by Selena Scott
“DORA!” Her door was getting knocked almost off its hinges. She stumbled out of her bed and checked the peephole. She frowned as her stomach flipped.
“What?” she yelled back as she wrenched the door open.
Danil froze as he looked down at her. She realized she probably should have put some pants on before she opened the door. She stood there in some lacy boy shorts that barely covered her ass and a tiny jersey tank top. Well. If it was a problem for him, then he was gonna have to deal with it. The cool morning air wafted in and raised goosebumps over her skin.
She cocked out one hip and put her hand on it. “I repeat, Danil. What?”
He dragged his eyes up from her legs on display but seemed to get just as caught on her breasts which were threatening to spill out of her tank top.
“Danil,” she said, snapping her fingers in front of his face.
His eyes finally made it all the way to hers and she saw that they were twin fires. Burning with desire for her, but also with anger.
He stepped into her room, causing her to take a step back. Slamming the door behind him, he scanned the room.
“Sure!” she said, tossing her hands in the air. “Come on in!”
She paced away from him toward the bathroom. Being this close to him was making her system go haywire and she needed a second before they were gonna have whatever argument he seemed so dead set on having. But she froze when she heard him scuffling around.
Turning, Dora’s jaw dropped to the absolute ground when she saw what he was doing.
“Are you packing my things?! Danil! Stop!” she shouted as she raced over to him. She grabbed the pair of jeans that he was stuffing into her suitcase and yanked on them.
He easily unhanded them. “Actually, yeah,” his deep voice rumbled through her. “Put those on. For my sanity. And. God. This, too.” He pulled out a simple blue bra from her pile of clothes and shoved it toward her. He quickly averted his eyes from her chest and resumed shoving her things into her suitcase.
Dora tossed aside the clothes he’d handed to her and started smacking his hands away from her things.
“Danil! What the fuck are you doing?” she barely recognized her own voice with all the anger and shock lacing through it.
“What does it look like?” he growled. “I am packing your things. We are leaving in two minutes. So I suggest you help.”
Dora took a shocked step back from him and crossed her arms over her chest, a mulish expression spreading over her face. “I’m not going anywhere, Danil.”
He absolutely ignored her as he opened the drawers of the dresser she’d never used and slammed them back shut. Next he strode into the bathroom and grabbed all her cosmetics and shampoos out of there, jamming them into her suitcase as well. Next were the scattered shoes throughout the room. But when his eyes landed on her carefully organized desk, recorders, notebooks filled with notes, her laptop, Dora threw herself in between the bull and the red flag.
“I’ll do it!” she shouted, resigned to joining him since beating this 200 pound Belarusian giant wasn’t in the cards for her.
He turned without a word, hoisting her bag into the air and striding out of the room. Dora heard a car door slam as she hurriedly organized her things into a messenger bag that had been her father’s. She was just hoisting it over her shoulder when her anger came back. What the hell was she doing? Her father would not want her to just go with this brute in order to avoid a fight.
She was Pandora Katsaros. Award-winning journalist and part-time private investigator. She was the daughter of Stavros Katsaros. The wiliest, canniest, most innovative detective in history. She wasn’t gonna stand for this shit.
Tossing her bag onto the bed, she turned just as Danil was reentering the room. She fisted her hands on her hips like before and gave him the most condescending look she could muster, calculating that it would be the only thing that might take the wind out of his sails.
“Danil, this is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman, I’ve paid for this hotel, I’m not letting you check me out and kick me out of town just because I’ve been irritating to you. Because the fact is, I know that this town has secrets and that your family-”
She never got to finish her sentence, though, because Danil was bending down in front of her and tossing her over his shoulder.
Dora barely bit down on the little squeak that threatened to shriek out of her. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He grabbed her bag off the bed and the clothes she’d never bothered to put on.
And then he was slamming the door behind them and she was buckled into the front seat of his car before she could blink.
Dora clamped down on the traitorous reaction of her body to his car. She had good memories of this car. Well, one in particular. But they didn’t, shouldn’t, apply anymore because now he was erasing all of that by being a complete dickhead and trying to kick her out of town. Just when she was finally getting close. Circling in on something really good.
Dora clamped her arms over her chest and glared at him, doing her absolute best to ignore how handsome he looked, wearing only suit pants and an undershirt, like he’d rushed out of the house before getting all the way dressed.
“Fine. You know what? I don’t give an earthly fuck, Belarus. Drive me to the city limits. Drive me to Montana before you kick me out. I don’t care. I’ll just find a way back here. Because it’s what I do. You can’t get me off the trail. I’m going to get to the bottom of this fucking story if it’s-”
Danil slammed the brakes of the car and swung into the driveway of a house. It was on the outskirts of a little domestic neighborhood, but it was set back into the woods a little. It was a little, two-storey brick house with a messy garden out front. She realized that the shutters were blue. It gave her a little jolt in her stomach. She’d always had a thing for blue shutters.
“Where are we?” she demanded, but Danil didn’t answer. He simply slammed his car door, grabbed her suitcase in one hand, her messenger bag over his shoulder, and Dora over his other shoulder.
