Chapter 15 #2
She got his shirt off and pushed him, and he sat back hard on the edge of the bed, and the sight of him there, the great Yegor Tarasoff looking up at her with his whole heart bare and not one inch of vault left in him, stopped her for a second. Then she sank to her knees between his.
She worked the clasp of his trousers open and drew him out, the thick length of his cock already hard and straining in her hand, and she stroked him from the base to the broad tip and watched his head fall back. "I'm allowed to want this now. I keep noticing it."
She lowered her mouth over him.
He swore, a low broken sound, his fingers tangling in her cornrows but never pulling, only holding, as she took him deep and worked him slow, her tongue swirling around the broad head of him, her hand following her mouth down the thick length of his cock.
He was helpless under her, this man who controlled everything, his stomach muscles clenched tight, his breath coming in harsh ragged bursts.
She felt him swell and pulse against her tongue, felt the exact moment his control began to disintegrate, and she hummed low in her throat and took him deeper.
"Stop," he rasped, dragging her up his body. "Stop, or this is over, and I am not finishing anywhere but inside you tonight."
He hauled her into his lap and kissed her hard, tasting himself on her, and there was nothing tentative left in either of them.
He pulled off her top and bra. He filled both hands with her breasts and dragged his mouth down to suck her nipples until she was grinding against the rigid length of him.
When his fingers found her sex she was already wet and aching, and she did not make him guess at anything; she told him, plainly, and he stroked the swollen flesh of her until she was shaking.
But she did not want to come on his hand tonight. She wanted him. She pushed him flat onto his back and climbed over him before he'd finished agreeing.
"Look at you up there," he breathed, his hands sliding up her thighs, gripping her hips.
She reached between them, took his cock in her hand, and guided the broad head of him to her entrance, and sank down slowly, taking every thick inch of him until he was buried to the hilt and they both cried out at the heat of it.
Then she set the pace, and it was hers; her palms braced on his chest and her cornrows swinging loose around her face, riding him with her head thrown back.
He let her drive it. He gripped her hips and watched her take her pleasure, and he told her he loved her, in plain English now, no hiding it in a language she couldn't understand.
"Say it back," he ground out, thrusting up to meet every roll of her hips. "I've waited long enough."
"I love you," she gasped, and felt his whole body buck beneath her, and the saying of it broke something open in her too.
She came like that, sitting up over him, in charge of it, her hand pressed where she needed it and his cock driving up into her through all of it, the climax tore through her so hard she nearly folded forward.
He held off until she was through, his arms shaking with the effort, and only then let himself follow, planting deep with a low ragged groan and her name and his fingers pressing bruises into her hips she would find fondly in the morning.
She collapsed onto his chest, both of them slick and breathless and grinning like idiots, his heart slamming under her cheek.
"We're getting married," he said into her hair, wonderingly. "On purpose."
"On purpose," she agreed, and kissed the corner of his mouth. She felt, for the first time in her entire adult life, completely and unguardedly happy.
*****
She found out two days later, nearly dropping the pregnancy test in the sink.
She'd been feeling off for a few days, tired in a bone-deep way, queasy at the smell of the coffee she normally loved, and she'd done the math half-distracted and then done it again, properly, with her stomach dropping to the ground.
The birth control. The two days during the Dorian crisis when her whole life had been a screaming red alarm and she had not, for the first time in years, remembered to take a single pill.
The math was not complicated. She sat on the edge of the enormous bathtub and stared at two pink lines and felt the entire floor of her future tilt and then, slowly, settle into something that felt, impossibly, like solid ground.
She told him over breakfast.
He was reading something on his tablet, drinking the coffee whose smell now made her want to die, and she set the test down on the table next to his plate, face up, and waited.
He looked at it.
She could not read his face at all, and her heart climbed into her throat.
Then Yegor, billionaire, oil heir, the man who had been a vault for twelve years, looked up at her with his whole face shining, and started to laugh. Not a polite laugh. Not a boardroom laugh. A great, helpless, joyful laugh that came up out of the very bottom of him.
He lifted her clean off her feet and spun her once in the breakfast room, she shrieked and held on then he set her down and took her face in both his hands and pressed his forehead to hers, still laughing, and now with tears in his eyes.
"A family," he said. "A real one. You and me and…" He laughed again, dazed. "I'm going to be somebody's father. God help that child. I'm going to be a terrible, overprotective, completely besotted disaster of a father."
"You're going to be wonderful," she said, and meant it down to her bones.
"I'm going to learn," he corrected. "Same as everything else. I'm going to learn."
*****
The weeks that followed filled up with the ordinary news of people they loved.
Renata announced she was opening a second bakery, in Houston this time, of all places, three blocks from where Hot Honey was about to break ground on its first brick-and-mortar, the two of them growing up side by side all over again in a brand-new city, with Tanisha quietly putting up part of the investment and Renata pretending not to know exactly where the money had come from.
They spent a whole giddy weekend with a city map and two highlighters, plotting it out.
"We did it," Renata had said at one point, going suddenly quiet, her highlighter hovering.
"T. We actually did it." And Tanisha had to put her own pen down for a minute.
The brick-and-mortar was the thing she could still hardly believe.
A real building. A roof and a sign that said Hot Honey in her own handwriting, blown up huge.
She'd walked the empty space a dozen times before they signed the lease, standing in the middle of the gutted dining room imagining where the pass and booths would go, where she'd hang the photograph of her grandmother that had hung in the food truck for three years.
Yegor had come with her once and said nothing the whole time, just watched her move through the empty space lighting up, and afterward in the car he'd said, “that is the most alive I have ever seen you”, and she'd had to look out the window.
Lyuba filed for divorce from Arkady. She and Yegor were not, and might never be, what they'd been before, but they were going to family therapy together, the two of them, a thing Tanisha could not in a thousand years have imagined the granite Tarasoff siblings doing, sitting in a quiet office in matching misery, learning slowly how to be a brother and a sister again instead of two children their father had carved from the same cold stone.
It was not easy. Yegor came home from some of those sessions wrung out and silent, and once, only once, Tanisha had found him sitting on the edge of their bed with his head in his hands, and he'd said, “she told me today that I was never there. After Papa died. That I went into the company and never came back out, and she lost her brother the same year she lost her father”.
He'd looked up. “She was right. I didn't even know I'd done it”.
Tanisha had sat down beside him and held him, and said nothing, because some things you just carry, and some things you finally, at long last, put down.
The Jasper empire had simply gone quiet. No merger. No allies. No daughter at home. Just Wendell, with his long empty afternoons, exactly as Yegor had promised.
It was over a late dinner, both of them tired and happy, Tanisha's hand resting on a belly that was just beginning to round, that Yegor brought up the wedding.
"I want to do it at the dacha," he said.
"In Russia. Where my great-grandparents are.
Where I brought you, the only woman I've ever brought anywhere.
" He turned his glass slowly. "And I want to do it at Christmas.
Snow on the ground. The domes lit up across the river.
Your grandmother, my mother, Pavel's violin and all the people we love, in the one place on earth that has only ever held the real version of me. "
Tanisha looked at the man who had once stood at the top of a staircase unable to say three words, now planning a Christmas wedding in the snow out loud, easily, like a man who had finally learned the language.
"Christmas," she said softly. "At the dacha."
"Christmas at the dacha."
And she reached across the table for the hand of the husband she had married by accident and started, for the first time in her life, to plan a future she actually believed she'd get to keep.