With my eyes still on his, I pull my shirt up and off. With my eyes still on his, I take the waist of my slacks and I slide them down my thighs, I kick off of shoes. Leaving my little lace bra and panties on, I climb across him, straddle him. The places where his bare skin is against mine heats into a near burn. Sliding up higher, so I am pressing against him where he is hard, I roll my hips forward, and then back.
Again, he shudders. His hands lift, to settle on my hips. His breath draws in deep. “I need you, Radiah,” he says; his words are lust-ridden, deep and half hoarse. His dark eyes seem black with intensity, riddled with need and full of secret want breaking free from all of his reserve, from all of his control. It is a wilderness rising, a reaching of the deep feelings he so often keeps hidden coming to the surface. I watch them rise, livid in his eyes and in his lips; I watch the color of feeling steal his cheeks and take his temples.
How could I have ever thought of leaving this man? Rising higher on my knees, I let him take the hem of the panties with his fingertips. With his other hand he touches, brushes friction through the lace of the bra, grazes his thumb against the hardened nub of my nipple. I’ve been without his lips for too long; arching my back first, and breathing into his touches, I shiver and I lean down to him, to take his mouth with mine. I am in love with the places he starts and with the places he stops, with the finite wholeness of him, with the terrifying knowledge that one day he will end. I want to savor every moment from this moment on. I want to spend the rest of my life with him.
I put my life into my kiss. I put my life into the softness, into the hardness of his lips, into the heat of his mouth. My body fits into his palms. My body fits into the places his fingers drift and close over. We kiss deep and hard, then deeper, and then harder. I don’t want to break the kiss; I bite at his lips, I run my tongue over his kisses, bear down harder against him, and roll my hips forward.
Beneath me, Alexei stiffens even harder. His hand rises up from the small of my back to undo the hooks on my bra. The hooks pop free and I rise a little higher on my knees, release his lips just for the time it takes him to slide one strap free from one arm and then the other. Everything feels so heightened right now that even the silk strands brushing down over her arms make me feel like shivering.
Alexei sees it. With the bra gone, he palms his hands over her breasts. “Are you cold?” he asks me.
“No,” I breathe out; my breasts fill Alexei’s hands even more. It fills me with an almost shy feeling, the way he is looking up at me now. There is such a dark, such a lust driven look in his eyes...but there is something else there too. Something more. A something more that seems to burn brighter than I’ve ever seen it burn before. The small ember sparks, black in his dark eyes, and I see my reflection mirrored back to me; when I see myself in Alexei’s eyes, I like what I see. I can only hope he sees it in my eyes too, can see the way I see him, because I know I see him the way no one else does.
He leaves one hand cupped to one breast; he moves his other hand higher, to brush his fingertip along the arch of my throat, and up along the curve of my jaw. Closing my eyes, I savor the feeling. I feel the fingertip rise higher, feel it slide over the curve of my cheek, feel it pause on the half-moon under my eye.
The flutter of his fingertip touches the flutter of my eyelashes. Beneath me, Alexei’s body seems to widen, to stretch into everywhere. I feel him everywhere, like he has become the ground, like he has become the landscape and the environment. He has become everything. I want to hold all of him, and I want him to hold all of me.
Without opening my eyes, I rise higher on my knees. His hand drops from my face, lowers to my hip. I feel the brush of his fingertips there, feel the hook of his index finger dig under the edge of the panties. He lowers them, and I lean forward, so he can draw them down my thighs.
I don’t have to see his eyes to feel the harder beating of his heart and the deeper draw of his next breath.
Reaching back, I take over, I push the panties down my calves, I kick free of them.
Still with my eyes closed, I arch my back. I center myself against him. The brush of the head of his cock against the place I am damp and aching for him makes my next breath stagger. Taking him in my hand, I dig him forward.
His hands close on my hips and he pushes his own hips up, and forward.
Breathing out, setting my hand down on his chest for leverage, I lean back further. My eyes open. It doesn’t seem like an action I control; it feels like, as he pushes forward, he is opening my eyes. It feels like he is opening my heart. All at once, I am opening to him in so many different ways all at once.
Looking down at him, I rise a little higher and then I push down. It’s an urge I have no will to fight against, this drive, this desire to move with him inside of me.
I take him deeper. His face contorts as he pushes; it’s a look of pleasure, of intense satisfaction, and it makes my eyes fill with tears.
“Baby.” Murmuring, I lean down a little lower so I can take his lips again. I don’t kiss him hard this time, and he doesn’t kiss me hard this time. With Alexei pushing in slowly beneath me, claiming me in less than inches at a time, we claim each other’s mouths in the same achingly slow, smallness to smallness way.
When he starts to circle his hips as he pushes up, I feel like I’m going to lose it. Tilting my hips, I let my weight go from the brace of my hand. It makes his next thrust push harder and endless, he endlessly fills me with himself. Grinding down as he grinds up, we make the space between us disappear.
