7. Taylor
TAYLOR
My problem is how much I liked the way Mikhail carried me like I weighed nothing.
The way his hands pressed into my back, broad and firm and horribly sure of themselves.
I liked the way he didn’t stumble, didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask if I was comfortable every three seconds like boys do when they want credit for being decent.
I should be thinking. I’m always thinking.
I think through assignments and train routes and the exact amount of money in my checking account.
I think through what I say before I say it because I hate sounding foolish.
I think through everything so carefully that sometimes I feel like I’ve lived my whole life from three inches behind my own eyes, watching myself try to be good.
Now he’s looking at me like he wants to eat me alive, and I forget every word I have ever learned.
I should be thinking in this stranger’s house, beneath this man twenty-three years my senior whose home more closely resembles a lair, but when Mikhail stands over me, one knee pressing into the bed, his tie loose and his salt-and-pepper hair disturbed from my fingers, I find myself strangely devoid of thought.
I’m breathless and mindless, sensation only.
His shirt is wrinkled where I’ve pulled at it. His mouth is darker than before, lips wet from kissing me. He looks ruined. Ruins that I made. The knowledge goes through me like lightning.
“You’re staring,” he says.
“So are you.”
“I’m allowed.”
I prop myself up on my elbows. “Why?”
“Because you are in my bed.”
My stomach flips. I should have an answer for that. Something clever. Something that keeps us balanced. I’m allowed because I’m in your bed.
Instead, my eyes go to his hands. They’re large and scarred faintly across the knuckles.
Not polished hands. Not soft hands. I noticed them in the bar and tried not to.
I notice them again now as he reaches for me.
I swallow hard, and I watch from where I’m propped on my elbows as those rough fingers reach for my legs and open them.
He kisses the inside of my knee, his brown eyes never leaving mine, and I feel something deep inside me clench.
I am only the heat in my stomach, rising to my chest, and the burning where his hand touches behind my thigh and grips my skin. I am only my wet underwear clinging between my legs and the sweat under my arms growing cooler in his dark room.
I am only my throat jumping when he leans down and kisses me, one hand braced near my hip.
This kiss is not like the first one. That one was a collision.
This one is worse because he is choosing every part of it.
His mouth opens mine slowly. His tongue brushes against mine, and the sound I make is so humiliatingly soft that I feel heat rush up my neck.
He hears it. I know he hears it because his hand tightens around my knee, and he kisses me deeper.
His knee slips between mine, his weight above me but not on me.
I want it on me. I want the heaviness of him.
I want to know what it feels like to have all that control pressed out of him.
Or pressed out of me, maybe. I hook my fingers in his loosened tie and pull. He comes down another inch.
Not enough. I pull again. This time his mouth leaves mine, and he looks at me with a warning in his eyes. “Careful.”
“I thought you liked direct.”
“I do.”
“Then come here.”
His nostrils flare.
For one second, I’m proud of myself. Then he catches both my wrists in one hand and pins them above my head, and pride turns into something bright and helpless that sparks down my spine. “Oh,” I say.
His mouth finds my throat. “Yes,” he murmurs against my skin. “Oh.”
My eyes close. The room tilts.
His teeth graze the place below my jaw, and I jerk before I can stop myself. Not away. Toward. My body is very clear on that distinction even if my mind is scrambling behind it with a flashlight and a map.
Mikhail’s free hand moves to my waist, then lower, over my hip, dragging the fabric of my dress with it.
I am only the skin under his hand as it slides higher beneath the hem of my dress, coming alive under his touch. I am my back arching as his fingers reach the waistband of my tights and underwear, and then I am my breath catching so sharply that his hand stills against my slick heat.
His face lifts from my neck. His brown eyes find mine, narrowed and suddenly alert in the low light, and his mouth asks, “What?” roughly against my neck. I can feel his lips and tongue work together to form the word against my jugular.
“Nothing,” I say quickly, shaking my head, sinking my fingers into his black hair and opening my legs for him. But when I look at him again, his eyes narrow. His grip around my wrists loosens, but he doesn’t let me go.
I try to kiss him, but he moves his head back enough that my mouth brushes his jaw instead, and his hand frees itself from beneath the elastic. I feel the shame lump forming in my throat as his fingers drag away from me.
