Chapter 41
Ilya
I’d planned to make her mine tonight, just not on the cold bed of the forest floor. Like an animal. Rough and uncontrolled.
She deserved better than that.
The forest floor, my dog looming sentry, frost in the air.
None of that had been my plan. None of what happened tonight had been my intention.
But she ran.
The thought has a quick burn of something unpleasant swelling inside my chest. I’m not sure I believe her, even now, that she intended anything other than to escape me forever when she darted from the car into the dark forest.
Into the cold.
Fucking hell.
She’s clinging to me now, but not in the way she’d clung to me when I’d first entered my rooms. As though she feared she would die if she tore her face from its hiding place in the curve of my neck.
I’d been filled with so much rage as I stormed across the space into my bathroom. She’d been shivering so violently, and my dick was still stained with the blood of her innocence—the consequences of the brave testing I was confident she regretted, and my shattered control.
She’d meant to run from me, but I’d caught her. I promised her I would always catch her. I vowed she would always be mine.
She claims she did it with the intention to experience exactly what happened, but how can that be?
I glare at the room over her shoulder as I stalk from the bathroom with her dripping wet body in my arms. I’m leaving puddles of water on the floor with every step I take, but I don’t care.
I can care about nothing but testing the claims my little hellion has made.
She wants me.
She initiated the taking. The claiming.
She pushed me to the ledge and then challenged me to jump.
My mind flashes to the way she’d pressed her lips to mine in the bathroom when I’d shown her the cookie-scented lotion I’d bought for her. My skin feels tight and aware.
I think of the way she’d ground her ass into my cock, her knees in the snow. A low growl hums in my chest.
An image of her on her back, creamy thighs spread wide, pink pussy dripping and on display as her blue eyes dared me to take it all—the shimmering backdrop of a starry night reflecting the crystals in the snow and the challenge in her eyes. My dick throbs a painful, heavy throb.
The memory of my first thrust. Of bottoming out inside her, and the way she’d screamed, beautiful neck arched, into the night.
Home.
My body wants nothing more than to settle deep inside her again, but I won’t take her as I took her on the forest floor. I won’t claim her roughly again tonight. If I have her, it’ll be as her first time should have been. Gentle. Tender. Not with the monster that lurks under my skin clawing to break free.
I lay her on the bed of blankets that sprawls before the lit fireplace, a hum of pleasure swelling as her eyes widen with awe. A twinkle of gold catches her eye, and she cranes her neck, gasping.
“Oh, Ilya, wow.” Christ, the way she says my name. Does she know it could bring me to my knees? “How?”
“Polina and Daniil.” My voice is a rough contrast to the soft spill of hers.
“This is—” Shimmering eyes find mine as I lower my body over hers. My hands are planted into the floor on either side of her head, my knees between her spread legs. The amber flames of the fire dance with the golden glow of the Christmas tree that overlooks the scene of us, painting her freckled, flawless flesh in magic. She’s radiant.
I finish her sentence. “Beautiful.”
“You planned all this?” I don’t nod. I say nothing. Her eyes drift to the flames in the hearth and she pulls her lip between her teeth. Then her chin quivers. “I’m sorry.”
The shimmer in her eyes intensifies. My heart bleeds for her.
“Why are you sorry?” Is this when she tells me she regrets it all. That she lied, and she doesn’t want me? That her letting me in had been an act to keep me on her hook because she’d failed to lose me in the escape?
Sick rage boils my blood.
I want this woman with everything I am. I could breathe her into my lungs for the rest of my life and die a happy man.
I want her to want me. I need her to need me.
I don’t know why I thought I could steal her and command her affection. It doesn’t matter now. It’s too late to turn back. Even if she hates me, I’ll devote the rest of my days to making her fall for me. Even if she never feels for me half of what I feel for her, I will be happy.
Her eyes land on mine, and it’s like a fist to the chest. A blow to my soul.
“I ruined everything, didn’t I?”
Her voice is so quiet, so broken, I frown. “Talk to me, Little Blue.”
Her hands lift from where they’d settled on the blanket to touch my sides. Slowly, her fingertips drift over my torso, my chest, as she’d done in the shower. A single tear falls from the corner of her eye to disappear into her wet hair.
When she gets to the place where my heart thunders like a storm inside my chest, she lays her palm flat. Her eyes settle on mine. They’re like an open book, codes of emotion I need to decipher.
“You’re always so in control. Always so—so methodical. Even when you want something, you take it with calculation.” She sucks in a breath. “I wanted to experience what it might be like to make you snap. To have that control shatter. To feel what it would feel like to just have you. All of you.”
Heaven help me, but this woman will be my ruin.
She continues spilling her truth. “I ran because I knew the predator in you would chase. That you wouldn’t be able to help yourself. That you would want to punish me. I ran because—when you bought me the cream and I kissed you—and tonight—just everything.” She pauses, her truth turning jumbled on release. “I—you—Ilya…”
Watching her struggle with her words, with her emotion—she’s exquisite. Her chest heaves with every heavy breath, her hands trembling where they rest against my chest. My dick is heavy and swollen as it hovers above her wet entrance, dripping with the need to sink into her warmth.
