by SR Jones
Finally, the music ends, and I stop moving, chest rising and falling to nothing but total silence.
Oh, shit, did I make a mistake? I glance over to the table to see tears streaming down Violet’s cheeks. She pushes her chair back and starts to clap as she says a soft bravo. One by one every person at the table stands and claps.
Then Bohdan walks over to me, picks me up and spins me around, kissing me hard. “You’re astonishing,” he says. “My beautiful, talented, jewel. I fucking love you.”
I freeze for a moment in his arms, but then I say what I’m feeling. “I love you too.” He kisses me and kisses me, and I let him, not caring that we have an audience.
It’s one of the most magical moments in my life.
Much later, back in the house we’re staying in, the magic is still there, but so is a sadness. I can’t stay here locked away like those other women do. I need to dance. Yes, I would quite like to step back. Possibly maybe do the odd one-off tour or show, and the rest of the time work on something new. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that I’d love to teach dance here. I’d really enjoy giving a whole new generation the bug that I caught so young. And whilst I might not want children of my own, for a variety of reasons, it doesn’t mean that I dislike children. I like them a lot and would love to work with young people, helping them discover the joys of dance. For the majority, it would be nothing more than a hobby, but one that will give them great posture and fitness foundations for life.
Bohdan comes up to me and wraps his arms around me. “You were magical out there,” he says. He scatters something over me, and I look up and laugh when I see the petals floating around me.
“Covering you in magical pixie dust,” he says with a smile.
“I meant it, what I said before,” I tell him. “I do love you, but things for us aren’t easy.”
He pulls me into him and kisses me before leaning back to look at me, his blue eyes dark in the dim glow of the hallway light. We didn’t turn the kitchen light on when we entered the room. “You think it’s easy for K and Cassie? Jesus. The shit they had to get through. Or Violet and Andrius?”
“I can’t be like those women,” I say. “They’re almost prisoners here. They don’t get to leave unless with their men, but the men get to leave any time they like.”
I’ve seen Konstantin go off on business for two days while I’ve been here, and Andrius flew to Athens to see the two men who were here tonight, but Violet? She stays here. So does Cassie. Their men say it is for their safety, but to me they seem like prisoners. I’ve been a prisoner for far too long to become one again.
Bohdan sighs and takes a seat, pulling me onto his knee as he plays with my hair.
“They are in danger because there are active threats against K and Andrius, and that’s why they stay here.”
“So why, for example, does K get to travel around but not Cassie? Doesn’t seem fair.”
He laughs. “Because K is big enough, ugly enough, and violent enough to take care of himself. Cassie would be a soft target. It wouldn’t be the same for you. I worked for K, and yes, I am sure I have enemies the same way he and Andrius do, but I wasn’t the leader the way K was. I wasn’t a legend the way Andrius was; still is if we’re being honest. My scalp is nothing as compared to theirs, and I got out before it got that way. Now Vasily, he’s the new K, and I’m sure he sleeps with one eye open. Me? I got out, and I’m building something new. I’d like you to be a part of that.”
“I’d like to still dance sometimes. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Dancers of my age, they often get fewer parts. Or they get injured, and then they must retire, or they become part of the chorus line of dancers. I don’t want that. I’d like to go out on a high. I’d like to teach, though, and I’d love to still do the odd show, maybe even a tour or two now and again.”
He twirls my hair in his fingers and kisses my neck at the side. “I can’t see that being an issue. If you wanted to tour, I would come with you. You’d be safe with me there, and if for some reason I really couldn’t, then I’d send one of the men we’re training to be with you. As for teaching, well you could run a summer school out here.”
I still in his arms, completely and utterly still. For a moment, I don’t even breathe because, damn, he always reads my mind.
Oh wow. “I had the same thought.”
He laughs. “Yeah, we’ll run a summer school training the baddest of the bad to be even badder, and you run one next door training up future ballerinas. It’s kind of epic.”
“It kind of is. And I could run it like a holiday company almost. You know, spend three months learning ballet with Madame Dasha Imanovich in Corfu, and visit the lovely old Corfu Town and palace of Achillean; that kind of thing.”
He turns my face to his. “Dasha, it could work really well. Tons of wealthy people holiday here, and I bet a lot of them would love for their daughters to have something worthwhile to do in the summer while they’re making business deals on their yachts.”
“And their sons,” I chide. “Ballet isn’t just for girls.”
“Of course,” he says with a smile. “You should think about it and make some loose plans. I could speak with Andrius, Reece, and K, see if there’s a bit of the land we’re purchasing that you could use.”
I frown at that because although it sounds wonderful, and I had the same thought myself, it’s hardly ideal when you think of the two businesses side by side. “I don’t think I can set up my dance school on the same land with men firing guns, Bohdan. That’s the only issue.”
“Firstly, the firing range will be very secluded and nowhere near the main buildings. Secondly, think about it. If you want to make it a super elite school, there’ll be nowhere safer for those kids than here.”
“I don’t know if I do want it to be super elite,” I say. “Ballet was my dream, and I was a poor kid in Russia. I’d like other poor kids to get the chance to experience it if they dream about it.”
