“Yes. But I couldn’t eat it. Not even a bite.” Her hand went to her stomach, and the corners of her mouth turned down like a child who’d lost its favorite toy. “I’m stuffed, and there are three more carts of food I want to devour.”
His stomach was glad for the news, but when he picked up his own fork, he realized he still had no hand for his steak knife if he had to keep hold of her.
She seemed to catch on at the same time. “Here. Let me.”
Anya reached for his plate and cut him a slice. Leaning over the table, she extended it toward him. He tried to grab the fork, but she swatted his hand away and raised the bite to his lips.
He opened his mouth and, at the first sumptuous taste, closed his eyes. It was a delicious piece of steak. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had such a fine cut. Maybe never.
When he opened his eyes, he found her watching him, a milder version of the hurt from earlier on her unguarded face. He wanted to take it away, but he couldn’t risk the truth. Whatever she might feel, if he admitted to being Demyan’s son, it would likely be the end of them working together, and they had to find the man, for both their sakes.
“You know, when you asked me earlier who keeps me company, I said no one special. But the truth is, I’m seeing a woman. She works at the home where my mother lives.”
Anya tucked her chin. “Yet you kissed me like, like…like that?”
Like what? It had just been a kiss. But then he remembered the sweet, slick feel of the inside of her mouth, the velvet of her tongue, the way her whole body had melted into him, her hesitant response until she understood he welcomed her exploration of his mouth too, when she’d poured herself into him, full of passion. Her every lick had jacked up his arousal, his need for her radiating out of that throbbing, broken place in him.
No, not just a kiss. A kiss like no other he’d experienced--both sweeter, more arousing, and completely, wildly off-limits.
“We just started dating. We’re not exclusive. Technically, I’m allowed to kiss whoever I want.”
“Oh.” Her cute little frown reminded him she may not even know the rules of modern dating.
“So that’s why…” He waved to where they’d been standing when she’d kissed him. “I don’t want to give you the impression there’s something wrong with you. You’re a beautiful woman. It was an amazing kiss. I’m just hoping things work out with…” What was her name? “Polina. So I shouldn’t be kissing you.”
“I see.” This time, she handed him the fork to feed himself.
He missed the intimacy of her placing the first bite on his tongue, the way that rich flavor filled his mouth at her bidding, but he accepted the ornate silver utensil and raised it to his own lips.
“I’m sure you want to get married. Have a family. Things nice men do.” Her mouth was pinched as if she were holding something in, but for the life of him, he couldn’t read the expression. Some cop he was.
He forced a chuckle in response to what seemed like a joke fallen flat. “Yep. I follow the nice-guy manual to the letter. By the book all the way. I have exactly eight months to get married, or I’m behind schedule. After that, I get fifteen or sixteen to achieve fatherhood.”
Total bullshit. He’d never lasted more than two casual months dating a woman, trying to draw out something boring and meaningless just to prove to himself he could, but if it would spare Anya’s pride, the marriage goal was a worthy lie.
“Did you want a husband and a family when you were alive?”
She shrugged, glancing out the window and downward, where a crowd had lined up to enter the theater. “Before I met Demyan, I hadn’t given it any thought. I was young and so focused on my career. Then, when he showed an interested in me, I only let myself want things he wanted. If he had said he wanted a family after my career had peaked, I would have made that my own goal. None of the women who danced with me in the company were mothers, but plenty of my early teachers were, it was common for the matrons to instruct the young girls.”
So pragmatic. Nothing of her own desire, aside from dance. An angry sort of grief closed around the two bites of steak in his stomach, the same resigned outrage he always felt about his mother. What had Demyan professed to Oksana? What had he promised and failed to deliver in a way that had killed her spirit?
Had his mother ever possessed the fierce ambition Anya did? It was nearly impossible to imagine, but sometimes those possibilities indicated just the question an inspector must ask. “What if Demyan had said he wanted you to quit dancing and simply be his wife?”