“You what, Irelynn?”
“I don’t know how it happened.” Panic is seeping into her voice now. Her entire body is trembling, and there’s a wildness to her eyes that wasn’t there even as I stole her innocence on the forest floor. She truly looks like she might fight to flee me now, but instead, she juts her chin, resolute. “You’re not a good man. I know you’re not a good man. You’re the head of the bratva. I don’t even know what that means, but I know it’s bad.” Her lip trembles as she wets it, my eyes tracking the movement. “You’ve told me you’ve killed people—and that’s—it’s not okay. It terrifies me. You terrify me.” She releases a breath I inhale into my lungs. It burns a brand into me, scarring. “You stole me, Ilya. You. Stole. Me.” Another tear slides across her temple as she looks up at me. “You’re not a good man, and I don’t know how it happened, but it did.”
I study her. “What happened?”
Her shoulders lift in a helpless little shrug. “I fell in love with you.”
There are words I expected her to say, but those hadn’t even been at the bottom of the list. For a long moment, I can’t move or think of anything but the echo of those words as they sink into my mind, into muscle, and bone, and blood.
They settle in the void where a flicker of light warms me, resuscitated by her affection. Her love.
My eyes close, attempting to brand the image of this moment on my mind. Slowly, I lower my forehead to hers, begging, “Say it again.”
She gives me more. “You’re not a good man, but in your way, you’ve been good to me. I don’t know how or when it happened, but I fell in love with you.”
“Again.”
Her hands drift from my chest around my neck, fingertips sinking into my hair. She brushes her full, soft lips over mine. “I’m in love with you, Ilya.” She kisses me, holding nothing back. “I love you.”
I kiss her back now, letting my body fall over hers as she hugs me to her. My heart swells as she pulls me to her. I kiss her deeply, wishing I could climb inside her body and stay for eternity within her warmth. She wraps her legs around my waist, a shudder rolling through her body as I rock my length into her wet heat. My girth spreads her as I stroke my length against her, not yet sinking inside.
Pulling back from her kiss, I say, “This is what I wanted for your first time.”
There is so much guilt living within me for how I took her tonight.
She holds my eyes. “My first time was everything I wanted it to be, Ilya.”
How can that be?
How can she be this perfect?
“Little Blue.”
“Make love to me, Ilya.” She kisses me softly. “Make love to me now, gentle. Tenderly. How you imagined it.”
I groan at the thought. “We can’t.”
“Why not?” She pouts. It’s so adorable, I can’t help the spread of my grin.
I fucking love this woman.
“I just took your virginity, and I wasn’t gentle about it.”
“I’m not sorry.” I know she’s lying. She has to be.
“Not tonight, Little Blue.”
“Ilya.” She catches my face between her hands, forcing my eyes to hers. “Please.”
I’m helpless against her. She has got to know that she could ask me for the moon, and I’d find a way to give it to her.
With shattered will, I take her mouth in a deep kiss. She opens to me without any hesitation. It’s only been two months, but I have her. All of her. Mine.
I am hers. I’ll be hers until the last breath I breathe. When my dark soul departs this body, I will still be hers, clinging to her golden light, absorbed by her in death just as I am in this life.
“I love you,” I say into our kiss. “I love all the beautiful parts of you, Irelynn.”
Her legs part wider, pleading for me without words as I guide my tip to her entrance and slowly, gently, I push inside.
I just had her, but she grips me impossibly tight. With every gentle thrust of my hips, she sucks me in deeper. Little cries tangle with tiny sighs as they burst from the deep of her. I swallow every sound, devouring every little moan.
Bottoming out inside her wet heat, I pause. I kiss her mouth, her cheeks, her closed eyelids and her temples. My hands roam her body, memorizing the feel of her soft skin beneath my touch. She holds nothing back as I begin to move again, marveling at the way she moves with me. At the way she fits around me and beneath me.
“You were made for me.” I grip her hip as I begin to pump steadily, my rhythm still slow even if it”s a bit more aggressive.
Her soft moans turn ragged as she clings to me, her hips rocking into mine, meeting me thrust for thrust.
“You’re perfect.” I kiss her throat. “You feel so good around me.”
Her breath hitches as we climb higher and higher. I grip her hip in my hand, pulling out completely before I sink to the hilt. I do this again and again, watching the way her breasts bounce every time I fill her.
I feel her body tighten around mine, the quiver of her pleasure under my touch. She’s close.
I pull out and thrust in long and slow and deep.
“Oh, Ilya.”
I love when she says my name.
“Oh—oh my?—”
“Let go, baby. Come for me.” I kiss her, swallowing her cries of release as she shatters around me.
I thrust through the waves of her orgasm, feeling my own build. Then, as the pressure climaxes, my body tightens, and I root myself deep inside her. Seed spills deep, filling her up as I pump wave after wave of my cum into her tight pussy.
Staying rooted deep inside her, I murmur against her lips, “Home. I’m home.”