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“Don’t cry for me,roza,” I tell her. “Each of these scars are lessons.”
“Some lessons can be learned without scars, Arsen. Things don’t always have to hurt to be important.”
I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or to herself.
But either way, that old, familiar feeling comes surging up my throat.Bury it all deep. Keep that shit in the shadows. Don’t think about the past or the future, about Grandfather or about that cold, concrete cell that stole the best years of your life.
Think about this.
Think about her.
Think about business.
I grab her without warning and we go tumbling into the bed, a tangle of limbs. I swallow her cry with my mouth because if she says another fucking word, I might rebel against that prison warden voice in my head and do things I’ve never done before.
I can’t afford that. No matter how tempting it is, the right thing to do is to dive into her and wipe my mind blank.
So I do exactly that. Her silky blonde locks fan out across my sheets. I drag her to the edge of the bed and sink into her with one brutal thrust.
I groan and remember something:This is why we’re here.Not to memorize each other’s bodies or dive into our pasts.
We’re here to make a baby.
Business.
If anything, though, it’s even harder to remember that purpose as I fuck into her again and again. I’m a blur of sensation, losing myself in her—the one unforgivable sin for a man like me.
The moment I’ve come inside her, I pull out and stumble away from the bed.
Laila’s eyes are half-lidded. Her hair is tossed around her like a crown, her chest heaving as sweat shimmers across her breasts.
“Where are you going?” she whispers as I make for the door.
“The room down the hall,” I answer, allowing myself one last glance at the scar on her hip before I stride away from her. “You can have this one to yourself.”
8
ARSEN
I follow the trail of her honeysuckle scent down the hallway to the kitchen.
Scrubbing my skin raw in the shower to get her smell off of me was clearly for nothing. One night here, and she’s somehow already embedded herself in every fiber of my penthouse.
When I walk into the kitchen, she’s standing in front of my state-of-the-art coffee maker with a scrunched nose.
“Dobroye utro.”
She whips around when I speak, a hand pressed to her chest. “Jesus, you’re quiet!”
“All predators are.”
She gives me a nervous chuckle. Apparently, she thinks I’m joking.
Silence settles between us. I can feel last night creeping into the room.
It was a mistake.
I stood in the mirror this morning and told myself what had to be true in order for this to succeed: her life, her scars, her past—none of it is my business.
