Chapter 13 - Adrian
Sitting in the chair in my home office, I’m not even facing the computer. I’ve got the whole chair turned to face the window, and I’m watching Winter play its wild tune outside in the garden. The wind is whipping through the trees, and the ground is frosted and white.
I’ve been staring out of the window for over an hour. And with each passing moment, I am becoming more and more angry with myself.
It’s out of control.
This intense desire I have for Athena is now completely out of control.
I should never have kissed her. Before I kissed her, I never knew how she tasted, or how she felt beneath my touch. I never knew, and it was better that way. Even though it was still a challenge to keep my hands off her, it wasn’t as difficult as this is now.
Because now I have been teased.
How the hell do I stop myself from thinking about her?
Fuck.
How she moved against me.
Those soft, beautiful sounds of pleasure that danced from her lips and made her arch against me.
Fuck! I can’t stop picturing it. Over and over again. How she spread her legs wider and how her fingers pressed into my side when I ran my fingers over her sweet, honeyed clit.
“Fuck!” I snarl out loud, frustrated with myself, on edge, and pushed to my limits.
And she’s a virgin. A fucking virgin. Could it actually be any more perfect than that? No man has ever touched her, ever tasted her. I would be the first.
The problem is that she still doesn’t trust me. And why should she? I’m a criminal. I come from a world that terrifies her. To her, I am dangerous, a risk that might not be worth taking.
But that sweetness. That softness.
I have no right to want her. I haven’t earned her trust or the right to take something so personal from her. Something so special.
But I still can’t stop thinking about it.
It’s consumed me for three days now. Three days since I kissed her. Three days since we have had any kind of real conversation because we’ve both been avoiding each other.
Shoving the chair backward, I stand up, wanting to punch something to release some of the pent-up agitation inside me.
Punching won’t help anything, though.
Heading downstairs, I decide I’ll have a whisky. At least it might take the edge off. Just to settle the thoughts and stop my head from spinning out of control.
I storm down the stairs with a figurative dark cloud following me. I can’t remember the last time I was this moody. It’s been ages. Maybe…yes. When I fought with Anka. Dammit. That was not a good time. I don’t need to go back there.
Like some kind of taunt toward my own thoughts, as I reach the bottom of the stairs, who should come through the front door—Anka.
“Hi!” she says happily, smiling as she closes the door behind her. “I wanted to pop in and see how things were going,” she says, walking over to me to hug me hello.
I wrap one arm around her, stiffly hugging her back.
“Jeez, what’s wrong with you? You’re as tense as a plank of wood,” she groans, pulling a face at me. “That was a horrible hug.”
“Nothing,” I huff, letting out a heavy breath and trying to adjust my face, which I’m sure looks exactly how I feel. “How are you?” I ask, forcing a smile onto my face.
“Right. Nothing,” she says sarcastically, not impressed with me for lying to her.
I think the lying was the biggest failure between us.
I lied to Anka about so many things. Every time I opened my mouth to speak to her, it was a lie, and it was all with the single-minded goal of controlling her.
When I found out she was with Viktor, I wanted to tear the world down and drag her back to my side.
My ego was destroyed. My ego wanted to take revenge.
How dare she be with my enemy!? How dare she stab me in the back like that!
? I was horrified, and I went out of my way, did everything I could, to make sure she left him.
I lied.
I threatened his life.
Essentially, I made her choose between her own happiness and me killing the guy.
And at the time, I might have meant it. But I knew he was too strong for me to take down like that.
I told her otherwise, though. I made her believe that his family was too weak to stand up to me, and they would never have been able to protect him.
I gave her no choice in the end. She had to leave him. She had to come back to me.
And ultimately, it was all my ego. Me, controlling my family. What I did was cruel, and I have spent night after night obsessing over how much darkness I had in me to allow myself to do something like that to someone I love.
It broke her. It hurt her. And I thought she would never forgive me.
But she did.
She actually found it in her heart to forgive me.
But the forgiveness is still new, and I am fully aware of this because the guilt of what I did is still so heavy.
I can’t lie to her ever again, or it will destroy how far we’ve come in rebuilding our relationship.
I guess, even if I lied to her now and said everything is fine, it doesn’t take a genius to see through it.
“Adrian,” she scolds me, pursing her lips and raising her brows.
“Dammit,” I huff. “Sorry, I’m having a shit day,” I groan.
She tilts her head to the side, studying my face. “Is this about someone in particular?” she asks, narrowing her gaze.
“It could be about anything. You can make assumptions that it’s narrowed down to one person,” I huff, walking away from her, heading into the living room. “It could be something and not someone,” I say defensively.
Anka laughs, a quiet little laugh from behind me.
“It’s about her, isn’t it?” she asks, following me into the living room. She has a cheeky told-you-so tone in her voice. A little know-it-all taunt.
I pour a whisky to buy myself time to think about my answer. “Want one?” I ask.
“No thanks, I just had a coffee. But come on, spill the beans. Tell me what’s really going on,” she pushes. “Am I right? Is it about her?”
I flop onto the sofa with my drink, and she sits nearby, turning her body to face me.
“Come on, Adrian, very few things can get you into such a grumpy mood.”
“I know, I know. It’s just… I don’t know…I was…I wanted to….”
“You like her, don’t you!” she says excitedly. “You like her, and you don’t know what to do about it,” she blurts out.
I clench my jaw and roll my eyes. “Yeah. I like her and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Well, have you spoken to her? Does she know?”
