But his next words were sharp with hurt. “We are perfect fit. Why do you leave me? Why?”
Tears pooled in her eyes. Oh God, why did he always have to make everything so hard? He was just manipulating her again. She knew that. Doing whatever it took to get his way. It only sounded like he was sincerely hurt, she reminded herself.
He interrupted her mind’s scramble to harden her heart to his questions by once again grabbing her by her twists, so she had no choice but to look at him. “Talk to me, zhena. I want you to talk to me.” He punctuated each question with a hard, desperate stroke. “Tell me why you won’t stay.”
She closed her eyes, not wanting to be swayed by what looked like real anguish on his face. She knew better. It’s just another manipulation, she told herself. Yet another damn manipulation.
“Why do you hide from me, zhena?” he asked. “Why can’t you talk to me?”
She whimpered, hot and sticky pleasure making its way through her core, despite the seriously messed up nature of this sexual transaction.
“You will tell me reason,” he growled, pushing into her harder. “Tell me.”
“No,” she moaned, finding it harder to hold on to her determination with every thrust.
“Tell me.”
She clamped her mouth shut and shook her head back and forth.
“TELL ME!!!” he roared, pushing into her with one final thrust.
It was like pushing the button on a detonator. The orgasm exploded inside of her like a bomb, making it impossible to hold on to herself, to her pride, to keep what she’d been refusing to tell him inside any longer.
“I heard you!” she cried as she came apart for him. “I heard you on the phone with Alexei at the hotel. I heard what you said about me!” And then she couldn’t talk anymore.
The orgasm lasted a very long time, her body convulsing with the aftershocks of her climax even after she thought it was done. But eventually she fell right back to down to earth, her post-climax euphoria rapidly fading only to be replaced with a deep sense of humiliation.
And then there was Nikolai pulling out of her and falling onto the couch beside her like she’d just punched him.
40
NIKOLAI sat on the couch, and so did Sam. For several minutes it was very quiet in the plane, with nothing but the soft whooshing of the aircraft eating up the miles.
It didn’t take long for the chill to set in. Sam was still completely naked and her confession hadn’t exactly left her feeling warm and fuzzy. More like cold and ashamed.
But before she could reach down to gather her clothes, he came out of his fugue. “You heard phone call?” he said.
“Yeah… I heard it.” Sam reached down to pick up her blouse and put it on without the bra, just wanting to cover herself up, to hide from this conversation and Nikolai in any way that she could. “I heard it all. About how I’d fallen right into your trap to make me perform like a real wife in bed.” A fresh dose of humiliation surged through her and she grimaced.
“And that is why you hate me? Because I take advice about how to make you real wife?”
“I don’t hate you,” she whispered as she did up the last button. “I hate the way you make me feel.”
He looked over at her then, his eyes deeply troubled.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked him.
“I also think this to myself,” he answered. “Several times I think it. I hate way you make me feel.”
“No, Nikolai, it’s not the same,” she said with a bitter shake of her head. “I’m frustrating to you because I won’t act the part you want me to play. Because I won’t surrender and be the perfect wifey and let you fuck me whenever you want. The way I feel about you, that’s different.”
He stilled. “Different how?”
She sighed, and decided to tell him all of it, to kill every last ounce of pride she had.
“The reason I can’t have a sexual relationship with you is because it would hurt me too much. It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. But I’ve fallen in love with you and I’m going to work on not being in love with you, but I can’t do that if we’re having sex, or if we’re still married, so I can’t be married to you anymore…”
Nikolai’s mouth worked and at least six different kinds of distress registered across his face, before he finally choked out, “You love me?”
“Yes, I love you,” she admitted with a shake of her head. “Because I’m a masochist, who apparently doesn’t know how to not become overly attached to every walking sob story that comes across my path.”
Nikolai frowned in that Russian way of his. “So this love has happened before. Man tell you he has bad past and you love him?”
“No,” she answered, wishing she was anywhere but stuck thousands of miles in the air having this conversation with Nikolai. “I’ve never been in love before. Believe me, if I’d thought it would be a possibility with you, I wouldn’t have agreed to the marriage in the first place. But I’ve started two domestic violence shelters. And it still breaks my heart whenever one of my intakes goes back to her abuser. Every single time—but keep in mind, I still want to open forty-eight more Ruth’s House shelters.”
She looked away from him. “I fell in love with Pavel pretty much from the first moment I saw him in your laundry room, all dirty and skinny. And I couldn’t adopt Back Up soon enough after I read the little card outside her cage at the rescue fair, talking about the abuse she’d suffered.” She took a deep breath, and forced herself to meet his eyes again. “Obviously, I have a problem…”
“Obviously,” Nikolai agreed. A look of deep consideration came over his face. “So you are saying you love me like you love Pavel and Back Up. Because I am broken man and my story makes you sad.”
