LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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