Chapter 12 #2
I breathe. The stretch eases, shifts, becomes pressure, and then delicious fullness. He reads the change in my face and pushes deeper another inch, and then pauses. The patience he’s giving to my care cracks me open with love for this man.
When he's fully inside me, we both go still. The water runs over us, the lake stretching beyond the glass, blue light turning our skin to cold sapphire. His eyes hold mine and neither of us breathes.
"Blyad'," he whispers, his jaw flexing, the cords in his neck standing taut.
"Is that Russian for 'you feel incredible' or Russian for 'I need a minute'?"
He exhales. The sound is half laugh, half surrender, shaking through his body into mine. The vibration sends a ripple through every place where we're connected.
"Both," he says. "It's both."
Then he moves. Slow at first, long, deliberate strokes that let me feel every inch of him.
My body rises to meet each one with an instinct I never knew I carried.
The stone wall is cool against my back, his hands hot on my hips, the water warm between us.
The sounds I'm making fill the room, bouncing off glass, off stone, coming back desperate in a register I've never visited.
He's quiet, nearly silent, the contrast between my noise and his silence making both louder.
His breathing hitches when I clench around him.
A low groan tears from his throat when I drag my nails down his back.
My name falls from his mouth in the space between thrusts, spoken against my temple, my cheek, my mouth.
"Good girl." He says it against my mouth when I take him deeper, when my hips find the rhythm of his and match it and exceed it. "That's my good girl."
Something inside me collapses. Not the orgasm, not yet, but a wall I never knew I was holding up. The sound I make is a sob that has nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the weight of wanting this man and finally having him inside my body where the wanting started.
His arms tighten around me, holding me through it, his face in my hair, his hips moving in a rhythm that is no longer slow. The urgency arrives. Everything we've built since the terrace, since the kitchen, since the living room floor, all of it crests at once.
"Rowan." His name breaks in my mouth. "I need, I need..."
"Da." He knows what I need before I can finish asking. His hand slides between us, finds the place where his body meets mine. The pressure of his thumb against my clit while he moves inside me is the thing that ends me.
The orgasm rolls through me in waves so deep I lose my hearing for three full seconds. My body seizes around him, my legs clamping tight, my fingers in his hair. The sound I make is raw and unkempt, filling the compound.
He comes with his forehead against mine, a word in Russian I can't translate but can feel in the way his entire body shudders against me. The breath empties from his lungs like he's been holding it for twenty-two years and finally lets it go.
We stay against the wall, the water running over us, his chest heaving against mine, my legs shaking around his waist. Neither of us moves because moving requires coordination that no longer exists in this shower.
His thumb traces my cheekbone, pushing wet hair from my face. The tenderness after the intensity is devastating in a way the intensity never was. My eyes burn hot, the tears threatening but not falling.
"Ty v poryadke," he says quietly, just for me. The Russian wraps around the words, softening them into a promise. "You're okay."
I press my face into his neck, breathing in warm water, soap, cedar, slate. The compound itself woven into his skin.
He carries me from the shower, wrapping me in towels, one around my body, one around my hair. He sets me on the bed with more gentleness than I've ever seen from his hands.
He brings water from the kitchen along with grapes, the small green ones I've been eating from his fridge for days because he keeps buying them without commenting on the fact that I eat the entire bag in one sitting.
He sets the bowl on the bedside table, sits behind me on the bed, and his fingers find my hair.
He braids it.
"Are you braiding my hair right now?" I say it to the towel around my chest because looking at him over my shoulder while his fingers are in my hair might actually kill me. "You just took my virginity in a shower and now you're braiding my hair. Who are you?"
Those massive, scarred hands that loaded cargo on the docks of Saint Petersburg, that broke jaws, built empires, turned a silver ring for twenty-two years, work through the wet white length of my hair with a patience that stops my breathing.
He separates the strands into three sections, weaving them together slow and careful.
I can feel the calluses on each finger as they cross over each other along my scalp.
"Where did you learn to braid hair?"
"My mother had long hair." The words are quiet. He rations personal history the way he rations words, carefully, in small portions that cost him more than he lets on. "She would sit on the floor and I would sit behind her on the couch. She taught me when I was six."
My back presses against his chest, his heartbeat steady behind my shoulder blade. The compound is quiet around us, just the hum of the ventilation, the distant sound of water settling in the shower, his fingers in my hair, over and over, weaving, pulling, smoothing.
I eat grapes while he braids, the juice bursting sweet and cold against the warmth I'm still carrying in my skin.
He reaches around me for one and I hold it up to his mouth instead.
He takes it from my fingers, his lips brushing my fingertips.
My stomach flips even though the man was inside my body fifteen minutes ago.
Apparently the learning curve for Rowan Volkov intimacy has no ceiling.
He ties off the braid with an elastic from the bathroom drawer, his arms wrapping around me from behind to pull me against his chest. I go boneless against him, his chin resting on the crown of my head.
"Still okay?"
"I'm so far past okay I can't even see okay from here."
His chest shakes with the silent laugh, the one that never makes it past his throat but vibrates through every bone pressed against my spine.
I turn in his arms, pressing my cheek to his chest. His heartbeat fills my ear, deep, slow, steady.
He just made love for the first time in his life, because that is what that was.
Whatever he did before, whoever he touched before, it was not this.
I know that the way I know the smell of lily of the valley and the weight of a rolling pin.
His fingers trace the line of my braid down my back. His lips press against my forehead. The gentleness of both gestures, the soft continuous attention after the intensity of the shower, undoes me worse than the orgasm did.
My eyes burn again. This time I let them.
He doesn't say anything, just holds me tighter, his hand moving in slow circles on my back, his mouth resting against my hair. His silence is the loudest comfort I've ever received.
I fall asleep on his chest to the sound of his heartbeat under my ear, the blue light rippling on the walls, the taste of grapes and steam and a man who said my name to the water because he believed he was alone.
I wake to warmth, his body behind mine, his arm heavy across my waist, his breath slow and even against the back of my neck. Morning light filters through the cliff-face windows in pale stripes, cutting across the bed, the black marble floor, the boots sitting by the nightstand.
His mouth moves against my hair.
"Dobroye utro."
The syllables are rough with sleep, low and warm, spoken into the braid he wove last night. His arm tightens around my waist, pulling me closer against his chest. The soreness between my thighs is a deep, sweet ache that reminds my body of every inch of him.
"What does that mean?"
"Good morning." His thumb traces my hip, lazy and unhurried. "In Russian."
"Dob-ROY-yeh OOH-tro." I butcher every syllable with full confidence and zero accuracy.
His chest moves against my back. The vibration starts low, builds, breaks into a sound completely new from him. An actual laugh, short and real, startled out of him by the sheer audacity of my pronunciation. The vibration rolling through his body into my cheekbone is the best sound in the world.
"Terrible," he says, but his arm tightens and his lips press against the curve of my ear. I can feel the smile he's wearing against my skin.
I roll into him, pressing my face against his chest, breathing in cedar and clean skin. He is solid, present, here.
The compound is quiet around us. Morning light, his heartbeat, the slow circles his thumb draws on my hip.
From this angle, curled against his body with his arm around me, I can see the edge of my boot where it sits beside the nightstand. The leather is scuffed from running. The zipper glints in the morning light.
The paper is inside. Nikolai's name on every route.
I close my eyes, pressing closer to his chest, counting his heartbeats against my cheek.
Tomorrow. I'll deal with it tomorrow.