Going forward now, so our stomachs are tight together, so our breathing becomes like the petals of a flower pressed between the pages of a book, his next thrust staggers, blunts through the suffocated, narrow channel where we are joined. My breasts press to his chest. His hands slide against me, caress at my bottom, down my thighs, along my back, over my shoulders. The grinding need between us becomes the deeper, heavy pressed draws of coming together and coming apart—a hitching, grind of everywhere becoming bound and stuck and unstuck together and apart into one heat, until we are the long stillness of friction becoming one, one friction that is doing before being undone.
Cupping at the back of my head, he draws me nearer. “I want you,” he breathes out between my lips.
“I want you,” I breathe out back to him.
I start to remember always loving him. I start to remember forever. Forever is never what we’d planned. But, suddenly, forever doesn’t seem like years. Forever seems like inches and instants. Forever seems like the small, miniscule muscles in his shoulders before his shoulders expanded into being this way, into being this broad. Forever seems like a heartbeat and like one breath before that breath becomes the next.
Together, we rock. We rock slowly, savoring the increase of friction, the slow increase of speed. My fingers grip at his shoulders, my nails dig into the muscle there. His hands palm and lift, close and grip and slide. Little by little the urgency in our kisses, in our hands, in our rhythm, becomes higher, heightened. My hips press tighter to him—we are pushing without pulling back, grinding tighter without releasing the space again.
All of the friction builds inside of me, stirs my want into a need and my need into a stirring that does not stop; when Alexei palms me tighter, forces me to almost still my grinding against the brace of his moving, I whine and I open my mouth against his neck. Biting down, I feel my release rise into a long, agonizing crest of sensation. It feels like a sunrise that won’t stop teasing the horizon with the heat of its touching; it is a long drawn tease of energy stirred hotter and tighter until it breaks through me, vibrant and throbbing.
Taking my hips, with my body going lax against his, Alexei lifts me a little higher, to start thrusting through the distance between us. Each thrust strikes deep and long and tight and with my eyes half-lidded, I watch the ecstasy climb higher in his beautiful eyes.
When his thrusts turn harder, and more desperate, I bear down hard again, and push back against him and he grunts, gasp
s a harsh breath. We dig and we push and we want, together.
I feel the heat of his release, long and aching like a forever inside. Moaning through it, I keep my legs wrapped around him. He wraps his arms around me. We lay together panting, and burning, and, tonight, I know we are only beginning. We are only beginning tonight and we are only beginning the rest of our lives. I know as I hold tighter to him that I will not let him go again.
I know as he holds me, he will not let me leave again. I don’t want him to. I want him to fight to be with me. And I never, ever want us to stop.
But I know there is something more we need to do. I know we can’t just pretend all of the things that were not working between us away.
I don’t want to start from the top. I don’t want to start by asking him, again, why we can’t plan to have a family together.
I want to start from the bottom. I want to start from the inside.
I want to start with the smallness.
Circling my fingertip against his stomach, I lean my head down against his shoulder. “Alexei.” I know what I want to say. I’m just not sure how to say it. Maybe the easiest thing, the simplest thing, is the best thing. “Tell me about St. Petersburg.” Spreading my hand open wider, I nuzzle even nearer. “Please.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever asked him so directly about his childhood before. Of course, I’d made overtures. I’d talked and I’d expected my talking to make him start talking too. That had never seemed to work. Maybe, because I’d never pushed, Alexei had never known how important it was to me. I think there is more to his refusal to talk about the idea of having children than his job. I think it goes much deeper.
I can see it in his eyes: a dark distance that isn’t really as far away as he might want it to be. I can feel it in his stomach. I can feel it in the way the muscle tenses, tightens beneath my fingers. I want to go back there with him.
He closes his eyes. The weight that is rising through him is almost palpable. It’s tangible. I can feel the things inside rising from the currents, coming to the surface. A part of me wants to give him an out. A part of me wants to change the subject for him...and a part of me knows too that we are never going to move forward without going backwards first. So I don’t let this go. I keep coaxing, quiet with the soft circling of my fingertips.
I kiss at his chest. I want to draw him nearer, draw him closer.
His breathing slows, steadies. The room is dark, and quiet. The heat between us warms.
“We never had enough to eat.” He says it quietly, in his low, rough rumble. “Any time she did get money, he drank it away. And every time he drank it away, they’d scream.” His voice goes even lower. “When they’d scream, he’d start hitting. When he’d start hitting, he wouldn’t stop. Until I got big enough to stop him.”
Leaning even nearer, even nearer when there is no more nearness to close between us, I kiss at the side of his jaw. Inside, my stomach is clenched. I hate imagining what he must have gone through. But I don’t want him to stop talking. I know I’m strong enough to hear what he has to say. And I know he has to say these things or he will never be free of them.
“The thing is…” Alexei’s eyes open now. He’s not looking at me though. His eyes are up on the ceiling. “When I started hitting him back—I liked doing it. I liked hitting him, Radiah. What does that say about me? What does that say about the kind of man I am?”
Now, he looks at me. He looks at me through the corner of his eye. He looks at me and I see the apprehension, and I see the self-loathing.
“Except you weren’t a man then, Alexei.” Rising on my forearm so my eyes are on his eyes because I want him to see when I am saying this, I tell him, “You were a little boy.”
