by Rie Warren
I hugged her, leaning over her prodigious belly to get to her. “I don’t think Maksim intends to make anything exactly easy on me.”
The vivacious redhead pulled back. “It’s like that, is it? Never mind, I brought food for us, girl.” She shook two bags from a fast food joint. “I have been jonesing for some salty fries and a greasy burger so I sent Kirill out.”
She tossed me a bag and waddled over to the sofa. “And I’m sitting my ass right here because if I get up on a stool I might never make it down again.”
I laughed, happy for the distraction and her nonstop chatter.
“Dig in and gimme the tea, sister.” She talked with her mouth half full of fries. “I want wedding night gossip and I do not want to hear any of the crap about Oleg. That’s already all Kirill and Arkady can talk about, which doesn’t make for awesome post-wedding chatter.”
Busying myself with my fries and a ketchup packet, I ignored her for as long as I could. So that was about two minutes while she devoured her burger and slurped on her smoothie.
I was still chewing when Jo leaned back, sighing contentedly and rubbing her belly.
“Baby soooo needed that. And I still need me the goss.”
“Not much to say.” But damn if my cheeks didn’t flame.
“Oh hell no. Uh uhn. Not buying it. That blush says you’re a liar, Sasha.”
I shrugged, but a naughty thought tickled at me.
I took another bite of the juicy burger, chewing slowly. I sipped my smoothie, ate a fry.
Jo slapped a hand on the sofa. “I’m five million years preggers and my cankles now have their own zip code. Just please gimme something for distraction,” she wheedled.
“Fine. He’s pierced.” Quickly chomping on more French fries, I avoided her gaze.
“Where?” Sounding absolutely spellbound, she scooted closer on the sofa.
“I plead the fifth.”
“Oh, I just bet you do. I’m sure you were pleading all night long. More Maksim. Deeper Maksim!” Her gales of laughter filled the room.
Not a second later I burst into laughter too. The woman was incorrigible and infectious, and I never knew what was going to come out of her mouth next. She was exactly what I needed to make it through the day.
As we settled down, she pointed to the letters sticking out from beneath the cushion on the chair opposite us.
She got her nosy on again. “Oh, hey. What are those? Saucy notes from a lover?”
I forgot all about laughing then. “They’re from my mama to Papa.”
“Ohhh. And you never read them before?” Turning to me, Jo touched my arm.
I shook my head, trying to hold fresh tears at bay. “Baba just gave them to me. I don’t know if Papa knows.”
“Wow. And your mom loved him and you, right?”
I nodded, biting my lip. “So much.”
“I wish I had something like that from my ma. I mean, not letters to my da, because he was a goddamn monster, but I wish I knew if she’d ever had any kind of love like I do for Kirill.” In the next instant, it was Jo who burst into tears.
Quick to console her, I tried to pull her into my arms.
She halfheartedly swatted me away. “No, it’s okay. Fuck me. These pregnancy hormones are killer.”
She was still weeping when the door opened and in walked Kirill carrying a heavy trunk on his shoulder.
Maksim followed with another.
Lowering the case to the floor, Kirill rushed to his wife. “What is wrong, malyshka?”
She unabashedly wiped her face against the front of his shirt. “Same thing I told you last time you saw me slobbering all over myself like a fool. Hormones.” She half wailed, half laughed.
“Joanna,” he said in such a deep soothing tone that she shook with fresh tears, all but climbing into his arms.
That tore at my heart again, knowing I’d never have a connection like that with Maksim even though I was married to him.
Picking up his precious cargo, Kirill carried her to the door. “I will take care of her downstairs.”
But just before he crossed the threshold, Jo perked up to peer over his shoulder directly at his brother. “Hey, Maksim. A little birdy told me something a little naughty about you.”
And she winked!
That wicked woman.
As the door closed, Maksim pivoted slowly toward me. “What did you say to her?”
“Not a word.” Casting my eyes away, I was very aware my cheeks had flushed again.
What the hell?
This light complexion was giving me a super bad rap.
“Hmm.” Maksim studied me suspiciously, and his gray gaze all but stripped me bare.
12
Maksim
I WOULD NOT LET Sasha escape my gaze after Jo’s parting words.
She’d spilled something to Kirill’s wife, but I didn’t know if it was about the piercing—god forbid—or the spanking, the tying up, or the fact we hadn’t fucked.
Yet.
I knew my assumptions were correct when she squeaked in a higher than normal voice, “Where did you go?”
“I think you are smart enough to figure that out.” Two trunks lay at our feet, filled with her personal items from the estate.
Her mouth puckered as I paced around. “And I needed to tell Yury in person exactly what happened last night.”
“Did you also happen to tell him what Oleg said about my mama?”
Meeting her stark gaze, I nodded. “He expressed regret that you had to hear such things.”
“Then why can’t he come here and tell me himself?” She stomped her dainty foot, a habit she had when life didn’t go her way. “And why the hell did he let you go into my rooms to get my stuff?”
“Because you are my wife, Sasha.”
