Chapter 39 Stefan
STEFAN
The call that got me out of bed earlier than I would’ve liked turns out to be nothing. I’d received reports of an attack on Safonov Bratva property, but turns out, “attack” is a bit of a misnomer.
I arrive on site to see that the damage is nothing spectacular. A few broken windows, some spray-painted obscenities on the brick facade of my Charlestown warehouse. Run-of-the-mill vandalism, the kind that happens every day all over the city.
The important takeaway is that it’s nothing Bratva-related. Nothing that screams targeted hit or seems connected to whatever Iakov is cooking up with the feds.
I’m trying to work up some justified violent anger about the whole thing and I just can’t manage it.
Because it’s Olivia filling my head instead.
Specifically, Olivia as she looked sprawled across my sheets this morning, her dark hair a mess against my pillow, her naked body still marked from my teeth.
I stood in the doorway as she slept, irritated by my own inability to look away.
Irritated that, even unconscious, she commanded my attention.
It’s a hostile fucking takeover. The woman has invaded my home, my thoughts, and now, my self-control. I don’t like it.
I don’t like how long I stood there and looked at her while she slept. Head to toe, hip to lip. I looked at every goddamn bruise and hickey I left on her and reminisced about exactly how I made each one. I was so hard I felt light-headed.
I forced myself to leave before she woke. One sleepy smile from those lips and I would have crawled back into bed and stayed there to do it all over again.
Weakness. That’s what it is.
And I despise weakness, especially my own.
It makes no fucking sense. I’ve had her—several times now. Fast. Slow. Primal. Passionate. All the ways that usually sate my hunger.
I should be fucking done with her at this point. The obsession to claim her should be fading. That’s how it’s always worked before—conquest achieved, interest diminished. Onto the next.
But with Olivia, each taste only sharpens my hunger. The scientist in her would probably have a sterile explanation. Something about dopamine receptors or biological compatibility, some shit like that.
I just know it’s becoming a fucking liability.
When I get back home, I park in the garage and go straight to my office, bypassing the urge to go check on Olivia in my bedroom. I sit behind my desk, straighten reports that don’t need straightening, and align my pen perfectly parallel to my notebook’s edge.
Control. Order. These are the foundations of my empire and my sanity.
They’re in short supply these days.
A message from Mikayla flashes on my screen: Weird comments appearing on AFS Instagram. She follows it with a few screen grabs of comments from anonymous accounts with blank avatars. “Sleeping your way to success, Dr. A?” and “How much does Safonov charge for his ‘special investments’?”
A flash of rage ripples through me, white-hot and immediate. The fury I couldn’t summon for my vandalized property surges now in full force.
I look down to see my fingers curled into a fist.
Mikayla: This has Walsh’s fingerprints. Want me to handle it?
I take a controlled breath, ironing out the tension from my shoulders, leashing down the impulse to call Walsh’s clinic myself.
STEFAN: Monitor only. Track any escalation. If it’s Walsh, I’ll handle it myself.
Just as I’m hitting send and imagining violent scenarios of setting fire to Walsh and her offices, a sound at the door draws my attention.
“Good morning.” Olivia’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “Working hard or hardly working?”
I glance up and my mouth goes dry. She stands in my doorway, one hand resting on the frame, the other on her hip.
Her blouse has an extra button undone, revealing a hint of lace beneath.
The same kind of pencil skirt I’ve seen on her a dozen times before somehow looks different today—tighter, shorter, or maybe it’s just the way she’s standing, hip cocked to one side.
With her looking like that, I’m working hard, alright. Rock hard.
“Busy.” I look down at the papers on my desk. Anyone with half a brain could tell it’s a silent dismissal, but she ignores it.
Not only does she ignore it, but she ventures closer. The way she does it makes my eyebrows raise. Is she jutting her hips out more? Bending over farther than she needs to as she approaches? Is she gnawing at her bottom lip?
She perches on the edge of my desk, close enough that the heat of her thigh radiates against my hand. The scent of her wafts around me. Blyat’, I’ll have to burn my sheets to get rid of the smell. Might have to burn my desk, too.
I raise my head slowly as she toys coquettishly with the ends of her hair. “This act doesn’t suit you,” I remark.
She shrugs and shifts. Her skirt rides up her thigh. My eyes snap to the flash of skin before I can jerk them away.
The small smirk on her mouth tells me she caught it all.
“I don’t know what you mean.” She crosses her legs, sending the skirt even higher. One shove and it could be bunched around her hips. I could lay her out flat, fall to my knees, and—
“I wanted to thank you for last night,” she continues in a purr.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” A faint blush creeps up her neck and she trails it with her finger, dragging her nail along a pale purple bruise on her collarbone. “A man has never… claimed me like that. The way you touched me… the way you made me… Well, I’ve never—”
“I remember what I did.”
She leans forward, her blouse billowing open to reveal the edge of her bra. “And the donation to the clinic. That was… unexpected.”
“That had nothing to do with last night,” I grit out. “It wasn’t a fucking payout.”
She reaches out to touch the back of my hand where it rests on the desk. “I know. It just shows how well this arrangement is working. How much we trust each other.”
“Trust,” I repeat.
If she had any idea what was going on in my head right now, she wouldn’t trust me enough to be sitting this close.
What’s that thing Mikayla was talking about the other week? How some poll said that women lost in the woods would rather come across a bear than a man?
Well, right now, I’m the fucking bear.
She nods, eyes bright, lip full. “We have a mutually beneficial arrangement. A perfect understanding.” Her tongue darts out, pink and playful.
