59
CORA
His hands settle on my hips, fisting in the material of my shirt. His shirt. “What are you doing?”
“You spend a lot of time talking about what everyone else needs. I want to talk about what you need.”
“What I need is to be a man of my word.”
“So be one,” I say plainly. “I’m not stopping you.”
His thumbs stroke over my ribs. “No, but you’re making it really fucking hard.”
I may have been unconscious half an hour ago, but my body is thrumming now. I feel like a livewire in his hands.
“You have secrets. I know that. But so do I.” I wrap my hands around his neck and trace my fingers through his silky hair. “We both have good reasons not to be here—not to be together. But I can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t let you tear this shirt off of me right this second.”
I feel his hard length pressing against my center. “For one, this is my shirt.” He smirks. “I’d hate to lose it.”
“Oh. Okay.” I reach down and pull the shirt over my head in one smooth motion. I toss it at the end of the bed and turn back to him. “Is this better?”
Outside, I’m confident. On the inside, I’m a ball of uncertainty.
Until I see the way Ivan is looking at me.
Desire turns his eyes dark—feral. He groans as if in pain and presses his forehead to the smooth skin between my breasts. “Cora.”
My name on his lips is an aphrodisiac. Fuel on the fire—not that it needed any.
I slide my hips forward and back, gently grinding into him. “Some cruel twist of fate has brought the two of us together and I say we make the most of it while we can. Until we bounce off each other and go our separate ways, why not enjoy the sexual chemistry?”
He lifts his head from my chest, looking up at me beneath heavy brows. “I didn’t take you for the casual sex type.”
“And I didn’t take you for the monogamous type,” I fire back. “You’ll marry a ‘suitable woman’ one day. But until then, you’re more than free to fuck me.”
He squeezes my ribs, his hands shifting ever higher until his thumbs brush against the lace material of my bra. “Things are going to get complicated fast.”
“Things are already complicated. But this?” I grind into him again, trying not to moan. “This has always made perfect sense.”
He grits his teeth and swipes his thumbs over the hard points of my nipples. A faint whimper sneaks between my lips. “Nothing about you has made any fucking sense. Not since the moment we met.”
I’m not sure what he means, but I don’t want to ask. Not now. I don’t want to get sidetracked with anything else.
Not when he is alive and in front of me.
Not when, in a not-too-distant future, he’ll be far out of my reach.
“This will sell our charade.” I’m breathless already, half-lost to the desire pounding between my legs. “It will make us seem more realistic.”
His hands slide down my waist and wrap around my lower back. I arch into his touch.
“Unless we’re planning to offer webcam viewings of my bedroom, I don’t see how what we’re doing right now will help sell anything to anyone.”
If he wanted to, I’d let him set up a webcam. If it meant he’d keep touching me, I’d do just about anything.
He growls again, a low rumble vibrating from him and through me. I force my eyes open—force myself to look at him. At his stubbled jaw. At the tattoos climbing up his neck. At the golden flecks in his amber eyes.
And for just a second, I’m forced to look at myself. At my own motivations for being here. For suggesting any of this.
This is more than a flimsy facade for the sake of “his mission.” This is a facade for what I really feel. For the feelings I can’t navigate and won’t confess.
Despite it all, I want this man. Desperately.
This is just the only way I can have him.
For now, it has to be enough.
Ivan’s eyes trail over my face and my body. Then, all at once, he pushes me back and prowls over me. He settles between my legs, his hands pressed into the mattress on either side of my head, caging me into his body, his scent.
“God, it’s good to feel you like this,” he murmurs between bites of my collarbone. He looks at me up the length of my body, his eyes hooded. “Seeing you the way you were was a fucking nightmare. This is…better.”
Someone admitting they like you better conscious isn’t exactly poetry, but Anya’s words ring out in my head. If he reveals even a drop of emotion to you, there’s an ocean of feeling where that came from.
This is sex. Just sex, I remind myself. Hoping for anything more is a waste of energy.
“I prefer myself conscious, as well.” I slide my hand between our bodies and stroke the underside of his erection. “It makes it easier to do this.”
He drops his head onto my shoulder and groans in my ear. “Fucking hell, Cora.”
I slip inside his pants and grip him. “It’s good practice, too. You said if people could see us having sex, they’d have no doubt about our relationship. Maybe we should give it a try.”
A laugh hisses between his clenched teeth. “Reconsidering my webcam idea?”
“I’m toying around with it.”
At the next slow pull of my hand, Ivan gently presses his teeth into my shoulder. “Keep toying with it, then.”
His lips find their way to my neck again, but he moves slowly. As if we have all the time in the world to be here. To explore and touch and kiss. And laugh.
