Bought for Her Innocence

by Tara Pammi

  “You gave him money...” She slid onto the bench at the foot of the bed soundlessly, the whole picture emerging in front of her. Her gut turned so painfully that she thought she might be sick. “For how long?”

  “Years.”

  Shock shattered her, bringing shards of pain with it.

  “When I realized what he’d been doing, when his words didn’t add up anymore, I cut him off instantly. But his addiction to gambling was already in his bones. I should have realized he would somehow find the money, that the burden would fall to you. He had already turned you against me, and after he was gone...there was no point in telling you the truth.”

  He had protected Andrew even then. And her from the ugly truth. For a man who said he had done everything only to alleviate guilt, Dmitri had done so much for them.

  More than their own mother.

  “The last time he came to see me, I begged him to tell me where you were. And he said he would if I gave him money.” He pressed his palms to his eyes. “It was the hardest thing to see him like that...”

  “He made me hate you.” God, Andrew had not only squandered what Dmitri gave him but borrowed more from Noah... “I’m so sorry...for all the things I said to you. For what he did.”

  Dmitri crouched in front of her, his long fingers stroking over her bare arms. She shivered, and pressed her forehead in his shoulder. Shame and grief vied for space within her. “Don’t, Jas. You’ve carried his burden long enough.”

  His hands moved over her shoulders and soon she was in his embrace.

  Jasmine wished she could cry and let it all out. But fury had turned into a hard knot and settled deep in her chest. She felt like ice.

  Andrew had cheated both her and Dmitri to the very end.

  That addiction was in their genes, their blood. And she was just as prone to it as they had been. Did hers come in the form of this man? Was it already too late?

  But Jasmine found she couldn’t care. She didn’t care.

  Her brother’s betrayal cut too deep. All those years of slaving herself over a debt he had made, of defending him in her own mind, of putting her barely clothed body on display every night—all of it had been for nothing. The grief that she hadn’t somehow been enough to get him through it... The crushing weight lifted.

  She had paid the price for their weaknesses, their addictions. She would pay no more, not in shame, not in grief, and not by making their weaknesses her own.

  The ice cracked just like that, the white-hot flame of her fury, her powerlessness found target in the man in front of her.

  She jerked away from him. “Why did you tell me all this today? Why not that first night? Why now?”

  Something desperate flashed in his eyes when he spoke. “You wish I hadn’t told you?”

  “No, I want to know what changed today.”

  Suddenly, she understood the second layer to his reaction when Gaspard had touched her.

  She remembered the carnal promise in that blinding, incinerating moment on the flight when he had devoured her mouth, as if he was drowning. Finally, she understood what Dmitri had been hiding since the first night beneath his lacerating contempt for her...

  An avalanche of want and need ripped open inside her as she looked at him with new eyes... He had wanted her all along... Then, why had he pushed her away so efficiently?

  “Tell me, Dmitri,” she commanded now, fully aware of what she was asking. No longer confused about her own want for him, no longer guilty or ashamed about it.

  She’d never been an innocent, except in the most technical sense anyway.

  Still, he had given her a choice.

  She wanted him; she had known that from the beginning. But tonight, there was no shame or weakness that came with that want. Tonight there was nothing but the two of them.

  “Because I realized the inevitability of this thing between us.” His soft voice only amplified the spiraling tension in the room. “If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow... It’s going to consume us both.

  “I have never denied myself something I want. I want you. Every time you look at me, all I can think of is being inside you. Every time you lash at me, all I can think of is kissing your mouth... To hell with your debt and my honor, and Andrew... To hell with pretending I’m something I’m not. Nothing in the past decade has made me as hungry or as desperate as you have, Jas. So do you want this for as long as it will last? Do you have the guts to actually take me on, Jas? Because if I touch you, I won’t stop.”

  For a seemingly infinite moment, she looked as though she would tell him to go to the farthest corners of hell. Theos, he deserved it just for the way he had treated her this past week. He already had a one-way ticket there for what he was about to do.

  He was going to slake his lust and move on... Because that was all he did. That was all he had ever been capable of.

  But he was through with being something he was not. He was through with denying himself. And he didn’t allow himself to think of the consequences tomorrow. He’d deal with it.

  Right now all he wanted was to taste that lush mouth again, remove that hurt from her eyes.

  “You were attracted to me all along?” she demanded.

  The gold fabric molding her lithe body, she looked like a goddess who had only just realized her power.

  His heart threatened to shove past his rib cage. “Attraction is such a lukewarm word, pethi mou.”

  Even in that desperate last moment, he had tried for honor, Dmitri told himself. He had sounded nothing like a lover should. Christos, he was more tender with women whose name he didn’t know, but with her, he sounded like an arrogant, lust-riddled jerk.

  But at least he had told her what his terms were. If she didn’t want him like that, she could walk away.

  He was not seducing her, he told himself.

  And then suddenly, she was walking toward him, and he shuddered with relief and tension and anticipation.

  Before his next breath, her hands were in his hair and pulling his head down to meet her mouth. They groaned and pressed closer to each other, as if they couldn’t get enough already.

