Chapter 9 #2
The building is quietly expensive, the kind of place that doesn’t need to announce itself. The doorman is expecting me. The elevator is fast and silent, and I watch my own reflection in its mirrored doors and notice that I look nervous, which I am, though I couldn’t cleanly say about which part.
Pavel. The person or people who might have followed me to him. Hell, even Vet at this point.
Operations, my ass.
Pavel opens the door himself. He looks at me for a moment with those pale, careful eyes, reading me the way he always does, and then he asks me, specifically and without preamble, whether I took a cab or a rideshare, whether I paid cash, whether the address I gave was the one he specified, and whether I noticed anyone on the walk over.
“I followed every instruction to the letter. You know I did.”
Something in his posture settles by a fraction. “Good.”
The penthouse is spare and immaculate and very high up, and the city spreads out beyond the windows like something spilled, all light and dark and cold geometry.
I stand in front of those windows for a moment and look out at it and think about the fact that he lives up here above all of it, and I feel the question I haven’t resolved shift and settle in my chest like a stone finding the bottom.
He comes to stand beside me at the window. Close, but not touching. Looking out at the same city. “Care for a drink?”
“No. I’m fine.”
After a moment, he says my name, quietly, and I turn to look at him, and his expression is the one I have no clean word for, and I stand there with the city blazing below us and everything Vet told me still somewhere in the back of my mind.
I think, I know what you are. I know it more clearly tonight than I did a month ago. I know what lives on the other side of that line you draw, and I know that you draw it carefully, and I know that I am standing on the safer side of it because you put me here deliberately.
I don’t know if that’s enough. I don’t know if it should be.
He reaches up and tucks a strand of hair back from my face, unhurried, with those careful, rough fingers, and the stone in my chest doesn’t go anywhere, but the question quiets.
I let him pull me into his arms, and the city burns on below us indifferently, and I stop thinking about dark corners the moment his lips land on mine.
“Pet, you worry me.” His voice is low and soft in a way that feels like a caress over my skin.
“I worry you?” Laughable, considering our circumstances.
But there’s some faraway look in his eyes, and his jaw flexes. “Every time I am not with you, I worry.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
“Da.” Those thick fingers smooth over my cheek, then hook around the back of my neck in one quick motion as he pulls me to him again. His tongue pries into my mouth, and just like that, my mind quiets.
He takes my clothes off one piece at a time until I’m naked in front of that tall window wall. All of Manhattan could see me now, if only they were as high up as his penthouse.
They are not.
“Look at the city, pet.”
I face the window, and he picks my hands up to place them on the glass. It feels precarious, like I might fall straight through it. But I know I won’t.
Pavel would never let me fall.
His large, warm hands skate all over my body until they settle between my thighs and cup my pussy. A rumbling exhalation flutters through my hair as he massages me there. “I love that you’re always wet for me.”
“I love that you’re always hard for me.”
“A match made in heaven.”
Or a match made in hell, considering what I know about you.
I swat the thought away. I’m here to enjoy him, not get caught up in whatever else he has going on in his life. And then his fingertips draw circles around my clit, and I’m not caught up in anything but him.
“The whole city will see you come tonight, pet.”
My breaths shorten. “Prove it.”
“Giving me orders? That’s a spanking.”
I grin at the city and slightly arch myself to receive that spanking.
“Oh, pet, you are in a mood, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
One hand stays on my clit, while the other gives me a sharp spank.
Both get me closer to something good. He keeps at it—circle, spank, circle, spank—until my wetness trails down my inner thighs.
Then the spanking hand switches it up. Those fingers enter me from behind, while the others stay on my clit, and fireworks launch in my brain when I come hard, gasping his name.
With that, he scoops me up and carries me to his bedroom. It’s almost exactly what I expected. Spartan, like the rest of the place, and dark. Even the sheets are a rich navy blue. But what I did not expect was the lighting system beneath the bed. That’s where most of the light comes from.
Which has the effect of keeping the room almost entirely dark.
