I can’t help but smile at the panic crossing her face. She didn’t mean to insult me, but she can’t help but be honest.
It’s another trait I’m not familiar with.
“My brother always said the best way to learn about someone is to go directly to the source. Perhaps you should give that a go?” I hate talking about myself, but if it slides us toward a conversation we’ll need to have at some stage this weekend, I can place my neurosis on the back-burner for an hour or two.
“Okay.”
Justine drags her sweaty hands down her denim shorts before joining me at the counter. While washing dirt off potatoes in the sink, she asks me a range a questions I assume most people stumble over during a first date. They’re not overly probing, but they reveal she’s not knowledgeable on many aspects of my industry, which convinces me her time with Dimitri was brief.
Short enough to save her from being classed as his? I don’t know yet. But I am determined to find out.
I stop calculating my next move when Justine asks me to hand her a peeler. “A what?”
Her smile could bring a man to ecstasy without touching him. “A potato peeler.” As humor glows in her eyes, her mischievous grin grows. “You do know what a potato peeler is, don’t you?”
Laughter would usually result in bloodshed, but since it’s coming from Justine, and it is more in happiness than contempt, I subdue my anger by switching the humor in her eyes to lust.
After pulling her waist-length hair away from her neck, I rest my stubble-covered chin on the shoulder blade. “I was raised in a household that believes—”
“Women are either maids or whores? I’m aware.”
Her eyeroll freezes halfway when I press my lips to the throb in her throat so I can count her pulse. “Not all women belong in those categories,Ahren.” I savor the shudder that rolls down her spine when my desire to taste her becomes too much to bear. My tongue only tracks across her skin for the quickest second, but the moan she releases makes it seem much longer. “Some are angels.” I bite and nib at her neck without a protest sounding from her mouth. “And others are queens.” I suck on her skin firm enough to leave a mark, but soft enough she has no idea on the evil attempting to claim her. “You, my sweetAhren,were born to be both.”
When she leans into my embrace instead of repelling from it, I wedge my hand between her and the counter I have her squashed against. The silky smooth skin on her stomach flutters under my touch, but unlike last night, she doesn’t voice a protest when I slide my hand toward the heat between her legs.
The same can’t be said for me when Trey unexpectedly bursts into the kitchen. I growl out my annoyance, which heats Justine’s skin almost as much as my mouth.
The irritated expression crossing Trey’s face switches to leering when Justine uses his interruption as an excuse for an interlude in our exchange. After slipping my hand out of the waistband of her shorts, she squashes her breasts against my arm to gather a plastic-looking thingamabob out of the drying rack on my left.
Ignoring the way the quickest brush of her tits on my arm has my cock acting as if he hasn’t sampled his first cunt, she commences peeling the potatoes she just washed. I may have believed her calm, collective ruse if the needy scent of her cunt wasn’t thickening my cock even more than budded peaks in her shirt.
Trey’s interruption better be important. If it isn’t, he’s a dead man walking.
Chapter Thirteen
"The marinade on the steak? What is it?"
Justine pushes her half-consumed plate of steak, mashed potatoes, and steamed vegetables to my side of the table before raising her gorged eyes to mine. She looks just how she would have looked if Trey hadn’t interrupted us—thoroughly satisfied.
The yearning in her eyes detonates when I murmur, “I’ve only tasted one thing more delicious than this steak…” I pause when the hunger in my tone enflames her cheeks. “Fuck,Ahren, I love the way you blush. If there weren’t cameras watching my every move, I would be spreading you out on this table and eating you for dessert.”
Although Trey’s interruption could have been held off for an hour or two, it was for the best. I was so eager to feed on the lust teeming between Justine and me, I completely forgot about the cameras watching my every move. Trey’s arrival reminded me I wasn’t just risking my crew seeing Justine in a vulnerable state. I was placing her on Vladimir’s radar as well.
For my entire life, anything I ever wanted, Vladimir took. The love of my mother. The devotion of my siblings when he grew worried our bond was becoming unbreakable. If I so much as showed an interest in something or someone, he made it his.
I scoot closer to Justine, squashing her into the far corner of the dining nook. Vladimir’s surveillance is top of the range, but not even the most advanced equipment has the ability of recording through concrete support beams.
Needing my hands on her in some way, I twist a piece of Justine’s hair around my finger. It’s as silky and as smooth as her pasty-white skin. Something so simple shouldn’t appease the hesitation I’m certain I was born with, but for some reason, it does.
Justine reads the carefreeness in my eyes in the wrong manner. “You can trust me, Nikolai. Anything you say won’t leave this room.”
My lips twist into an uneasy grin. “If only that were true.” I keep my voice low enough the poor quality microphones in the cameras won’t pick up my reply. “I don’t trust anyone,Ahren. The devil was once an angel too.” Hating the fear trickling into her greenish blue eyes, I veer our conversation back onto mutual territory. “Now tell me about the marinade on the steak before I spend my afternoon hunting for a much more succulent recipe.”
I anticipate for her to respond to the fight in her eyes, so you can imagine my surprise when she jests, “If you want my Nonna's secret recipe, I would first have to kill you.”
“Nonna? So you’re Italian?” Shock resonates in my tone. She could only be paler if she was a vampire.
When she answers my question with a simple ‘yes’ I say, “Then where did you get your red hair and pasty skin tone from?" I tug on the strand of hair I was twisting earlier, causing an avalanche of curls to cover the slithers of silver on her shoulders.
