Chapter 8
Galina
My fingers grip the sheets tightly enough to stop the trembling. I’m smart enough to know when I’ve pushed too far, and that was definitely too far. Part of me knew that and did it anyway, just to see what his reaction would be.
I didn’t expect him to hit the headboard.
The sound of the shower running isn’t comforting. It’s a taunt, reminding me he is in there naked. With his enormous dick, hard and in need of attention. I wonder if he will see to it himself, or leave it.
I chew my lip, as I really want to know. I had an orgasm. The best orgasm anyone has ever given me with just their fucking mouth. He’s talented. It means he’s had lots of practice, which sends a spark of jealousy through me when I wonder how many women have been in his bed before me.
It’s enough to make me push the sheets back and climb off the bed.
I’m at the bathroom door before I can stop myself, turning the handle and slipping in, my eyes on the shower.
Laszlo is standing under the torrent, back facing me, hands on the tile. “Get out unless you want something to happen that I can’t stop,” he says, without turning around.
I close the door behind me. “If I wanted to leave, I wouldn’t be in here,” I say, and my voice is steadier than I feel.
Water hammers down over his back, tracing the black ink across muscle and skin. He still doesn’t turn around. His head is bowed. His hands are braced against the tile. Every line of him is tense enough to make my pulse jump.
“Galina.”
Just my name. Nothing else. A warning all by itself.
I step closer anyway, bare feet silent on the heated floor. The steam wraps around me, damp against my skin, my hair. God, I am out of my fucking mind.
“You don’t get to act like that,” I say. “You don’t get to smash your hand up and then put it around my throat because I said something you didn’t like, then walk off and leave me with it.”
He lets out one hard breath. “If I stayed, I would have fucked you into the bed whether you wanted it or not.”
Heat shoots through me so fast it almost buckles my knees. The sight of him tortured in the shower hits me low and hard. Water runs down his chest, over the tattoos, over his stomach, lower. His hair is wet and dark, water running down the back of his neck.
He turns then, slowly, and I have to fight the urge to step back.
His eyes pin me where I stand. Blue. Brutal. Stripped of every trace of humour. His hand is braced against the tile, knuckles split and reddened, water washing diluted blood down the drain.
“Why are you in here, Galina?”
Because I can still feel his mouth on me. Because my body is humming and my pride is in pieces, and I do not know where anger ends and want begins any more.
He made me come and then walked away. He looked at me like he could ruin me and hated himself for wanting to.
I am jealous. I am wet. I cannot stand the thought of him deciding when this starts and when it stops.
“You don’t get to be the only one with control.”
I have not come in here just because I want him. I have come because I refuse to let him be the only one setting the terms.
His expression changes, just slightly. Not softer. Worse. More focused.
“Control?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“You came in here to take it?”
“I came in here, so you don’t get the last word.”
A short breath leaves him, which might be a laugh if any humour lived in this room. It doesn’t. Not right now.
“You’re playing a dangerous game.”
“I was born into one.”
His gaze drops, finally, from my face to my body.
Not in a rush. Not greedy. He takes me in properly, from my hair to my bare legs, and my skin heats under it.
I should have put something on. I know that.
I came in here half out of spite and half out of hunger, and now I am standing in his bathroom with nothing on but my nerve.
He reaches behind him and turns the water off. Silence hits hard after the rush of it.
“Say what you want,” he says.
“How many women have you had in your bed? How many have you fucked until yours was the only name they remembered?” The words are out before I can stop them, and I see where they land.
In a place of amusement, wicked and cruel.
His mouth lifts at one corner, and I instantly regret giving him that.
“Jealous already?” he asks.
“I’m asking a question.”
“You’re asking two.” He steps out of the shower, water running down his body, and grabs a towel.
He doesn’t wrap it around his waist. He drags it over his hair once, then tosses it aside and walks toward me completely naked, completely unbothered, completely aware of what his muscular, inked body does to me. “Why?”
My throat goes dry. “Because I want to know what I’m getting.”
“Liar.”
I lift my chin. “Excuse me?”
“You want to know if any of them mattered.” He stops right in front of me. He grips my chin to tilt my head back. “They didn’t.”
The answer hits too hard. Relief is humiliating.
Relief loosens something ugly in my chest, and I hate it on sight. Relief is dangerous. Relief was how women like me start mistaking a man’s restraint for safety.
“How many?” I ask again.
“Enough.” His gaze drops to my mouth. “You’re the first woman who’s walked into this bathroom to interrogate me after I made her come.”
Heat floods my face. “I’m not interrogating you.”
“What would you call it?”
“You don’t get to be jealous and then be offended when I am,” I murmur.
“Jealous,” he says, brushing his thumb over my bottom lip. “Are you jealous, Galina?”
“Concerned,” I stammer. “This marriage might be forced to prevent a war from spilling blood on the streets of London, but you will not make a fool of me.”
That hits exactly where I wanted it to.
Thank fuck. I’m done explaining myself to this man. But I only have myself to blame. All I had to do was say it in the car, and we would’ve been done with it.
