Chapter 11 - Nadya #2
“You fucking love it,” he announces self-contentedly.
That doesn’t help.
“Nadya.”
The hair on the back of my neck stands at attention. “Have I mentioned that I really hate the way you say my name? Quit. I’m fine. I’m not running anywhere. You have me right where you want me. Congratulations.”
It’s impossible not to notice when Viktor’s fingertips skim their way around my waistline, before they latch onto a hipbone and whirl me around. It knocks the breath out of my lungs. A smile, infuriatingly, presses my lips.
“Not even close. But I’m not pushing. Can’t you be in the moment with me? I would’ve thought it would appeal to you.”
“That’s your problem, Viktor. One of them, at least. You start thinking, and it goes nowhere good. Honestly, how did you think I would feel?”
I don’t have to look up at him to know I’ve got his undivided attention. That’s how he is. So intense that it’s compelling. It’s what reeled me in, that first night. I’m already sick and fucking tired of it burning me.
“I’d never predict how you’d feel, Nadya. Just don’t detach and drift away. I would rather you be pissed and tossing innovative insults my way than that.”
“I’m not your fucking jester, asshat. And what makes you think I give half a shit about what you’d rather?”
When he doesn’t shoot back a response, I have no choice but to look at him. He was waiting for it. I’m caught in the mousetrap of his whiskey eyes. What a great reminder that extended exposure doesn’t always equal immunity.
“I am not immune to hope, much to my disgust.”
The corners of my mouth twitch upward. Fuck. “Ew. Mine too.”
He bends down and bumps his nose into mine. I don’t know what the hell to do with it. My heart trips over its feet, threatening to fall out of my ass.
I suspect hypnosis is at play when my lips part of their own volition, and what pours out is a confession I couldn’t have foreseen.
“My brothers have no idea you’ve got a foothold here.
You’ve been running them around Massachusetts for months.
Meanwhile, you’ve been here, right? You’re doing something shady behind your brother’s back.
And maybe they could’ve caught you, using me as bait.
Except I didn’t let them. So, really, the baddest guy in this situation is me. Because I’m a fucking idiot.”
“You can’t steal all the credit, Nadya. You don’t even know the half of my idiocy. Don’t sell me short.”
I shake my head. “It’s not funny, Viktor. Whether you’ve got me, or I manage to get away and have to tell them. Either way, I’m fucked. How am I supposed to live with that?”
He does not confess. Then again, the fact that he denies none of my accusations is an admission in and of itself. Yet none of it brings me any relief.
This time, when Viktor’s forehead drops against mine, I can tell it’s because he doesn’t want to look me in the eye.
Our faces are so close now, his lashes tickle me when they flutter shut.
Those lashes are longer than they’ve got any right to be.
I know women who’d kill for those lashes—or at least who definitely pay for them.
“I won’t tell you it doesn’t matter. Of course it does.
But I have my reasons for doing what I am.
And I can promise you they aren’t what your brothers think they are.
You have no reason to trust that. Fuck, I know.
” A pause. A deep breath. Then he exhales, “I’m going to tell you everything. Just not tonight. Compromise with me.”
“I’m compromised enough,” I mutter stubbornly.
He rears back and looks back at me. “Be here with me. In whatever mood you want to be in. Just be here.”
The way he looks at me in this moment, I have to wonder how many others—if there are any at all—who’ve been on the other end of this. There is an adamance there that parallels my own. And there’s a note of pleading, too.
I look back up at him and nudge him away.
“One drink,” I accede right after, the words undermining the action entirely.
He at least has the decency to bite back his infernal grin.
“One drink.”
***
Who’s to say how one drink turns to three?
Before I got tipsy, I got drunk on power, that’s how.
It’s effortless to blame Viktor. He let me have my way when I vapidly insisted that I would be ordering his drinks too.
Then again, maybe I should be less of a narcissist, because it got me a little wet to hear him entice, “Bend me to your whims.”
His voice alone was enough. I didn’t need the quirk of his brows to drive his innuendo home. There was a moment where I’d ordinarily say something cutting. There were a couple of them. I just kept forgetting to say anything vicious.
It was not helped by his informing me that he does not, in fact, drink.
At all.
Ever.
And then, somewhere along the way, I am a little past tipsy, and he holds his hand out to me, his head cocking pointedly toward the changing tempo of the music.
The rhythm mellows and the bass amps up, quivering voraciously through the floorboards all the way to my feet.
Viktor looks at me the way he looked at me in an alleyway outside of a club in a different city. My body is on fire.
At what point did I step into a goddamn rom-com?
“This is the cheesiest bullshit anyone has ever done to me,” I blame, but how personally can he really take it when I slip my hand into his?
He doesn’t lead me so much as he twirls me repeatedly until he has me cornered in a semi-cleared space by the gleaming bar. There’s no need for words when he reels me into his body, and my edges collide with his.
“I can make it cheesier,” Viktor says.
“You couldn’t possibly.”
All the sting from my barb is blown to pieces when he throws my body into a dip so deep that a few inches of my hair pool on the floorboards. Viktor’s lips skim up the line of my throat. It’s here that he admits, “I wanted to dance with you the first night I saw you.”
