Chapter 17
17
ROMAN
D arya is quiet in the car as I drive us up to the lab. The rocky mountain landscape is lit gold in the dying afternoon sun. She stares at it through the window, her face turned away from me. The light turns her skin to a glowing, buttery sheen. With her hair in a loose knot on her head, a few strands drifting about her face, she has an incandescent beauty that makes my heart twist. Her hands rest on her belly, one thumb stroking mindlessly back and forth over the thin fabric of her sundress. She seems entirely turned inward.
I need her.
It isn’t only the sexual desire, although that is always there between us. I need her smile, her touch. After Sergei’s revelations, I need to know that Darya and I are connected, that we’re both safe.
That we are here, together.
On a broad curve there is a scenic lookout point, bordered by granite boulders. I pull the car into the gravel, facing it out over the valley below, and step out, walking around to open her door. I give Darya my hand and she takes it, moving straight into my embrace. I wrap my arms around her body, shivering as hers go about me. One hand cradles her head against my chest, the other at the base of her spine, pressing her body flush against my own. She smells of vanilla and coconut, feels warm and vital against me. When my thumb touches her jaw, I can feel the rigid tension beneath her velvet skin. I stroke her face softly, feeling the tension slowly melt from her body and my own heartbeat gradually settle against hers. We stand like that for a long time, the shadows slowly growing around us, just breathing.
When Darya pulls back, her face is wet with tears. “I’m sorry.” Her voice hitches, her eyes on mine wide and dark with hurt.
“For what?” I hold her face, using my hands to collect her tears.
She shakes her head, her eyes fluttering closed then opening again. “That your mother has been alive all this time. For the secrets my father kept from you. For... all of this.” She drops her forehead against my chest, her head still shaking, as if she can somehow push away the revelations of the past hour.
I kiss the top of her head, inhaling her essence like a tonic. “None of this is your fault. None of it, Darya. Neither of us are responsible for the sins of our parents.”
“You have nothing to be responsible for. Your parents did nothing to deserve any of this.”
“That’s not entirely true.” She looks up, frowning. “The conversation I told your father about, the one I overheard between him and my parents? I need to tell you what was said.” I lead her over to one of the boulders looking out over the valley. Drawing her down to sit opposite me, I take her hands and tell her everything I recall of what was said between Sergei and my parents.
“Sergei didn’t want my mother to run,” I say at the end. “He wanted to protect my parents and me. It was Rosa who insisted she had to leave, and my father who forced Sergei to let her go. Whatever Sergei’s faults, and whatever else I might lay at his door, I can’t blame your father for my parents’ decisions.” I tip her face up so she meets my eyes. “And you shouldn’t either.”
She shakes her head again, that wordless gesture of rebuttal, as if trying to push away all she’s learned. “How can you defend him?” Her voice isn’t quite steady, tears brimming again. She swipes her eyes angrily. “God, I wish I could stop crying.”
I touch her cheek. “You have reason enough.” It occurs to me that I’ve seen Darya close to tears more in the past day than ever before. She’s not given to fits of crying, normally holds her emotions tightly within. I guess the trials of the past week would test anyone’s resilience. “I’m not defending Sergei.” I pause, searching for the right words. “But perhaps I understand him.”
“You’re joking.” She frowns at me. “Are you saying he did the right thing, concealing Rosa’s identity from me as well as from you? I still can’t believe he did that.” She goes on without waiting for an answer. “You have no idea how difficult it was, getting to Argentina. An entire sea of immigrants was coming the other way, and none of them understood why we were going south. Nobody wanted to help us. Papa was sick, and I’d never gone further than the walls of our compound without security. I might as well have been an infant, for all I knew about the world. I trusted Papa implicitly. Everything he told me to do, I did. So when we got to Argentina, and he told me his contact was too dangerous for me to meet, I believed him.”
Her face hardens. It hurts me to see her pain, the effect of those years.