He stands, taking me with him, and he places me on the table, sitting me on the edge as he stands between my legs and tips my chin up. “We could set up a foundation,” he says.
“What?”
“A foundation. We set it up and offer holidays, say ten places a year to kids from Ex-Soviet regions.”
“We?”
“I have money, Dasha. Some of it I’m putting into this venture with K, but I still have plenty left over. You have money. We could split the initial startup costs, and then you could use the money from the rich kids to run the scholarship side of things. You could run the whole thing overall as a nonprofit, and use the rich kids to pay for the poorer kids.”
He starts to pace, and I can see it, that sharp mind of his positively turning as he thinks and walks.
He turns back to me. “We could have a motto, something like ‘In dance all are equal.’ When the kids come here, they get a simple uniform, maybe a whole bag of clothes, dance clothes, and casual clothes, badged up with the school logo so that they’re all the same, right? That way, the poorer kids aren’t going to be intimidated dancing next to the rich kids carrying Hermes bags and shit. They’ll all leave that behind when they come for however long it is, and they have an intense ballet workshop with you over so many weeks.”
I can feel tears pricking my eyes because this could be awesome. It could work. Really work.
It would need a lot of tweaking and planning, but it could work.
“I think we might have something we could build with this,” I tell him.
He tips my chin up again. “I want to build something with you, Dasha. Let me.”
I nod, close my eyes, and fall into him. Into trust. Into love.
I let myself be vulnerable.
I pray I don’t come to regret it.
Chapter Twenty-three
Vasily
London
I meet Zoey at nine in the evening toward the end of my week in London, in a hotel bar. It’s a swanky, upmarket place where the drink
s cost what a meal would in a less snobbish establishment.
She’s sitting at the bar when I enter, and she surprises me. Normally, she wears jeans, biker boots, and t-shirts. This evening, though, she’s wearing a slinky black dress. She’s sitting facing the door but turned toward the bar as she talks to the barman. I study her for a moment. Her dress ends just below her knees, and her feet are encased in high, black shoes with gold studs on the ends. I smile, that’s a Zoey touch. Her bag is black, also with studs on it. Her tiny waist is the focus of the dress as it is nipped in there before it hugs her hips. They’re slim too. Everything about Zoey is slender but not in a tiny, petite way. She’s slim but tall. Lean but toned. Her arms have definition. The woman clearly works out.
Normally she wears lots of silver, with chunky rings and bangles adorning her wrists and fingers. Tonight, she’s wearing a red leather bracelet with gold spikes on it, and a gold ring that I can’t see clearly from here, but it looks almost like barbed wire.
She takes the glass in front of her, sips at the cocktail and closes her eyes for a moment. Smiling, she nods her approval at the bartender, takes one of the olives on the stick, and pops it into her bright pink mouth.
Fuck me, she’s hot.
I walk over to her, and she glances up, sees me, and chews and swallows. “Hey there.”
“Hi.” I settle on the bar stool next to her.
Her voice is girly, breathy. It reminds me of Marilyn Monroe, but she looks like Lara Croft in a cocktail dress.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asks me.
“Vodka, your best, on the rocks.”
“How Russian of you.” Zoey smiles at me and sips her cocktail again.
“Not really. Russian’s tend not to have it on ice. I like it this way.”
Plus, I’m still babying myself as I recover from the gunshot wounds I sustained when the fucking Armenian’s broke into K’s home. I’m doing well, almost back to normal levels of functionality, but it will take me some time to get my fitness levels back to what they were. Neat vodka won’t help.
Zoey sips at her drink, and I point to it. “What are you drinking?”
“Dirty martini,” she says.
That sums her up. “You want another?”
I expect her to say no and continue sipping at her drink. She shocks me when she downs it, licks her bright painted lips and nods. “Sounds good. Thank you.”
Zoey, it seems, likes to live life on the edge a little. She’s a tree hugging bad girl, how intriguing.
“Is it good?” I ask when she tastes the newly prepared cocktail the bartender places in front of her.
“Hhhhmm, delicious. Have a taste.” She slides the glass over to me, her fingers touching mine where they rest on the bar. Her nail polish is a shocking pink too, to match her lips. I want to smear that lipstick all over her face as I kiss her so hard, she tastes me for days.
I take the glass and take a sip. God, that is good.
She grins. “See? There’s a reason James Bond drinks a martini. Maybe you should have one?”
I shake my head. “I’m still taking it easy.”
“Oh?”
So she doesn’t know about me being shot. Then I think to myself, why the hell would she? K might have taken her out to Corfu to work with Maxim, his friend from back home, but he didn’t have her stay at Andrius’ place. She’s not his friend. She’s his employee. Curious, I lean toward her.
“Tell me it’s none of my business, but did you and K ever screw?”
She doesn’t blush, or simper, or tell me to get lost. She shakes her head, takes another olive, sucks it into her mouth, chews, swallows then hits me with a direct stare. “No. We met in a bar. I asked him if he wanted to fuck, but I’ll be honest with you. He’s not my type, but I’d had a shitty week. Really shitty. Almost as shitty as this one,” she adds. “Sometimes, when things are that bad, only drinking, dancing, and sex can help. I’d been drinking, I wasn’t in the mood for dancing, so when I saw Konstantin, I thought I’d try the sex approach. It didn’t happen.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. He came back to my place. It was a shitty place then, but I’ve got a better one now, thanks to the job he gave me. He saw my drawings and said they were amazing. Offered me a job. Effectively said he didn’t screw the help, hence the sex was off the menu, and left.”
