by Selena Scott
Maxim’s hands were huge and everywhere. His palms hot and rough as they worked their way under her shirt, dragging over her soft skin. He snaked one hand under her bra, closed his hand over her breast and kneaded her. Her head fell back and she moaned, melting into the feeling.
His mouth closed over hers, swallowing the moan.
“Quiet, for boy,” he muttered. But then latched his mouth onto her pulse point and made her moan again.
Ivy could feel his stiff cock through his jeans and she rubbed herself against it. Wildly anxious for any sort of friction. Any sort of release.
Standing up off of him suddenly, she was wild-eyed and breathing hard. She ripped her shirt off over her head, fumbled with her jeans, kicking out of them. She was vaguely aware of that thing called foreplay. But fuck it, who needed that after the week she’d had? Maxim’s scent and body and heat every-fucking-where. She couldn’t turn around without coming face to face with the little hairs racing up his arm. With the v of his muscles arrowing down into the top of his jeans. She didn’t need any more revving up. She had a problem and she needed it taken care of now. Like, yesterday.
“I need this, Maxim,” she panted. It was true. Searingly true. But something inside her screamed for one last layer of protection. Who in their right mind got naked and laid out on the train tracks, waiting for the 4:05 to Monterrey? She couldn’t afford to let anyone fillet her heart. Her body, however, he could do whatever the hell he wanted to. “I need it so bad. But it won’t mean we’re together, alright? Let’s just do this for each other. Let’s make each other feel good.”
She tucked her knuckles into her panties, ready to wrench them away from her legs but Maxim’s huge hands stopped her.
He stood, pulled his own shirt over his head, skinned out of his pants and tossed them away. He was inches away from her, breathing fast and somehow staring at all of her at once.
He flicked his hands around her back and Ivy was conscious of her bra falling away. Next, he kneeled in front of her, and her panties slid away.
She tried to kneel too, but he held her standing.
“Maxim,” she whispered, urgently. “Now.”
“Yes, now,” he agreed. “But first I must do something I didn’t do before.”
Before she could ask, he was tipping her backwards, laying her gently out on her carpet. On all fours over her, Maxim arranged her hair out in a fan around her. Ivy arched her back, wanting any kind of relief from the ache between her legs but receiving none.
He started at her feet. Lifting one and then the other, he traced his hands over her heel, the arch, he slipped a finger between every one of her toes.
She gasped and flinched at each tickling sensation, overwhelmed when his hands circled her ankles, moved up her calves. He lifted one leg and planted a warm, open mouth kiss to the back of her knee, moved to the front. Coming over her, he rubbed his chest on her thigh, crawled forward so that his cock, straining against his underwear, slipped across the flesh of her leg, for just a moment. And then he was all hands again.
Up her thighs to her hips. One and then the other.
“Maxim, what are you doing?” she gasped as his hands slid to her ass, his fingertips feathering across her cleft, up to the dimples of her back.
“I am touching every inch of you,” he replied tersely. “It was only regret of our first night together. That I did not touch you in every place.”
His hands came around her front then, one of his fingers pressing into the shadow of her navel. His thumbs came up her center, the rest of his wide, thick fingers making a cage around her ribs as he dragged his hands upwards. His hands paused at her breasts. Apparently his mouth was gonna do that part.
And he was just as thorough there as he’d been everywhere else. Ivy gasped, her mouth opened and her eyes slammed shut. He sucked one of her nipples straight into his mouth. An orgasm started a delicious tug in her belly but fell away when his mouth moved to the other nipple, suckling at her. It rose again and fell as he released her there as well.
He sucked at her collarbone, leaving a shiny purple mark that made his dick even harder to see it there. She was perfection. Absolute perfection. Her body was a light, silvery blue in the light from the porch. She looked as if she were laying at the bottom of the ocean, anxiously waiting for him to make her come so hard they created another continent.
God, he was happy to oblige.