“I took Papa to meet this contact in an apartment building in a run-down part of Buenos Aires. He made me leave him in the foyer. I remember the floor was pockmarked, paint peeling off the walls. I wanted to stay and try to catch a glimpse of this person we’d battled mud, hunger, and exhaustion to find. But I’d been raised in a household where men took care of business and women took care of the kitchen. Papa’s word was law. When he told me to leave, I obeyed his orders. Never once did he tell me it was a woman he was meeting, or anything about who she was, why she was important. Why didn’t he tell me?” The palpable hurt in her voice breaks my heart. “Why couldn’t he just trust me? And what is so damned important about the Naryshkin treasure that it needs all this secrecy? It’s just... stuff, no matter how valuable. How can it truly matter to them all so much that they’d tear all of our lives apart, just to keep the contents of that vault safe?”
She’s crying again, and I wrap her in my arms, rocking her until the sobs subside, stroking her gently as my shirt turns damp.
“I don’t understand it either.” My lips rub against the silken mass of hair. “I guess there’s more to the story. Maybe we’ll find out, after all this is over. I just couldn’t listen to any more today.”
“Me either.” Her voice is muffled against my chest. “I was too angry, and your face when he told you about Rosa...” She lifts her head and without warning kisses me, her mouth fierce on mine.
I understand it. I understand this , the primal need for connection in place of words.
I take her passion and return it, my hands twined in her hair, my body suddenly raging with need. I want her with a blind, mindless urgency.
“Oh God, Roman.” Her moan against my mouth rips through my body, sending my dick into overdrive. Her hands delve into my shirt, and the soft cry she gives when she touches my chest has my body pounding for hard, fast release.
I’m also horribly aware that since her return, our only time together was exactly that.
I can feel her devastation and hurt. Darya already knows how desperately I want her.
She also needs to know how fiercely I love her.
I stand and move us both to the Maybach. Hitching Darya onto the hood, I spread her legs and stand between them, her musky scent hot and intoxicating. I tug the sundress down to her waist, releasing the clasp of her bra. Her breasts surge into sight, somehow even more lush and rich than I remember, tawny in the afternoon light. The swollen buds atop them thrust toward me as she arches her back, moaning, and my good intentions are almost shot to hell right there.
Forcing my lust under control, I bend my head to her, taking first one creamy mound then the other, and she cries out, her hands in my hair pulling my face against her. I lathe her with my tongue, her body twisting under me as she pushes herself into my mouth. She seems to swell under my tongue, her whole body bucking under my touch.
I’m achingly hard, and reveling in it.
“Roman,” she gasps, arching toward me, the thin material of her sundress and my suit pants doing nothing to mask the heat of her against my cock. “That feels so good.”
I grunt in answer, rolling one of her nipples between my finger and thumb, devouring the other. I’m obsessed with the sight of her arched naked on the hood, glowing and golden like some kind of ancient goddess. I love this, the way her body comes immediately to life, racing toward orgasm the moment my hands are on her. It’s a heady rush, more powerful than any high-speed engine could ever be. My dick is rock-hard and desperate for release, but despite the fact that we’re bared to the sight of anyone who might come around the corner, and the fact that an entire team is waiting for us at the lab, I don’t want to rush.
I press her breasts close together and bend my head to them as her soft, panting moans become louder, music to my ears.
“Oh.” Her head goes back. “Oh, Roman. Don’t stop. Don’t stop...”
I lift my head just before she tips over the edge, capturing her mouth, my hands in her hair. Her breasts are completely bared, the sundress bunched around her waist but still covering her thighs. I stand slightly back from her and she gasps, her eyes flying open.
“Look at me,” I growl.
Her molten eyes stare into mine, her lips swollen and parted from my mouth. Slowly, deliberately, I inch the sundress up her legs, my thumbs inching closer to the heat at her center. A slight breeze stirs her hair, brushing tendrils over my face. She quivers as I massage her inner thighs with my thumbs, spreading her legs wide for me.
“I think you need this as much as I do.”
Her sharp intake of breath as I speak travels straight through me. I edge my hands up her thighs, feeling the tension in them. I pull my shirt off, and she gasps at the contact as her nipples, swollen and wet from my mouth, come up against my naked chest. Her cry makes my cock leap.
“Did you think about my hands on you when we were apart?” My hands clench around her thighs, just hard enough to make her gasp.
She nods.
“Say it.”
“I thought— oh— I thought about your hands on me.”
“Nobody else but me will ever touch you like this. Say it.” I circle my thumbs on her upper thighs, one maddening inch away from a pair of rose-colored silk panties that are dark with her arousal.