The waiter had opened a bottle of wine, and Anya reached for it before tipping just a few sips into a glass. It seemed moderation had become an instinct for her through all her discipline, even after she’d devoured that steak without pausing for breath.
She lowered her lids, then tossed the mouthful back without bothering to taste it. Maybe not so moderate after all.
“If he’d proposed a domestic marriage, I truly don’t know what I would have done or said. It’s impossible to contemplate. His acceptance was always conditional on a good rehearsal or performance. And we danced very well together. I can’t imagine him wanting me to quit. What would he have loved about me then?”
Her dark, beautiful gaze flashed to him for a split second when she posed the question, then darted away. He exhaled, grateful for a reprieve from that laser-like intensity, and tried to keep his palm light and still where it rested on her ankle, alongside his inner thigh.
Even that brief glimpse of her pain, her emptiness, it was enough to slice him open. A rush of praise filled his mind, a litany of her appealing attributes--her quick intelligence, her sense of humor, the concern for others she felt but was afraid to show. She was complicated and beautiful and kissed like she was made for sex. What wasn’t there to love?
But Anya Truss wasn’t the kind of woman--or ghost--who would accept compliments like that. Even if she happened to be the only one he’d ever especially wanted to say them about. So he would rely on his interrogation technique to get him through this meal instead.
“And now? When you think of what you missed out on, is it a family?”
She still stared out the window, so he might have been mistaken, but it seemed like a tear shone in her eyes. “No. Not that.”
“Then what?” Fierce curiosity seized him.
She exhaled through her nose, shaking her head, her gaze fixed on the crowd, now moving amoeba-like into the concert hall. “That’s my secret.”
A crease formed between her brows, and a moment later, a yawn stole over her whole face, a scrunchy, adorable distortion of her pretty features. A moment later, his brain triggered the same response.
“Tired?” she asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“I think so. I haven’t felt it in so long. But my thoughts feel like they’re traveling through cotton wool, and I vaguely remember that sensation.”
“So when you’re a ghost--?”
“No fatigue, no sleep. No rest from a constantly racing mind and incessant need for vengeance.”
“Shit.”
“Pretty much.” The slight upward tilt of her chin revealed she was looking past him into the bedroom.
Oh, hell.
“It’s all yours,” he said.
“Great. I can go ghost and stare at that luxurious bed all night.”
“Anya--”
“Look. I respect Polina and your sixteen-month plan and all it entails. But I really, truly, need to sleep in that bed. If that means you have to hold my ankle all night, so be it.”
Holding her ankle required his head at her feet and vice versa. In that formation, if one of them slid in the bed by just a few feet, they’d be forming a very infamous number. If he found himself eye level with the black lace hem of her nightie in the middle of the night, it would be damn hard to pretend that he respected Polina even a little. In the haze of sleep, he might even forget his father had probably
already seen that lace up close.
He tried again, his voice even more pleading. “Anya--”
“Sergey Yuchenko.” She’d flipped on the siren voice like a switch, and instantly every cell in his skin was on alert, straining toward her. “You will do what I wish.”
His cock went fully erect in an instant, her every word like the damp stroke of a silky tongue up the shaft. He tried to count backward to clear his mind. Sixty-eight, sixty-seven.
“Bed. Now.” That time, the words were like a swirl around his tip.
And, in spite of a lifetime of precedent, his cock got even harder.
He groaned. She clearly didn’t understand how commanding him with her powers of seduction would only make the situation worse.
She tugged on her ankle gently to add to her insistence, and when he tugged back, her toes brushed his unprecedentedly hard erection.
Her bewitchingly black eyes widened. “Oh!”
“Now you see the problem. So unless you want to go to bed with that, you should turn off the siren shit, and cut the rest of my steak. Then, we’ll eat cake. And if you promise not to use the sex-ghost voice on me again, I’ll try to think of a way we can both get some sleep.”
