Chapter Sixteen
Vitaly
The bakery feels too small for what I want tonight. Even perfect can’t hold this much hope.
I’ve arranged the tables out of the way. One center of the room. Low lights.
It’s set. Serving dishes on the nearest table. Olivier salad, fresh black bread and I’ll end with heart shaped zefir.
One more check.
I smooth my jacket.
Straighten the rose and sunflower again, needing something to touch before she walks in and I forget how to use my hands.
The gift sits beside her plate.
Delicate gold hearts and diamonds to wrap her wrist. Hold her when I can’t be there.
She steps inside and everything stops.
She’s wearing a pink dress again. One that clings like it knows secrets about her body I’m still discovering.
My pulse goes nuclear.
I have to lock my knees or I’ll cross this room on them.
The charm between her breasts glints. Those heels make her look breakable in the way that destroys men.
I drag my gaze upward. It snags on her curves.
“Kroshka,” I manage, voice thicker than it should be.
She bites her lip. “It’s not fair when you call me that.”
I know what my words do to her. Don’t mean to take advantage but I love watching the effect.
She moves in that timid way, puts a hand on waist and arches up pressing the sweetest kiss to my jaw. “You dressed up,” she says, fingers brushing my lapel. “For me.”
Her fingers brush my chest, and every muscle south of my belt tightens so fast it hurts. I catch her wrist, gentle, always gentle, but my thumb finds her pulse.
She sees me in a way that makes old parts of me wake up. Parts that forgot they existed. “You always dress for me.”
Her grip tightens at my waist. Like she wants more and is too shy. Am I reading wrong? Can’t be. She touches me every time we’re near.
Her eyes catch on the table. “What is this?”
“More of home. You wanted to taste more of me.” That was loaded.
She catches my face in her tiny hand. Thumb over my jaw. “I do. I really do.”
I survive the meal by sheer will. Every time she feeds me, her fingers brush my mouth and my pulse turns reckless.
Every time her lips close over my fingertips, I have to count backward from ten in Russian so I don’t drag her across the table and ruin the Olivier salad with what I actually want to taste.
When she opens the box and sees the bracelet, she bounces with joy.
She settles over me and the heat of her is a shock straight through wool and good intentions.
I’m hard in seconds. Embarrassingly, achingly hard. And there’s no table to hide behind anymore.
She extends her wrist. “Put it on?”
I do. So careful.
Then she feeds me zefir and eats from my hands like it’s intimacy she’s starving for.
My body reacts.
She shifts once. Just once. The softest part of her presses down on the hardest part of me.
A helpless sound crawls out of my throat. My hands snap to her waist on pure instinct, fingers digging in.
“Kroshka?” My breath scrapes out rough.
“Yes, Vitaly?” Her voice is innocent, but her mouth is sin against my neck, lips tracing my pulse, claiming it.
“Will you come home with me?” It comes out need, not invitation. “I’ll make medovukha. Something sweet to finish the night. Just us.”
“You don’t have to treat me like glass,” she says, straddling me fully now. “I adore you, Vitaly. I’m not going to break.”
I answer by sliding both hands down to her thighs, gripping hard enough to leave tomorrow’s fingerprints, and pulling her flush against where I’m straining. “Then don’t ask me to be gentle,” I say against her mouth, voice shredded.
She gasps.
“Wait,” she says.
And the word slices everything open. My chest goes cold.
“I moved too fast,” I say immediately. “Forgive me, kroshka. I thought.”
She cups my face, kisses between my eyes.
“No. You beautiful, sweet man.” Her mouth drifts to mine, brushing, tempting. “I want you. Inside me. Now. Here.”
Her hips grind down again, and my vision blurs. “But I need to be honest with you before we go any further. About my family. What loving me means.”
The ice melts. My breath steadies.
“Tell me.” I brace. Because I haven’t told her what loving me means. The danger. Oksana.
She keeps moving in my lap.
“I have several I love. At home. They know about you. They know what’s happening here.” Her nails rake lightly along my waist. “They’re ready for you to be part of us.”
“Several.” My hands tighten on her hips. “You have lovers?”
The word sits wrong in my mouth.
Lovers. Plural.
And she’s sitting on my cock telling me this like it’s not reshaping everything.
But her eyes are steady. Honest. Not apologizing.
Not lying.
So I process.
“I do. You know one of them already.” A soft kiss at the corner of my mouth. “Noah.”
Noah.
My Noah.
My chest clenches.
Not betrayal. Something else.
A door opening I didn’t know was there.
My hips jerk up involuntarily. “My Noah?”
She laughs against my ear, wicked and tender. “Our Noah.”
My cock pulses under her.
She feels it. She rolls her hips again. Slow, obscene, reassuring.
“How many, kroshka?”
I’m asking because I need to know.
Not to judge. But to understand what I’m agreeing to. What I’m bringing danger into. What safety they can actually offer.
“Four.” Her teeth scrape my jaw in a way that makes my spine go liquid. “Five with you.”
I’ve never been enough for one woman.
The idea of being enough for five people is…
I don’t have a word for it.
Then, playful, hungry. “Six when the new one settles in.”
I swallow hard, dizzy with wanting her and the sharp, bright realization that she is not small, not fragile, not meant for one pair of hands.
“Juliet…” I breathe, face buried in her neck.
Her lips drag down my throat. “Come home,” she whispers. “Let them adore you. Let them protect you.”
“Protect me? Adore me?”
“They will,” she promises, dragging her nails lightly down my stomach. “Because you’re mine. And we protect what’s ours.”
I lean her back enough to see her face.
There’s fire in her eyes.