“Cut the fucking act, Olivia. What do you want?”
She doesn’t flinch at my tone—another warning sign. The Olivia I’ve come to know would have bitten back.
“Freedom. Just for an hour.” When my expression hardens, she quickly adds, “For work. I have an important client meeting that I can’t miss.”
The memory of bullets whizzing past her head flashes in my mind. “Absolutely not.”
A frown punctures her damsel-in-distress act. “You told me I wasn’t a hostage. If that’s true, then let me go. My company needs—”
“Your safety matters more than your company.”
“Actually, asshole, nothing matters more than my company.” She catches herself getting feisty and tries to veer back toward the weird mix of professionalism and seduction that she seems to think will sway me. “I can’t let a potential client slip away. She specifically requested to meet alone.”
“Then I’ll accompany you,” I offer.
But she’s shaking her head before I’m halfway done speaking. “Women’s reproductive health is intimate, Stefan. She won’t discuss her fertility issues with a man looming nearby.”
“Then she won’t get to discuss anything with you at all.” I push back from my desk and start to stand. “I’m not risking your safety for—”
Olivia moves faster than I expect. Her hands come down on the arms of my chair to cage me in. Our faces are inches apart as she holds my gaze.
“Please,” she whispers. “Just… please.”
Slowly, her eyes never leaving mine, she drops to her knees between my legs. I know exactly what she’s doing. And I know how I should respond: stop this and remind her that I can’t be persuaded by sex.
No matter how good she looks kneeling in front of me.
But I can’t bring myself to say the words.
“Well, I guess if you’re so worried,” she murmurs, her fingers trailing up my thighs, “you could always come for me—I mean, with me…”
The not-so-accidental slip of the tongue lingers between us as she frees me from my pants, drawing a groan from my throat. But the groan dissolves as she bends forward and wraps her red lips around me.
I watch her like I’m in a daze, motionless as she swallows me down, her lipstick smudging against my skin.
I grab a fistful of her hair, holding her to me as the vibration of her moan sizzles through my bones.
I should stop this.
I don’t.
She pulls up to circle her tongue around my tip. I drop my head as pleasure builds at the base of my spine. “Fuck, Olivia.”
When I look down, she’s smiling around me. Mouth full of my cock and fucking smirking.
I know she’s manipulating me… but I also know she’s fucking enjoying it. I can’t bear to make her stop.
My cock twitches against her tongue. I might as well scream that I’m on edge and about to explode.
Taking it like a challenge, Olivia sucks me deeper.
The pull to finish in her mouth is strong, but it’s not enough. I’m not ready to be finished. Before I can consider the consequences, I fist her hair and drag her off of me with a pop. Then I haul her into my lap.
Just like I thought it would, her skirt bunches up around her waist easily. It only takes one swipe of her silk panties to push them to the side. “You’re so wet, lisichka.”
She places her hands on my chest, back arched. The sight of her unravels me—hair falling in dark waves, lipstick smudged, pupils blown wide with desire. A flush spreads across her chest and her thighs tremble in anticipation.
“I was going to let you finish like that,” she whispers.
“Don’t want to waste it,” I lie instead of telling her the truth, which is that I’ve been thinking about being inside of her again since the second we finished last night.
I pull her onto me in a single, brutal stroke.
She cries out—and just like that, I know she isn’t acting anymore.
Her body remembers mine. The wet heat of her grips me, silky-smooth. My hands find her hips and guide her up and down.
She collapses against me, her face nuzzled in my throat. When she whimpers in my ear, it becomes beyond obvious that she thought one fast, sneaky little blowjob would be enough to get her way. She thought I’d be that easily convinced.
In some ways, she was right.
She just underestimated my hunger.
“Tell me the fucking truth,” I demand as I gather up a handful of her hair and peel her head back so she has no choice but to look me in the eye. “Tell me what you really wanted when you came in here. Not a meeting. Not freedom. What was it?”
“You,” she breathes out. She’s so lost in sensation that I know it’s the truth. “Please, Stefan. Please let me come.”
I don’t want it to end that fast, but the unexpectedness of this encounter is fucking shredding my self-control to pieces. And she’s so tight, and so wet, and so fucking beautiful when she whimpers like that…
And her body is right there, breasts bouncing in front of me, hot breaths escaping her lips on every moaned exhale…
And she’s so desperate, so needy, in a way no one ever dares to be around me, because I’m the kind of man who takes and takes, a selfish bastard, a cruel son of a bitch, that’s all I am…
Fuck it. So be it.
She sought me out.
Maybe, for once, I can give.
So I do. I give her my orgasm and I give her hers. We claim them greedily at the same time as I empty myself in her for the second time in the last twelve hours.
That’s not my biggest sin, though. My biggest sin is that, right as I’m almost there, I impulsively lean forward and kiss her.
That’s how we come: sealed together at the waist and sealed together at the mouth, sharing a single breath of air back and forth.
It’s only when my orgasm is finally finished ravaging me that I realize what I’ve done and break away. Olivia collapses against me, too weak to hold herself up right.
Still wrapped around me, she whispers against my ear, one last time, “… Please.”
I don’t know who manipulated who anymore. I no longer know where the game ends and real desire begins—for either of us.
The same way it did when she dropped to her knees, my resolve crumbles.
“One hour,” I grit out. “You get one hour… and I wait in the car.”
“Thank you, Stefan.”
I feel her soften with relief.
And, fucking hell… I like knowing it was because of me.