Читать книгу Not Just The Boss's Plaything - Caitlin Crews - Страница 9

HE TASTED LIKE the night. Better even than she’d imagined.

He paused for the barest instant when Alicia’s lips touched his. Half a heartbeat. Less.

A scant second while the taste of him seared through her, deep and dark and wild. She thought that was enough, that small taste of his fascinating mouth. That would do, and now she could go back to her quiet—

But then he angled his head to one side, used the hand at her cheek to guide her mouth where he wanted it and took over.

Devouring her like the wolf she understood he was. He really was, and the realization swirled inside of her like heat. His mouth was impossibly carnal, opening over hers to taste her, to claim her.

Dark and deep, hot and sure.

Alicia simply...exploded. It was like a long flash of light, shuddering and bright, searing everything away in the white hot burn of it. It was perfect. It was beautiful.

It was too much.

She shivered against him, overloaded with his bold taste, the scrape of his jaw, his talented fingers moving her mouth where he wanted it in a silent, searing command she was happy to obey. Then his hands were in her hair, buried in her thick curls. Her arms went around his neck of their own volition, and then she was plastered against the tall, hard length of him. It was like pressing into the surface of the sun and still, she couldn’t seem to get close enough.

As if there was no close enough.

And he kissed her, again and again, with a ruthless intensity that made her feel weak and beautiful all at once, until she was mindless with need. Until she forgot her own name. Until she forgot she didn’t know his. Until she forgot how dangerous forgetting was for her.

Until she forgot everything but him.

When he pulled back, she didn’t understand. He put an inch, maybe two, between them, and then he muttered something harsh and incomprehensible while he stared at her as if he thought she was some kind of ghost.

It took her a long, confused moment to realize that she couldn’t understand him because he wasn’t speaking in English, not because she’d forgotten her own language, too.

Alicia blinked, the world rushing back as she did. She was still standing in that club. Music still pounded all around them, lights still flashed, well-dressed patrons still shouted over the din, and somewhere out in the middle of the dance floor, Rosie was no doubt still playing her favorite game with her latest conquest.

Everything was as it had been before she’d stumbled into this man, before he’d caught her. Before she’d kissed him.

Before he’d kissed her back.

Everything was exactly the same. Except Alicia.

He was searching her face as if he was looking for something. He shook his head slightly, then reached down and ran a lazy finger over the ridge of her collarbone, as if testing its shape. Even that made her shudder, that simple slide of skin against skin. Even so innocuous a touch seemed directly connected to that pulsing heat between her legs, the heavy ache in her breasts, the hectic spin inside of her.

She didn’t have to speak his language to know whatever he muttered then was a curse.

If she were smart, the way she’d tried to be for years now, she would pull her hand away and run. Just as he’d told her she should. Just as she’d promised herself she would. Everything about this was too extreme, too intense, as if he wasn’t only a strange man in a club but the kind of drug that usually went with this kind of rolling, wildly out-of-control feeling. As if she was much too close to being high on him.

“Last chance,” he said then, as if he could read her mind.

He was giving her a warning. Again.

In her head, she listened. She smiled politely and extricated herself. She marched herself to the nearest exit, hailed a taxi, then headed straight home to the comfort of her bloody laundry. Because she knew she couldn’t be trusted outside the confines of the rules she’d made for herself. She’d been living the consequences of having no rules for a long, long time.

But here, now, in this loud place surrounded by so many people and all of that pounding music, she didn’t feel like the person she’d been when she’d arrived. Everything she knew about herself had twisted inside out. Turned into something else entirely in that electric blue of his challenging gaze.

As if this really was a Shoreditch fairy tale, after all.

“What big eyes you have,” she teased him.

His hard mouth curved then, and she felt it like a burst of heat, like sunlight. She couldn’t do anything but smile back at him.

“So be it,” he said, as if he despaired of them both.

Alicia laughed, then laughed again at the startled look in his eyes.

“The dourness is a lovely touch,” she told him. “You must be beating them off with a stick. A very grim stick.”

“No stick,” he said, in an odd tone. “A look at me is usually sufficient.”

