiting for our passports to be made and to dye our hair. So, we settled for the latter of the two.
Ashton and I's little episode in the woods were forgotten almost as fast as it had arrived, both of us cracking jokes by the time we hit civilization at two in the morning, after nearly eight hours of walking in the snow. We probably could have done it in half that if there wasn't white hell on the ground. My legs were numb from the cold by the time we found a car to steal. Ashton hot wired the 2014 Volkswagen Polo in record speed out of desperation for even the smallest amount of heat.
Ashton had driven in Russia so I took the liberty to drive the remaining four hours to Minsk. Ashton actually slept most of the way, but I didn't mind because when we stopped thirty minutes away from the capital to exchange our currency, I fell asleep in the back seat of the car and Ashton let me sleep while he drove an hour west of the city to throw anyone watching us off our tracks. Then we took a taxi back to the capital, which I also slept in.
After we had a late breakfast, I purchased colored contacts and hair dye while Ashton booked a hotel room, leading to us standing in the bathroom of our hotel looking at hair dye boxes. I was going to go blonde because I had a feeling Ashton would be a fan of an ash brown for himself, similar to my natural hair color.
"Well, I'm not going blonde, if that's what you are asking. This face and skin tone is not meant for blonde." Ashton told me while I leaned forward over the counter to put in a pair of blueish-grey contacts, much more common than Ashton's vibrant blue.
"Brown it is, then. You'll need to use brown contacts too." The assassin's sapphire eyes were too recognizable and abnormal for a Middle Eastern man, despite their immense beauty.
"I'm going to go blonde for Israel but I'll change it to black right after we leave Tel Aviv. As long as it's not brown, we are okay. I'll have to keep the blue contacts though because I had the same brown eyes when I was undercover in that region." I murmured before straightening up and running my hand through my hair while looking at my new set of eyes. They matched my pale skin tone pretty well.
"What do you think?" I asked Ashton, meeting his own piercing ocean eyes in the mirror where he stood right behind me with my head just barely as tall as his shoulder. The hotel we were staying in for the next two or three days was incredibly nice with marble floors, walls, and counters in the bathroom with a large double sink and full mirror. It was stunning and that wasn't even including the actual room which was a modern one bed with a view of the capital that was truly breathtaking.
Ashton's observant gaze studied my face in the mirror-like he had that first day I saw him in the park, memorizing every minuscule detail. At that moment I had known Ashton was memorizing my face so when even the smallest thing went wrong, I would be the one that popped into his head as the culprit. I wondered if that was still true.
"You look beautiful," his husky voice reached my ear lowly. I didn't expect Ashton to compliment me like that. Sexy or hot was one thing, we were always making sexual jokes, but beautiful? I almost went rigid with surprise when he said that. It took everything in me to play it off with a smirk.
"Take them out for a second," he murmured, his amused smirk playing at his lips. Drawing my eyebrows together in confusion before raising one, I did as he told me anyway and removed the blue from my iris'. When I finished, I turned and looked at him. Ashton's hand cupped my jaw, tilting my head up a little more so I was staring into his eyes like last night in the woods. "The blue is pretty but your dark brown eyes beat them any day," Ashton told me, in an almost matter-of-fact way.