Ivy gasped again as his hands came up to meet hers, but didn’t stay. His mouth kissed at her neck as his fingers licked past the webs of her fingers, traced her palms, circled her wrists. He reared back and placed a kiss at the inside of each of her elbows. Up her arms, he quickly rubbed his thumbs through her armpits, making her blush and wiggle. But he only grinned, lowering her head and smelling her there in a loud, gusty inhale.
“Maxim!” she admonished, blushing harder.
“Christos,” he muttered, in apparent pain. “I thought you were mermaid, but you are witch. You have cast spell over me.” He leaned down and huffed at the pit of her arm again before he let his hands trace up to her neck.
What was happening? Ivy had never felt more naked in her life. He was just supposed to pin her down and have sex with her on the couch. He wasn’t supposed to be plucking her feelings out one by one, parading them around for the world to see. He wasn’t supposed to somehow hold up a mirror for her to see her own beauty. She shouldn’t be fucking glittering right now. But she was. Oh God, she was.
His hands crested her chin, and his fingertips, light as moths, brushed over her cheekbones, her lips, her slightly big nose. Both eyelids. He danced his thumbs around the shell of her ear and inside for just a moment. His fingers traced every inch of her scalp before they threaded through her hair.
He reached down, fastened her legs around his hips. His eyes were dangerous, smooth whiskey, as his chest rose and fell. He crouched forward, planted a hand on either side of her head, his mouth just a breath away from hers.
“I touch you everywhere.” One of his fingers grazed over the mark his mouth had left on her collarbone. “I mark you.”
“Maxim,” she whispered, gripping hard at the last slippery shred of resolve. “I can’t make you any promises.”
His nostrils flared as his eyes heated with some unknown emotion. “I touch you everywhere,” he repeated. She felt the nudge of his cock head at the entrance of her dripping, aching pussy.
Tightening her legs around him, she drew him forward. “No promises,” she whispered.
“Everywhere,” he said again. And pressed all the way into her in one, confident thrust.
There were no toes dipped into this pool. He didn’t hesitate. Maxim immediately started a rhythm that had Ivy’s mouth pulled open, her hands turned into claws over his back.
He fucked her across the living room floor, his furious breaths warming and cooling the crook of her neck as he took her. Ivy’s hair pulled as it caught in the legs of the coffee table and she was dimly aware of Maxim turning the piece of furniture over as if it were made of matchsticks.
She smashed her hips against his, grinding her clit against his cock on every stroke. He groaned, biting hard on her lip.
“Everywhere,” he said into her mouth, licking over her teeth, under her tongue, every dark, feminine corner of her.
She was rising, tightening, swirling, falling away and rocketing up all at once. Half of her strained away from the fire that built inside her while the other half sprinted.
He was taking her, taking her, taking her. Every thrust was pushing her further and further from who she had been before she met him.
“Everywhere,” he said again, his honey eyes tight and intense on hers. And this time she was certain that he meant more than just her body. He was coming for her heart.
Maxim rode her hard, unrelenting, savage. Her body bucked and bore down when he teased at her clit with his thumb. He strummed and circled and plunged inside her. And then, when it was almost too much, when she was certain she cou
ldn’t take anymore, he fell forward again, pressing that thumb right into her mouth.
“Everywhere,” he growled again. And she exploded.
***
Ivy nodded weakly into his neck, her heart racing against his and her breath like a kiss.
He wasn’t sure if she was nodding in agreement that he’d touched her everywhere, or if she was just generally acknowledging what had happened. But, frankly, that was her business. And he didn’t have it in him to pry.
He barely had it in him to keep existing. She’d positively wrecked him. Torn that orgasm out of him like he’d stolen it from her in the first place.
He could have slept a solid 12 right there on top of her. But he was more than twice her size, and the boy could wake up and discover them at any moment. He rolled away from Ivy but didn’t let her go far. He could sense that touching her was very important right now. He’d made her vulnerable with all the touching from before. And then he’d fucked her fifteen feet across the living room floor. He needed to, how could he put it? Ah. He needed to seal the envelope.
