by Lucy Ellis
They could go from there.
Rose bit down hard on the inside of her lip. He must think she was an idiot.
‘Plato, I—’
‘Rose.’ He grunted her name and lowered his head and kissed her. It was a gesture designed to shut her up, and he knew his mouth wasn’t reassuring.
Rose whimpered. His lips were hard, bruising. He was taking from her what he needed. His life was so much more hard-edged than anything she could imagine, and instinctively she understood he needed something softer, something only a woman could give him. Rose wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she had never felt more female—because he needed her, and it was sending hot, undeniable messages to every one of the erogenous zones in her body.
She tried to kiss him back, but he dragged his mouth away and she remembered they were standing in the street, and nothing about this was private. Then she forgot that because he was trembling against her.
‘Are you okay?’
Plato made a derisive sound and clamped his hands on her hips, bringing her in tight against him. Rose felt him hard and thick even through the layer of her wool coat. She knew she should have been outraged. They were in public, and she had a dozen questions, but in an instant all she was aware of was how aroused he was and what it was doing to her.
He was sending her a message. She was his to take, and this was what he wanted from her.
It was outrageous, but right now it didn’t matter because it was what she wanted too.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ROSE thought she’d made her decision in the street, but as Plato unbuttoned her coat in the foyer of his apartment and she slid out one arm and then the other she acknowledged that that was a lie she’d been telling herself for days to hide the truth. She’d made this decision the moment she’d clapped eyes on him at the press conference in the Dorrington.
She applied her smaller hands to his coat, gazing at the broad hard chest she was undressing, and lifted her revelatory eyes to his. For a moment she faltered. His expression was so hard, and the events in the street flickered through her mind. For a second she wondered who this man was. She still had dozens of questions…
But he forestalled her questions by lowering his head even as he dragged her up into his arms, and suddenly he was completely in charge and she was…hopelessly caught up in his embrace. Rose had never felt so excruciatingly excited in her entire life.
The men she had dated in the past had always asked if they could kiss her. Sometimes she’d said yes, occasionally no. It had always been very civilized, and she’d kept the ball in her court. Like the boys who’d pursued her back in Fidelity Falls and made the mistake of going through her brothers first.
Plato’s mouth took hers without a by-your-leave and he didn’t hold back. It was as if, like her, he’d been fantasising about this for days. Heat exploded between them and sent a chain reaction through the rest of Rose’s body. She felt the erotic intensity of the moment almost too acutely. One hand was clamped at her hip, holding her flush against him, whilst the other delved into her hair as he cradled her head and kissed her. No man had ever kissed her as Plato did, ravishing her mouth, forcing her to open to him, taking what he wanted.
Plato knew he was holding her too tightly. He had to be hurting her. He felt her wince but he couldn’t not squeeze, couldn’t not drag her up against him. He heard her soft, broken breaths as she struggled to kiss him back and knew he was being an unreasonable brute—but really what did anyone expect? What did she expect? Chert, she knew what to expect now. She’d had a brief blast of everything that was wrong in his life. Now she could have a taste of what it meant to mess with a guy like him.
He fumbled one-handed with the buttons on her tight little wool jacket, popping one, then another. He only stopped kissing her to appreciate the cleavage and fine black lace. Nothing beige in sight. He realised she’d put this on for him—before the argument in the restaurant, before she’d fled from him down the street, before she’d known the truth. For some reason it made him clumsy all of a sudden.
Rose pushed her hands to his chest and shimmied down to her feet, the look she gave him both inviting and wary. Her small hand did guard duty over her jacket and she backed up.
For a crazy minute he thought he’d blown it. That she’d decided it was over. The luxury of the private, privileged world he had won his place in was no longer able to screen the base realities of where he had come from. She was thinking about what she had seen and heard in the street, and like the smart girl she was she wasn’t going to let some street thug from Udilsk touch her.
Rose reached up and laid her hand on his cheek, her gentle palm drawing the weight of him towards her. She was so intensely lovely, her hair falling out of its pins and framing her face in loose ebony curls. It struck him that the first time he had seen her she had reminded him of a Renaissance Madonna, but the Rose he knew now was much more earthy and real, and that fire burning inside her suffused her delicate features, making her eyes intensely blue as she gazed at him.
She came up on her toes and put her lips to his and kissed him, soft as the inside of a rose petal, her eyes wide open, never leaving his. Slowing him down.
Plato stopped moving, stopped breathing.
Rose knew now he’d only ever told her the truth, had only ever been trying to protect her, and she so desperately wanted to give him something back. From all she had seen today and what she now knew about Plato’s life it seemed the thing he lacked was tenderness. She could give him this—a little softness to take the edges off his hard life.
A sensual smile curled up the corners of her mouth and she kissed him again, this time her eyes drifting closed as her tongue delved between his lips, holding his head in place with both hands. He leaned forward so Rose could reach him, and the gesture wasn’t lost on her.
She could feel the lust thumping inside him. She had never been wanted like this. She opened her eyes, saw the strange wild light in his and asked, her voice pure enticement, ‘Where do we go?’ She wasn’t entirely referring to geography.