“A wolf,” she said, and grinned. “Just as I suspected.”

He blinked, and again looked at her in that strange way of his, as if she was an apparition he couldn’t quite believe was standing there before him.

Then he moved with the same decisiveness he’d used when he’d taken control of that kiss, tucking her into his side as he navigated his way through the dense crowd. She tried not to think about how well she fitted there, under his heavy arm, tight against the powerful length of his torso as he cut through the crowd. She tried not to drift away in the scent of him, the heat and the power, all of it surrounding her and pouring into that ache already inside of her, making it bloom and stretch and grow.

Until it took over everything.

Maybe she was under some kind of spell, Alicia thought with the small part of her that wasn’t consumed with the feel of his tall, lean frame as he guided her so protectively through the crowd. It should have been impossible to move through the club so quickly, so confidently. Not in a place like this at the height of a Saturday night. But he did it.

And then they were outside, in the cold and the damp November night, and he was still moving in that same breathtaking way, like quicksilver. Like he knew exactly where they were headed—away from the club and the people still milling about in front of it. He led her down the dark street, deeper into the shadows, and it was then Alicia’s sense of self-preservation finally kicked itself into gear.

Better late than never, she thought, annoyed with herself, but it actually hurt her to pull away from the magnificent shelter of his body, from all of that intense heat and strength. It felt like she’d ripped her skin off when she stepped away from him, as if they’d been fused together.

He regarded her calmly, making her want to trust him when she knew she shouldn’t. She couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, but...” She wrapped her arms around her own waist in an attempt to make up for the heat she’d lost when she’d stepped away from him. “I don’t know a single thing about you.”

“You know several things, I think.”

He sounded even more delicious now that they were alone and she could hear him properly. Russian, she thought, as pleased as if she’d learned his deepest, darkest secrets.

“Yes,” she agreed, thinking of the things she knew. Most of them to do with that insistent ache in her belly, and lower. His mouth. His clever hands. “All lovely things. But none of them worth risking my personal safety for, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Something like a smile moved in his eyes, but didn’t make it to his hard mouth. Still, it echoed in her, sweet and light, making her feel far more buoyant than she should have on a dark East London street with a strange man even she could see was dangerous, no matter how much she wanted him.

Had she ever wanted anything this much? Had anyone?

“A wolf is never without risk,” he told her, that voice of his like whiskey, smooth and scratchy at once, heating her up from the inside out. “That’s the point of wolves. Or you’d simply get a dog, pat it on the head.” His eyes gleamed. “Teach it tricks.”

Alicia wasn’t sure she wanted to know the tricks this man had up his sleeve. Or, more to the point, she wasn’t sure she’d survive them. She wasn’t certain she’d survive this as it was.

“You could be very bad in bed,” she said, conversationally, as if she picked up strange men all the time. She hardly recognized her own light, easy, flirtatious tone. She hadn’t heard it since before that night in her parents’ back garden. “That’s a terrible risk to take with any stranger, and awkward besides.”

That smile in his eyes intensified, got even bluer. “I’m not.”

She believed him.

“You could be the sort who gets very, very drunk and weeps loudly about his broken heart until dawn.” She gave a mock shudder. “So tedious, especially if poetry is involved. Or worse, singing.”

“I don’t drink,” he countered at once. His dark brows arched over those eyes of his, challenging her. Daring her. “I never sing, I don’t write poems and I certainly do not weep.” He paused. “More to the point, I don’t have a heart.”

“Handy, that,” she replied easily. She eyed him. “You could be a killer, of course. That would be unfortunate.”

She smiled at that. He didn’t.

“And if I am?”

“There you go,” she said, and nodded sagely. Light, airy. Enchanted, despite herself. “I can’t possibly go off into the night with you now, can I?”

But it was terrifying how much she wanted to go off with him, wherever he’d take her, and instead of reacting to that as she should, she couldn’t stop smiling at him. As if she already knew him, this strange man dressed all in black, his blue eyes the only spot of color on the cold pavement as he stared at her as if she’d stunned him somehow.

