Her Russian Beast: 50 Loving States, New Mexico (13 page)

“To get a towel,” she answered, unable to keep the irritation out of her voice.

“No towel,” he answered. “You have napkins.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You will be more careful with your pizza.”

“But it’s not a grease spot,” she muttered.

He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not a grease spot.”

“What is it then?”

She didn’t answer. Just looked at him, willing him to connect the rest of the dots so she wouldn’t have to humiliate herself any further by trying to explain herself.

That was when his eyes finally dropped below her face….and took in her glistening pussy.

A curse—not in Russian, but in Buryat, the language Bair only used when he was really, really angry.

And then he was no longer in front of her but behind her. His fingers bit into her hips, yanking them back so she had no choice but to catch herself on the arm of the couch. Then he slid into her tight space with such force, her entire body rocked forward, her heels coming off the ground.

“Beast…” she gasped. Not because it hurt, but because it felt so good. The same way it felt when she went too long without singing and finally let the song out. But even better, because he was so hard inside her, giving her exactly what her body needed. Fucking her in a way she had only dreamed of for months.

H
E’D tried
. For so many months, he’d tried. Countless agonizing weekends of refusing to watch her watch him. Ignoring the pounding erection between his thighs as he brutalized the punching bag. Torturing himself until his muscles ached. Only allowing himself five minutes with her mouth—sometimes even that felt like too much.

More often than not, he had to pull out before the timer on his watch vibrated. Knowing if he didn’t stop now, he’d release into the back of her throat.

He didn’t drink anymore, because he didn’t want to lose control. He barely looked at her, because he didn’t want to lose control. He made her strip every time he saw her. Sit there with another man’s wish on her chest to remind himself.

She’s just a fucking whore. She would’ve gone with anyone who took her out of that Greek basement.
Punch! Punch!
He called her every name he could think of in English, Russian, and Buryat. He’d done everything he could to kill his addiction to her. Including the most brutal form of aversion training. Taking just a little, then denying himself the rest.

But none of it had been enough.

“It’s not a grease spot.”

A moment as understanding finally dawned over him. Her words. Her body language. Why she was acting so cagey. His eyes had slipped down before he could stop them. Seen her naked pussy, glistening in the room’s soft light.

And then his mind completely blanked.

He was inside her before he could even think not to be. Not to take himself out of his fighting shorts. Not to grab her hips. Not to sink his pulsing length into her tight, soaking wet space.

A base relief overtook him when her sex clutched around him. Familiar and hot. Drawing him in like she’d been missing this, too.

Before he knew it, he was pulling her roughly into his primal thrusts, owning her body in the way he’d been denying himself for months. And for a long time, he was lost. The past and the present colliding as he pounded into her, remembering everything. Her pleasured cries. How good her pussy felt on his dick, so welcoming and hot. A clutch of fire that only burned for him.

He couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop…his hands viced her hips even tighter. Living the memories as the old compulsion over took him.
Need her! Need her!

She was the only thing. The only thing that made his life better. The only thing that worked. The drug that had completely enslaved him. And he couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop…

“Don’t stop, Bair! Don’t stop! I’m going to—oh!”

She came, screaming the name only she called him. And that did something to him.

A sharp ache gathered at the base of his spine, and he lost the battle, hips jackknifing forward as he released inside her on a stream of Russian words.

Need her! Need her! Need her!
He came so long and hard, her pussy soon became sloppy with his cum. And even then he couldn’t stop fucking her. Not even when the slickness coating both their sexes made it hard to stay in. Even then his hips kept rutting, helpless against this drug of a woman.

The only drug that had ever made him feel whole.

The whole world suddenly went white as a second orgasm flooded his system, draining the Darkness out of him, like no amount of exercise ever could.

At least the Darkness went away for a little while…

As soon as he came down out of her light, it came back with an enraged howl. Cursing him, shaming him…he pulled out of her on a backward stumble, feeling pathetic as fuck. Because of what he’d just done. Because of her.

