“Kat, I think something is very right between us. I don’t think anything’s wrong at all.” He finally got her to look up at him, only to find the walls in place again.
“I have to go,” she said, pushing at him. “You really have to let me go now. Right now.”
Poor little girl. He knew he’d freaked her out and he understood the agitation she felt. He knew he needed to give her space and time to think about things. Hell, he needed to do some thinking himself, but he had made one decision for sure. Ekaterina Argounov was worth the trouble after all.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll let you go, but I’m walking you to the door. You’re leaving here alone tonight.”
She fussed with her skirt, checking herself all over as if someone might be able to tell from something besides her shell-shocked expression what had just gone on. He leaned to kiss her again before he unlocked the door.
She looked up at him. “No—”
He muffled her refusal by pressing a soft kiss to her lips.
“Don’t,” she warned him.
He held his tongue. He had and he would and he was going to again. Not right now. He wouldn’t push it now while she was freaked-out and skittish. She had every reason in the world to be scared. For fuck’s sake, he was scared too. He had planned to bring her back here, give her a good talking-to in private and send her out of his life for good. He wasn’t sure when those plans changed, but they had changed drastically and irrevocably. She was going to be his. His mind was made up.
He led her through the nightclub to the door, his hand still wrapped around her elbow.
“Let go of me,” she said, looking around them.
“Nobody knows, you know.”
“I don’t care.”
At the door, out in the cool night air, he kissed her again, but she shied away so his lips pressed beneath her earlobe.
“I’m going to call you tomorrow.”
“I won’t be home,” she said, taking off down the street.
“I bet you will,” he replied to her retreating back. God, that beautiful ass. It was going to haunt him until he had it in his hands again. Her reactions to him had been amazing. She had responded to his touch like a finely tuned instrument. Behind her walls, beneath her reserve, she was vibrating with passion. More importantly, she took to submission like a natural. He couldn’t wait to Dom her again, really train her up to the good stuff.
She didn’t make it easy for him, though, just as he’d suspected. She didn’t answer any of his nightly calls to the Argounov household the following week and she didn’t return to the club. No matter—he had a secret weapon. He dialed the Argounov number, this time during the day while Kat was at work. “Hullo?” came the strident voice he remembered.
“Mrs. Argounov,” he said in his most polite, eligible-bachelor tone, “this is Ryan McCarthy, Kat’s friend from the hospital. I’m so sorry I haven’t called before now. I’d love to come to that dinner you offered and meet Kat’s father. How is Kat, anyway?”
He could hear the excitement in her voice when she replied, “Oh, Dr. Ryan McCarthy! Katya is doing just fine. How wonderful you call here. You come see her and have dinner with us. This is great!”
“I’d love to surprise her. Just show up to dinner, you know? Kind of blow her mind?”
“Okay, yes.” Her mother chuckled conspiratorially. “Blow the mind. Yes, that is a good idea. You come tomorrow night and Katyusha, she will be surprised.”
Ryan thought surprised might be an understatement. But he was a goal-driven person and now he had a goal. He sat down and absently started folding cranes, lost in thoughts of thick dark curls, deep green eyes and Kat’s skin against his cheek.
* * * * *
Nope. Surprised wasn’t the best word for what Kat seemed to be feeling when he showed up at the Argounov home the next night. Elena pulled him in, enveloping him in a smothering hug. Over Elena’s shoulder, Kat pinned him with a murderous glare.
“Ekaterina,” Elena snapped. “Come and greet your visitor. Look! Look who has come.”
“I see him,” Kat said.
“Well, come give a hug to him. This man who help you when you banged your head very bad. He helped you.”
Helped her, thought Ryan. And spanked her and fucked her silly in a storage closet last week.
“Come, come greet him,” Elena crowed, pushing Ryan toward her. “She is looking well, no, Ryan?” She said it like Ry-ann. “Completely her old self.”
He gave Kat a huge smile. “Ekaterina. You do look great. Really, completely wonderful.” He hugged her, holding her close and whispered in her ear, “Don’t grind your teeth.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” she whispered back. “You’re here for dinner? Very nice.”
“Yes, it was very nice of your mother to invite me. It was terribly rude of me to wait so long.”
“Katya, go,” interrupted Elena. “Go in the kitchen and help your sisters. I introduce Dr. Ryan McCarthy to your father. He has wanted to meet Dr. Ryan and say thank you.”
“Yes, we know he’s a doctor already, Mama,” Kat muttered before turning on her heel to obey. She disappeared into the back of the home, her family’s wonderful home that was crowded, cluttered and absolutely resonant with life. Ryan waded through playing children and toys to where Kat’s father sat in the TV room off the living room.
“Dmitri! Dmitri!” Elena said briskly.
The thin, gray-haired man looked up at Ryan with a confused gaze as Elena rousted him from his easy chair.
“Here is the man, this one, Dr. Ryan McCarthy. He is the one who has saved your daughter’s life.”