“My name is Nikolai,” he said, and she had the oddest impression he hadn’t meant to speak at all. He shifted, then reached over and traced her lips with his thumb, his expression so fierce, so intent, it made her feel hollowed out inside, everything scraped away except that wild, wondrous heat he stirred in her. “Text someone my name and address. Have them ring every fifteen minutes if you like. Send the police. Whatever you want.”

“All those safeguards are very thoughtful,” she pointed out, but her eyes felt too wide and her voice sounded insubstantial. Wispy. “Though not exactly wolfish, it has to be said.”

His mouth moved into his understated version of a smile

“I want you.” His eyes were on fire. Every inch of him that wolf. “What will it take?”

She swayed back into him as if they were magnets and she’d simply succumbed to the pull. And then she had no choice but to put her hand to his abdomen, to feel all that blasting heat right there beneath her palm.

Even that didn’t scare her the way it should.

“What big teeth you have,” she whispered, too on edge to laugh, too filled with that pulsing ache inside of her to smile.

“The biting part comes later.” His eyes gleamed again, with the kind of sheer male confidence that made it difficult to breathe. Alicia stopped trying. “If you ask nicely.”

He picked up her hand and lifted it to his mouth, tracing a dark heat over the back of it. He didn’t look away.

“If you’re sure,” she said piously, trying desperately to pretend she wasn’t shaking, and that he couldn’t feel it. That he didn’t know exactly what he was doing to her when she could see full well that he did. “I was promised a wolf, not a dog.”

“I eat dogs for breakfast.”

She laughed then. “That’s not particularly comforting.”

“I can’t be what I’m not, solnyshka.” He turned her hand over, then kissed her palm in a way that made her hiss in a sharp breath. His eyes were smiling again, so bright and blue. “But I’m very good at what I am.”

And she’d been lost since she’d set eyes on him, hadn’t she? What use was there in pretending otherwise? She wasn’t drunk. It wasn’t like that terrible night, because she knew what she was doing. Didn’t she?

“Note to self,” Alicia managed to say, breathless and dizzy and unable to remember why she’d tried to stop this in the first place, when surrendering to it—to him—felt so much like triumph. Like fate. “Never eat breakfast with a wolf. The sausages are likely the family dog.”

He shrugged. “Not your family dog,” he said with that fierce mouth of his, though she was sure his blue eyes laughed. “If that helps.”

And this time, when she smiled at him, the negotiation was over.

The address he gave her in his clipped, direct way was in an extraordinarily posh part of town Alicia could hardly afford to visit, much less live in. She dutifully texted it to Rosie, hoping that her friend was far too busy to check it until morning. And then she tucked her phone away and forgot about Rosie altogether.

Because he still moved like magic, tucking her against him again as if there was a crowd he needed to part when there was only the late-night street and what surged between them like heat lightning. As if he liked the way she fitted there as much as she did. And her heart began to pound all over again, excitement and anticipation and a certain astonishment at her own behavior pouring through her with every hard thump.

At the corner, he lifted his free hand almost languidly toward the empty street, and for a second Alicia truly believed that he was so powerful that taxis simply materialized before him at his whim—until a nearby engine turned over and a powerful black SUV slid out of the shadows and pulled to a stop right there before them.

More magic, when she was enchanted already.

Nikolai, she whispered to herself as she climbed inside the SUV, as if the name was a song. Or a spell. His name is Nikolai.

He swung in behind her on the soft leather backseat, exchanged a few words in curt Russian with the driver and then pressed a button that raised a privacy shield, secluding them. Then he settled back against the seat, near her but not touching her, stretching out his long, lean body and making the spacious vehicle seem tight. Close.

And then he simply looked at her.

As if he was trying to puzzle her out. Or giving her one last chance to bolt.

But Alicia knew she wasn’t going to do that.

“More talk of dogs?” he asked mildly, yet all she heard was the hunger beneath. She could see it in his eyes, his face. She could feel the echo of it in her, new and huge and almost more than she could bear. “More clever little character assessments couched as potential objections?”

“I got in your car,” she pointed out, hardly recognizing her own voice. The thick heat in it. “I think I’m done.”

He smiled. She was sure of it, though his mouth didn’t move. But she could see the stamp of satisfaction on his hard face, the flare of a deep male approval.