Alexei
I sit in the car and I wait. This is a thing I’ve done plenty of times before. It’s simple surveillance, in some ways. In another way there is nothing simple about this at all, because it’s Carla’s apartment building I’m sitting in front of.
Because Radiah is inside and, in a few moments, she will come out. When she does, if he is here, if he is following her, I will start to follow him.
It wasn’t an idea I was too thrilled over. I don’t like putting Radiah in danger. But the fact is, the sooner I can end this, the better. The sooner it ends, the less danger she is in.
The fact is, this hadn’t been my idea.
The fact is, she’d convinced me to try this plan.
“I want to do it,” she’d told me.
Last night, lying in the bed together, with her curled up against my side, she’d whispered those words to me.
“No,” I’d told her. It was not something I thought I’d even let us consider. I’d kept my eyes up, away from her, because when Radiah wants to convince me, she’s become very adept at it. I told myself I couldn’t allow her to convince me of this, and not looking at her was a step in that direction. So, I stared at the ceiling. I knew that looking at her might make me give in. In that moment in particular it felt like Radiah could have easily talked me into believing the sky was green. Or that Manhattan was a small town.
At my side, she’d risen onto her elbow. She’d set her head down against my shoulder. When she pressed her lips against the side of my collarbone, I knew I was in trouble. “I don’t want this to hang over us, Alexei,” she’d said. “I know,” she’d said, “that you won’t let anything happen to me. And we need—” she’d paused. Her lips had lingered. “We need to be proactive. We need to do something before he tries to do something. Take the fight to them. Go right to where the trouble is and neutralize it before trouble takes control.”
I’d smirked. “You sound like me,” I’d told her.
“Well,” she said. I could feel the smile against my neck. I loved that, feeling the warmth, the shape of her smiling. “Maybe that’s because I’ve heard you say something similar. And maybe…” She’d smiled at me. She’d lifted a little higher, had swung her leg over mine to lay against me. Her smile had been dazzling; her dark brown eyes full of warmth and fire. Her voice had gone even softer. “Maybe you’re right about a lot of things, Alexei.”
Maybe you are right about a lot of things, Radiah, I hadn’t told her. It’s not the first time I’ve doubted my intention to stay in the organization. Now, I have Radiah back. But for how long? How long before I lose her again because I can’t give her the full commitment she wants? I don’t want to lose her again. I don’t want to lose her for good. I know she deserves better than I’ve given. Can I give her what she needs, what she wants, what she should have? A woman like her, she deserves it all. She deserves so much more than this. This, which is actually putting her in danger. Again.
Now we are here. I am in the car. Radiah is inside the building. And he, I think, the man who is after Radiah, he is here too. Somewhere hidden in plain sight.
Well hidden. It’s easy to stay unseen on blocks like this, in the half-dark, in the shadows of the buildings, in the anonymous groups of people that cluster in and out from under the awnings, from in and out of the doorways. I don’t see him. But if he’s here now, when Radiah comes through those doors, I have no doubt he will take the bait. And then, I will have him. I’m sure this Emilio is connected to the same organization that killed Boris. Because of this, and because of what Radiah has told me, I have no doubt Emilio has no qualms about using Radiah to get to me. It infuriates me. In my mind, women, children, families, are off limits. I’m not the only man in my position who feels the same. I’m not the only man with an unspoken code. There are things that are never articulated, but they are known. A gentleman’s agreement in a world with no law.
Or maybe it is not this way anymore. Maybe I am archaic, maybe men like myself, and men like Vasily, have no more business doing these things anymore. Maybe things are done the way Emilio does them now. Maybe in Emilio’s mind he hasn’t crossed any lines.
But he has. He’s crossed my line.
For those things, he will pay a price.
A price...and it
’s a cost I don’t allow myself to dwell over. I’ve never killed a man. I don’t plan to kill him. But I will, if I have to. I want him gone, out of my city, and away from my woman.
I will do what it takes. Whatever it takes. In my mind this is about more than handling the man who is using Radiah to get to me, and it’s about more than sending a message to the men who killed Boris. This is a message to myself. A message with a question attached. How far am I willing to go? To protect her, I think I’m willing to go all of the way.
On the seat beside me, my cellphone hums. It’s Radiah.
Leaving now, the text reads. And then, be careful, baby.
Picking the phone up, I slip it into my pocket. Again, I scan the streets. He will make his move when she comes through those doors and I will be ready.
The street is not empty, or quiet. New York streets rarely are, even at this time of evening, well past eight. Would Emilio even put one of them at risk? One of the people walking down the street is a woman with a child, beyond her there is a small, frail-looking elderly man. I’ve never been comfortable with putting other people at risk. Maybe that’s why I’ve avoided so much of the more violent parts of my job. One of the first things I do when I am tasked with something is to make a risk assessment. Not for myself, but for everyone else. I choose places that put me at a greater disadvantage rather than take an upper hand if it means any kind of collateral damage.
Her Designer Baby: (Loving Over 40 Book 1) Page 28
