Chapter 5 Polina
Polina
The IV is half-ripped from his arm when I walk in on day ten, and he’s reaching for a stack of folded clothes on the visitor’s chair like he’s decided he’s leaving.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He continues tugging at the medical tape while his other arm reaches for a black sweater that the so-called brother left behind. The IV line hangs from the crook of his elbow, barely attached, and a bead of blood is forming where the needle has moved.
“Getting dressed,” he replies, like this is the most reasonable thing in the world.
I step inside and kick the door shut behind me. “You haven’t been cleared. Sit down before you rip your sutures.”
“I’m discharging myself.”
“That’s not how this works.” I grab the IV line before he can yank it out the rest of the way. “If you leave against medical advice and that wound reopens, you won’t make it to another ER in time. Do you understand that?”
“I understand the risks, and I accept—”
“No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be standing here trying to put on a sweater with three bullet wounds that have only begun to heal.” I step closer and block his path to the chair.
He stops pulling at the tape. The stubborn ass doesn’t sit down, but he at least stops.
“Sit. Down.”
For a long second, he just looks at me. Then something changes behind his eyes. The cockiness fades, and what’s left isn’t the man who flirted with me from a hospital bed. This version of him looks tired. Worn down. Almost guilty, and that throws me more than anything else he’s done so far.
“You’ve done enough,” he says so quietly that I’m not sure I heard him right. “More than enough. I’m not going to let you risk your career for me anymore.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Doctor.” He drops the sweater and turns to face me. Even as a patient, barefoot on cold linoleum, he commands the room. “You’ve falsified records and lied to your colleagues. If anyone connects the dots, you’ll lose everything.”
The pretense crumbles. Neither of us says a name, but we both know what’s in this room. Not a construction worker and his surgeon, but two people from families that would sooner kill each other than share a hallway.
“I knew what I was doing,” I snap.
He jabs a finger in the general direction of the OR and shouts, “You traded a decade of work for a man who should have died on that table.”
Something hot and furious rises in my chest. “I didn’t spend four hours pulling bullets from your body so you could walk out of here and bleed to death in a parking garage. That is not how this ends.”
“How does it end, then?” He shuffles toward me, and I square my shoulders, bracing myself against the way my heart stutters when he’s so close that I can feel his breath ghost across my face.
“You keep me here, keep lying for me, keep risking everything, and then what? Your family finds out. Mine finds out. You’re the one who pays the price. ”
“That’s my decision.”
Another step. He’s close enough now that I can feel his body heat seeping through my scrubs. “I won’t be the reason you lose this.” His voice drops. “Absolutely not.”
“You’re an idiot. You don’t get to choose what I sacrifice.
I have been taking care of myself since I was sixteen years old.
” I keep my voice level even though my hands are shaking.
“Built my career. Earned my place in this hospital. Nobody gave me anything, and nobody gets to take it from me. Not my family, not yours, and definitely not you.”
“I’m not trying to take anything from you.”
“Then stop trying to make decisions for me.”
As we stare at each other, the room feels too small. Not a muscle moves between us.
“And you don’t get to pretend this is about medicine.” One more step, and my back meets the door. He rests his good hand against the door beside my head, caging me in without making contact. “Tell me the truth, Doctor. Why did you really save me?”
My pulse is slamming against my ribs, and every breath comes shallow and fast as his eyes dip to my mouth.
His lips are right there, and he’s close enough that I can count the stubble along his jaw.
My tongue darts out to slide along my bottom lip, and he watches the movement as he sucks in a breath.
“Don’t lie to me,”
I should push him back, duck under his arm, walk out, and send someone else to handle this.
Instead, I grab the front of his T-shirt with both fists and pull his mouth to mine.
The kiss is a detonation. His lips crash into mine, and the groan he makes—a low, guttural sound from deep in his chest—vibrates through my every nerve.
My back is pinned to the wood, and his good hand slides to the side of my throat, where he presses his thumb into my pulse point. I bite his lower lip, and he growls, and the sound shoots straight to my clit.
His tongue sweeps into my mouth, and I let him in, tasting him and pulling him closer by the fabric bunched in my fists. He wraps his injured arm around my hip, and I feel him wince from the strain, but neither of us stops.
He pulls back just far enough to breathe, and his forehead drops against mine.
“Tell me to walk away, Doctor.”
“And I will.”
I don’t. I can’t.
Something in his eyes catches fire. He hooks his arm under my thigh, lifts me off the ground, and sets me on the counter beside the sink. Medical supplies rattle as my ass hits the surface, and I wrap my legs around his waist to pull him between them.
The second our bodies meet, I feel how hard he is. My scrubs are thin, and his T-shirt and drawstring pants are no real barrier. The friction when he rolls his hips into mine drags a moan from me that I couldn’t have held back with a gun to my head.
“Fuck,” he whispers into the curve of my throat, lips dragging a hot path below my ear. “You have no idea how long I’ve held back.”