He dragged her across his chest and flipped a blanket down from the back of one of the armchairs. He wrapped it over them and traced a pattern over her back. Whispering to her in Belarusian, he told her everything he wanted to say. No reservations. She wiggled against him weakly.
“What are you saying up there?” she asked, pushing a hank of sweaty hair out of her face.
“I’m saying a little Belarusian poem for your breasts,” he lied easily. “It goes ‘I have many favorite parts of your body/ But there are two tied for first place/ In case you don’t know/ It is your breasts’.” He kissed her laughing mouth. “It is ancient Belarusian poem. Although in my language, it rhymes.”
“You are so full of shit,” she chuckled, reaching across the floor for her underwear and her t-shirt.
He didn’t want her to get dressed. He wanted to lay naked and on the floor with her for the rest of his life. But, he realized, she wasn’t using her clothes for armor. She wasn’t shutting him out as he feared she might. So he figured he could afford to let her do whatever it was she wanted right now.
She found his underwear on the ground, tossed them over to him. “You can’t stay the night, Maxim. And I don’t say that to be rude! I just-”
“I know,” he said; saying the words himself was less painful than hearing her say them. “It is not good for Linc. Yet.”
She ignored his ‘yet’. And stood, in just her underwear and t shirt. She cleared her throat.
“Oh. You are telling me to leave right now?”
She said nothing. He could see some internal battle in her face. He realized that even she didn’t know the answer to that question. She was trying to muster up the words to tell him to leave while her face was asking him to stay.
“It is only 9:30,” he said. “We could watch movie. And then I will go.” He scratched at his stubble. He should be more honest than that. “Well, we will probably fuck again. And then I will go.”
She let out an involuntary laugh. Her face a wash of relief that he hadn’t made her choose what happened next. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A few days later, Lana narrowed her eyes at the high def screen that she watched carefully. She slid a hand over her gelled blonde hair. She liked it that way; it kept it out of her face. She lit a slim cigarette and watched Ilya and Maxim Malashovik toss a young boy, 4 or 5 years old, back and forth to one another. The boy giggled and screamed. They stood in the woods out by the Malashoviks’s house.
The image was partially blocked, because, well, she couldn't plant cameras everywhere in the woods and she did the best she could with what she had. She eyed Maxim critically with the smallest tinge of regret. Originally, Navuka had wanted him for their shifter soldier program. And he would have made an incredible soldier with his size. But that day, almost 12 years ago now, it had been Anton that her team abducted for research. He'd been younger, quicker, and so much easier to manipulate. The wisest choice in the long run.
Lana frowned at the image of the two men and the boy on the screen. The fucking Malashoviks had been a thorn in her side for the last fifteen years.
Navuka had suspected they were a family of bear shifters for years before that even. When the Belarusian government had started Navuka, the Malashovik family had been some of the first names on the list of potential recruits.
Well, she stubbed out her cigarette. Maybe 'recruits' wasn't exactly the right word.
She could barely help the hiss through her teeth as she watched the screen in frustration. They’d been most of the way toward converting Anton into a super soldier. The crowning jewel of the Belarusian army. And then his family had raided the lab. Fucked everything irrevocably. Navuka was still recovering from that particular siege. Years of research and time and effort up in literal smoke. And their proudest project, their most valuable pet, in the wind.
Lana wasn't sure what was more frustrating. When they hadn't known where Anton and the Malashoviks were. Or knowing exactly where they were and not having the manpower to take them.
She was sick of waiting for an opportunity to take Anton, no matter what Sergei thought was best. As far as she was concerned, they needed to be done with the Malashoviks. She wanted so badly to just kiss them goodbye and get some new recruits. A new shifter army. But after what happened last year. Losing the first tiger shifter. And then the second - the fucking Malashoviks again - that had been a mess. And the life president had been so angry at them that she'd genuinely been surprised when she and Sergei had woken up the next morning. He wasn't known for forgiveness or leniency. And they'd made a lot of mistakes over the years.