“Not yet, solnyshka,” he murmured, his voice a low rasp. “Not quite yet.”

And she melted. It was a shivery thing, hot and desperate, like she couldn’t quite catch her breath against the heat of it.

“Come here,” he said.

They were cocooned in the darkness, light spilling here and there as the car sped through the city, and still his blue gaze was brilliant. Compelling. And so knowing—so certain of himself, of her, of what was about to happen—it made her blood run hot in her veins.

Alicia didn’t move fast enough and he made a low noise. A growl—like the wolf he so resembled. The rough sound made her shake apart and then melt down into nothing but need, alive with that crazy heat she couldn’t seem to control any longer.

He simply picked her up and pulled her into his lap, his mouth finding hers and claiming her all over again with an impatience that delighted her. She met him with the same urgency. His hands marveled down the length of her back, explored the shape of her hips, and Alicia’s mind blanked out into a red-hot burst of that consuming, impossible fire. Into pure and simple need.

It had been so long. So long, and yet her body knew exactly what to do, thrilling to the taste of him, the feel of his hard, capable hands first over and then underneath her bright red shirt. His hands on her stomach, her waist, her breasts. So perfect she wanted to die. And not nearly enough.

He leaned back to peel off his jacket and the tight black T-shirt beneath, and her eyes glazed over at the sight of all of that raw male beauty. She pressed herself against the hard planes of his perfect chest, tracing the large, colorful tattoos that stretched over his skin with trembling fingers, with her lips and her tongue, tasting art etched across art.

Intense. Hot. Intoxicating.

And that scent of his—of the darkest winter, smoke and ice—surrounded her. Licked into her. Claimed her as surely as he did.

One moment she was fully clothed, the next her shirt and the bra beneath it were swept away, while his hard mouth took hers again and again until she thought she might die if he stopped. Then he did stop, and she moaned out her distress, her desperation. That needy ache so deep in the core of her. But he only laughed softly, before he fastened his hot mouth to the tight peak of one breast and sucked on it, not quite gently, until she thought she really had died.

The noises she heard herself making were impossible. Nothing could really feel this good. This perfect. This wild or this right.

Nikolai shifted, lifting her, and Alicia helped him peel her trousers down from her hips, kicking one leg free and not caring what happened to the other. She felt outside herself and yet more fully in herself than she had been in as long as she could remember. She explored the expanse of his gorgeous shoulders, the distractingly tender spot behind his ear, the play of his stunning muscles, perfectly honed beneath her.

He twisted them both around, coming down over her on the seat and pulling her legs around his hips with an urgency that made her breath desert her. She hadn’t even been aware that he’d undressed. It was more magic—and then he was finally naked against her, the steel length of him a hot brand against her belly.

Alicia shuddered and melted, then melted again, and he moved even closer, one of his hands moving to her bottom and lifting her against him with that devastating skill, that easy mastery, that made her belly tighten.

He was muttering in Russian, that same word he’d used before like a curse or a prayer or even both at once, and the sound of it made her moan again. It was harsh like him, and tender, too. It made her feel as if she might come out of her own skin. He teased her breasts, licking his way from one proud nipple to the other as if he might lose himself there, then moved to her neck, making her shiver against him before he took her mouth again in a hard, deep kiss.

As raw as she was. As undone.

He pulled back slightly to press something into her hand, and she blinked at it, taking much longer than she should have to recognize it was the condom she hadn’t thought about for even an instant.

A trickle of unease snaked down the back of her neck, but she pushed it away, too far gone for shame. Not when his blue eyes glittered with sensual intent and his long fingers moved between them, feeling her damp heat and then stroking deep into her molten center, making her clench him hard.

“Hurry,” he told her.

“I’m hurrying. You’re distracting me.”

He played his fingers in and out of her, slick and hot, then pressed the heel of his hand into her neediest part, laughing softly when she bucked against him.

“Concentrate, solnyshka.”

She ripped open the foil packet, then took her time rolling it down his velvety length, until he cursed beneath his breath.

