He reached in his pocket slowly and took out a cigarette and leaned past me to get a lighter from the kitchen windowsill. I stared at him, so close, as he bent his head, the lighter flared, and the tip of his cigarette glowed.
“Don’t smoke in the house,” I said, my throat raspy.
“I’m going into the garage,” he said.
I sniffed, still trying to recover my footing. “People who smoke are gross.”
He paused in the garage door, looking at me casually, as if he hadn’t just ruined me. Then he took the cigarette from his mouth and his gaze swept over me. Appraising, perhaps judging.
“So are women who let men spit in their mouths,” he said. “But look at you, swallowing like a good, little slut.”
I gaped at him.
“Goodnight, Sienna. I’ll be up later, but don’t wait up for me.”
The garage door shut behind him and I sat there on the sink, still naked, for a while longer. God, how could I be so infuriated with him one moment and yet want him so badly the next? My nails dug into the sink and my chest heaved as I struggled to gain control of my feelings. Part of me wanted to march into the garage and slap him. Another part of me wanted to beg him to fuck me, to claim me even if it hurt.
Instead I went upstairs and turned on the removable shower head full blast. It took a few orgasms to wring the pulsing desire from between my thighs. Then I fell into bed and pulled the covers up over my head to block everything out. But his pale eyes still swam in my mind’s eye, self-assured and maybe a little arrogant.
God, he knew exactly what he was doing to me.
Chapter Six
Viktor
I thought about her for the entire goddamn evening while I tinkered underneath the vintage Mustang. My mind kept shifting back to the touch of her naked body against me, to the taste of her mouth on mine. I tried to lose myself in the mindless task of scrubbing rust from the bumper, but nothing could keep my focus on what my hands were doing.
It was dawning on me slowly that I felt more than just desire for her. I’d thought enough time had elapsed between now and the last time I felt something for a woman, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. Now that I felt that same warm flicker in my chest when I laid eyes on her, I was afraid.
The last time I’d loved a woman it had ended in violence and death. I’d spent the last twenty-five years trying to fix my head, trying to put myself back together. Trying to scrub the image of the mother of my child dying from the backs of my eyelids. Trying to find some solace in the bottom of a glass. But that kind of horror didn’t erase easily if it did at all.
Now it was coming back for me like a monster creeping out from the shadows. Digging its claws into me and dragging me back down to a place I thought I’d left a long time ago. I closed my eyes, letting my head rest on the cold concrete. I needed this marriage to work, despite my wife’s protestations against it.
There wasn’t room in our marriage or in our bed for the ghost of Yulia.
Twenty-five years was a long time to mourn someone. It was time to let myself love a woman who still had a heartbeat. And Sienna, God, if I was going to love anyone, let it be her. She was fiery and difficult to deal with at times, but she was brimming with life, with the energy I’d lacked for a long time. Perhaps after years of existing alone, operating out of grim duty, her fire was exactly what I needed.
The only problem was, she didn’t want me and she definitely didn’t love me. Yes, she melted under my touch and came under my fingertips and my tongue, but when I looked in her dark eyes, I felt her resistance. She might be fine with giving me access to her body, but she wasn’t ready to give me her mind.
And why should she? After all, I was little more than her captor.
I rolled up the garage door and lit another cigarette. It was an unusually warm night, but then South Carolina hadn’t experienced much of a winter this year. The moon rose full over the marshlands and an owl screeched in the distance. I took a deep breath, leaning back, and letting the fresh air move into my lungs.
If I had it my way, I’d drop everything and disappear into the marshlands. Fuck the Bratva, fuck my life in Russia, fuck the new territory in New York. I wanted a house in the middle of goddamn nowhere with nothing more than a bed where I could sleep tangled up with my wife. And a porch so I could fuck her over the railing and have a cigarette afterwards.
That was a pipe dream. I had the unique misfortune of being my father’s son, which meant my life was planned out for me before I was even conceived. And having my older brother die before the age of twenty meant there was even more pressure to uphold the family reputation. There was work to be done in the Bratva and no one but me to do it.
My men and their families depended on me. The territories I governed in the United States and overseas depended on my guidance. This was my life and my legacy and, as much as I fantasized about a way out, there wasn’t one.
Not for me. Or for my son.
No, I had to build a secure world for my children. And that started with Boston. Fuck, I hated it, hated that I was building a legacy out of bloodshed. But that was all I knew how to do, all my father had taught me. It was the heavy goddamn albatross about my neck that had chaffed at me for the last forty-four years. Always there, always reminding me whose blood ran in my veins.
I blinked, jolting myself out of the destructive spiral of my thoughts. Looking forward was the only way to stay sane, even if it did involve starting a war. The Irish ran Boston and they had for decades. But with Lucien in my corner, we could take them in a war and win access to the ports. The amount of product we could move if we owned the New York and Boston ports was unimaginable. Millions of dollars worth of it.
The only problem was that Lucien refused to get into a war with the Irish outfit. That left me with no other option than to draw the Irish into a war with the Bratva and force Lucien to hold true to our alliance and back the organization when the time came. The Irish wouldn’t stand a chance against the Italians and the Russians combined. And when the war was over, there would be the ports. The spoils of war, there for the taking.
That was the real reason I’d agreed to Lucien’s alliance in the first place. And why Sienna was sleeping in my bed at this very moment.