“That’s completely—” His lips parted with a curse. “Fine.”
“You okay, Valerian?”
“No.” He swore again. “You’re perfect, and I’m dying all over again. This is… everything.” He gripped my ass and squeezed as he thrust into me like an animal unleashed.
“Right there!” I yelled. “Please!”
With strength he shouldn’t have, he flipped me over with his legs, so he was on top as he kissed me. “You feel so good, Vi. Almost like you were made for me.”
Tears filled my eyes. “Maybe I was.”
Our tongues tangled as our bodies clashed into one another in a beautiful mess of sweat and smoke.
My orgasm hit so hard and sudden that I couldn’t speak. Feeling him inside me, feeling the tremors of his body with his release was like being reborn, and when he collapsed on top of me and then rolled over onto his back, I really did think he had died as he whispered my name and closed his eyes.
I checked his pulse just in case.
Death by orgasm.
He would never live that one down.
I kissed his cheek and smiled.
His pulse was strong.
He just needed to sleep off the rest of the drug.
I grabbed one of the blankets draped across the chair in his sitting room and covered him with it. In a sudden move, he jerked and then grabbed my wrist. “Stay.”
“I should probably get everyone set up in rooms, figure out dinner—”
“See? I knew you would be the perfect wife. You gonna clean for me too? Or are—”
I lurched away from him and smacked him in the back of the head. “Oh, I’m sorry, did that hurt?”
“Italians,” he grumbled. “Always with the slapping.”
“Russians.” I leaned over and kissed his full, lush mouth. “Always with the vodka.”
“Vodka is life,” he whispered and then repeated what I assumed was the same phrase in Russian.
“I know you’re trying to sleep.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And that it’s been a long day.”
“Yup.”
“Are you even listening?”
“Totally.” He yawned.
I sighed. “I’m just curious. Are you completely fluent in Russian? Is the accent even real? And I’m assuming that you didn’t really have a sight problem and were wearing contacts to dull that emerald green?”
Without so much as opening his eyes, he responded with a Russian accent that reminded me of our first days together. “It comes and goes; I grew up around it so I can talk like all the men that used to come to the house. As far as being fluent, I’ve known Russian, Italian, and some French since my mom made me take lessons in all of them starting at the age of three, and you’re correct.”
“And yet you still suck at English? Crazy…”
His eyes flashed open, and then he was pulling me onto the bed and trapping me next to him. “Less talking, more cuddling.”
“You hate cuddling.” I smiled against the mattress as his arms held me against him.
“Only because every time I cuddled with you I got so hard it could have become embarrassing, so I lied and said I hated cuddling—the last thing I needed was your dad cutting my dick off because, at the tender age of fourteen, all I could think about was pinning you to the mattress and screwing you.”
“Fourteen, huh?”
“I would have probably gone off like a bullet if you as much as grazed my zipper.”
“You mean like you do now?”
“Viiiiiiiiiiii…” He drew my name out. “I was drugged, you know.”
I smiled. “Fine, sleep, and then we talk.”
“We always talk; it’s what we did, so we didn’t fuck.”
“It’s what you did.”
“You liked it.”
I sighed happily. “I loved it.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Petrov.”
“Good night…” I kissed the top of his head. “My Russian Polar Bear King.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
I knew the day would come when the sun would set, and darkness would run, I hoped for it, I believed, and finally, it’s as if I can see the road ahead, the path I took, the life I had once overlooked. —Valerian Petrov
Valerian
It took me eight hours to sleep off the fun little drug that Nikolai had created a few years ago.
I’d heard rumors about its effects, and now I could easily say they were true, and I never wanted to experience that sort of helplessness ever again.
During my naptime, I’d gone from having my cousins and friends downstairs with a few associates to every damn man that worked for me, stopping by to check on me, most of them left with a bottle of vodka, meaning I needed to host a party and soon.
And we would as soon as I did the thing I didn’t want to do but needed to do in order to gain that last shred of forgiveness that was cowering in the corner of my heart.
The sound of classical music filtered through the living room as Ash and Serena poured drinks for themselves. Phoenix stood on the far side of the bar, eyeing me along with Andrei, who looked the most relaxed I’d ever seen them. After finding out about my brush with death, they decided to come down, along with my dad, to make sure everything was okay.