That’s the funny thing: all it takes is one look at Ivan to know that he would be great in bed. But the easy banter, the laughter—that was unexpected. That, more than anything, makes it hard to keep the yearning in my chest in the box where it belongs.
He growls out a curse and then slides away from my touch. His eyes are near black as he kisses his way down my stomach and lower. He tugs at the elastic of my panties, dragging the lace down my thighs and then shoving them down to the floor along with his own pants.
I watch him with my mouth open. He’s so fucking gorgeous. It still blows my mind that this man chose me.
Then he pounces again and all thoughts go flying out of my head.
When he hooks my legs over his shoulders and lowers his face to my pussy, I almost buck us both off the bed. He feasts on me, licking and sucking until my hands are fisted in the sheets and I’m thrashing. My thighs clamp down around his ears as the sensation becomes too much.
I thread my fingers through his hair and ride him while I come undone again, again, again.
When he finally lifts his head, a wicked smile on his lips, my heart stutters.
I want more.
More than his body. More than mind-blowing sex.
I want all of him. The warrior. The protector. The leader. The charmer.
I want every iteration of Ivan Pushkin, and as much as I try to push that inconvenient truth to the side, it’s impossible to ignore when he’s smiling up at me like this.
“Scream like that every time I touch you and we’ll have everyone fooled.”
“Did I scream?” I didn’t realize it, but I’m not surprised. The orgasm is still ebbing away, aftershocks still shivering through me.
He nods, keeping my legs hooked over his shoulders as he crawls up my body. “Don’t worry if you missed it. You’re about to do it again.”
Before I can answer, he fills me in one thrust.
I claw at his shoulders, trying to bring him closer. To bury my face in his neck so he can’t see what this is doing to me. But with my legs over his shoulders, this is as close as we can get. Close enough that he can see every fleeting emotion as it crosses my face.
I can see the sweat glistening in the hollows of his throat. I watch his jaw flex with each thrust. Worse, I see him study me the same way I’m studying him.
And when Ivan looks, he sees everything.
“Take this off.” I grab awkwardly at his shirt, pretending I care about it while he’s filling me again and again.
Ivan deftly slides my legs off his shoulders and leans back, tugging his shirt off with one move.
I reach for him, grateful for the position change until I go to loop an arm around his waist and find a large bandage there. It's taped over his ribs and wrapped partially around his back.
“What happened?”
He glances down and then shrugs it off. “Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing. That’s a huge—” I lose my voice as he slides into me to the hilt, our bodies slapping together. I press a hand to his chest. “Is that from tonight? Did you get hurt?”
Anya said he was grazed. I imagined it like a road rash. But his bandage is bigger than my entire hand.
“It was a bullet graze. I’m fine.”
I press a palm to his side, and he winces. “That’s not fine, Ivan! He shot you! You saved me, but he shot you.”
He growls low in his throat. “It’s a graze. And we can talk about it later.”
To punctuate the point, he draws his hips back and slams into me again.
“You shouldn’t have—You have so many people who care about you.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice steady when my body is fighting to get closer to him. “I don’t want you to die to save me. My family isn’t like yours. There isn’t anyone who cares about me. You should—”
He hauls me against him in an instant, dragging me off my back so we are kneeling together, chest to chest. “For fuck’s sake, solnishka. I’ve explained this to you over and over again.”
“Explained what? I don’t know anything. None of this makes any sense to me.”
“Then let me clear things up for you.”
He slides my body up and down his thighs, taking me in slow, steady strokes while he looks into my eyes. He brings his mouth nearly to mine, letting our lips brush with every word.
“I do whatever the fuck I want.”
I start to argue, but he takes my lower lip into his mouth. His tongue swirls against mine, muddying my thoughts and my senses. I’m putty in his hands.
His hand slips between us, thumb circling between my legs. I tip my head back, eyes closed. “You can’t die for me, Ivan.”
“Of course I can.”
His thrusts are shallow now, but I feel like he’s touching the deepest part of me. I want to stay like this with him for as long as possible. Forever, if I had my way.
But I don’t have forever.
We might not even have tomorrow.
So I cling to the bleeding edge of now. We rock together until I’m rolling my hips against him and crying out to the ceiling, dizzy with pleasure.
Slowly, Ivan lays me back on the mattress. He fists a hand in my hair as we collide together. Once, twice, and again and again until he pants out a curse.
I trace the swirling tattoos on his arms as he spills into me. His body flexes with release, then he lets out a long, exhausted sigh. He nuzzles his stubbled face against my neck and, when he talks, his voice is a hoarse whisper in my ear.
“I always get what I want, Cora. And what I want is you.”