He really was a bastard.
He did not deserve to put his hands on her. Rough, tattooed, fighter’s hands, stained with ink, stained with blood. The man he’d been...the boy he’d been before his world had changed forever could have been good enough for her. But he had not been allowed to remain that boy. He’d been forced to change, to adapt. And he had.
He’d been pushed into violence, and so he’d become violent.
In contrast, she was smooth, untouched by the world in many ways. And he knew it. There would be no pretending later. He knew what he was doing. And more importantly he knew what he would not be able to do for her after. He could offer her nothing. Nothing but this.
But, though it should, it was not going to stop him.
“You have nothing to fear from me,” he said, feeling as if he was telling her a lie. “I have no desire to hurt you.” That much was true, though it might be inevitable.
“I won’t turn back. I’ve made up my mind.” They paused in front of the door of the coat check, and Victoria handed the woman sitting at the front her numbered ticket. A black wrap and handbag appeared a moment later, and Victoria wasted no time in opening up the little clutch and producing the cuff he’d given her this morning.
She extended her hand and placed it into his with trembling fingers. “See? I’m committed. I’m making this decision while not under the influence of lust. Well, not mind-numbing lust anyway. You aren’t talking me into it while you have me in a fog. We had the hour. We had this long walk over here. We even had this little talk about my nerves. And the answer is still yes. This cuff is still yours. And I still want you.”
He had told her that the leather cuff he wore around his wrist meant nothing. He had lied. It was his father’s. And he had taken it off the man’s dead body in the moments after his life had exploded around him.
A reminder.
Of the fact that he was a changed man now, because his father had pushed him to decide between two impossible things: his life, or Dmitri’s and his mother’s.
Of the fact that truly, there had been only one choice. It was only a matter of being strong enough to make it.
And he was.
He began to tie the cuff back around his wrist, just above his watch. “You have no idea how much this pleases me, milaya moya.”
He realized his hands were shaking, too. There was something happening inside of him, a kind of shivering sensation taking him over. It was not like anything he’d felt before.
The closest it came was to the moment just before he had taken that gun in his hands in a beautiful home in Moscow and pointed it at the man that he had always called father. He had felt something like this then. As though the control was slipping away from his grasp, as though everything was about change. As though life and death hung in the balance and if he did not make a decision quickly he would fall on the wrong side of it. As though all of life’s options had reduced down to one, one that was terrible, great, powerful and unavoidable.
Yes, this strange trembling feeling was most comparable to that.
To fear.
But that was crazy. What man feared a naked woman? Certainly not him. He had seen countless naked women before, had put his hands on them. Had been inside of them. Why should she be different?
Because she is.
And he had known that from the beginning, which was why he had taken great pains to avoid this. To avoid touching her, kissing her, wanting her. Because he had known even then that she was different. That this was different.
Ridiculous. She might be different, but she was still just a woman.
He gritted his teeth and turned to face her. “Shall we go?”
“Yes, happily, we are already sharing a room so that takes away some of the awkwardness of the whole your-room-or-mine question.”
“We do not have the same bedroom in the suite.”
“Still, it eliminates the walk of shame risk.”
“Victoria,” he said.
“What?”
“Stop talking.”
She snapped her mouth shut, her crimson lips sealed tightly. He was tempted to make a dry comment about how rare this must be, but he refrained. This was not the time for jokes.
She had been making them to clear the tension, and he had decided he did not want any of it diminished. He wanted this moment. All of it. All of her.
He wrapped his arm around her waist and walked them both down the corridor that led to the elevators. He pressed the button and waited in silence before they stepped inside, finding themselves shrouded in the relative privacy.
Under normal circumstances he would immediately close the distance between himself and his prospective lover. Would pull her into his arms and began what would be finished in the bedroom right here on the way.
But not here. Not now, not with Victoria.
He only wanted to look at her for a while. To watch the pulse beat at the base of her throat, to watch the faint blush in her cheeks spread over the rest of her skin, flesh that spoke of arousal. To see the blue of her eyes all but disappear as her pupils expanded, as her eyes darkened.
To appreciate the fact that he still didn’t know what she looked like naked. To savor this time of not knowing, because soon every question would be answered.
There was something perversely pleasurable about this moment of in between. This last bit of torture. Of not having, of wanting. Of being so near to satisfaction he could taste it, but far enough that he was in near physical pain from the weight of resisting.
Victoria took a deep breath, her shoulders lifting slightly, her fingers tightening on the little clutch bag she was still holding. She was nervous. But she was also excited. He had never fully appreciated how enjoyable it could be to watch for these small signals in his partners. Or perhaps it would not have been enjoyable with any other partner. Perhaps it was only Victoria and that indefinable quality that had reached out and grabbed him by the throat from the first moment he’d seen her.
He let the silence expand between them, let it settle over them like a cloak. Until he became exceedingly aware of the sound of her shallow breathing, of the sound of the elevator’s gears grinding, moving them closer to their floor. To their destination.
It stopped, the door sliding open. Victoria’s breath caught in her throat, her lips parted slightly, her eyes wide.
He reached out and touched the back of her neck, sliding his fingers around slowly, reveling in the velvet softness of her skin. He tightened his hold, guiding both of them from the elevator and out into the hall. She turned slightly, her eyes meeting his. There were questions there, but none that she spoke. And so he answered none of them. Instead, he kept his hold on her firm and continued down the corridor toward their suite.
He used the key card to unlock the door and held it open for her, waiting for her to enter. Another sign of her desire to be with him. And he needed another one. Because he had the feeling that once he touched her he would be at a point of no return, then he would find it almost impossible to stop were she to change her mind. So he had to be certain now.
He stood in the doorway and watched her walk to the center of the room, crimson against the white marble floor and the cream-colored furniture.
She dropped the wrap and the bag onto the sofa and looked up at him, biting her lower lip. It occurred to him then that he had not kissed her today. He had not kissed her since last night on the balcony, and he had not kissed her before that. Such a strange thing to want a woman as fiercely as he did when he had touched her so few times.
And suddenly he was desperate for more. Desperate to taste her deeper than he had before, longer.