Page 74 of Wicked Mafia Sinner

“I think I’m ready for what comes next, is what I am saying.” My heart trembles right along with my hands. He holds them tighter and we exchange a look before his eyes return to the road.

“If I am pregnant, I think a lot will change for both of us. Are we ready for that?”

What if he leaves me? What if he gets in trouble and goes to prison or worse, dies?

No. I kick those thoughts out of my head. I can’t let that kind of worry take hold. Rowan is not my father.

“I feel your worry, malyshka. You will always have me. I meant every word I said to you. I want you, heart, body and soul. If we’ve made a love child, I will cherish that life as I cherish yours.”

He raises my hand and presses a kiss to the back of my knuckles. Heat blooms over my skin and I feel strings forming over my heart tying us together.

“And if we haven’t?” I ask, my heart breaking at the thought of what that might mean.

“Then we try again and again.”

“You know, that just smeared a balm over the wounds my father created years ago by leaving us.”

There’s a long pause before Rowan has anything to say. I think the conversation can come to an end when he tells me a truth I never expected from him. “That is one of my sins, too and why Nikolai hates me.”

“You abandoned your son?” This is news to me. I go to pull my hand away from his, struck in the heart by the confession, but he tightens his fingers on mine.

“Nyet, malyshka. Please listen. Abandon, no. Not in that sense. I sent him to boarding school so my way of life would not touch him. It felt like abandoning him, but I knew it was for the best. My life was death, violence and blood. Sending him away turned out to be my biggest mistake. While away from my side, my father poisoned Nikolai against me.”

“Sounds like you had two evils to pick from.”

Rowan nods. “Yes.”

“Then you didn’t abandon him, Rowan. You tried to protect him. If anything you might not have fought hard enough to keep him out of harm's way, but it sounds like you didn’t abandon him. Not like my father did to me and my sister. He left my mother with crushing debt and a broken heart. He was her high school sweetheart and he just walked away.”

Rowan raises my hand and kisses it softly this time holding it there for several seconds. “You are a kind soul, my beautiful beam of sunshine. Never let anyone steal your light. Not even me. Especially not me.”

We ride in silence for a few more minutes. His last words weigh heavy on my heart and mind the whole way to wherever we are going.

He takes a turn I don't expect, and angles the SUV down a ramp into an underground parking structure. The sunlight cuts to fluorescent in a blink, and the temperature drops by ten degrees in the span of three seconds.

"You know, you have a running theme," I say as the car descends another level.

"What theme?"

"Underground. Everything is underground. You live underground. You park underground. I'm starting to think you photosynthesize in reverse."

It’s good to hear him chuckle.

He pulls into a spot near an elevator and kills the engine. The silence fills the car, heavy and warm. He slants me a sideways look that says if he had the time he’d kiss the hell outta me. Instead he says, "Come."

He's out of the car and around to my door before my seatbelt releases.

The elevator is industrial. Brushed steel walls, concrete floor, the faint smell of machine oil and something sweeter underneath it, like old paper. He presses the button for floor two. We rise with a hydraulic groan.

"Floor two," I say. "Not a sub-basement? Not a hidden bunker? Are you feeling okay?"

He pulls me into his side and wraps his arm around me. "You're very funny today," he murmurs against my hair and then kisses the top of my head.

The doors open.

The smell hits me first.

Paper. Binding glue. Coffee. And beneath all of it, the warm, dusty sweetness of thousands of books sharing oxygen in an enclosed space.