Chapter Seven — Isla #3
“I’m choosing,” I said. “I need you to understand that. Not because I’m afraid. Not because I don’t have options,” then with an eye roll and a lower tone, I added, “even though I practically don’t.”
His eyes squinted together in a way that implied nothing but laughter. The thought that I’d elicited that from him filled me with some sort of pride that made me smile.
“But I’m choosing; that’s the point.”
His eyes seemed to search mine for a second. Then his lips claimed mine.
When he kissed me this time, it wasn’t accidental.
It was careful. Controlled in the way his voice was controlled—not cold, but deliberate, as if he was applying the same focus to this that he applied to everything that mattered to him.
His hand found the side of my face and tilted it, and he kissed me like he was learning something he intended to know thoroughly.
I kissed him back. And that seemed to trigger something in him that marked the end of the ‘careful’ part.
My hands found the front of his shirt, and his arm came around my waist, the warmth of him hitting me.
The kiss soon became something that had been building since the first morning when he’d walked into the room with his controlled face, his scrambled eggs requested to a lighter specification, and that mistake of a kiss.
His hands moved from my waist and lifted me. And then he was carrying me towards the bed, and my legs were wrapped around his waist. Then, in another minute, we were stripping each other of our clothing, and I was on my back at the center of the massive bed.
He knelt up and, just as he was about to speak, I told him, “If I weren’t sure, I wouldn’t be in this bed right now.”
He looked at me for a heated second like he was trying to see if I meant what I’d just said.
Then he took off his black boxers, and I sucked in a breath at the sight of the heavy length he’d released. He caught me looking and raised a brow.
I licked my lips as he took my panties off in a split second.
“I’ll be gentle,” he promised.
My response to that died in a shaky gasp as he slid the head of his dick along my slit.
“Don’t tease me,” I breathed in a rush.
He entered me in one long thrust, making me throw my head back in a mix of pleasure and pain.
“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice just above a whisper.
When I brought my head back up, the hunger in his eyes was undeniable.
“I’m fine.”
His eyes didn’t leave mine as he started moving, picking up pace until the only thing I could feel was how he filled me in the most pleasurable way. And the way he looked at me like he would stop at the first sign of discomfort.
I had not been looked at like that in a long time. Perhaps ever.
My sighs and gasps soon became unstoppable moans, which still didn’t overshadow his guttural sounds.
“I’m…” I breathed.
“I know, Isla. Come for me.”
Oh, fuck.
My body became a quivering, shaking mess as I came. Alexei followed almost immediately.
Afterward, the room was quiet. I lay with my head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, which was not at its resting rate yet.
Neither was mine. His hand was moving in slow, absentminded patterns against my shoulder—I suspected he wasn’t aware he was doing it, which was its own form of information.
I thought about my business, my calendar, the Hendricks event in three weeks that I’d need to send a coordinator email about by Monday. I thought about Val and if she’d have noticed my absence at my apartment yet.
I thought about Alexei’s pulse against my palm in the poker room. I thought about the way he’d touched me just some minutes ago, like I was precious.
The thing about trust is that it doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates, or it doesn’t, and by the time you notice it, it’s already been there for a while.
I noticed it now, in the quiet of a room I hadn’t chosen, in the arms of a man I hadn’t chosen, in a life that was set around decisions made under duress that had somehow produced this particular moment.
I trust him.
Not blindly, but genuinely.
He had caught me every time I’d fallen, literally and otherwise.
He had answered my questions honestly. He had described me—to his family, without my knowledge—as stubborn and brave, not as a complication or a problem or a debt acquired at a card table.
He had said, ‘I don’t know’ when he didn’t know, which was the rarest thing.
He had kissed me like I was worth being careful with.
I pressed my hand flat against his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palm.
This is dangerous, Isla.
Because Siroc White was a threat I could map. He was external, the kind of danger that had edges you could see and plan around.
But this was different. This was internal.
I didn’t just belong to Alexei Golovin in the legal, strategic, protection-and-permanence sense that he’d proposed.
Now, I trusted him.
That wasn’t a part of what I had agreed to. And it had happened anyway, in the gap between one version of my life and whatever this was. And, unlike everything else in the last forty-eight hours, I couldn’t find it in me to be furious about it.
It was a terrifying truth.