“Nobody else will ever— ah —touch me like this.” She gasps the words, quivering in anticipation.
I touch her lower lip with my tongue, and she makes a soft, breathy noise that makes my cock jerk in anticipation. I hook my fingers through her underwear and pull them off, pushing her sundress up to join the top half at her waist, spreading her legs wide so she’s exposed completely, not taking my eyes from hers.
“You know what I thought about? What I couldn’t stop thinking about?”
She shakes her head slowly, her eyes on mine as dark as if she’s drugged, wet lips parted, breath hitching in her throat.
“I thought about how you moan when I touch you here.” I draw one finger down the crease between thigh and heat, and she quivers, then goes utterly still, her eyes locked on mine. “How delicious it is to feel you swell under my hand.” My thumbs gently manipulate her folds, rolling the swelling bud beneath them, and she moans. I put my mouth close to her ear. “How fucking hot it feels when I finally touch you.”
My thumb slides over her clit, and she grips my shoulders, her cry cutting the air.
“Christ, Darya.” She’s slick and needy, her clit a throbbing pulse under my thumb as I slip a finger inside her. I let her rock on it with increasing urgency, her hands clutching my shoulders.
“Most of all,” I growl, finally releasing my cock, “I thought about being inside you.”
The glazed light in her eyes as she looks down between us sends me into overdrive. She wraps her hand around my throbbing shaft, and I leap at her touch. I slip another finger inside her, groaning at the wet heat of the ribbed walls inside. I dip my head to her breasts again, and she bucks wildly against me, her hand curled around my cock, stroking me with increasing urgency. Her lips touch the shell of my ear.
“I don’t want to wait,” she whispers, and I throb fiercely in her hand. “I want your cock, Roman. I need you inside me.”
My hands slip under her ass, cupping and spreading her so she’s laid out before me in a swollen, glistening feast. I stare at her slick folds, my mouth watering. “I have to eat you,” I say roughly.
“No—I’ll come—”
“I don’t give a fuck.” I lower my face to her, and she screams at the first long stroke of my tongue, her heels scrabbling for purchase, hands in my hair as she thrusts herself into my mouth. I leave my fingers inside the hot tunnel, covering her clit with my mouth. I bathe her with my tongue, groaning at the sweet taste, working her impossibly swollen core until she’s bucking against me.
“ Roman! ”
Her orgasm hits with savage immediacy. She clenches around my fingers, pulsing into my mouth, and I ride the long, intense waves with her, my cock so fucking hard it’s painful. When I lift my head her eyes are closed, her body still rippling around my hand. Spread and wet on the black surface, she’s never looked fucking hotter.
“Stay there, milaia ,” I say against her ear, my body surging as I ready my cock . “Stay with me.”
I enter her with a driving intensity, and her scream echoes around the valley.
Deep inside her, the ripples milk me like a thousand tiny fronds. My hands under her ass pull her down to meet me, and when I angle myself up and find the magic fit, she bucks again.
“Oh.” The moan rips from deep inside her. “Roman, that’s it. I’m still coming...”
“I know, milaia . I can feel you all over my cock.” It’s all I can do to retain control, but I don’t want this to end. Her fierce, pulsing contractions around my shaft are a paradise I want to lose myself in, an island of mindless sensation amid the darkness all around us. I thrust deeply and deliberately, gasping at every tightening of her body, reveling in her small cries. The savage ripples fade, but she keeps rocking with me, a slow, deep rhythm that has me groaning her name and muttering an endless stream of mindless words into her ear.
“You’re so fucking hot, milaia . So wet and tight.”
She moans, jerking against me.
“Christ, Darya, the way you feel...” I hold out as long as I can, riding the crest of the storm with every stroke. But then she grips my arms and her movements begin to speed up.
“I’m going to come again.” She says it breathlessly, and I lose my shit.
I drive into her with a roar and with the hard, fierce strokes that tip us both over the edge. Her walls convulse around me, and I erupt in a hot, pulsing torrent that pours from the base of my spine, almost blinding in intensity.
We cling to one another until the last of the waves finally abates.
Darya peeks up at me, my cock still inside her. “Lucky this is a quiet road.”
We laugh softly, our bodies still joined, arms around each other, because sometimes when the intensity is too much, laughing is the only thing left to do.