He nips at my neck where my throaty laugh vibrates. “Before I clocked that pussy?”
His warm, private laughter gets me drunker than the filthy martinis.
“No. After, you vicious, extraordinary, wild thing.”
He reels me back up with a palm at my nape—a hand that doesn’t fall away once he’s spooled me upright. His other arm wraps all the way around my waistline, fingers curling over the hard fin at my hip.
“Why?” I ask softly, dazedly.
“I don’t know. I saw you, and it was being struck by fucking lightning.”
I get it. That’s the worst part. I understand what he means.
There’s a current buzzing through my system as we speak, and it jars me.
My appetite for him is as organic as it is involuntary.
It is a fact that should’ve been obliterated by his true identity.
But it feels, when he touches me this way, like his name hasn’t changed anything between us.
I know that isn’t true. Yet my body struggles to believe my head.
It wants to stay in his arms. It enjoys how Viktor harbors me against his chest like treasure, and sways me through an entire song.
It revels in the knowledge that he dances the way he fucks, with wandering hands and meaningful hips.
My body likes him so much, it wants this song, and then another one.
It’s too damn easy to forget that it is proving what Viktor said completely right.
Anyone who’s spent more than ten seconds with you understands that you have no sense of self-preservation.
Except this isn’t just about my preservation. It never has been. Maybe if that’s all it was about, this wouldn’t be so hard.
When I finally begin to squirm, Viktor’s hands drop away instantly. What a unique form of torture, to just let me go.
“I need some water,” I say lamely.
“Sure,” he says.
Wordlessly, throwing none of his disappointment in my face, he lets me go.
I sink back into the book and try to slow my racing pulse.
When he follows after me, he sits on the other side of the booth.
He doesn’t try to meet my eye. He just pulls out his phone, answers his texts, and lets me reel however I need to.
He reads how much space I need, and he gives it to me.
There is no need for me to ask him. He demands no guilt for my needing it.
It’s extremely inconveniently kind of him.
I repay it by spending the silence gathering up bits of his various indiscretions and lining them up in my head. Like a detective’s murder board, I loop red string from pushpin to pushpin, and stare down the evidence until I remember the truth behind all of Viktor’s pretty words.
It works, for the most part.
He gives me time before he asks, “You hungry?”
It sounds so domestic and normal, I could laugh. Or scream.
I feel insane.
Yet he says nothing about the hysteria he must hear when I rasp, “Yeah.” If I didn’t know better, I’d think he’d missed it altogether. But Viktor Zakharov misses nothing. This, I’ve known longer than I’ve known his identity.
“Good.” He smiles and offers me a hand once more.
***
It takes me a little longer than I’m proud of to shake away the reverie.
What the fuck? He may as well have drugged me again with how sluggish my thoughts have become. The extremes he hits me with make my head spin. A couple of intimate confessions while he slow-danced with me, and he’s got a clean slate? I don’t think so. That isn’t how it works.
His hand is still wrapped in a dish towel where he cut himself, taking a knife from me, for fuck’s sake!
What ultimately jars me out of the pliant creature who’s letting him woo her around town is the realization that he stops the motorcycle in front of a snazzy apartment building.
Intent on taking some kind of control here, I charge ahead of him. It makes my ire surge that he doesn’t even speed up to race me. All the while, his gaze drips down my body, from the tip of my head to the tips of my toes, tangible as a caress.
Somehow, I just know he’s smirking behind me when the prissy, uniformed doorman shoots me the stink-eye and stops me in my tracks. He’s so fucking pleased with himself, saying, “Robert, let her through. She’s my wife.”
Like I need to know there are benefits to belonging to him.
Like any benefit could be enough.
“You mispronounced ‘hostage’,” I correct.
“She’s been driven mad with hunger,” Viktor explains somberly, never missing a beat.
Robert appraises us with the lazy disinterest of a fat, spoiled cat.
I’d tell him that he won’t be so smug once I give him a black eye, but I suspect that isn’t fucking true.
The elevator doors slide open with a merry ding! He steps in beside me. A part of me wonders if this is where he slept last night, after he stashed me in the one-bedroom in the warehouse. Wha? Does my good behavior tonight get me swankier accommodations tonight?
With dawning horror, I watch the numbers climb toward—
Yep. We’re headed for the fucking penthouse.
“I’m not fucking you,” I roar at him when he gestures me out the now-open doors. “You have lost your mind. Just because I had a couple of fucking drinks with y—”
I don’t know what the hell it says about me that it’s finally seeing the tic in his jaw that makes me feel better. This evidence of his patience wearing thin is the most normal thing that has happened since I took a hot stranger back to his hotel room to give him my v-card.
“Nadya. We’re here for dinner.”
“At a random penthouse?” I don’t bother tamping down the disbelief.
He just walks off, making a beeline for the door. “I never said it was a random penthouse,” he throws over his shoulder.
It isn’t his penthouse. Or else he wouldn’t rap his knuckles against the heavy door, announcing his presence.
“Who—?”
My answer unveils itself with the whoosh of a door opening, and a woman haunting the doorway.
A beautiful woman.
With the same deep-set, hazel eyes as Viktor Zakharov’s.