She pouted. “My siren powers are useless on you.”
He chuckled, unwilling to tell her the truth. She didn’t need a drop of supernatural potency to command his attraction. And, weirdly arousing voice or not, it seemed impossible he could get any sleep even on the distant side of a bed from her.
Chapter 15
Truly, in spite of the way Anya had craved sleep for decades, she could barely close her eyes. For the first time since…well, before her death, a man other than Stas Demyan consumed her thoughts.
And of those thoughts, many were consumed by that significant erection. She’d only felt one of those before, and the grocer boy was less impressive than Yuchenko in more than just kissing skills. But once she’d mined her memory for as much detail as possible of the toe-brushing-against-Sergey’s-hard-penis incident, she was left with a single, sleep-interrupting question. Did Sergey desire her, or was it purely her vila powers turning him on?
Her arm ached, resting at an odd angle to keep them connected.
After they’d each eaten a slice and a half of cake, he’d marched her into the bedroom to experiment with various sleeping arrangements. But all his suggestions would have surely resulted in him letting go of her in sleep. So she’d proposed he use his belt to strap their hands together. To honor his wishes--and Polina, even though she hated the girl on principle--Anya had been as modest and chaste as possible when she’d helped him undo the buckle and unthread the leather band from his jeans.
There’d been something so permanent about the binding, like those fairytale weddings in which a white band was wrapped around the bride and groom’s hands. She’d watched, dry-mouthed, as the dark leather crisscrossed her fair skin and his, also fair but with that honeyed sun-kiss burnishing it. The thick black leather felt far more permanent than a bit of white ribbon. The belt seemed to signify a possession, not a promise, and that was darkly arousing in a Demyan sort of way.
Her mouth had grown even dryer, and she’d swallowed. All at once, the urge to kiss Sergey again had roared up in her, like a tiny but strong tornado. She wanted to taste his teasing tongue, to feel again the difference between the dance they’d done and the way Demyan had dominated her.
Instead, he’d yanked back the blankets and engineered a wall of pillows to bisect the bed. Then he’d turned off the light, let his jeans fall to the ground so that he wore only his boxer shorts and T-shirt, and they’d climbed in. Wordlessly, Anya scaled the mountain of cushions and settled into the plush mattress.
A bed. It felt heavenly. Literally. When she’d longed for a true death, the end of her riverbank limbo, what she’d wanted most was the soothing pull of gravity to press her into a feather bed, or a soft cloud if that’s the way they did things in heaven.
Yet now she lay on her back, fingers interlaced with his, the long-forgotten sensation of pins and needles burning along her arm. She wriggled the limb, trying to improve her circulation without waking him. It was no use.
She sat up and oh-so-gently undid the belt buckle, holding his fingers tightly while unwrapping the length of leather from their wrists. As soon as the last loop was loose, his fingers went slack in her hand, nearly freeing her. Even if she could restore the connection immediately, she didn’t want to be wet, cold, and seized with the echoes of panic. She wanted to stay in her skin, warm in the soft bed, hand in hand with Sergey Yuchenko, whose ragged, slumbering breaths were just shy of a snore.
She pried her numb and aching hand free, quickly grabbing hold of his with her other fingers.
He frowned in his sleep, mumbled something, and grew restless. She gripped his fingers tighter. His frown grew deeper, and he tossed two of the barricade pillows off the bed like a frustrated toddler tangled in his blankets. Then he rolled right over the remaining pillows. They flattened like pancakes under his big body. Unimpeded and still with all appearance of sleep, he pulled her to him. She wound up face-to-chest against his muscular, delicious-smelling body, which was not at all bad, but in her skin, she did need to breathe. So she turned and pressed her back to him, wrapping their interlaced fingers around her rib cage.
Instantly, the foggy weight of sleep stole over her. If this was the only taste of heaven she’d get, it wasn’t bad. And he needn’t worry. It was just an innocent cuddle. Polina didn’t have to know.