“Not…. exactly. We kissed. But… look, she doesn’t know me. I can’t force things to happen between us. I’m going a little crazy, though, because I can’t stop thinking about her, and I think that kissing her made things worse because she doesn’t really want anything to do with me now,” I sigh.
“That’s probably just your mind toying with you. Maybe the kiss overwhelmed her or something. Maybe she is nervous about how she feels, too, and doesn’t know how to talk to you about it?” Anka asks. “You can be quite daunting to approach when it comes to sensitive topics,” she says.
“I’m not daunting!” I disagree.
“You're kind of. If she likes you and doesn’t know you feel the same way, she might be terrified to say so,” she suggests.
The idea gives me the smallest bit of hope. It’s possible. But then I think about the horror on her face just before she bolted from the shooting range.
“I don’t know,” I shrug.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“Give her space. I reckon that if I give her time, she’ll let me know what she actually wants. Whether it’s with words or how she acts toward me, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out,” I grumble.
“You’re letting her decide?” My sister sounds surprised.
“Yes. I don’t want to go tell her I like her when she is in a position where she needs a place to stay and needs protection from her father…
then maybe she says she likes me too, only because she feels obliged to say it.
” I talk, letting my thoughts all spill out.
I’ve tried to think of this from every angle. Every reason. Every option.
“The bottom line is that I have to give her the space to make up her own mind,” I say, coming to the same conclusion I have come to every time I think about it. “So, I don’t want to bring up this specific topic with her.”
Anka smiles. She looks quietly satisfied and almost proud of me.
“What’s that look for?” I ask, scrunching my nose.
“I think you’ve learned from your past mistakes,” she grins.
“What do you mean?”
“Well… you’re letting her choose for herself. You aren’t trying to force, manipulate, or control the situation. It’s the right thing to do, Adrian… I’m just… I’m proud of you. That’s all.”
A dry chuckle rumbles through me.
“It’s really difficult being a nice guy,” I joke, stealing a quick glance at Anka.
She packs up laughing.
Relief washes through me, and I laugh with her. At least we can joke about it now. Maybe not fully. Maybe not all the time. But we’re at a point where we can be open with each other and have a laugh about things.
Anka and I talk for a while longer before she stands up to go. “Ok, well, I’m glad I stopped by. And I’m really glad you spoke to me,” she smiles, hugging me goodbye. This time, I give her a proper hug with both arms.
She laughs. “That’s so much better,” she says, burying her face against my chest.
“Thanks for listening,” I grin.
“Thanks for sharing,” she says.
***
It’s early evening when I go in search of Athena.
Maybe I can just try to talk to her. Say hi.
Ask her what she wants for dinner. It doesn’t have to be so tense between us.
The longer I let the space between us grow wider, the worse it will get, and I don’t want to lose the connection we are slowly building.
After searching the house, I check the security cameras and spot her downstairs in the playroom. It surprises me.
Heading down there, I walk in to find her sitting on the training mat with the handgun in front of her.
She looks up, getting a fright when she sees me. “I promise it’s not loaded!” she blurts out immediately. “I just wanted to practice handling it,” she says quickly.
“It’s ok,” I smile, walking over to her. “What are you practicing?” I ask, crouching next to her, to look at what she’s doing.
She has the magazine out, and the slide pulled backward, locked in place.
“I was practicing putting the magazine in and out and how to hold the gun and uh, cock the slide thing. It’s not that easy to pull it back. It takes a lot of strength.”
“It does take some getting used to,” I smile. “Do you want to put some bullets in and shoot a bit?”
“Yes, I wanted to, but I didn’t want to do it alone,” she smiles nervously. It’s easy to sense the tension between us, but I’m determined to make light of it so we can move past what happened.
“Well, I can help you. I’ll grab the bullets; you get the earmuffs.”
She stands up and eagerly walks over to the hanging area, where earmuffs and other items are hooked into a neat wall system. When I get to the range, she has the gun on the table and the earmuffs around her neck. She hands me a pair.
“Thanks,” I say.
I open my mouth to say more. Sorry that you felt pressured the other day. Sorry for what happened. Sorry for… it all sounds stupid in my head, so I just say, “Ready?”
She nods.
I stand behind her, looking over her shoulder while she loads the bullets one by one into the magazine. Then she slides it into place inside the grip and does a tiny little dance of triumph. Except I’m standing pretty close, and the dance wiggles her hips against me.
I clear my throat, reminding myself that I’m not thinking about mischievous things. I’m just trying to make things right between us.
She lifts the gun, looking down the sight to aim.
“Shift your left hand a little back,” I say quietly.
AS I speak, she leans into me a little. It’s a subtle movement but very deliberate.
“Like this?” she asks, not quite getting it right.
I reach up, wrapping my arms around her to help her adjust her hands. “Like this.”
I drop my hands to let her shoot, except unconsciously, I leave them resting on her waist.
Athena lets out a long, slow breath. Her finger tightens against the trigger.
She fires two shots, three. Four.
By the time the clip is empty, she’s hit the target probably 80% of the time. A huge improvement from the other day.
She sets the gun down and pulls the earmuffs off, spinning to grin at me.
Her wide, dark green eyes are glittering with a thousand thoughts she hasn’t spoken. My eyes lock with hers.
Don’t kiss her. Don’t kiss her. My body is on fire. My hands are gripped against the table behind her, locking her against me, and I can’t find the strength to move.
My chest heaves with the heavy breath I take.
Don’t kiss her.
Her lip’s part. Perfect plump cupid-shaped lips.
“Kiss me,” she whispers.