“Yes, I guess so,” she answered. “Though, I maybe wouldn’t have put it in such a harsh way. But yes, I stupidly let myself fall in love with you. Maybe I could have prevented it from happening if we’d just kept it contained to sleeping in separate places back in Indiana, but c’mon… Greece… and the Veronica Mars movie… and your gruesome back story… and then you ordered me breakfast! Why did you have to order me breakfast? Nobody’s ever done that for me before, and it really messed me up.”
“So you are in love with me now because of date, my sad story, and breakfast I order.” He considered this information with a heavy frown, then he shrugged and said, “Okay, I take it.”
Her near-crushing heartache turned into deep confusion. “What? What do you mean?”
“You will stay with me, no divorce, and I will take your love.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Okay, that’s not exactly how it works.”
“No?” Nikolai asked, with what sounded like genuine confusion. “How does ‘it work?’”
“I’m in love with you and I’m putting some distance between us because I don’t want to be in love with you.”
“Why not?” Nikolai asked.
“Because it hurts too much.”
“Why?” he asked again.
Was he serious?
“Because you don’t love me back!” she answered, stringing the words out carefully since obviously Nikolai was even lower on the emotional intelligence spectrum than she’d originally feared.
Nikolai’s brow wrinkled and he turned fully towards her, laying his arm across the back of the couch.
“Zhena, I have important question for you. When you said I could learn be good parent, did you mean it?”
“Yes, I meant it,” she answered immediately, though she had no idea why he was asking this in response to her confession of love.
“So why you think I not learn to love you?”
Before she could answer, he looked down, almost as if he were frustrated with himself for not being able to solve a tricky math problem. “No, I not ask right question…”
He looked back up at her, his green eyes the opposite of ice now. So heated, they seemed to burn.
“I will answer now question you asked me bef
ore,” he told her. “Yes, zhena, my father was enforcer for our former Rustanov mafia family. Yes, he taught me everything he knew. I did not, how you say, follow in his footsteps. I became hockey player. But I did remember these things. I did use them to kill those Russians. I killed them to protect Pavel, and I killed them to protect you.”
Sam stared at him wide eyed. Why was he telling her this now? To get her to stop loving him? To convince her she’d made a mistake by bringing her heart into it? If that was the case, then he’d used the wrong tactic.
She looked down, then back up again to say, “I see where you’re going with this, but unfortunately that only makes me love you more. Nobody’s ever gone out of their way to protect me before.”
Nikolai looked at her for a few moments and let out a sad sigh, as if she were the most pitiful woman he’d ever encountered—which maybe she was. Then he said, “When you did not realize it was date until I say to you, ‘Zhena, this is date,’ I thought maybe you are smart in some ways, and maybe not so smart in others. But now I see question I should ask you is are you same as your mother?”
Her heart stopped, her back going up straight. “Why would you ask me that? Because I’m not upset about you killing the Russians? You think I want to be in an abusive relationship?”
“No, I asked you, because you thought I told you about my killings to make you stop loving me. This is why I ask,” Nikolai answered, his voice harsh and angry. “Are you same as your mother? Do you think you are—how did you say—undeserving of loving relationship?”
Sam froze. “I…”
She wanted to say no. She wanted to say she used to dream about being in a loving relationship, of having a family with someone she loved, so obviously she thought she deserved one. But she ended up telling him the truth instead.
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
Nikolai reached out to her then, cupping the side of her face gently with his large hand. “I will tell you another secret now, zhena. I was not talking on phone with cousin. I was talking with Pavel.”
“Pavel? But why?” she asked, sitting back in stunned surprise.
And his hand fell from her face.
“Why did I ask nine-year-old boy how to make you my wife in every way? Because I was desperate,” he answered with a miserable look. “So I ask Pavel his help. And he told me story. He said when you saved him, he thought, ‘She is good person. I wish she was my mother.’ So he called you mama, because he wanted you to be mama to him, and after we married you became his mama. This made him very happy. So when I ask him advice, he told me to do same. He said to be nice to you, treat you like real wife and he said if I do this, you become my real wife, same as you became his real mother.”
Sam stared at him in horror and he shifted his gaze away from her. “You look at me like this because I took advice from child.”
“Not because you took Pavel’s advice, but because you asked a child how to get me into bed!”
Nikolai screwed up his face. “You think this is about sex only?” he asked. Then he reset with an annoyed huff. “Okay, you have been in Indianapolis less than year. Maybe you don’t understand yet. I am big deal. I could have many girls at any time.”
“Oh, I get that, Nikolai,” she answered with a pained expression. “I totally get that.”
“Then why you think this way about me?”
Nikolai asked this question, both his tone and his face filled with hurt, and it disarmed Sam. Not only because she wasn’t used to him showing emotion, but also because… “Because yeah, maybe you think you can learn, but I’m not sure you can. I don’t even know if you’re capable of love. You said it was a silly custom. Remember?”
“I know what I said!” he snarled. “But you—how you say—should observe things I do, not things I say!”
Now it was him taking a deep breath before he said, “I wanted you from first time I see you. From beginning. I told you that. First time I touch you, I have no control and I put baby inside you. I slept on floor because I couldn’t be in our bed without you. Your dog is no good guard dog and she make me rub her belly too much, but I pet her because she is yours. I took you to Greece, watched your strange movie about female detective. I told you things. Things I told no one before, not my cousin, not God, no one.”