Nothing. Nothing in this entire world made him feel as weak as she did.

Which made it all that much worse when the siren straightened and turned to face him with the milky cloud of his load now spread over her golden brown sex and thighs. The sight of her affected him. Just like it always did.

His manhood swelled, almost painful between his legs.

“Go to the bedroom,” he choked out harshly, unable to regulate his tone. “And do not come out until I tell you to.”

“Bair—”

“GO!!!!” he roared. “GO!”

She went. But not fast enough. It was already too late. He knew that even before the door slammed.

Seven months of addiction work—gone just like that. She was back in his system. And no amount of raging against her was going to get her out.

A
FTER sleeping fitfully
as hell through the night, Thel woke up in the bright sun of a new day…to the sound of Bair still going at the punching bag. She was zero percent surprise, but she put on a robe and went out there anyway.

How were his hands withstanding this
? she wondered after a few moments of watching him pound the bag. He was covered in sweat, and she didn’t have to ask to know how he’d spent the hours she’d been sleeping. But, old habit, she asked anyway.

“How long have you been out here?”

“Strip.”

“Bair—”

“Strip.”

“Okay, I’m ordering breakfast.”

That statement finally got him to stop. The punching noises ceased, and she could feel his dark eyes on her like a physical touch as they followed her to the phone. She, however, pretended she didn’t notice the huge Siberian watching her intently as she put in a room service order. Pancakes for her, two Power Breakfast plates for him.

“Strip,” he said as soon as she got off the phone.

“I’m going to take a shower.”

She didn’t wait for his answer, just left. And by the time she came back into the room, clean and dressed in the other complimentary hotel robe, she could smell the fragrant good morning scent of breakfast.

Bair was already eating, shoveling the food in his mouth. He still ate like a beast, she noted. Fast, with an elbow stuck out like he was afraid the food would be taken away from him. Apparently there were a few habits the business makeover still hadn’t touched.

He flinched when she sat across from him, but he didn’t pause in his shoveling.

At least he didn’t demand she strip again, she thought to herself as she reached out to the silver service to pour them both a cup of coffee.

After putting a little creamer in hers, she dumped five white packets into his, remembering he drank it black with a fuck ton of sugar. Another good memory floated to the surface as she stirred it for him with a silver spoon. Coffee and sugar, the taste of his kiss when he dropped her off at school.

However, there was no sugar in his black gaze when he stopped eating to watch her make his coffee. She pushed the cup of coffee toward him anyway, feeling like the bravest girl in the world for offering this feral animal a little bit of sweetness.

Pause. But eventually he picked up the cup, still watching her as he took exactly one sip.

Then he said, “Strip.”

She concentrated on cutting her pancakes, keeping her head down like she hadn’t even heard him.

“You have my attention, Sirena. You do not want my temper.”

Familiar words. Such familiar words, but she speared her first bite of pancake into her mouth and steadily ignored him as she began to eat her breakfast.

“Do you wish to be punished for this?” he asked, when she was halfway done with the short stack. “Is this defiance worth me making sure one of your performances goes to an understudy?”

Her heart tripped. A bullet fired, precise and mean. Hitting its target exactly where it hurt most.

She had petted herself out for this opera after swearing she’d never do that to herself again. But this opera burned in her chest like nothing ever had before, because it was the work her siren had always been meant to sing.

The thought of it going to someone else, even for one performance, stabbed her like a knife to the gut.

But still she didn’t strip.

Bair gritted his teeth. “Fine. You have lost one performance. I will give you another minute, and then you will lose another.”

She tried—she really did, but her siren wouldn’t let her. After less than thirty seconds of resistance, she quickly undid the robe, once again exposing her body to the cold room.

“Good girl,” he said, his eyes lit with predator triumph.

Like she really was some animal. Prey finally put in its place.

Her insides crawled with shame.