She found herself in a dark tunnel, a kerosene lamp hanging from a bracket on the sooty stone wall. The light penetrated the area immediately around her, each obscured by darkness. Panic tightened her chest. Where was she? Which way should she go? The bitter fear in her throat tasted so familiar--she’d been here many times--and yet, she had no idea which way to turn.
In a burst of lucidity, she grasped that it was a dream. An old one she’d had many times.
“Why, if it isn’t Anya Truss.” The voice resounded in the narrow passageway, silvery, urbane, and as familiar as the darkness.
Stas. And he was too near.
She plastered her spine against the stone, directly under the lamp. Where was he? Would he come at her from the right, or the left?
A self-satisfied chuckle vibrated off the walls, stirring the still air as if he was just on the dark edge of the ring of light. “Well, this is a surprise. I thought you dead. But I should have known you wouldn’t give up so easily, you stubborn creature. How long has it been?”
She shook without any of the romantic desire that had once mellowed the fear of this nightmare. Once upon a time, her brain had turned it into a fantasy--the damsel to be rescued by her daring hero, who was only part beast. But now, it seemed all too clear there was only danger and no hero in this dream.
Slow footsteps slapped the stone floors and echoed in the narrow space. She trembled, trying to harness the fear into a gale that could roar through the tunnel. But the dread gripped her, refusing to leave her body.
Where was her vila’s courage? Her power over the wind? Perhaps there wasn’t enough air in the tunnel to command.
She had to run. Standing still was suicide, and that no longer appealed. But which way?
“Oh, you are tempting when you’re afraid, those succulent little breasts heaving behind your lace.”
The voice still seemed to come from all around, but if she had to decide, she would put her money on him coming from the right.
“There is no escape, Anya. I’ll never let you go.”
She ran left and straight into a hard, male chest. “Oomph.”
He grunted too, pulling her tight to him with strong arms. “Anya?”
She opened her mouth to scream, but… That wasn’t Stas’s voice.
“Sergey?” Her own came out as a croak.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, instantly on alert. “You’re shaking.”
“Nightm
are.” She snuggled into him, the fear draining from her like floodgates had been opened. What rotten luck that her first night of sleep in ages had ended like that.
His arms went around her immediately, and he cradled her, stroking her hair. “Everything’s all right.” Then, suddenly, his whole body stiffened behind her. “Hell. Where are the pillows?”
“You threw them on the floor earlier.”
“Oh.” Holding himself very still, he breathed out a few long, steady breaths.
Slowly, and in spite of his effort, she became aware of being prodded in her lower back.
Well, good morning to you too, Inspector Yuchenko. She couldn’t resist wriggling against him.
He groaned. “Fuck. Knock it off, Anya.”
She flipped over to face him. “We could, you know. I might never get the chance again. It would be an act of charity. Take pity on this poor ghost and give her one last taste of earthly delights.”
“Absolutely not.” He set his handsome face into those determined lines, but sleep left his features soft enough she could still see his inner puppy--that sweet, chivalrous, doggedly protective side.
Her free hand went to cup his jaw, and they stared at each other for a long moment.
“Anya.” That time her name was a tender whisper, and if it hadn’t had a harsh note of pity in it, she might have hoped he would give in.
“You are no fun.” She shoved his chest, trying to brush off the rejection.
He took hold of her other hand. With both wrists pinned in front of her, she felt captured, imprisoned.
“Listen,” he said, in his bossy cop voice. “If you do get another chance like your sister has, don’t settle for just some fuck. You deserve so much better than how Demyan treated you.”
But hadn’t she told him Demyan had never--?
A funny chirping sound interrupted her. Did they have robotic birds in this future she’d found herself in?
“What’s that?”
“My phone.” To reach it, he had to drag her several inches onto his side of the bed. She went willingly, burrowing into the sheets, warm and redolent of his intoxicating smell. She could really get used to being alive, with the sheets, and the smelling and such.
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