“Wife? Arggh!” She dragged her hands through her long hair. “I am so sick of this life. Men just making unilateral decisions, and I’m supposed to go along with everything regardless of what I want?”
My jaw clenched, my stare hardening. “You agreed to the wedding.”
“A wedding, yes. But not this . . . this sham of a marriage. Come on, Maksim. You don’t want this anymore than I do. Besides the wedding was supposed to make me untouchable to Oleg. Look how well that turned out.”
I could barely conceal the anger in my voice when I said, “It does not matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” She growled again.
Then she spun around and made a move to kick her bare foot against one of the leather-bound trunks, but I stopped her.
I took her up in my arms, pulling her away.
She would likely break her toes if she did something so foolish.
She wriggled like a little heathen until I plopped her back to the floor.
“This is all a ruse anyway!” Shouting, she looked very attractive with her cheeks aflame and her eyes sparking. “I shouldn’t have to stay with you anymore.”
“Ruse or not, it must appear real.” And I was surprised to find the more time I spent with the woman, the more I looked forward to taming and bedding her.
She was having none of it though. “But Oleg already knows everything. He knows I’m here now. What’s the damn point of this anymore?”
“The point is . . .” I inhaled a deep breath, let it out. “You are safest with me and always have been whether as my wife or not, because I would put myself in front of a bullet for you as I have promised the pakhan.”
And Yury would move heaven and earth to make sure her fate would be different than what befell her mother.
Sasha glanced at me as if trying to gauge the truth in my eyes, and I’d never been more serious.
Then she slumped down on top of one of her trunks, face in her hands, and she’d never looked like such a glum little girl before.
She’d always been willful and spirited and had talked more than I preferred, but the Sasha I’d known forever was preferable to this broken sight.
A crack widened in my heart, whic
h plummeted when I noticed something else. Now that we’d stopped arguing, I saw that her eyes were puffy, red-rimmed. She’d been crying.
The only other time I’d seen her get teary was at Arkady’s wedding, and the sight took me off guard.
“You were crying, Sasha?” I kneeled down in front of her and pulled her hands off her face.
Even the tip of her nose was pink.
“What was it?” I asked, trying to make my voice less gruff. “Did I hurt you with the . . . spanking?”
“What?” Her eyes popped up.
The blush returned to her cheeks as she stared at me.
“No.” She shook her head, glancing away. “I mean yes of course it stung but”—her voice lowered—“you could tell what the spanking did to me.”
Blyad. Yes, I remembered every vivid detail with a sudden rush of blood to my cock that would just have to settle the hell down this time.
“Then why do you cry?”
“Baba gave me letters that my mother wrote to Papa.” There was a wobble to her chin. “I was reading them before Jo came up to visit.”
That fissure in my heart deepened.
I rose to my feet then scooped her into my arms.
She didn’t struggle this time.
I settled into the deep comfortable chair with her on my lap and brushed the hair from her cheeks. “I’m sorry you never knew much of your mother.”
“You are?” Her unusually light eyes met mine, glossier than usual as if she would cry again.
Nodding, I folded my arms around her to hold her lightly. “Yury also said it was his fault he hadn’t prepared you for any of this. That he kept Liliana all to himself in his memories.”
“Papa did?” The tears escaped to slip down her cheeks, which gave me tender feelings toward her.
I gently wiped them away on my fingertips.
She reached beneath a cushion and brought out a packet of letters, which she held as if they were a most precious gift. “She loved me though.”
I could not imagine a mother who wouldn’t have loved Sasha although, from my own unpleasant childhood, I knew there were parents incapable of caring for their young.
“That’s not all though,” she continued, pausing to draw a labored breath. “She knew about Oleg’s papa. She mentioned him.”
Her eyes darted to mine. “She vowed to get back to Russia, to Papa, in time to have me and marry him. But she knew, Maksim. He was out to get her just like Oleg wants to take me.”
Strengthening my arms around her, I buried my face against her hair. “He is never going to get his fucking filthy hands on you.”
I would rip his arms from their sockets and claw his esophagus from his neck first.
“You can’t promise that.”
Drawing back from her, I tipped her chin up until she met my glacial gaze. “I can and I do.”
She stared at me for a long moment before breaking eye contact. “I know Papa just tried to shield me from the ugliness, but it still hurts to have been left in the dark. She was my mother.”
Unclenching the fists I’d unconsciously made, I swept my hands up and down her back as she started sniffling again.
“It’s just utterly . . . hopeless. I don’t understand the point of anything anymore. Papa and my mother were so in love for what? Love is stupid.”
She sounded so petulant even in her pain that I almost laughed. But I didn’t. Love made a person weak and vulnerable, on that we could agree.
“Love is difficult,” was all I said to her.
Lust was much easier.
Rearing up all of a sudden, Sasha angrily swabbed at her eyes. “And I know I’m spoiled so you don’t have to keep telling me.”
For once, that had been the farthest thing from my mind.
I sat still as she repositioned herself on my lap, hitting my groin in such a way that I had to bite back a groan just like I’d stifled my chuckle.
Her plump ass now rested fully on my cock as she straddled me, but her intent wasn’t sexual.
