Page 41 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

It’s somewhere between an order and a plea. A sweet spot.

My knees hit the plush carpet, and I polish the glistening head of his cock with the flat of my tongue. The salt of his desire coats my tongue like communion. I look up at him to see if this gets to him the way he gets to me. If he’s coming apart at the seams, too.

The look on Anton’s face is debauched. Filthy. So primal. So possessive, especially the thumb that strokes its way along my lip to the corner of my mouth, in the moment before the opposite palm cups the back of my head. “You can take more,” he insists, hoarse. “There you go. You’re so fucking stubborn, aren’t you? But so good to let me use it. Use your perfect fucking mouth.”

His praise is as mindless as it is debased. I drag my slick cleft over my own ankles, crossed beneath me. So viscerally, I feel how wet it makes me, letting him have my mouth. Having him tell me no one’s better. Murmuring about how wrong he is, but how he can’t stop, that he can’t stop using my perfect mouth, because it feels too good.

Tears prick at the corners of my eyes, and it isn’t just because of the pressure of him, going from filling my mouth with nudges of his hips to filling my throat with helpless thrusts.

“So… fucking… stubborn,” he grits out through his clenched teeth, and I don’t doubt that it’s a compliment.

No woman could help it for this long. I can’t. I don’t even think about it. My free hand—the one not cupping his balls, tugging gently, knowing it’ll drive him crazy now that I’ve already proven it—slips between my own legs, rubbing frantically at my swollen nub.

Immediately, Anton notices. Before I can wrap my head around it, he has his hand around my throat, commanding me upright, condemning, “No,” like his grip doesn’t tighten at the sight of strings of saliva connecting my swollen lips to his glistening cock. “You’re mine to take care of. That’s what you need, isn’t it—to be spoiled?”

He is a conundrum, this man. His mouth orders, and his eyes beseech. His hips have worked my throat raw, and he places the gentlest kiss on my lips. He snatches my hand away from my clit, then can’t stand to stroke it for long before he’s hoisting me up into his arms and carrying me to bed. He sits himself on the bed, and I on his cock.

Gravity does the work for him.

He slides in so deep, so completely, my breathing stalls. I can’t breathe until his lips are at my pulse, kissing my neck, murmuring, “You’re so fucking tight, I can’t—I can’t...” His lips are sweet with me, and his hand is not, gripping a handful of curls and wrenching my head back.

He’s all over me, enveloping me, like he’d like to consume me.

My exhale comes out as a needy whimper. His thumb finds my clit, rubbing comforting circles into it, like his vicious mouth isn’t making a mess of my breasts, licking and sucking. Or he doesn’t give up the ministration to keep his fistfuls of skin at the swell of my hips in his possession, using it to grind me harder against him.

“Never enough fucking hands,” he mutters irately, biting me.

He nips at my neck, my throat, my collarbone.

When the pleasure building inside me bursts, it spreads through my limbs in tongues of flame. As I quake in his arms and cry out against his mouth, which I drag back to mine, all I can think is, This is the opposite of hatred.

Chapter 14 - Anton

When Irina died, I hadn’t had to think about it—some part of me had just accepted, implicitly, that I’d never share a bed with a woman again.

It astonishes me in the worst way that having done so with another woman now didn’t keep me up at night. I’d thought the peace of sharing another person’s body heat, the comfort of a solid presence beside yours, would never be a treat I could enjoy without being haunted. That I would, at best, be drenched in guilt.

But I sleep like a fucking baby.

Darya and I don’t sleep clutching at each other like long-lost lovers. It’s comfortable, instead: our bodies lie on our own sides of the bed, our backs to each other, close enough for heat radiating off one to seep into the other; still, Darya’s cold little toes pressed up against my calves all through the night.

It isn’t a shock to my system to wake up and be confronted by her face. If I’m stricken by anything, it’s by Darya being real. Being in my bed, relaxed enough by my side to let her body rest.

Without her makeup, an array of painfully pretty freckles is splattered across her nose and the apples of her cheeks. I helped her take off the makeup. In the bathtub, I’d joined her this time, and not just because she’d threatened to castrate me if I “abandoned her”.

As if I could’ve been strong enough to walk away from Darya, with her needy hands and her hungry eyes, telling me to condition her hair for her and find her a silk pillowcase for her curls.

I’d thought I knew what it was to be a husband, and that role was gone, irrespective of my current marital status. At least in that specific way, I’d occupied it. And that’s not untrue.

Being a husband to Darya, I find, is entirely different.

It includes doting on her. She isn’t one to allow herself to be taken care of, but she’s somehow antithetically one to demand it when she’s in the mood for it. And it includes being rewarded with the honor of that service when I make good on the word I give her.

Rewards such as her riding me in the backseat of the car, letting me take her apart with her back tucked against my chest, after I take her to the Bratva meeting where I’d asked for her astute observation to suss out anyone acting shady, and introduced her as “Darya Yuri-Zakharov”.

Different is the word I’ll go with.

I can’t stomach any other.