  He took her mouth with desperation and rough need, swiping at her trembling mouth with his tongue, impatient to possess her. And she...she was draped around him like ivy, her breasts rubbing and pressing his chest, one long leg wrapped around his as she moaned.

  And the last flicker of self-restraint he possessed went out.

  The taste of her had clung to him for two days, her jagged whimpers etched on his brain. Never had a woman so thoroughly consumed his every thought, never had she felt so out of his reach... He didn’t question the possessive fire he felt as he learned her.

  He had already decided when it came to Jasmine, he was mad.

  Dmitri ran his hands over the taut line of her back to her rounded buttocks, the narrow flare of her hips. There were so many places to touch, so many places to learn. And she sank into his rough caresses, gasping and moaning under his mouth. As if she was as out of control for him as he was for her.

  He dipped his hands into her hair and molded her scalp, bending her to his plundering mouth. Like raw silk, her hair cascaded through his fingers. She smelled of wildflowers and summer, and he breathed it in, hungry for every texture of her.

  The more he touched her and stroked her and tasted her, the smooth forehead, the narrow bridge of her nose, the already red curve of her mouth, the pulse that skittered at her neck, the rim of her dainty ears, the more he thought of someone else’s hands on all of it...on all of her...

  Of someone, scum like Gaspard or John King or someone like his father, laying a finger on her, marring skin that was like satin, touching curves that were pure perfection, forever ruining that innocent yet wild spirit inside her, the hotter his anger and desire burned...

 
He took and took, licked and bit, stroked and tasted, plundered and devoured her mouth until she was panting and moaning, and gasping his name...

  “Dmitri...” she whispered against his bristly jaw.

  The trailing heat of her mouth against his neck made his throat dry. He pulled her up again, afraid that he would ravage her if she so much as kissed his skin...

  Then she said it again, his name.

  It fell from her mouth like a warm caress, an entreaty and command all wrapped in one... Hearing his name on her lips did what the little will he had over his body couldn’t... It calmed him down, called him down from the edge.

  He couldn’t take her like every other woman in the world, not because of her innocence, but this was her...

  “Keep saying my name like that,” he commanded, looking for a hook, or a zipper, something that would reveal her to him.

  Her arms around his nape, her mouth against his, she complied. “Dmitri.”

  Too impatient now to think straight, he caught the crisscrossing strips of the gold silk and pushed it down her shoulders. Not before running the back of his hands over the hard nipples visible through the silk.

  She made a sound, like a throaty purr, at the back of her throat, her gaze unabashedly meeting his. The liquid longing he saw there threatened to undo him.

  The dress slithered down her breasts and hips with a silky whisper and pooled around her legs.

  Dmitri stepped back, the better to see her, his breath knocking about in his throat. And almost lost it then.

  It felt as though he had waited forever to see Jasmine like this and hadn’t even known it.

  He lost all sense of himself and time and space as he took in the glory of her body.

  For a woman who’d never been with a man, she didn’t slouch or cover her breasts, or bend her knees. Her slender shoulders thrown back, she stared back at him. Only her fluttering lashes and the tremble in her mouth betrayed her struggle.

  Something feverish burned in her dark gaze, a gauntlet thrown. As if she was daring him to find fault with her now, to insult her again with his words.

  Her breasts were lush and firm, with plump nipples that grew tight under his hungry gaze. His mouth went dry, his breath came in panting gasps as he drank in more and more of her. The flat plane of her stomach, the small tattoo, a rose, just above her bikini line and the shadow of the dark hair covering her sex underneath the sheer skin-colored thong.

  Slowly, softly, as if she had done the same thing a million times, as if it was etched into her DNA, she stepped out of the pool of the dress and kicked it with a flick of her foot.

  Three-inch stilettos with strings wrapped around her ankles, her long, sleek, toned legs completed the picture.

  Somewhere in the past few seconds, his erection went from hard to painful, contained in his boxers. He had never been brought to such arousal just by looking at a woman. If she so much as touched him...

  All the while his brain grappled to keep enough blood to form a coherent thought.

  Something didn’t add up, it said before his libido took over again.

  But, drowning in desire, Dmitri found he didn’t care.

  All he wanted was to bury himself in her so deep that he never had to think again. That she forgot to breathe. “Take off the thong,” he ordered, his throat croaking to form the words.

  “And the heels?” she threw back, sounding husky and breathless, and he thought he would implode.

  It was as if a different woman had emerged when she took off her clothes. No matter, he told himself, pushing himself off his feet.

  He would learn every facet there was of Jasmine, every inch of her; every thought that passed her mind would all be his soon.

  There would be nothing left of her that he didn’t know, touch or taste.

  “Keep them on,” he said, determined to unravel her just as thoroughly as she had done him from the moment she had come at him with that damned knife.

  It was as if with that one strike, she had permanently etched herself into his skin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JASMINE WAS FINALLY, incontrovertibly ready to be the woman she wanted to be. She was ready to be just her, devoid of ghosts from the past, ready to own her pleasure, her life.