Which was why it felt exactly like running toward a jagged cliff and taking a flying leap when she said, “I’ve missed you, too, Beast.”

His eyes and nostrils flared, angry confusion temporarily replacing the smug satisfaction.

But before his gaze could go flat again, she came over the low table. Knee pressing into his empty plate as she crawled into his open lap like the broken twenty-something she sometimes used to be, even though she was now a thirty-one-year-old woman who knew better. One who was well aware that doing this could well result in her being shoved out of this vengeful Beast’s lap. She braced herself for just that after hearing the soft thunk of his silverware dropping down to the carpet below. But then…

His big heavy arms wrapped around her cold body.

Oh God, oh God
. She’d nearly came undone right there. Nearly cried like she hadn’t cried in years from the feel of his arms alone. They felt so good around her. Just like she remembered.

Like coming home, she couldn’t keep herself from thinking. Like she’d just been renting space in another reality until she returned to where she truly belonged.

She listened to his heart beating, fast as a horse at first, but then slower and slower. He felt it, too, the sense of familiarity. The sense of rightness.

The song fell from her lips, unbidden. An old lullaby she used to sing to both Trevors, her brother and the nephew who’d been named after him, when they had trouble getting to sleep.

His massive chest heaved underneath where her head rested, half sigh, half shudder, and by the time the song was done, he was breathing evenly. A beast on the very edge of his sanity, finally lulled to sleep.

***

H
e woke
with a start a couple of hours later. And he blinked when he found Thel still in his arms. Her food cold and untouched, even though she’d thought she was starving when she ordered it.

As it turned out, breakfast wasn’t what she’d been hungry for after all. This. Only this.

And when he looked down at her, so handsome in his sleepy confusion, she moved in.

“No, Sirena, no kissing,” he said, jerking his head back. But this time, he didn’t have anywhere to go, since the chair was at his back and she was in his lap.

And this time, she felt no guilt whatsoever about pinning him with her siren stare and saying, “This is happening, Beast. I’m going to kiss you. I want to kiss you.”

So she did. Found his lips like she used to and kissed him for all she was worth, before quietly saying, “I’m only going to be Sirena until August. Do you want to spend the short time you have with me fighting or fucking?”

He answered that by standing and carrying her into the bedroom and covering her with his body. They spent the rest of the day fucking like animals who’d not seen each other in a very long time, with the occasional break for room service and lazy naps. None of which lasted as long as that first one in the chair. She was lucky if she got an hour in, before she’d wake up to him whispering Russian in her ear, his thick cock at her entrance, pushing in…

They went on like this. Mostly silent, talking the best way they knew how until she woke on Sunday morning. The bed empty, but the feel of something decided in the air. They hadn’t talked about what happened in Germany. He hadn’t forgiven her, and she hadn’t forgiven him.

But the bed was empty. In fact, the hotel room was so quiet, it felt like…

She threw on a robe and ran through the empty hotel room to the front door of the penthouse suite, yanking it open. Nobody. Not even one hulking man standing in the hallway that led to the elevator.

“No way!” she whisper shrieked. The she slammed the door closed and threw her back against it with a happy smile.

He’d left her alone in the hotel room. Without a bodyguard or anything! A whole two hours before Dexter was due to arrive!

To anyone else it wouldn’t have seemed like such a huge step, being left alone after a whole day and night of lovemaking. Some might even have found it offensive. But those people didn’t know the Beast like she knew him. To her…

She curled her fingers against her mouth, the opening lines of the Beatle’s “We Can Work it Out” glowing inside her chest.

To her, his absence felt momentous. Like a page finally turned.

“
Y
OU’RE quiet tonight
,” Dexter commented the following Friday. His hands were at ten and two on the steering wheel as they drove to the private airfield.

“Yeah,” she agreed, fingering the postcard in her hand. It had arrived at the theater early this afternoon. Just a few hours later and it would have missed her. If Sola weren’t so organized, the paper rectangle might not have reached her until Monday.