“Well,” Ryan said, “I just tried to stop the bleeding and got her to the hospital. I wouldn’t exactly say I saved her life—”
“Oh, I do thank you,” Kat’s father interrupted, clasping him in a smothering embrace. For an older, somewhat delicate-looking man, his grip was surprisingly strong. “You have saved my princess. I owe you my life. My many thanks are yours,” he said, backing away with some effusive bows. His English was flawless and unaccented, if somewhat clipped.
“It was my pleasure to come to her assistance,” Ryan replied, perhaps a little formally. The whole event here, his royal reception, left him feeling like nothing less than a prince. He was seated later, of course, at the head of the table in a place of honor with Kat at his right side. Too bad the princess hated his guts.
Kat was silent throughout the meal, one of the most delicious meals Ryan had ever had the pleasure of eating. Her sisters cooed over their children and listened while Elena grilled him on every aspect of his life and Dmitri nodded from the other end of the table. But Kat just sat beside him in silence, stewing and blushing alternately, which charmed him no end. After dinner Elena insisted on reading his fortune, and he was happy to play along. With the whole family looking on, she prophesied a long life and much happiness for him, including many children with the love of his life whose description sounded suspiciously similar to her daughter.
All of this seemed to pain Kat terribly. He could have said, oh, it’s getting late, I’d better go, but he didn’t. It was too fun watching her squirm. And he needed to find some time alone with her before he left because they needed to talk. She disappeared into the kitchen for as long as she was able, but eventually she escaped upstairs. He caught her coming out of the bathroom. She gasped as he took her in his arms.
“Your family is wonderful, do you know that?” he said against her cheek.
She gave a humorless laugh, the smile not quite touching her face. “Is that what you really think?”
“They are. Warm, wonderful. You don’t understand how lucky you are.”
She pulled away from him. “Why are you here?”
“Where is your bedroom?”
“No boys are allowed upstairs.”
“This won’t take long. Your bedroom,” he repeated.
“I share a bedroom.”
“I don’t care. Where is it?”
She led him down the hall with a sigh, into a tiny room with a twin bed on one wall and bunk beds on the other. He locked the door.
Her halfhearted no was silenced by his kiss. He touched her breasts and caressed her ass, enjoying the feel of her again after craving her so badly. His hands were all over her. He couldn’t touch her enough.
“No, no…” she sighed, shaking her head against his neck.
“Yes.”
He started undoing his pants. He was going to fuck her. He wished he had time for more, to have her suck him, to bury his face between her legs, but she shared this bedroom, obviously, and her parents were downstairs. He rolled on a condom from his pocket and hiked up her skirt.
“No,” she moaned, even as she locked her legs around his waist and arched against him.
“I don’t think that word means what you think it means,” he said, lowering her onto his cock. He pulled her arms up around his shoulders and then cradled her ass in his hands, squeezing it, kneading it, thrusting in her hard. His hand snaked under her shirt to pinch her nipples through the sheer lacy material of her bra. Soon enough, predictably, her sighs of “no” turned to pleas for satisfaction. Please, Ryan, please. Please, please, now!
“Look at me,” he ordered when she was getting close. She ignored him, her legs gripping him even tighter. “Look at me, Kat,” he insisted, nuzzling her face up to his. “Come for me. I’ll hold you, Kat. Come for me now. I won’t let you go.” He held her, feeling her tense and shudder and watched the climax seize her. The erotic jerking of her body triggered his own orgasm. He came hard, pulsing explosive pleasure, joining her in her release. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to clamp his palm over her mouth to muffle her cries.
She struggled to get away as soon as she came back to her senses and he let her go with a sigh. She pulled at her skirt, rearranging herself with sharp, jerky tugs.
“You need to stop doing that,” she hissed at him.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You just don’t want to.”
“I wouldn’t have done this, come here to your house, if you hadn’t run away from me. Why didn’t you come to the club last night?”
“You said if I came to that club I couldn’t act like a whore.” She flipped her hair back, challenging him. “And I love to act like a whore, so I went somewhere else.”
“Kat,” he warned. “Watch the way you speak to me.”
“Why? Are you going to spank me again?”
“I might. You’d like it if I did.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would. You need it, I think.”
She rolled her eyes, turning away from him. “We need to go downstairs. She’ll come after us.”
He knew she meant Elena, and he was fairly sure she wouldn’t, but he followed Kat as she tore down the stairs. She took shelter in the kitchen again, only to have Elena yell for her to bring coffee and cake to her guest.
“He’s not my guest, he’s your guest,” she muttered under her breath. She offered coffee and Russian teacakes on a tray that he had a feeling she would rather have flung in his face. He took pity on her then and made his excuses. He’d accomplished what he’d come to do. She knew now that she wanted him every bit as much as he wanted her, and that avoiding him was pointless. He said his goodbyes, finding himself showered again with hugs and kisses from Elena and Dmitri. He shook the hands of all the husbands and the many sisters he still couldn’t tell apart and even fielded a few messy kisses from children of all sizes.
“You will come back again soon, yes?” asked Elena.
“Yes,” he said. “I can’t wait to come back again. I had a wonderful time.”
“Ekaterina,” Elena said, “you walk Ryan to the door and say good night.”
“Yes, Mama,” she answered through gritted teeth.
At the door Ryan kissed her again, even though he knew she hated it.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I won’t answer.”