“You weren’t offended?” A lot of women would be offended; I’m sure of it.
“Nah, course not. I got a job out of it. That’s better, right?” She smirks at me. “Anyway, like I say, he’s not really my type. I wasn’t in lust with him or anything.”
“What’s your type?”
She smiles again. “Dark hair. Blue-green eyes. Ink. Built but lean. Cut, you know?” She glances at my forearm where I have a tattoo on the inside of my arm.
She brushes her fingers over it, featherlight. Just that, a simple touch, has me on fire for her.
“Men who have tattoos in languages I don’t understand.”
“You’re not backward in coming forward,” I note.
“Would you prefer me to be?” She smiles at me. “Like the little lady to wait to be asked?”
“Hell no.”
“What does it say?” She nods at the ink.
“Voyage, in Russian lettering.”
“Can I ask the meaning behind it?”
I touch the ink with my forefinger. “It’s a reminder that life is a voyage. An adventure. A journey. It’s not meant to be spent static, you know? A voyage, it’s an experience. Life should be too.”
She touches it again, her slender pointer finger right next to mine. “It’s kind of deep.”
“Well, Zoey, if you’re going to etch something into your skin for life, it should have meaning, no?”
“Absolutely.”
“Want to compare ink?” I give her a cheeky grin, and she answers it with one of her own.
“Absolutely,” she says again.
“Come. I got a room. Hope that wasn’t too presumptuous?”
“Absolutely not.”
I bark out a laugh at that. “Come on, Zoey, with a Y. Let's tear shit up and see if we can make you forget for a while.”
When we reach the room, she pushes me inside, kicking the door closed behind her, and she’s on me with a hunger that matches my own. Our teeth clack as our mouths clash.
Her lipstick tastes like cherries, and she smells of something sweet like watermelon.
She’s a walking bag of contradictions. Hard and soft. Sweet but rough. Tough style, breathy, feminine voice. Who the fuck is the real Zoey? Is she a complex diamond made up of all these facets? Or are some of them a disguise?
I want to rip her dress right off, but I don’t. She hasn’t any other clothes with her, so that would be a dick move. Instead, I turn her around, so she’s facing the wall, and undo the zipper. It drops to the floor with a soft swoosh of fabric and pools around her ankles. She steps out of it and turns to me. I take in the feast that is her.
Yep, such a contradiction. I was expecting black and maybe lace when it came to her underwear. Instead, she’s wearing a baby pink camisole with matching panties. I reach out and touch it and realize it’s real silk. You can always tell the real stuff.
This I will rip from her body, I decide. She can walk home in just the dress. I take the camisole in my hands, look right into her pale blue eyes, and tear it from her. She smiles, and it is dark and filled with satisfaction.
“How rough do you want it?” I ask.
“Rough.”
“How rough?”
“Enough to leave bruises. Not enough to do lasting damage.”
My cock is so hard it’s going to burst. Fuck me. God invented my perfect woman, named her Zoey, and put her on this earth living in London. Why can’t she be in Moscow?
Then again, the way this is going, it’s a good thing she doesn’t. We’d probably end up in some sort of fucked up, messed up, destructive relationship, and right now, I’ve got to focus
one hundred percent on building up what K gave me.
I’ll fuck her and get her out of my system.
She drops to her knees and undoes my belt. When she looks up at me and licks those smeared, hot-pink lips, I swallow hard. Undoing my zipper, she takes me out, sliding her hand down the length of me.
I’m well endowed. Enough that with one girlfriend it was a bit of an issue. She only liked it from certain angles as she said it hurt. Zoey doesn’t look worried though; she looks greedy.
As she licks at the tip of me, her hands cup my balls and squeeze. Soon, she’s sucking down half my dick, using her hand to work the other half, and fondling my balls. Jesus Christ.
I pull her to her feet and undress. As I do, I stare at her perky tits, the pink nipples all hard.
“You got that lip gloss you’re wearing on you?” I ask her.
She nods once, turns to her bag that she threw on the dresser, opens it and takes a tube out. I take it from her and push some of the gloopy liquid to the tip of the tube. Then I smear it all over her lips again. She smacks them together and stares at me as she pouts. Her eyes widen when I do the same thing again to each nipple.
Now she has gloopy lip gloss on each hard nub, and I rub it in, smoothing it over her areolas too.
I stand back and admire her. The front of her silky panties is damp, and the patch is spreading.
“You look like a filthy fucking wet dream come to life,” I tell her. Shit, when did I start sounding like K with the gravelly voice? I clear my throat and step to her. Then I bend my head and take one nipple in my mouth, tasting the cherry flavor.
I suck her left tit hard, as I palm the other one before I swap sides.
“You like my lip gloss,” she observes.
“Tastes of cherries,” I say.