“You’re worried I’m going to cheat on you?” he asks with a dark look which terrifies me more than his hand slamming into the headboard above my head.
“I am worried you will make me look like a stupid wife that everyone pities because her husband can’t keep his dick in his pants.”
His eyes go flat. Not blank. Worse. Deliberate.
“You think I’d disrespect you like that?”
“I think men like you think they can do whatever they want without consequences.”
He stares at me for a long second, water still tracking down his chest, over the ink, down the hard line of his stomach. I force myself to keep eye contact even though every part of me is aware of the fact that he is naked, rock-hard and close enough to touch.
“Men like me,” he repeats quietly. “Tell me what that means, Galina.”
“It means dangerous. Spoilt. Entitled. Brutal. Ruthless. It means if a pretty woman smiles at you in a club, you decide whether you want her and deal with the consequences later.”
“You’re standing in my bathroom asking whether I’m going to humiliate you.”
I swallow. “Will you?”
He takes one step closer. My back hits the vanity.
“No,” he says. “I don’t humiliate what’s mine.”
The words hit me hard enough to still my breath.
I hate that response, even as much as it relieves me. I hate the possessive edge in it. I hate the heat that follows straight after, low and treacherous, because some ugly part of me likes the certainty.
“Can I trust you?”
His hand stays on my chin. Not rough now. Firm. Inescapable.
“You can trust that if I say something, I mean it.” His thumb presses once at the corner of my mouth. “I won’t fuck other women while you wear my ring.”
“While I wear your ring,” I repeat. “Blackmail, how apt.”
His eyes sharpen. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Take something real and act like it’s nothing because you’re scared of what it might mean.”
“What if I don’t give you what you want?” I ask, quietly, seriously enough that he drops his hand and takes a step back.
“Are you saying that even after we are married, I can’t touch you?”
“I’m not saying that at all. You are Bratva,” I whisper. “I know what that means. I have known men like you all my life. Sex is a weapon. A ruthless, savage weapon. I don’t know if I can… if I can…”
“Can what? Keep up?”
His brutally honest question fills me with shame, and I lower my gaze, even though I want to knee him in the nuts that are still so close to me. But he has hit the nail on the head, and he knows it. “Yes,” I mumble, hating him for making me say it.
His face changes, stripped of all mockery.
He reaches past me, grabs another towel, and wraps it around his waist in one sharp movement before he speaks. I hate that the first thing I feel is disappointment. I hate it more that he noticed enough to cover himself before answering.
“Look at me,” he says.
I don’t want to. I do anyway.
“You think I need porn star action with BDSM every night?”
My throat tightens. “Don’t you?”
“No.”
The answer comes too fast to be crafted. Too flat to be a lie.
He plants both hands on the counter on either side of me, not touching me, boxing me in without contact.
“You mouth off when you’re frightened. You push until someone pushes back because at least that feels honest. You wanted me in bed earlier and then panicked when you got proof of what that means. ”
“I’m not vanilla,” I say defiantly, just to get that point across.
“No one said you were,” he says, that smirk back in place.
“I’m not a porn star either.”
“Good, because that is not my style.”
“Then what is your style?” I grit out, wishing he hadn’t made me ask.
He holds my gaze for a beat too long, like he is deciding how honest to be. “You want the truth?”
“I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”
“My style is you.” His mouth twitches when my expression hardens. “Not as a line. As a fact. I pay attention. I find out what gets under your skin, what calms you down, what makes you wet, what makes you fight. Then I use it.”
“That sounds deeply fucked up.”
“I am a deeply fucked up person.” He stays where he is, caging me with his hands on the counter, but he still doesn’t touch me. I notice that. I notice every second he doesn’t touch me.
“I like control,” he says. “I like obedience when it matters. I like hearing the truth even when it’s filthy. I like a woman who knows how to ask for what she wants. I like giving her exactly what she can handle and then a little more when I know she wants it.”
Heat climbs up my neck. “That sounds suspiciously reasonable.”
He gives me a dark look. “Don’t worry. I’m still a bastard.”
“We are getting off topic,” I say, trying to draw my focus back to the question he hasn’t answered yet. “If you find me lacking, will you find your satisfaction elsewhere?”
“I won’t find you lacking, Galina. You made my cock hard simply by sitting on it. If you think I’m going to stray because you don’t satisfy me, if you don’t trust me when I say I won’t, then we have a serious problem.”
He steps back, letting me breathe. For the first time in my life, I’m speechless. I have boxed myself into a corner with this conversation, and now I don’t know how to escape.
Except I do. There is only one way to find out for sure if I satisfy him, and that’s to fuck him before the wedding, so we both know for sure we are compatible in this area.
But I know he wouldn’t touch me now even if I threw myself at him.
So, I do what good Bratva women do. I raise my chin and change the subject. “I want to go wedding dress shopping tomorrow. Arrange it.”
If he wants control, I will learn exactly how to use his need for it against him.
I brush past him and leave the bathroom with my dignity in tatters and climb into bed, pulling the covers up as high as I can without smothering myself and closing my eyes in the hopes I might get some sleep.