“I know your world is dangerous.” Her voice softens, but the hunger stays. “Noah told me about the woman tied to you. The risk. Your fears.”
Dread rises. “I should have warned you. Your family would be at risk.”
She kisses the tension away.
“We’ll keep you safe, Vitaly.” Her hips grind down with promise. “All of us.”
Something in me breaks open. Fear and desire and the impossible sweetness of being claimed by a woman who lives like a flame.
“Home,” I echo.
She smiles.
Juliet wraps her fingers around the back of my neck and pulls me in, owning my mouth. Her kiss is messy, hot, claiming. Nothing sweet now.
This is a devouring.
She tastes like sugar and heat and the promise of fucking destruction.
I swallow hard.
In Russia, family is everything. You bleed for them. You die for them. And they do the same. No questions. No hesitation.
She’s offering me that. Not one person. A whole unit.
It terrifies me.
It feels like coming home.
“You’re sure?” I breathe it into her mouth between kisses. “You want this?”
“Vitaly.” She rolls her hips. I feel how wet she is through my slacks. “I’ve been sure.”
Her dress rides up with every grind.
I grip her hips tight, drag her across me again, just to hear the sharp little gasp she makes when I press up right where she needs it.
“Say it again,” I say against her throat. “Say I’m yours.”
“You’re mine,” she breathes. “You’re so fucking mine.”
The last thread of control snaps.
“Waited all week for this,” she says, tugging at my shirt. “Every bite of cake, every time you handed me a coffee with that soft fucking smile like you didn’t want to bend me over the damn counter.”
“I wanted to do worse than that,” I growl, biting at her collarbone. “Still do.”
“Then take me.” She grabs my belt and undoes it like she’s done it a hundred times. Confident. Hungry. “I don’t need slow. I need you.”
Permission. She’s giving me permission to stop being gentle.
To be a man, not just a baker.
To take.
My zipper drops. I lift her just enough to shove her panties aside and line us up.
Her nails rake down my chest through my shirt.
“Now,” she whispers against my lips. “Now.”
I sink into her in one slow stroke and have to stop halfway just to breathe. She’s molten. Perfect. I’m shaking with it.
She moans like it hurts, like she’s needed this for too long.
“Jesus, you’re thick,” she breathes, voice wrecked.
My hands tremble where I grip her thighs.
She rides me with bruising force.
I let her set the rhythm at first, but when she clenches around me I lose the script, hands bruising her hips, thrusting up to meet her.
I lift us, lay her on her back, pin her wrists above her head, and fuck her with everything I’ve been holding back since the moment I met her.
She makes a sound, surprise, want, permission, and it pushes me deeper.
I thrust up to meet her, hips snapping with force I didn’t know I had.
She kisses me, staking a claim.
Bites my lip when I get too soft. Tells me I’m hers in a dozen filthy ways with every roll of her hips.
She clenches around me, shuddering.
“Fuck, fuck, Vitaly.”
“I’ve got you,” I whisper. One hand on her throat, the other gripping her ass. “Come for me, kroshka.”
And she does. Loud, unrestrained, nails carving into my shoulders as she grinds out every wave of it.
I follow with a broken curse, spilling into her with a raw sound I don’t make for anyone else.
Afterward, she slumps against me, both of us still panting, her hands tangled in my hair.
“You’re mine now,” she whispers.
“I always was.”
I don’t know how long we stay like that, clinging to each other, skin flushed and damp, breaths slowing into sync.
She shifts first, nuzzling my neck. “That was…” She exhales like the word won’t form. “Yeah.”
I smile into her hair. “Yeah.”
She reaches to smooth her dress.
I catch her hand. “No rush.”
“You offering round two?” Her voice is hoarse, lips curled.
“Not yet.” I nod toward the bar, where a forgotten carafe of water sweats beside a basket of black bread. “You need to eat.”
She laughs, but it turns into a small sigh.
I pour two glasses and pass her one.
She takes it, sipping slow, her gaze softening.
I tear a piece of bread, swipe it through butter, and feed it to her while she’s still straddling me, still connected, still trembling with aftershocks.
She licks the salt from my thumb and I almost take her again right there.
I break the crusty end of the bread, hold it up to her lips. “You burned calories.”
“Vitaly.” She’s watching me like I just handed her my heart, not a hunk of bread.
“Eat.”
She takes it from my fingers with a roll of her eyes and a flushed little smile. “Bossy.”
“You like it.”
“And I like you,” I say. “Even though I’m terrified.”
She stills.
“Of what?” Her thumb traces my jawline.
“Of failing you. Of getting you killed. Of not being enough for what you need.”
She kisses my forehead, my nose, my lips.
“You’re enough, Vitaly. You’re more than enough. You’re home.”
She leans forward, steals the rest of the slice from my hand with her mouth, tongue flicking against my thumb in a way that says she’s not done teasing me yet.
I shake my head, smiling. “You’re trouble.”
She swallows, then cups my jaw. “You’re mine.”
I’ve spent years building a life alone so no one could be used against me.
And she’s offering the opposite.
A life where I’m no one’s weakness, but everyone’s choice.
I press my forehead to hers. “That’s not going to change.”
We finish the water. Pick at the bread. Linger in the low candlelight while the outside world feels miles away. Even though it’s just the other side of the front window.
She sighs again, content this time. “Your place?”
“My place,” I agree. “The bed. The shower. And then anywhere else you’ll let me have you again.”
When she threads her fingers through mine, it feels like coming home.
All my life I thought love meant choosing one person and hoping they didn’t leave.
Juliet… she’s offering me something wider.
A place to belong.