Plato hauled her into his arms and carried her up the stairs. She put her arms around his neck and he could feel her warmth through her clothes, the female weight of her so wondrously distributed.
He lived upstairs. It was simpler, more comfortable than the vast spaces below. He saw Rose taking it all in—the pool table, the excessive entertainment consoles, the big screen on the wall, the huge sofas and walls and the ledges full of sporting memorabilia. She seemed to grow heavier in his arms, as if relaxing. He’d never brought a woman up here before. He wondered what she was thinking. Then he kicked open the door to his bedroom.
He kept expecting she would start up at him, stamp her foot, demand to be taken to the airport… He wouldn’t let her go, but he put her down and she didn’t do any of those things.
Instead she began unbuttoning his shirt, her hesitant touch driving him crazy. He replaced her hands with his more competent ones, ripping, sending buttons spitting. He dealt with her little jacket until he had her soft hands on his bare chest, nothing but silk and lace and underwiring between her breasts and his skin. She reached up and tugged his head down to fuse their mouths.
He hauled her up into his arms until she was dangling. He carried her over to the bed, still kissing her, and pulled down her skirt and tights and panties in one swift movement before setting her on the bed.
Rose knelt there in her slip, eyes dazed, ruby lips parted, everything left to the imagination but the peaking of her nipples. It was a sight so incredibly erotic he almost came. Seemingly ignorant of her effect on him, she reached for the buttons on his trousers. But he replaced her hands with his own because right now the only thing that mattered was to shed his trousers and briefs, deal with the condom before he disgraced himself.
She gave a little gasp as he tumbled her backwards onto the bed, eyes wide, and for a moment he could have sworn she was a little nervous. Wordlessly he rucked up her slip, knowing he should say som
ething, but he found the incredibly soft flesh of her inner thighs and words failed him. He tangled his fingers through the little soft dark curls at the heart of her and touched her heat. Rose moaned.
He muttered appreciatively under his breath in Russian, sliding his fingers into the hot slippery centre of her body, teasing her clitoris with his thumb, watching her eyes close, her back arch, listening to her whimper. He couldn’t wait.
Rose lifted her hips instinctively and his expression grew heavier, his eyes half closing as he slid between those gorgeous milky-white thighs, nudged her heat with his erection. He sheathed himself inside her, wide and deep. He didn’t pause, didn’t give her any time to adjust, he just wanted to claim her.
Rose sucked in air. For a few seconds the pressure was too much. It felt almost too much to take. She moved to push at his hips, but in that instant everything changed. A streak of pleasure in the wake of the unrelenting pressure caught her off guard and her little cry of protest tapered off into a full-throated moan.
He caught her mouth with his as he began to move, slowly but mercilessly, deliciously inside her.
Oh, my Lord…
More pleasure rippled through her nerve-endings as she began to move against him, teaching him what she needed, discovering it for herself. More—definitely more was what she needed. She told him so, in desperate little gasps of instruction.
Plato thrust in answer, deep and hard, the muscles in his back rippling under her desperately clutching hands. He yanked her legs up around his hips, her ankles pressing to the hair-roughened backs of his thighs, rubbing against the muscle as he thrust into her again and again. The pressure built, and all Rose could do was sob as her body sang around his. He shifted harder and higher and sensations ripped through her—until the inevitable happened. He threw back his head, the corded muscle visible in his neck and shoulders, his biceps pumped up. These visuals swooped through Rose’s mind as he grunted her name, buried his head against her neck with a harsh male groan and pulsed inside of her.
Rose wrapped him up tight in her arms as he came down on top of her, breathing hard. The weight of him…the scent of male skin and clean sweat and sex mingling with fresh linen sheets… All she could do was absorb his vulnerability in that moment and hold onto him. They were quiet together for a long time, their laboured breathing giving way to softer sounds and then a counterpoint.
‘Is it always like this?’ Rose murmured, shifting her head against his sweat-damp shoulder.
‘Moscow?’ His voice was a dark note she felt deep down in her sensitised body. ‘No, that was not ordinary.’
‘No, I mean this. Us.’
His fingertips played lightly over the little bumps on her spine and his eyes sought hers, that strange wild light still flickering there.
‘No.’ He gave a dry, involuntary laugh that sounded more like a groan. ‘This was definitely not ordinary.’
No, not ordinary. Sort of magical and…
‘Because I thought I’d lost you,’ she admitted softly, when before she had been too afraid to form the words.
‘No.’ He turned to her, his expression almost fierce, his mouth hot and dry against her temple. ‘No.’
‘I thought you were trying to control me,’ she confessed.
‘Nyet, I want to protect you,’ he said roughly.
For any other woman those would have been magic words, thought Rose.
‘Like my dad and my four brothers,’ she said aloud, realising as she spoke that he had been trying to protect her from outside forces as her brothers would—not to manipulate her as Bill had tried to do, trying to control her because he was weak and she was strong. Plato welcomed her strength.
‘Not like them.’
He nudged her chin up so he could look into her eyes. Rose’s heart gave a kick. He understood her.
