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Her scent hits me, and I want to crush her against my chest until she can’t draw breath. No man alive could resist this woman.
“You are completely wasted,” I murmur, pulling her in until my lips hover a hair above hers. “Let me take you home. Unless you want to tell me you want more than that.”
“I want more.” She shapes each word slow and clear, as though every syllable were a small kiss laid against my mouth.
Something in me finally tips over the edge. She is my brother’s ex. She is barely half my age. She is drunk out of her mind on my liquor.
And God help me, I no longer care about a single rule I built. Every careful line I drew can burn.
Fuck the consequences.
4
DELANEY
I climb into the back of Lev’s car drunk, but not so drunk that I’ve lost the wheel of my own choices. I know exactly what I’m reaching for tonight. After a day this cruel, I have earned the right to come undone for once.
Nothing on earth could close out a night this terrible better than the man sitting beside me.
Yuri drives us, the same one who delivered the couture earlier, and he keeps his eyes locked on the road the whole way. I appreciate how little he seems willing to notice.
I decide to bury the good girl everyone expects me to be. I press into Lev’s side and slide my hand up his thigh toward his belt.
He catches my wrist. “Such a bad girl,” he murmurs, teasing me. “Slow down a little.”
Under the passing neon, his chiseled features look carved from something colder and finer than skin.
“I know what I’m doing,” I say, and slip my hand free without any real effort. He never once tries to stop me.
I work his belt open and come face to face with the straining front of his boxers. He reaches up and raises the privacy screen, sealing the two of us off from Yuri and the world outside.
I trace the shape of him through the fabric, my hand shaking from how little I actually know. I shove the nerves down anyway. I’ve never done this before. I have never done any of this.
Five months with Maksim amounted to kissing, groping in his car, and one endless argument about why I would not go further. He called me frigid first, then fat, in that exact order, and then he found Vanessa. At twenty-three I’m still a virgin, and I decide the man whose belt I just opened doesn’t need that fact.
When Lev left me alone at the bar earlier, I feared both brothers were the type to throw women away like trash. His furious return and the way he drove that stranger off, told me otherwise.
He frees himself and looks down at me. “If you want it, use your mouth.”
His steel-gray eyes drag me down, and his raw scent floods my head until I’m wet from that alone. I take him into my mouth without a breath of hesitation. He’s swollen and thick, the flushed purple ridge of him sliding along my tongue. The weight of him in my mouth is obscene and I do it anyway, hollowing my cheeks the way instinct swears is right. His hand tightens in my hair, not guiding so much as holding on, as though I’m the one unmaking him. Knowing I put this cold, dangerous man here—that I of all people reduced him to this—sends heat pooling low and greedy in my belly.
I’m clumsy and certain at once, and I want to be good at this—for him, tonight.
I should be scared. I am. But the want burns straight through the fear and keeps going.
He pushes my head deeper. “Open your throat for me.”
He hits the back of it, and my mouth feels stretched and impossibly full. He’s enormous. I wrap both hands around the base and still cannot cover all of him.
My eyes sting but still I don’t pull away.
“Look at that slutty little mouth, kotyonok,” he groans, brows drawn tight. “Make me finish.”
The car moves along smoothly, yet the whole world spins. I suck harder. My saliva slicks him until the wet sounds turn obscene.
“Stay quiet for me,” he warns. “This car’s not as soundproof as you think. Yuri has ears.”
I nearly choke and slow myself down. He winds my hair around his palm and pulls with careful pressure. My scalp tingles, and I realize I’m taking as much from this as I give. It should frighten me how badly I want to be good at this for him.