But the intern had pressed the postcard into Thel’s hand just as she was leaving with a careful, “I’m pretty sure this is for you. It’s addressed to a Thel. But the return address says Virginia. That’s where you’re from, right?”

Yes, that was exactly where she was from, and the woman who’d barely raised her had always been the queen of perfect dramatic timing.

“I was a struggling actress in one of my past lives, dear,”
she once explained to a teenage Thel while they were walking in the woods near their house. “Always hungry for more lines, never getting the big role. Too bad for me, but lucky for you, oldest daughter. You’ve got your siren grandmother’s voice and my acting sensibility. You’ll be thanking us for that one day. ”

Thel hadn’t known what she meant back then, but then Bair had enrolled her in opera school, and she’d found herself at the top of her class. Certain to be a future opera star according to all of her teachers, and she’d understood why her mother had wanted credit ahead of time for passing on her past life acting gifts.

“Usually you’re asking questions about where you’re going this weekend by now,” Dexter said, drawing her eyes up from her mother’s postcard.

“I already know we’re going to San Francisco,” she answered.

“Oh, did Rustanov B tell you?” he asked, sounding surprised. Probably because it had never happened before.

“Not exactly…” she answered, and her eyes drifted back down to the postcard.

To the San Francisco address scrawled across it.

And the words written below,
“Tell Trevor hello for me.”

H
e should have taken
the time to beat someone up before coming here. Bair found himself pacing the floor of the hotel suite like a pent up tiger. Back and forth, wishing like hell he’d brought his punching bag.

“No more fighting with the bag, okay?” she’d murmured into his chest as they’d fallen asleep in the wee hours of Sunday morning.

He could have pretended he hadn’t heard her. He could have ignored the request. Hell knew, it hadn’t been in the plan to try to endear himself to her.

Instead he’d left his old friend on the plane, telling his guards not to bother with it at the last minute. So now he was in the hotel room, unable to calm himself enough to sit down. However, Sirena’s flight from New Mexico to San Francisco was relatively short, so he hadn’t had time to hit a boxing gym after his day of meetings with the San Francisco office of Rustanov Enterprises and the appointment with the doctor Alexei had found for him here.

You could have gone to the gym, too,
a mean voice pointed out inside his head.
You could have made her wait, but you couldn’t wait to see her.

Da
, that much was true. He’d been thinking about her and little else all week. The way she’d felt in his arms that last night. How natural it seemed to share a bed with her again after all these years.

He now understood why addicts never just fell off the wagon a little bit, but tended to hit rock bottom, destroying everything they’d managed to achieve in the years they’d been sober.

She was his drug, and he was already jonesing for another taste. Unable to stop himself from the rock bottom she knew she’d bring along with her.

“Hey, Bair!” she called out, bursting through the door with the strap of a large Boudin Bakery bag in her hand. “Dexter drove me to this place and I got us a couple bread bowls for dinner. I hope you don’t mind.”

He watched her go over to a counter and begin to remove the bio-degradable take-out containers.

“I would have asked first, but Dexter told me there wasn’t any such thing as somebody who didn’t like these clam chowder bowls, so I took a chance. And we beat the rain that’s supposed to be coming down soon. So I got lucky…”

She was talking a mile a minute, and he frowned, recognizing her mood. She was trying not to be sad. Manically unpacking the dinner the same way she used to throw herself like a mad woman into her summer studies, adding on hours of unneeded rehearsal for a two-week stretch every August.

“But it looks like they f0rgot to pack the napkins and silverware,” she said, digging around at the bottom of the bag. “I don’t know, maybe we can call down to room service for some spoons.”

He came up behind her, his lips finding her ear at the same time he bent her slightly forward at the waist. One hand on her wide hips and the other undoing the top button of his suit pants.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she gasped out when he lifted up the skirt of her dress and positioned himself at her tunnel’s entrance.

“You will feed me this way, and then you can feed me the other way,” he answered.