‘You are my woman. There is a difference.’
Well, there was that, thought Rose faintly, and found she’d run out of words.
She’d never been anyone’s woman before. She was a daughter, a sister, and she had been a girlfriend, a fiancée, a friend… But never someone’s woman, and there was a difference.
‘I have learned today you are capable of looking after yourself.’ This admission was accompanied by a smile that took her mind off their conversation and back to the warm thud of his heart against her spread hand.
‘What else have you learned?’
‘Not to take you out to dine. Whenever we are in a restaurant, malenki, it always ends in you storming out.’
‘True.’ Rose buried her smile in the bronze hair curling over his chest, arrowing down towards the taut musculature of his belly. Her hand followed. He was so male, as if every other man she’d ever met was a faint copy of this original.
Plato smoothed a hand over her rounded thigh, sliding up the silk she still wore. In a minute he’d strip it off her, learn every luscious inch of her centrefold body and anchor himself to the physical. But right now the femaleness of her body brought him back to how intimate this had been, how right it had felt.
He looked down at her face, her flushed cheeks, her closed eyes, the upward ruby curve of her lips. What was going on in that pretty head of hers? Was she judging him for the complexities of his life she couldn’t possibly understand? Surely what she’d seen today in the street had shocked her, and yet…she seemed fine. She was smoothing one gentle hand over his chest as if she were offering comfort in turn, and something tightened in him.
‘You will have to get used to the security,’ he said, his voice a low rumble in his chest, and waited for a reaction.
Rose sighed, snuggled a little closer. After today she would be glad of ten good men and a titanium wall between her and that explosion of male aggression and intimidation.
Running her hands over her own personal titanium wall, she wondered at what that meant. Get used to. He had to know she wouldn’t be staying here with him. It needed to be a fifty-fifty thing. She moistened her lips, knowing it was the moment to say something but unable to form the words. Did it really matter? They’d work something out. They had to work something out, because she wasn’t giving this up.
Nothing in the world could make her give this up.
Plato eyed her carefully, trying to read her. She seemed utterly compliant, and he felt that tightening in his chest again.
‘Malenki?’ he said in that deep, dark voice, his big hand closing proprietorially around the curve of her bottom.
‘Yes, cowboy?’ She blinked slowly at him, feeling as if the sun had just come out blindingly after a long winter.
‘Have I told you it was my lucky day when you wrote your number on my hand?’
‘I think you just did.’
Yet even lying in his strong arms she could feel the wariness in him as if talking intimately with a woman like this wasn’t something he had much experience of. Or maybe it was just her.
If both of them were gun-shy of taking a risk it was hard to see a future together.
She sighed as his hand began to drift again, covering her breast, thumbing her nipple through the lace. He bent his head and closed his teeth ever so gently over her now perky nipple, all rosy and pleased to see him through black lace.
He was rucking her slip up, and she lifted her arms above her head for him to ease it off. He reached under her to unfasten the tricky three hooks on her bra. She imagined he was accustomed to women who didn’t need so much support. It made her feel shy and a little exposed—until he peeled the lace and satin away slowly, unbearably slowly, and his eyes told her everything she wanted to know. Because he wasn’t looking at her breasts. He was looking into her eyes.
* * *
In the shower the water was warm, pulsing over her ivory skin. Her luscious, odalisque’s dream of a body was climbing his. Plato’s hands knew what they were doing even as his mind went to all sorts of places he didn’t want to investigate, and Rose lifted herself to him, as wild for him as he was for her. For the first time since he’
d arrived in this cursed city a decade ago something felt right and natural and good.
Wrapped in a towel, her hair damp and toppling over her shoulders, Rose sank onto the bed, reaching for him. But almost the minute her head touched the pillow she was out like a light.
He’d never seen anything quite like it, and he sat for a while, just watching her. Then he hooked one arm behind his head, wrapped the other around Rose, and tucked her up against him, his shoulder her pillow. She was still damp from the shower, fragrant from the shampoo and her own warm, female skin. In the shower she had tasted under his tongue like every flavour he craved. She slept in his arms as if she were a sea creature who had found her shell.
Yet he hadn’t kept her safe.
No matter how many times he told himself what had happened today had been a matter of fate, they had been in the wrong restaurant in the wrong street at the wrong hour. He kept coming back to the indisputable truth that he had been hard pressed to protect her, and no matter how much security he carried there was always going to be a level of danger in this city for him. He had made enemies here; even building a legitimate business he couldn’t avoid it.
She didn’t belong here, and it was just a matter of time before that became clear to her too… Again he felt that odd clenching sensation in his chest.
She was safe in Toronto. He had never visited a safer city. He remembered the vital interest her neighbours took in her welfare, how she left her damned doors open in the middle of the day, how trustingly she had come with him, a virtual stranger, halfway around the world to this place.
This beautiful, historical, treacherous city, with currents that could sweep you under just like that. He knew. He knew better than most. Because he had been both under and on top, and he knew which position he liked best.
He had learned to swim with sharks to survive; he could tear apart flesh with the best of them.
Yet in his arms lay this girl who melted him.