“Danil!” she yelped as he strode into the house.
But he didn’t stop until he’d gone all the way upstairs into a neat little room with a white comforter and a small wooden desk in the corner. The walls were painted an appealing shade of blue and the windows looked out onto a rolling green backyard. Dora could see lawn chairs and a hammock back there before she was dumped, rather heavily, onto the bed.
“There are hunters in the woods! You could have been shot!” Danil roared, pacing back and forth in front of her. “There’s mountain lions for Christ’s sake! And bears!”
Dora raised a wry eyebrow but Danil plowed on.
“And then what? A fucking medical testing site or whatever the hell that was? Just prancing through at midnight? Did you know it was abandoned, Dora? Did you know it was abandoned or did you think there was a chance that it was active and that you might run into the people who were committing those atrocities?”
He wheeled on her, his dark brown eyes like fiery ice as he demanded her answer.
“I wasn’t sure what I’d find,” she admitted. Answering him honestly, in part, because of how confused he had her. Where the hell was she and what the hell was going on?
Danil threw his hands up in the air. “Well, aren’t you the lucky one that it was just the cops that found you! Do you even know what could have found you? What’s in those woods?”
“No!” Dora shouted back, standing on the bed so that she could, finally, be at eye level with this brute. “I don’t. Yet. But something tells me that you do. Care to share?”
Danil whipped away from her, a growl of rage seeming to roll right out of him. He turned and slammed out of the room, nearly taking the door off the hinges in the process.
Dora stared at the closed door. That’s the way he ended a conversation? Hell, no. He had a lot to learn about arguing with a Katsaros. Dora had taken one step across the bed before the door slammed back open and he was striding back into t
he room, his hands in fists.
“You think I’m the kind of man who would kick you out of town?” he demanded from her. His eyes narrowing in anger but, Dora also saw, hurt as well. “You think I’d swallow you whole in the back of my car and run you out of town a few days later?”
“I-” Dora clapped her mouth shut. She had thought that. Because she knew men. And it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. But she was also beginning to know Danil. She cocked her head to the side. And it had seemed out of character. Maybe that’s part of the reason it had shocked her so much.
He stared at her. Breathing like an animal. Barely in control. “Do you know where we are? This is my house.” He gestured around. “No. I’m not kicking you out, Pandora,” he growled out the words through clenched teeth. “I’m keeping you.”
And the door slammed shut again as he stormed out.
Well.
Dora pushed her hand through her hair. She was as perceptive as the next gal. Probably more so. And she knew when a man needed some space. But yeah. That one required some follow-up.
She bounded off the bed and out the bedroom. She saw another door slam down the hall so she followed it. Pushed it open as dramatically as he had.
“What do you mean ‘keeping me’?” she demanded. “Keeping me hostage?”
“Don’t push me right now, Pandora,” he growled, sitting on the edge of what had to be his bed. A king-sized wooden monstrosity that could have comfortably slept eight.
“I’m gonna push you whenever I want, Danil,” she yelled at him, one finger in his face. “It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. So you’re gonna tell me right now what you mean by ‘keeping me’.”
“Fine,” he said, staring up into her eyes. “Fuck it. But I’m better at showing than telling.”
And with that he leaned forward and stripped her tank top right off of her. Dora’s mouth fell right open as he slipped a finger in the front waistband of her lacy boy shorts and dragged her forward.
He was so tall that even sitting on the bed in front of her, they were still at eye level.
One of his massive hands came around to the back of her neck. Possessively knotting itself in her hair. The other hand stayed tucked in the front of her underwear.
“If you still have questions after this, we’ll talk then,” he said, all but against her lips.
And then his lips were on hers. Not like their first kiss, when he’d smashed them together in an unstoppable explosion. No, this was an inexorable press, a melding. His mouth clamped to hers. His tongue sweeping through her mouth, exploring places she hadn’t even known she’d had.
Similar to the first time, Dora felt herself caught between pulling away and pushing forward. Her brain was in a tailspin and it was all she could do to stay on her feet as his hand trailed around the waistband of her underwear, touching her hip to hip and then finally all the way around back. That same hand sailed up her spine, like he was zipping her up. And she felt the electricity that he left in his wake.
She shifted on her feet, a little gasp escaping her as both of his hands suddenly dropped to the back of her knees. Yanking her forward, she was suddenly straddling his lap, completely off the ground.
She barely had the chance to think smooth before he was gripping the back of her head and growling into her mouth.
“No more seedy hotel,” he said, pulling her bottom lip between his teeth. “You live here now.”
His lips fell to her neck and Dora’s head tipped to one side, giving him access.
“At your house?” she asked weakly, trying desperately to regain her hold on whatever the hell was happening right now.
“No. Yes,” he said. “Yes, at my house. But I mean here.” His hands gripped her ass and yanked her even further forward so that her core pressed against his incredibly hard cock. “I mean you live in my lap now.”
Dora let out a silent gasp; his words were like a zipping buzz through her blood. Every muscle in her body contracted. She could not believe he’d just said that.
She pressed herself against him, desperate for relief from the racing tension he had shooting through her.