My cock did not care one way or the other.
“I’ve had everything I ever wanted just handed to me,” she continued her diatribe. “Except for my freedom. Except my mama. A career I could call my own. But how selfish is all of that?”
Her fists hit my shoulders then her palms opened, and she smoothed her hands down my arms. I didn’t think she had any idea what she was doing to me—touching me so easily, sitting right on my cock.
“How can I miss someone this much when I never even knew her? You didn’t even have your father or mother. God, I am horrible, Maksim.”
“I have had my brothers.” I shifted uncomfortably, my hands on her hips to move her a safer distance from my groin. “That was enough.”
“How could it be?” She peered at me with such earnestness it was impossible to look away.
“It had to be.” I had my brothers and I had myself and that had been enough for a very long time, but I wasn’t so certain now.
Hearing the sadness and pain in Sasha’s voice reopened something old inside of me that I’d buried down beneath layers of responsibility and obligation.
She had been honest with me for once.
I could perhaps do the same. Tell her something even my brothers didn’t know.
And I remembered something Yury had told me during my first year with him when I was so young. When you say something important to a woman you respect, you do not shirk or look away.
He must’ve been thinking about his Liliana.
He’d taught me many things, including how to kill with my bare hands and how to run the Bratva business when and if it came my time.
Mostly, he had tutored me in death because he’d recognized that cold, untouchable part inside of me that had been bred from the time I’d spent on the streets unchecked by parents.
As I gazed at Sasha, something must’ve changed in my expression, because she asked softly, “What are you thinking about?”
“Something Yury said to me once.”
“What was it?”
“Something only spoken between men.”
She huffed in an annoyed manner. “I knew it. I just told you the raw truth about me and you’re still going to subscribe to this completely asinine idea that men in our world have no feelings whatsoever.”
Before she could withdraw completely, I grasped her hips harder to keep her where she was. “I was going to tell you something else, Sashenka.”
She relaxed a little, settling back down on my lap and thankfully not too close to my cock that time.
“I’ve never spoken of this, not even to my brothers.”
Her pretty eyes widened, and she ever so carefully moved the letters from her mother to the table beside us like any rash move would make me clam up. “I thought you all knew everything about each other.”
“Not everything,” I muttered. Not the piercing for instance.
We would get to that later.
“It was back in Moscow. After our parents disappeared.” My voice sawed out from my throat, but I did not lose her gaze. “There was an older woman who owned a bakery. Arkady managed to get in her good graces.”
With my English threatening to become broken as I talked, I switched to the mother tongue.
“Every so often, she’d take us in. First thing in the morning when the rolls had just come out so fragrant. She always had the bath hot and ready first, making us take turns. The smell of those rolls . . . I always rushed through the bath that was a luxury we usually went without.”
A small frown crimped Sasha’s forehead. “I would’ve given up a million things for you and Kirill and Arkady if I’d had a clue. I just thought Papa wanted boys so much instead of me, he brought you all in because I wasn’t enough.” She clamped her mouth shut then murmured, “I’m sorry. This isn’t about me.”
A hoarse chuckle parted my lips. “It’s all right. You were a brat from the beginning, but we’d never seen anything like you, Sashenka. So clean and pure.”
>
Pampered, da. But who wouldn’t pamper a child like her?
Unlike me and my brothers who became street-hardened hooligans with no one to look after us.
“But I was too hungry. And too little.” My face screwed up as I remembered. “I could never sleep.”
The gnawing hunger that growled like a beast in my belly every single night while Arkady, Kirill, and I huddled together under a few thin blankets in a forgotten alleyway in Moscow.
“Weren’t you only like five or six years old though? Of course you were little and scared.”
“I didn’t say I was scared.”
She rolled her eyes, but there was no sting to the gesture. “So you weren’t scared. But you’d been abandoned. And you certainly aren’t small now.”
A grim grin curved across my mouth then dissolved away. “The baker’s husband sometimes gave us oranges. Fat, juicy things. Staved off the scurvy he said.”
My stomach got all twisted as I relived the memories.
“He was a big hairy man. I thought of him as the bear. I should have been scared of him. Kirill and Arkady knew better.”
“What do you mean?” Sasha asked, her fingers gliding along my jaw until I winced.
Then she drew her hand away.
“I was the last one in the bath one early morning. It snowed outside and the water had cooled, and everything looked like sugar through the window. I was so hungry.” My voice grew hoarse and thick.
“Arkady and Kirill always saved the best for me. I knew that. They stole milk. For me. They gave me the best parts of any food foraged even though I grifted right along beside them.” Swallowing over the stone in my throat, I watched as Sasha became more and more horrified, thinking I should stop now but I couldn’t.
“He told me he just came in to bring me a towel.”
“The baker’s husband?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t tell Sasha all this in English, it would be too much, bringing that black bleak world here. “But he made me get out of the bath and follow him to a back room so I could dry off.”
She gulped.
“He gave me the towel and held out a sack of oranges, another of fresh-baked bread. He said he’d give me the food if he could use me.”