Ghost Dance (Tulsa Thunderbirds Book 3) (36 page)

“Too much?” he asked, immediately gentling his touch without taking his hands from me.

“Too tender.” I could barely get the words out from panting. Ever since my accident, my breasts had been more sensitive than before, but this was something else entirely. Was it because I was pregnant? Probably at least somewhat, as they’d even been growing in the last week or two. Or maybe it was the blindfold forcing my other senses to be heightened. Either way, it was more than I had been prepared for.

“Want me to stop?” he asked.

“Please don’t.”

Dima pressed his lips against the side of my neck, tugging down the straps of my bra so he could free my breasts to the chilly air. Every nerve ending in my breasts tingled. Pricked. They were practically begging for his touch, and I was tempted to give voice to the pleas. Somehow, I kept myself quiet and allowed him to do as he would, only writhing against him when I absolutely couldn’t keep myself still.

“
Moyà
,” he repeated, suckling the delicate flesh of my neck and rolling my nipples between his thumbs and forefingers until I couldn’t help but squirm, wishing I could really drive my hips into him for better contact.

I threw my head back and sucked as much air as I could get into my lungs.

“They’re bigger,” he murmured in awe, his lips finding a home along my jaw. He flicked the tips of his fingers over my hard nubs, and my whole body shuddered in pleasure. “Your tits. All of it. They’re bigger.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“
Moyà
,” was his only reply.

His.
He was claiming me. Marking me with his scent. Branding me with the heat of his touch. I reached behind me and locked my fingers in his hair, dragging his lips to mine so I could kiss him.

He groaned and complied, his tongue forcing entry between my lips to meet my own, but he pried my hand free from his hair and tugged it behind my back. “My way,” he bit off between fierce kisses. Within moments, he had my other hand behind my back as well, and I felt the telltale sign of him securing the other necktie around my wrists—tight enough to prevent me from using them but not so tight that it caused me any pain.

Then he got up from behind me, and I fell over from the loss of his support. I tried to straighten myself, to rise to a sitting position, but it was no use. I could only lie where I was and wait for Dima to move me as he saw fit.

For a moment, I didn’t know where he was, and the anticipation of what he would do next nearly drove me out of my mind. I tried to listen as intently as I could, hoping to glean his location from the sound of his movement, but he was as stealthy as a cat. I never figured it out until he reached for my jeans and tugged them, along with my panties, down to my ankles in a swift move. A couple of quick tugs later, and he had me completely naked.

“Happy now?” I teased.

“I always like you better naked.”

The bed dipped again as he crawled up beside me. He put his hands under my shoulders and shifted me until I was propped against the pillows. Then he put more pillows under my hips, angling my body to better accept his.

“Hands all right?” he asked once he’d finished arranging me just so. “And your shoulders?”

“I’m fine.” Fine, if you considered feeling like a blazing inferno of need to be
fine
.

Dima settled himself between my knees, and I almost whimpered in the anticipation of being with him. Apparently there was a great deal more anticipation to come, though. Starting with my feet, he massaged and kissed a very slow path up my legs, stopping occasionally to say, “
Moyà
,” or to ask how much I felt when he touched me in a certain way, how much sensation I had in a particular spot.

“Just pressure there,” I said, or “Everything, dear God, everything.”

“Mm,” he said, as though he were trying to memorize every detail of my response.

He’d barely reached the soft spot on the backside of my knee, and I was already wriggling and begging him to get on with it.

When he shifted closer to me, his large frame brushing the tender skin inside my thighs, I instinctively tried to reach for him.

No use. I couldn’t free my arms.

With just the hint of a fingernail, he traced a path from the inside of one knee, up my thigh, across my belly, then back down my other thigh to end at my knee. “
Moyà
,” he said again, and something wrapped around my heart and squeezed, stretched, tugged me in a thousand different directions at once. Suddenly, I realized this wasn’t just sex, and I didn’t like it. I wanted everything to go back in time, until it was nothing more than touch. Purely physical. Only lust.

But there was no going back.

“Dima,” I begged. “Please stop teasing me.”

“Like to tease you.” For a moment, he didn’t touch me at all. Then his lips pressed to the spot above where the baby was growing.

I jumped when his tongue flicked out to swirl inside my belly button. The sensation was enough to surprise me on its own, but there was something more. A need to hold him close to me. A yearning for more of his possessiveness. A strange desire to give him so much more than simply control.

“Like that?” he asked, stopping to shift higher, so his head hovered over my breasts and his long hair hung down to tickle me.