“I am where you live,” he growled, tipping her backwards, crushing her to him as he nipped along her collarbone. Her shoulders. “I am home.”
Dora didn’t particularly believe in magic. Even though she’d done an article on Wiccans a few years ago and seen some pretty crazy stuff. But she’d never seen anything that made her believe that spells existed. Except for this. It was almost as if the second Danil was speaking the words, he was somehow making them true. Tilting her world, changing her existence with little more than breath from his throat.
Dora scrambled on the edge of her tipping earth. She had to keep her footing. She couldn’t tumble.
“I can’t,” she whispered to herself more than anything else.
But Danil must have taken it personally because she was suddenly up in the air as he stood up with her. He turned and laid her out on the bed. He ripped his shirt over his head and then crawled over her, caging her in, his face only inches from hers.
“You can. You will,” he said. He wasn’t growling now. His voice was low and deep and rumbling with everything but anger. There was certainty there. Need. And that accent. Jesuslordholyposeidon. Dora squeezed her thighs together as he kept talking. “I don’t hurt you, Pandora. I am safe for you. I keep you safe.”
His words were less precise as his passion rose and Dora could understand the feeling. She hadn’t been able to string together a linear thought since he’d put his hands on her.
“Okay,” was all she could manage through the breath she was trying to desperately hold. “Okay.”
He reared back off her then. He stood before the bed, whipping his belt out of the loops with a snap. His eyes were consuming her. Eating her whole like a forest fire. “So quiet, samotna ptuška. Always so quiet.”
He snapped the belt in his hands and gave her a wicked smile before tossing it away. Next, his pants were gone and he was crawling back over her, all amusement gone from his eyes. He was focused only on her. Dora got the feeling that a bomb could go off and he wouldn’t look away from her.
Reaching forward, he slid her underwear down her legs and tossed them away with a look on his face like they’d personally offended him just by existing.
“Naked,” he growled. “Like it is meant.”
He surveyed her head to toe and Dora had never felt prouder of her body than she did in that moment. His mouth was watering just looking at her.
“Your body loses my mind,” he said, mixing up his words and obviously not even caring. “But still so quiet.”
He dropped his mouth to her breast and tugged. Hard. Rudely, almost. Dora’s back arched clear off the bed as she gave a gasping moan. She bit her lip against the sound but Danil grinned against her breast, rolling her nipple in his teeth.
“Da, ptuška,” he said, tugging again. “Give that moan to me.”
He rolled them over so that she was straddling him. He guided her other breast into his mouth and tugged again.
“It is mine.”
Dora couldn’t help but moan again as she wiggled against him. Her naked pussy spread against his stomach. She was getting wetter by the second. So wet that she knew it must be dripping onto him but she couldn’t find it in her to care. He was driving her crazy. Taking her out of her body and onto another plane.
Dora shook her head to focus her eyes. She refused to get lost here. She needed to be as present in this moment as he was. Her gaze landed on Danil’s chest as she sat herself back up. Holy mother pectorals. She lightly grazed her hand through his smattering of chest hair and over the rises and falls of his muscles. The man was built like a tank. Like a football player.
She was reaching forward, to explore more of him, but he was reaching behind her, shoving his underwear down. Dora felt the hard, hot press of his erection against her ass as it rose up. A flood of wetness poured out of her.
<
br /> Danil gave a feral smile and fished in the drawer beside them. He ripped a condom open with his teeth and sheathed himself behind her. “Later I make love to you. Right now, I show you home.”
With that, he lifted her by her hips, one of his thumbs coming down and swiping through her pussy, parting her lips and spreading her wetness all around. She felt the head of his cock at her opening and she tried to sink down on it. But he held her still. Just above him. The head of his cock traced through her silkiness making both of them grit their teeth.
“Say it,” he growled.
“What?” Dora felt as if they were trying to speak to one another on the bottom of the ocean; words and light and sounds were bending. Her body was on fire.
“Tell me you live here now.”
She looked down at him. How could she say that? She wasn’t a liar and she’d never been more confused in her life. But the man whose hands gripped her hips like a vice stared at her with so much hypnotic intensity that she heard herself speak.
“I do.”
And he slammed his hips up into her, sheathing himself inside her to the hilt. He pressed her down to meet him as his hips fell back to the bed and Dora’s world was just light and noise and feeling. He held her so tight she couldn’t move on her own. Couldn’t find her own rhythm. But she didn’t need to. Because his rhythm was utterly perfect, consuming, overwhelming. He was touching her everywhere, she realized, as one thumb circled her nipple. The other thumb dipped between her lips, pressing into her mouth in the same rhythm as his cock in her pussy.
Dora’s muscles failed. She fell forward on his chest and all she could do was take and take. Her breasts smashed against his chest as his hands came around her. Gripping her so tight she could feel them melting into one another. Her body tightened unrecognizably. She never came this way. Just from having a man inside her. She’d long ago accepted that she was a complicated woman who needed either a very creative man, or some time on her own to get there. But apparently her body hadn’t gotten that memo. And neither had Danil’s cock. Because he slammed it into her over and over and Dora found herself racing through a thunderstorm. Her body electric, vibrating, storming and exploding.