Alicia liked the evidence of his own pressing need. She liked that she could make his breath catch, too. And then he stopped, braced over her, his face close to hers and the hardest part of him poised at her entrance but not quite—

He groaned. He sounded as tortured as she felt. She liked that, too.

“Your name.”

She blinked at the short command, so gruff and harsh. His arms were hard around her, his big body pressed her back into the soft leather seat, and she felt delicate and powerful all at once.

“Tell me your name,” he said, nipping at her jaw, making her head fall back to give him any access he desired, anything he wanted.

Alive, she thought again. At last.

“Alicia,” she whispered.

He muttered it like a fierce prayer, and then he thrust into her—hot and hard and so perfect, so beautiful, that tears spilled from her eyes even as she shattered around him.

“Again,” he said.

It was another command, arrogant and darkly certain. Nikolai was hard and dangerous and between her legs, his eyes bright and hot and much too intense on hers. She turned her head away but he caught her mouth with his, taking her over, conquering her.

“I don’t think I can—” she tried to say against his mouth, even while the flames still licked through her, even as she still shuddered helplessly around him, aware of the steel length of him inside her, filling her.

Waiting.

That hard smile like a burst of heat inside her. “You will.”

And then he started to move.

It was perfect. More than perfect. It was sleek and hot, impossibly good. He simply claimed her, took her, and Alicia met him. She arched into him, lost in the slide and the heat, the glory of it. Of him.

Slick. Wild.

Perfect.

He moved in her, over her, his mouth at her neck and his hands roaming from her bottom to the center of her shuddering need as he set the wild, intense pace. She felt it rage inside her again, this mad fire she’d never felt before and worried would destroy her even as she hungered for more. And more. And more.

She met every deep thrust. She gloried in it.

“Say my name,” he said, gruff against her ear, his voice washing through her and sending her higher, making her glow. “Now, Alicia. Say it.”

When she obeyed he shuddered, then let out another low, sexy growl that moved over her like a newer, better fire. He reached between them and pressed down hard against the heart of her hunger, hurtling her right over the edge again.

And smiled, she was sure of it, with his warrior’s mouth as well as those winter-bright eyes, right before he followed her into bliss.

Nikolai came back to himself with a vicious, jarring thud.

He couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure he breathed. Alicia quivered sweetly beneath him, his mouth was pressed against the tender junction of her neck and shoulder, and he was still deep inside her lovely body.

What the hell was that?

He shifted her carefully into the seat beside him, ignoring the way her long, inky-black lashes looked against the creamy brown of her skin, the way her perfect, lush mouth was so soft now. He ignored the tiny noise she made in the back of her throat, as if distressed to lose contact with him, which made him grit his teeth. But she didn’t open her eyes.

He dealt with the condom swiftly, then he found his trousers in the tangle of clothes on the floor of the car and jerked them on. He had no idea what had happened to his T-shirt, and decided it didn’t matter. And then he simply sat there as if he was winded.

He, Nikolai Korovin, winded. By a woman.

By this woman.

What moved in him then was like a rush of too many colors, brilliant and wild, when he knew the only safety lay in gray. It surged in his veins, it pounded in his temples, it scraped along his sex. He told himself it was temper, but he knew better. It was everything he’d locked away for all these years, and he didn’t want it. He wouldn’t allow it. It made him feel like an animal again, wrong and violent and insane and drunk....

That was it.

It rang like a bell in him, low and urgent, swelling into everything. Echoing everywhere. No wonder he felt so off-kilter, so dangerously unbalanced. This woman made him feel drunk.

Nikolai forced a breath, then another.

Everything that had happened since she’d tripped in front of him flashed through his head, in the same random snatches of color and sound and scent he remembered from a thousand morning-afters. Her laughter, that sounded the way he thought joy must, though he’d no basis for comparison. The way she’d tripped and then fallen, straight into him, and hadn’t had the sense to roll herself as he would have done, to break her fall. Her brilliant smile that cracked over her face so easily. Too easily.

No one had ever smiled at him like that. As if he was a real man. Even a good one.