He now looked at her like she was the one who’d done a cruel number on his heart and not the other way around. “I do these things because I want you to love me. Love me like you love Pavel. Love me like you love your useless dog. I do everything to make you love me. And now you say you can’t be sure I can learn love you?” he asked, his Russian accent thicker than she’d ever heard it before. “How you not sure? How can you not see I already learn this? How can you not see I already love you?”
And that was the kill shot.
Nikolai swung his hockey stick and the puck went right into the goal. No matter what the damaged girl who still lurked inside of Sam was trying to tell her about the chances of someone like Nikolai loving someone like her… when she thought about it, really thought about it, she could no longer go on believing this man who had killed for her, who had protected her in every way, who had fulfilled her every need—even the ones she didn’t know she had—did not love her.
As Nikolai would say, of course he did.
She looked at him with tears and wonder in her eyes. So afraid to believe after all she’d seen and been through that the man sitting next to her was really offering her a happy ending. But…
“You love me?” she asked. Her heart trembled, as did her hand when she reached out to cup his cheek like he’d cupped hers a few minutes ago. “You love me like I love you?”
He immediately covered her hand with his much larger one, and pressed his face further into her palm, as if her touch, and only her touch, could soothe the wild hurt inside him.
“Zhena, zhena…” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “How you not know?”
She had no idea, and tears began to roll down her face because she was so ashamed. Ashamed of not guessing it sooner, of cutting their trip short.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not realizing.”
The apology was barely out of her mouth before she was in the air, being ferried across the cabin in Nikolai’s fireman carry and through the door to the neglected rear bedroom. His manner was urgent, but when they got to the bed, Nikolai set her down gently, once again unbuttoning her blouse, this time with great care, before he stripped out of his own clothes.
Sam watched him get naked with heavy anticipation, all the while her mind screaming like a teenage girl, “He loves me! He loves me! He really loves me!”
As if reading her mind, he said, “Da, I love you, zhena.” Then he crawled into the large bed and covered her body with his before bracing himself above her on one arm. “But I must get inside you now. Please, I beg you.”
To his credit, he waited for her answer, keeping his hard length still at the entrance of her once again very slick folds.
“I want you inside of me,” she answered. “I love you so much, Nikolai. Please—” She didn’t have to finish her own beg. He reached down between them, and then…
Sam threw her head back with a moan. He was inside her. So thick and heavy, she could actually feel the pulse of his member against her inner walls. He rolled into her, carefully at first, until he found a rhythm that kept the stem of his cock against her clit as he thrust into her.
It was good, so good. Even better than before, because she didn’t have to bite her tongue about the way he made her feel. “I love you so much, Nikolai. So much. I’m sorry I didn’t realize…”
“Muzehnek,” he said harshly into the back of her neck. “Call me muzehnek when you say you love me from now on.”
“I love you, muzehnek,” she repeated, though she still had no idea what that word actually meant. Her heart soared into the sky. It was if she’d had a rubber band around it for all her life, and now Nikolai Rustanov had finally set it free.
But
the words didn’t have the effect she expected. Instead of going all out, Nikolai came to an abrupt stop, reaching out to cup a hand around her neck, anchoring it so she could look at nothing else but his grave face as he said, “I love you, too, zhena.” Harsh and low, like he’d never been more serious about anything in his life. “You believe me, da?”
She nodded, too choked up to answer with words.
But Nikolai wanted the words. Seemed to need them as he insisted, “You believe me and you will stay with me? Always?”
“Da,” she whispered.
A happy smile spread over Nikolai’s face like sunshine on a gloomy winter day. It felt like that one word from her had made him the happiest man on earth, and that in turn made her feel like the luckiest woman in the world.
He started moving again, filling her deep and tight, as he silently drove himself into her, his hand still cupped around her neck. No more words were exchanged after that, and eventually they fell over the edge together, in silent communion, as an ocean of complete and utter ecstasy washed over them both.
He kept their bodies connected for as long as possible, bracing himself above her, and gracing her lips and neck with tender kisses until he finally went soft inside of her. Even then, he didn’t seem to want to let her go. He lay down, still holding on to her, even as he positioned himself behind her. He settled a hand over the gentle swell of her stomach, as if he were sheltering both their child and her in his large arms.
And Sam had to blink back more tears. She was still having trouble processing all of this. That she had somehow stumbled into a loving relationship with a man who understood her on the deepest levels, a beautiful man who forced her to communicate with him through mind-blowing sex—
“I will never call you Samantha,” he said behind her. “Never again.”
“What…? What changed your mind on that subject,” she asked.
“Pavel told me reason. About your stepfather calling you by that name. I don’t care if it sounds like I love another man. I will only call you Sam in future. Sam or zhena.”
She was going to get Pavel something insanely nice for Christmas this year, Sam decided. Like his own pony. Or maybe a trip to Disneyworld.
His Pretend Baby Page 83