“Mikhail,” I complain. Whimper, really. Because apparently I am an unthinking person who complains and whimpers when a Russian man who is twice my age removes his hands from my underwear.
His expression shifts at his name. A flash of something hot and pleased and almost angry. “Tell me,” he says. His fingers release my wrists.
I lower my hands slowly, embarrassed by the sudden freedom. “There’s nothing to tell.”
He studies me for another second. I hold his gaze like that proves something.
It must, because he starts moving again.
His fingers slide beneath my dress, but instead of touching me, he hooks them into the waistbands of my tights and panties.
He peels both down slowly, eyes burning a hole into mine, dragging them over my hips and thighs until he has to stand at the end of the bed to pull them free from my legs.
The tights land in a dark knot beside the bed. He tosses my panties after them.
My center jumps, thinking he’ll grab me, pull me apart, and enter me before I can even decide if I like it. But he touches my ankle first. Just my ankle. His thumb strokes the thin bone there, and my entire body goes still.
He notices. Of course he notices. The corner of his mouth lifts. “Sensitive?”
“No,” I whisper back petulantly.
“No?” he asks, his voice lowering to meet mine.
His hand slides up, over the outside of my calf, dragging my dress higher by accident or design.
I watch his hand move and realize, with a delayed pulse of panic, that I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with mine.
In movies, women know. They arch. They pull men down.
They say things without sounding like they’re reading from a script.
I sit there on my elbows, my chest rising and falling too fast, watching his hand climb my leg like it has every right in the world.
Mikhail’s gaze cuts to my face. “Taylor.”
I blink. “What?”
“You are thinking again.”
“I’m sentient. It happens.”
His hand stops at my knee. The absence of movement is somehow louder than the movement was. “You’re nervous,” he says.
“Most people are nervous in Bond villain bedrooms.”
“This again.”
“I’m just saying, the decor is doing you no favors.”
He looks around the room as if seeing it for the first time, then back at me. “The decor?”
“It’s very…” I search for the word in Russian and fail, saying in English, “Intimidating.”
“Intimidating,” he repeats, his accent thickening the word. I can’t tell if he knows what it means. His face sobers. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No.” The answer is immediate. Too immediate. His gaze drops to my mouth. “No,” I say again, quieter. “I don’t want you to stop.”
“Then why do you look terrified?”
“I don’t.” I look away, toward the dark windows. “I’m not terrified,” I say.
“No?”
“No. I’m just…” I swallow. “I’m aware.”
“Aware.”
“Yes.”
“Of what?”
I give him a look. “Mostly of you.”
His expression changes. Heat flashes through his eyes, fast and dark, and then he leans down and kisses me again like I have said something filthy. Maybe I have. Maybe anything honest is filthy if you say it in a room like this.
His hand moves under my thigh, lifting my leg until my knee rests against his hip. The position opens me more than I expect. I feel the shape of him through his trousers, hard and unmistakable, and every part of me goes tense at once.
Not because I don’t want him. Because I do. Because I want him so much that the wanting has outrun my knowledge of what happens next.
Mikhail feels it and doesn’t ask. He goes completely still and lowers his forehead to mine, his breathing ragged. “Taylor,” he says.
I close my eyes. If I don’t look at him, maybe I can still save the version of myself I’ve been pretending to be. “What?” I whisper.
His hand leaves my thigh. Not fast. Not like I have burned him. But deliberately. He places it on the bed beside my waist instead. “Look at me.”
I shake my head.
“Taylor.” The second time is quieter. I open my eyes. He’s close enough that I can see the little lines beside his mouth, the shadow along his jaw, the hard control in his face that looks almost painful now. “What have you done before?” he asks.
The question is so direct that my whole body turns cold. I blink at him. He waits. I try to laugh. It comes out small and awful. “Wow. Okay. That’s one way to kill the mood.”
“The mood is not my concern.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” I snap, looking down at the hard shape of him.
“Answer me,” he responds, just as snappy, unbothered by my commentary on his hardness.
Anger flickers up, bright and welcome. “You don’t get to interrogate me.”
I stare at him. He stares back. The silence stretches between us, filled with everything I don’t want to say.