But he knew what he was. He’d always known. His uncle’s fists, worse after Ivan had left to fight their way to freedom one championship at a time. The things he’d done in the army. Veronika’s calculated deception, even Ivan’s more recent betrayal—these had only confirmed what Nikolai had always understood to be true about himself down deep into his core.

To think differently now, when he’d lost everything he had to lose and wanted nothing more than to shut himself off for good, was the worst kind of lie. Damaging. Dangerous. And he knew what happened when he allowed himself to become intoxicated. How many times would he have to prove that to himself? How many people would he hurt?

He was better off blank. Ice cold and gray, all the way through.

The day after Veronika left him, Nikolai had woken bruised and battered from another fight—or fights—he couldn’t recall. He’d been shaky. Sick from the alcohol and sicker still with himself. Disgusted with the holes in his memory and worse, with all the things he did remember. The things that slid without context through his head, oily and barbed.

His fists against flesh. His bellow of rage. The crunch of wood beneath his foot, the shattering of pottery against the stone floor. Faces of strangers on the street, wary. Worried. Then angry. Alarmed.

Blood on a fist—and only some of it his. Fear in those eyes—never his. Nikolai was what grown men feared, what they crossed streets to avoid, but he hadn’t felt fear himself in years. Not since he’d been a child.

Fear meant there was something left to lose.

That was the last time Nikolai had drunk a drop of alcohol and it was the last time he’d let himself lose control.

Until now.

He didn’t understand this. He was not an impulsive man. He didn’t pick up women, he picked them, carefully—and only when he was certain that whatever else they were, they were obedient and disposable.

When they posed no threat to him at all. Nikolai breathed in, out.

He’d survived wars. This was only a woman.

Nikolai looked at her then, memorizing her, like she was a code he needed to crack, instead of the bomb itself, poised to detonate.

She wore her dark black hair in a cloud of tight curls around her head, a tempting halo around her lovely, clever face, and he didn’t want any part of this near-overpowering desire that surged in him, to bury his hands in the heavy thickness of it, to start the wild rush all over again. Her body was lithe and ripe with warm, mouthwatering curves that he’d already touched and tasted, so why did he feel as if it had all been rushed, as if it wasn’t nearly enough?

He shouldn’t have this longing to take his time, to really explore her. He shouldn’t hunger for that lush, full mouth of hers again, or want to taste his way along that elegant neck for the simple pleasure of making her shiver. He shouldn’t find it so impossible to look at her without imagining himself tracing lazy patterns across every square inch of the sweet brown perfection of her skin. With his mouth and then his hands, again and again until he knew her.

He’d asked her name, as if he’d needed it. He’d wanted her that much, and Nikolai knew better than to want. It could only bring him pain.

Vodka had been his one true love, and it had ruined him. It had let loose that monster in him, let it run amok. It had taken everything that his childhood and the army hadn’t already divided between them and picked down to the bone. He’d known it in his sober moments, but he hadn’t cared. Because vodka had warmed him, lent color and volume to the dark, silent prison of his life, made him imagine he could be something other than a six-foot-two column of glacial ice.

But he knew better than that now. He knew better than this.

Alicia’s eyes fluttered open then, dark brown shot through with amber, almost too pretty to bear. He hated that he noticed, that he couldn’t look away. She glanced around as if she’d forgotten where they were. Then she looked at him.

She didn’t smile that outrageously beautiful smile of hers, and it made something hitch inside him, like a stitch in his side. As if he’d lost that, too.

She lifted one foot, shaking her head at the trousers that were still attached to her ankle, and the shoe she’d never removed. She reached down, picked up the tangle of her bright red shirt and lacy pink bra from the pile on the floor of the car, and sighed.

And Nikolai relaxed, because he was back on familiar ground.

Now came the demands, the negotiations, he thought cynically. The endless manipulations, which were the reason he’d started making any woman who wanted him agree to his rules before he touched her. Sign the appropriate documents, understand exactly how this would go before it started. Nikolai knew this particular dance well. It was why he normally didn’t pick up women, let them into the sleek, muscular SUV that told them too much about his net worth, much less give them his address....

But instead of pouting prettily and pointedly, almost always the first transparent step in these situations, Alicia looked at him, let her head fall back and laughed.