Still, even so. She was tired of waiting on Anton. She didn't think he was magically the answer to their problems.
She wanted to move the hell on and find other shifters in the world. The tigers had been a mistake. Glory was too old when they got to her. She wasn't impressionable or malleable enough for their experiments to take hold. Hell. Anton had almost been too old at 19.
They needed a young one.
She leaned back in her rickety chair and looked around at the crappy old cabin they'd been using as a home base. God, she hated it here. She wanted this to be over. She was a scientist, for Christ’s sake. She was sick of being told how to conduct her research by some politician half a world away.
She needed the thrill of the experiments. Her mind thought back to those days in their lab in Belarus. To his delicious pain. How his body had taken it, how day after day, they’d shaped him into exactly what they wanted. She savored the memory like a square of dark chocolate.
She sighed and looked out the window of the dingy room. She could see Sergei pacing back and forth out on the sidewalk, listening to someone on his cell phone and nodding deferentially every so often. That got under her skin and irritated her. Even when they can’t see him, he’s deferential.
Lana curled her lips back from her teeth. No imagination. That had always been his problem. He was a rule follower. She supposed she could have been stuck on this mission with someone much worse. Someone unattractive or someone unintelligent. Neither of those were Sergei’s problem.
Her eyes drifted back to the surveillance screens she watched. The only one with any activity was still the screen with Ilya, Maxim, and the child. Halfway through reaching for another cigarette, Lana froze, her eyes glued to the screen.
The child had fallen to the ground, curled in on himself in a very familiar way. Maxim and Ilya crouched next to him, hands on his shoulders. The boy bared his teeth, his face getting redder and redder.
Lana had thought that she’d seen too many things in her life to ever suffer from wonderment again. In her eyes, it was ignorance that led someone to be amazed by the things the world had to show them. But there she was, shocked as a child at her good luck. At the gorgeous opportunity the world had tossed into her lap.
A little, unnatural smile curled her lips upwards as
she watched the young bear run a paw over his muzzle and sit back on his little haunches.
***
Well. He hadn’t called.
Ivy swallowed against the bitter taste in her throat as she leaned over the steering wheel of her new (used) car. She was sitting in the driveway of Ilya and Katya’s house, glaring at the front door.
Her son was in there. He’d been at ‘bear camp’ all day while she’d gone to her first day at work. So she had no reason to be nervous about walking up to the front door.
But Maxim might be in there. It had been 48 hours since he’d fucked her into the year 3000 and he hadn’t called. She had no way of knowing if he was in there or not.
She didn’t want it to matter.
But it kind of mattered.
Ugh. No way was she letting some dumbass insecurity stand between her and her son. Ivy gathered her hair back into a messy bun, switched off her car, and swung out onto the gravel.
She was a moment away from knocking when she heard her son’s laughter bubbling over from the backyard. Smiling despite herself, Ivy trekked around to the back.
She came around the corner of the house to see her son holding a bright green super soaker, shaking his booty and his tongue at Danil.
Danil laughed, challenge accepted. “You think you’re such a tough guy, kid.” And then he raised his own super soaker and squirted her kid right in the kisser.
Linc flew backwards, skidding in the mud and screaming with hysterical laughter. He clumsily pumped his own water gun as fast as he could, but his chubby, wet little fingers wouldn’t let him get a grip. The gun clattered to the ground and Danil was getting closer. She could see Linc’s frantic, joyful hysteria rising.
“Ace!” Ivy hollered and raced toward her son. Looking up, seeing his mother racing toward him, Linc easily tossed her the super soaker. She pumped it once, twice, three times for him and passed it back. Danil never stood a chance. His nice, button-up shirt was soaked to the bone as he laughed and whipped his hair back from his face.