“Let me use my hands,” I pleaded.

“
Nyet
. You’ll grab my hair and rush me.”

“I just want—”

“You want to let me do things my way,” he interrupted. “Said you want to give me control. Let me have it. Stop fighting. Just feel.”

Just feel
. He obviously had no idea what he was asking of me with such a seemingly simple request. I’d spent the last four years doing everything in my power to
not
feel. I wanted all my sensations back, but I’d done everything I could to suppress every damned emotion in me.

But now they were rushing over me like a rising tide, and I was being pulled under.

Dima raised himself over me. He settled his hips between my thighs, close enough that the head of his cock pulsed against my flesh, and leaned over me, resting his weight on his forearms. Then he kissed me, long and slow and deep. So deep I felt his damned hand wrapping itself around my heart and making itself at home there.

I wanted to push him away. To make him stop. To put an end to everything he was doing to me on the inside before I was crushed under the weight of four years of buried emotion.

But I couldn’t.

All I could do was kiss him back as desperately as he was kissing me and trust that he could keep me from being washed out in the riptide that was coming for me.

His tongue slid alongside mine, and he let his weight drop down on me a bit at a time, grounding me with his touch. But it was too late. I was lost at sea. Adrift and being pulled under by an irresistible force. Racked with a grief I couldn’t give voice to, because the words would overwhelm me.

He slipped inside me, saying, “
Moyà
,” like he would never let me go, no matter how hard I might try to make him.

I couldn’t hold on.

I couldn’t protect myself.

I couldn’t guard against the painful throbbing of my heart as it burst open and let Dima fill all the cracks, old and new alike.

“I’ve got you,” he said, his mouth brushing against my ear as he surged home inside me again and again. “It’s all right. I’ve got you.” He removed the tie from my eyes and swiped the tears from my cheeks, kissing my drenched eyelids.

He did have me. All of me. Every broken mess of an inch.

“
Moyà
,” he said again as he came, shattering the last veneer of my resolve.

His
.

I feared he was right.

I STAYED WITH
London a lot longer than I’d intended to. I had to, after the way she’d responded. She gave herself over to me completely. Allowed me to worship her body and give her pleasure the way I wanted to. She fell apart in my arms, and then she let me put her back together.

I didn’t realize until I finally had her in my arms again just how badly I needed to keep her there.

“
Moyà
,” I’d called her multiple times.
Mine
. London. The baby. I wanted them both to be mine. I wanted it so much I’d do just about anything to have them.

But right now, I had to get home before Svetka woke and realized I’d left her alone. I forced myself to separate myself from London, untangling my limbs from hers.

She rolled over with me, her body lax and limp after all the many times we’d fucked tonight. Her eyes shone in the moonlight. Tears. There’d been more than a few of those over the course of the night. Strangely, holding London while she cried had felt similar to watching Joyce take her first steps on her new leg. I didn’t know what to make of the tears, but I also didn’t get the sense they were entirely bad.

I kissed her again, lingering over the way she softened under my touch. “Have to go home,” I said when I broke apart from her.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“I don’t want you to go, either.” She hooked a hand around the back of my neck, sinking her fingers into my hair to keep me with her for a moment longer.

“Svetka will wake up and wonder where I’ve gone…”

London nodded and kissed me one more time, hard and fast, before releasing her grip on me. She blinked, and then the softness was gone from her face. It was like she’d been wearing a mask, but once I’d blindfolded her, the mask had slipped away. And now she was settling it back into place.

However much I might want to stick around and find a way to get her to dispense with the mask again, I couldn’t. I got out of her bed and drew on my clothes before going back to the living room to move her wheelchair within her reach.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

She nodded and rolled over.

Right about now, I wanted to kick myself for not having more time to stay, so I could get to the bottom of what had come over her. I couldn’t, though. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do right now but go back to my place and get Svetka ready for the moms’ trip to California. “Lock door behind me.”

“I will,” she said. “Go on.”

So I left.

Svetka was already up and making tea in the kitchen when I walked through my front door. She poked her head around the corner and raised a brow. “With your girlfriend?” she asked me in Russian. “Why didn’t you bring her to meet me? I could make her tea.”

“There’s no time to make her tea right now, Svetka.”

She patted me on the cheek. “Matushka. And there is always time to make tea for your girlfriend.”

“Maybe when we come back from California. Today, we need to get to the airport.”

“I’m ready as soon as I have some tea. I made bread. We’ll take it on the plane.”

Leave it to my Svetka to think she needed to make me bread to take on a chartered flight with the team.