  Clasping her nape with one hand, he caressed her hip with the other. Chest to breasts, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, they stood flush against each other. His erection, a searing brand against her lower belly, lengthened, and the thought of him inside her filled her with a mixture of excitement and anticipation. “It’s going to hurt whatever I do,” he whispered against her mouth. “I can’t change that.”

  Something more than simple pleasure billowed in her chest that he respected her enough to tell the truth. That he didn’t cover it up. That there was finally truth between them, at least in this.

  “I don’t care.” She met his eyes squarely. “I’m not the girl you saved, not the sister of the man you owed a debt to, not the girl you feel sorry for. I’m just me tonight, Dmitri, and I have waited so long to feel like this... And I want the real you. Not tenderness that you have to fabricate, not lies you use to tether me, just you.”

  “You’ll be the end of me.”

  She smiled, shivering from head to toe. “Then, I hope it’s a pleasurable end.”

  Fisting his hand in her hair, Dmitri took her mouth in a bruising kiss. This kiss was hotter and harder than ever before, his tongue plunging into her mouth mercilessly. She could feel herself getting wet, the chafing of her thong too much to bear.

  Her breasts pressed against his, his other hand splayed big and hard over her bare butt. “Theos, you’re made for this, your body... I’ve never seen anything sexier.”

  Jasmine shuddered violently, pleasure shooting across and over her, like molten metal flowing into all the places she had hidden even from herself. Her body had been nothing but an instrument for survival until now, something she had detested, something she had centered her shame on.

  Dmitri’s words and caresses made her love it as much as he seemed to, freed her from her own shackles.

  He pushed her against the wall, his suit-clad thigh jammed between hers, rubbing against her heated core. Pulling her hands above her head, he held them there.

  The fiercely possessive heat in his eyes sent her insides swooping as if she was on a downward fall.

  He trailed those sexy lips over her cheek, her jaw, licked the rim of her ear and then traced it down to the pulse at her neck. Throwing her head back, she gave in to it. This was what she wanted—Dmitri in all his bad-boy glory.

  When his mouth closed over her pulse, Jasmine shuddered, hard. She had been terrified that he would be gentle with her, that he would be that fake, sophisticated version of him. But he was not, and her heart soared at that.

  He was in this moment as fully as she had been, as real as he had been to her all those years ago.

  Her stomach curled in delicious spasms as he dragged his mouth down, over the valley between her breasts. While one hand still arrested her hands from touching him, he palmed her breast with the other. Lifted the firm weight to his mouth and flicked the tight bud with his wicked tongue. Jasmine arched into him in mindless need.

  Sensations sparked all over her, leaving little shivers in their wake.

  Holding her hard against the wall with one shoulder while his white-hot gaze consumed her, he took the hard nipple into his mouth and sucked.

  She came off the wall like an arrow, pleasure shooting down between her thighs. Her body felt like one pulsing mass of pleasure as he continued the torment with his tongue and, oh, dear, his teeth.

  At some point, Jasmine stopped fighting and began sobbing and moaning and begging. His name became her mantra as he continued his relentless assault.

  She had thought she knew wha
t lust meant, what incited it. Thought it dirty. Despised how willingly one took on such intimacy for a few moments of pleasure, had thought the whole world crazy...

  But the intimacy of their heated looks, the shared breaths, the fact his desire for her finally revealed the real Dmitri to her was just as arousing as the pleasure he was drenching her in.

  There was not an inch of skin he didn’t kiss or taste or suck. An intolerable, insistent ache built in her lower belly.

  She sank her hands into his hair as he kissed his way down her abdomen, his willing slave. He was still in the snowy white dress shirt and trousers while she was naked and that, too, felt erotic, that, too, was intended to remind her that he was bending her very body, her will to his.

  But she didn’t care. All she wanted was to go wherever he took her, revel in whatever he gave her. To be possessed by him in every way that mattered.

  And then he was kneeling in front of her, his face pressed to the flimsy triangle of fabric that covered her sex. “Theos, I can’t wait to taste you, Jas.”

  She was flushing and panting, and moaning...as he rolled down the thong and lifted her leg.

  Jasmine became boneless as he threw one leg over his shoulder, his harsh breath fluttering over the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. Thought she would melt into a puddle on the floor if he didn’t hold her up with an arm against her soft belly.

  “Oh...” The word floated out of her mouth.

  When the first flick of his tongue came over her wet folds, it was as if someone had plunged a knife from her spine to her belly, so sharp and acute was the sensation.

  Then he did it again, dipping that wicked tongue into her wet warmth with such expertise that she wanted to die from the onslaught of pleasure.

  She shifted and snarled against the wall as he continued licking her, the pressure relentlessly sending her up and up.

  “Please, Dmitri...” she pleaded, unable to bear it anymore.

  “Look down at me,” he commanded in a raw whisper.

  Her hands in his hair, Jas looked down. Kneeling in front of her, his mouth tucked against the most intimate part of her, he looked like some pagan god come to wreak havoc, and she his feast.