He lays me on the bed and strips, flinging his clothes somewhere, before he climbs onto the bed with me. I move to join him, but he quietly says, “Wait. I have wanted you in my bed a long time, pet. I am not rushing tonight.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He lies on his side and slowly touches me all over, as if he’s memorizing the feel of every inch of my skin.
My eyes have adjusted to the darkness, so I see him more clearly now.
The lines on his face. The tattoos on his left arm and pec—various and mostly black.
Silver chest hair, trimmed short, distorts them.
All the other times we’ve been together, there was an air of, “Hurry up!” but not this time.
This time, it’s just us. Here. Safe. No one to walk in on us.
So I go slow too, taking in every inch of him. As I explore him in return, though, I find it’s impossible to hold anything back. I replace my fingers with my mouth, kissing him all over. To my surprise, he lets me.
When I take his cock in my mouth, he groans, “Fuck yes.” His big hand laces into my hair, guiding me at his pace until my eyes water.
Then he pushes me down a little more, making me gag.
I moan on his cock, and he pulls me up his body.
“Enough foreplay. Need you.” He sets me onto his cock, and I move until he starts to enter me.
I’m too aroused, and sometimes that makes me tighter. Now is one of those times, so when he starts, my brain slides into cavewoman mode, because all my regular thinking is unavailable.
Big. Thick. Too much.
He abruptly sits up, which has the effect of pulling some of his length from me, and I can breathe again. When he kisses me and holds me tight, there is nothing else. Not air. Not space.
Us.
We move together, our bodies knowing exactly what to do.
He rolls, I ride, and then I’m on my back with him on top, dizzy from the sudden movement and my impending orgasm.
He knows exactly how to make me come, long, slow strokes against my G-spot, and the man meant it when he said he’d take his time tonight, because he’s doing exactly that.
Long. Slow.
I’m shaking beneath him, and he stares into my eyes as he laces his fingers with mine, pinning me to the bed as he fucks me so slowly I could cry. But then it hits, and I’m on another planet, floating outside my body as he rides me. Ecstasy, pure and warranted.
He makes me come again and again, rolls me over, flattens me to the bed and enters me from behind, from in front, from the side.
He grips my hip to pull me down his length, his teeth in my shoulder, growling against my flesh.
Another orgasm comes and goes, and as I cry out, my body arches to meet his for more. Always more.
He comes in me, on my back, on my tits. And then he’s hard again. If he’s not hard again, his mouth is on me. His fingers. I can’t get enough, and neither can he.
When he’s spent, truly spent, he lies back and huffs at the ceiling. I do the same and feel sleep coming for me.
Then I hear an odd buzzing sound and sit up. “Turn on the lights.”
“What? Why?”
“Turn on the lights!”
“Lights.” They come up, responding to his voice. “What’s wrong, pet?”
“I hear a bee. I’m allergic to bees!”
Now all I hear is his laughter. It’s odd at first. But I look over at him, and he’s clenching his flat stomach in a laughing fit.
“What the fuck is funny—”
He moves, and a vibrator lands on my lap. I jerk away before I realize what it is.
“The fuck, Pavel?”
“There is no bee.” He wipes his eyes since he teared up from laughing so hard. “I… I had thought to pleasure you in a new way, Molly. Since I cannot perform the normal ways.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I do not kid about making you feel good. I am sorry for the confusion just now, and I will be sure to alert you to any bees or vibrators in the future.”
I snort. “Did you just make a joke?”
“Perhaps I did.”
I reach for it and turn the vibrator off. “Well, we don’t need this anymore. Not tonight, anyway.”
“But you are not done—”
“I am so done.”
He arches a brow. “You’re sure?”
I nod and yawn and lie on his shoulder, which prompts him to wrap me in his arms. “This. This is exactly what I need.”
He sighs deeply, relaxing into it. “As do I. I merely wished for you to get everything you want from me.”
“I have. I am.”
Everything but the truth from your own lips.
But realistically, at what point does a pakhan tell his… girlfriend? Mistress? I don’t know what we are to each other. So why would he tell me all his deep, dark secrets?
I push the question aside for more snuggles with a man who might be a monster.