“Look at me.”
My eyes lock on his. Something in his gaze goes feral—then steady.
I dig my nails into his shoulders and grind into him.
The pressure of his cock through the thin layers of fabric hits where I need it, and the pleasure spikes hard enough to make me see stars.
He rocks forward again, and I arch to meet him, pulling him closer with the heels of my feet hooked behind his thighs.
He hisses through his teeth. A sound of pain, not pleasure, and for a second, the surgeon in me surfaces. “Your side—”
“I don’t give a damn about my side.” He takes my face between both palms and kisses me so deeply that I lose track of where I am. When he pulls back, his breathing is ragged. “Don’t you dare ask me to stop.”
The pleading in his voice undoes me. A man who commands rooms without speaking and threatens people through sheer presence just begged me like I hold something he can’t take by force.
His fingers drop from my throat to trail down over my breast. I suck in a breath when he drags his thumb across my nipple through the scrub top.
He does it again, slower, rolling the stiff peak between his thumb and forefinger until a whimper slips from me.
Then he keeps going, down my stomach, past the waistband.
“Tell me what you need, Doctor. I’ll give it to you.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not guessing with you.” His mouth brushes my ear. “Use your words.”
“Touch me. Now.”
The order shocks me more than it shocks him. He stills for half a second. Savoring the fact I said it out loud.
When his fingers slip under the elastic of my underwear, my hips jolt. He’s kissing my neck, grazing his teeth along the spot where my pulse pounds, and when he finds me soaked, the groan he lets out sinks into my skin.
“Jesus Christ, Doctor,” he rasps. “You’re this wet for me?”
I can’t form words. His middle finger drags through my folds, slow and thorough, and my thighs clench around his hips. He circles my clit, and the sensation is so intense that I have to grab the edge of the counter to stay upright. My head tips back, and I let out a low moan.
He watches my face while he works me, and the look in his eyes is close to reverence. Like he’s committing every reaction to memory. Like I’m something he means to keep.
“Beautiful,” he breathes. “You’re… so damn beautiful.”
He slides one finger inside me, and I clench around him, gasping. A second follows, curling forward, hitting the spot along my front wall that makes my thighs shake.
“That’s it,” he mumbles against my skin. “Fuck my fingers, just like that. I know you need this.”
He slides his thumb across my clit in a steady rhythm while his fingers move inside me, and I lose it. The orgasm rips through me without warning. Every muscle in my body locks, my legs tighten around his waist, and I bury my face in the crook of his neck to muffle the cry that tears out of me.
He keeps curling, pressing, and drawing every last tremor out until I’m panting and shaking and struggling to remember my name. My inner walls constrict around him in waves, and each one sends another shock through my system that leaves me gasping.
When I finally come down, my forehead is pressed to his collarbone, and my body feels like it’s been rewired. I can feel my pulse everywhere. In my throat, in my fingertips, and between my legs where his fingers are still inside me.
“Fuck,” I breathe.
My nails are still embedded in his shoulders, and I can feel him hard and throbbing against my inner thigh.
When I pull back to look at his face, his blue irises are nothing but a thin ring around wide pupils.
The fact that I did this to him, that I reduced this dangerous, impossible man to this, sends a secondary wave of heat through my lower belly.
He leans in to kiss me again, and I almost let him. I almost wrap my arms around his neck and pull him closer and beg him to keep going, because my body is still riding the high, and the thought of what his cock would feel like inside me is making it impossible to think straight.
And that’s when I see it.
Red. Blooming through the white fabric over his abdomen, right where the incision sits. A dark, wet stain that means he’s torn at least one suture, probably more.
“You’re bleeding.”
He glances down. “I don’t care.”
“Well, I do.” I gently push him backward. “You just proved my point about ripping your sutures. Congratulations.”
His jaw ticks. “Polina—”
“Don’t.” I slide off the counter and straighten my scrubs.
My underwear is soaked, my legs are jelly, and I can still feel the ghost of his fingers inside me.
But none of that matters right now. “I’m sending a nurse to redress that wound because I can’t think clearly enough to do it myself. Stay in this room.”
The groan he lets out when I reach for the door handle is the most frustrated, desperate sound I’ve heard from a man. It rolls through me like an aftershock, and it takes everything in me to keep from turning around.
I walk out and close the door behind me. As I stand in the corridor with my back to the wall with my pulse still thudding between my legs, I try my best to remember how to be a doctor.
But I can still taste him. I can still feel the phantom pressure of his thumb on my clit and the way his fingers curled inside me. If I close my eyes, I’m back on the counter with my legs wrapped around him and his voice in my ear.
Oh, my God. I kissed a Morozov.
Dmitri would never forgive me. My cousins would never look at me the same way. My sister would say I’ve gone insane. Everything I’ve sacrificed to be more than a bratva daughter with a famous last name would burn to the ground.
And the worst part is that if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t change a thing.
I am in so much fucking trouble.