“Yeah…” she said with an aching moan as he eased in between her legs. “Yeah…oh, Beast, I missed you this week…”

He leaned down over her back, bracing his hands on top of hers as he stroked into her from behind. His nostrils flared against the side of her neck, taking in her scent. She no longer wore the expensive perfume he’d regularly bought for her back in Germany, but she still used the same product in her hair. Something fruity with an underlying sandalwood.

It drove him crazy. Made him push in deeper, with the feeling that even though he was all but pasted against the back of her body, he still wasn’t in deep enough.

“Touch yourself,” he snarled into one ear. “Feel how wet you get when I’m inside you.”

A helpless whimper, then her elbow dug back into his hard stomach as she reached down. His cock jerked, his mind nearly coming apart when he felt her brush the underside of his dick, before settling into a circular rub at the top of her pussy.

“I bet the other men gave you things you wanted, but they never owned your body. Not like this. Not like me. You would not be able to stop yourself right now even if you wanted to, Siren, and even if I stopped.”

His hips went still, and her reaction was immediate. “No, please don’t stop,” she panted, grinding her hips back against him. “Please don’t!”

“No, the other men did not fuck you like this, Sirena,” he said with a nasty laugh at her ear as he started moving again. “No one has ever or will ever fuck you like I do. Think about this as I take you.”

She whimpered, her head falling into her chest. “You’re right. Nobody. Nobody but you. Beast, please…” Her hand fell away from her clit, unable to keep up with his unrelenting pace.

He unleashed a cruel smile. She’d always been terrible at rubbing herself after she was too far gone. Like an insistent teacher, he had to reach down and guide her hand over her clit. His large hand on top of her much smaller one, forcing her to rub her own juices over her engorged button.

“Beast…!” she moaned before coming apart with a shudder beneath him.

That was his cue. The red light that kept him caged up came off. He barred an arm diagonally across her body, heavy forearm mashing her cleavage as he fucked her harder and faster from behind. His hips slapping into her backside until his heat flooded her core, and they came as one, the orgasm freezing them both into a rictus of pleasure. Like a photograph of what used to go perfectly between them.

But not exactly like before.

The breasts…they hadn’t been there before. Before his large arm had fit perfectly into the space between her breasts, and now…

His heart went cold, and it felt as if his stomach had frozen over.

“How much?” he asked, pulling out of her and putting himself back into his pants.

“What?” she asked. Still dazed as she turned around to face him with a blissed out smile.

But when she reached up to curve a hand around his neck, he caught it, with an angry nod toward her chest.

“I cannot stand these fake things. How much to reverse the surgery?” he asked. “What do you want to make your breasts way they used to be?”

The smile died on her face, and suddenly he didn’t have to keep her from curving a hand around his neck, because she was taking it back with an angry tug.

“Don’t Bair. Just don’t…” She started around him, trying to get away.

But he got in front of her. “If it is matter of time, that can be arranged. I will have Alexei work it out with your production this week—“

He cut off, however, when he saw the look that came over her face. It was laced clear through with fury, and she shoved him with a strength he wouldn’t have thought her capable. He actually took a step back, not because of her push, but because he was so surprised by it.

She’d never looked at him like that before. Even when he’d offended her, she taken it in a laughing way. Even when he’d claimed her in front of others, she’d covered up her true feelings.

But not now. Now she shoved at him and screamed, “You know what, fuck you! Fuck. You!!!” Now she looked like she wanted to punch him, and her voice raspy with emotion as she said, “You are such an asshole, Bair.”

Yes, he knew that. But she’d never seemed to care so much about that before. Or at least she hadn’t shown it.

And before he could open his mouth to ask why she’d suddenly decided to do so now, she cut left, going out to the balcony, and sliding the glass door closed behind her. The universal sign of ‘don’t follow me.’

Leaving Bair behind, his mind in a whirl, trying to figure out what in the hell had just happened.