“If you don’t return my calls, if you don’t come to the club, I’ll be back here again in a week. Your mother loves me. I could eat dinner here every night if I wanted.”
“Okay, okay. Fine. I’ll come to the club. I’ll come on Friday.”
“And go out with me after.”
“After closing? That’s too late.”
“The storage room then.”
“Okay, fine,” she groaned. “God, why are you doing this?”
“Why do you think? I’ll see you Friday night, Ekaterina.”
“My name is Kat,” she corrected with a frown.
“Your name, Ekaterina Argounov, is whatever I want it to be. I’ll see you Friday night.”
Chapter Four
Ryan went home that night feeling happy and optimistic. Kat’s family was great, full of energy and life. There had to be hope for his dour princess and he planned to make her smile if it killed him.
Make her smile and make her do a lot of other things too, things that gave him massive hard-ons when he thought about them too long. His Dominant radar hadn’t failed him. She was a submissive all right, just in need of some training and a lot of unconditional love. He began making plans for her, plans for them. He wanted, first, to introduce her to the Dom/sub lifestyle and then he’d try to iron out her mental issues and her self-destructive drive. He imagined himself as a modern-day Pygmalion. He would sculpt her into a work of art, bring her to life. She would be his creation.
If she would cooperate, that was.
Like everything else about her, her relationship with him was ambivalent. She wanted him to take her, then afterward resented being taken. She found fulfillment and then pushed him away. She let him see the lost, flailing girl behind her gaze, but only for a moment before she hid again. He discovered at dinner that she was a translator, that she spent her days transforming English text into Russian. He would need to do the same magic—translate troubled Kat into his lovely Ekaterina. Translate her scowls into smiles.
He sat down to look over some notes, nursing a cup of coffee. He felt tired but invigorated. Soon his mind drifted into more whimsical fantasies. Pretty Ekaterina, the surgeon’s wife. She could bring him coffee every night while he went over his medical notes. He would keep her dressed in nothing but a collar and cuffs. Afterward, he could melt away the stress of the day with her. Hell, with what he made she wouldn’t even need to work. She could just stay at home and be his sex kitten, his sub. Their relationship would be based on power. His power over her and her willing agreement to submit to that power. And then, perhaps, marriage…children…
But not yet. For now, he needed to concentrate on making her his sub. His obedient, beautiful, pliant, emotionally available sub. His job entailed long hours, a lot of pressure and tension and she would provide a welcome outlet from the stress, although there was a hell of a lot he’d have to teach her to get there. She had a sassy streak a mile wide, not to mention a serious lack of confidence and a hiding problem. No matter. All of that paled in comparison to how aroused she got when he gave her orders, the way she’d reacted to his discipline, the way she moaned and turned to fire when they fucked. He had high hopes for her. When he was done shaping her she would be his prize, all the more special because he’d trained her himself.
He’d been with a lot of subs, trained a lot of girls the way he wanted them and been with a lot already trained, but they’d never fired him up half as much as Kat. Something had coalesced between them that night in the storage room. He knew it. She knew it. The difference was, she still fought it. Oh well, she’d see soon enough.
But he had notes to work on and phone calls to make and it was already late. He would let her simmer until Friday. Friday, he’d spank her again.
Friday arrived, though, and Kat wasn’t at the club as he’d told her to be. You said if I came to that club I couldn’t act like a whore. And I love to act like a whore. She was testing him. Common sub behavior. Would she dare pick up a gu
y somewhere else? There was no fucking chance he would allow that. He left Masquerade and checked a few other clubs where he thought she might be. Finally, he went to her house and sat on the stoop to wait for her to show up. It was a clear night, pleasant waiting weather at least. But if there was some stupid, drunk guy with her, he was in for the greeting of his life.
Ryan didn’t wait long. Just after midnight he saw her come walking down the block. Walking alone in her short little skirt, her tight sweater, her slut heels. She had walked from the club district here to Brighton all by herself. He was going to kill her. She slowed when she noticed him, too far away to see who he was.
Yes, you little fool. I could be a murderer or a rapist sitting here waiting for you.
She looked a little scared to find a strange guy blocking the way, but even more scared when she saw who he was. She turned on her heel and started to walk back in the other direction.
“No. Just…no. Go away,” she said when he fell into step beside her.
“I’m not going away. You’re a smart girl. You should have figured that out by now. Anyway, you don’t want me to. Not really.”
Her heels click, click, clicked on the sidewalk and she wrapped her arms around her waist. “I’m tired. I’ve been out dancing. I just want you to leave me alone.”
“Did you walk home from the clubs by yourself or are you coming from someone’s house?” he asked as calmly as he was able.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
He stopped her with a firm hand on her arm. “Yes, I would like to know and you’re going to tell me. Were you with someone else tonight?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no, I wasn’t,” she said, trying to pull away.
“You aren’t coming from someone else’s bed?”
“Let go of me or I will scream bloody murder until somebody comes.”
He released her and she started to walk again. He took her hand. She tried to pull it away the second he did.
“Just let me hold your hand,” he said.
“I don’t want to hold your fucking hand.” They struggled like two children thumb-wrestling.
Fortune Page 5
