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“Open your mouth, Kat. Now.”
She obliged, parting her lips and taking him deep into her wet heat with a moan. He sucked in a breath against the pressure building in his balls, determined to make this last longer than it had the last time.
“Harder,” he commanded, urging her on with gentle pressure at the back of her neck, managing to maintain control for a few more delicious thrusts. Soon, however, the sight of her bottom in the air—her hips squirming as her excitement built—was too much to resist.
He pulled out and spun her around, tugging her knees off the edge of the bed. She arched as he drove into her already slick pussy, crying out in pleasure. He tried to go slow, but soon he was pounding into her with abandon, fingers digging into her hips.
“This is mine. You are mine,” he said, voice rough. He accompanied the words with a stinging slap to the pale flesh of her ass. “Tell me, Katarina.”
“I’m yours,” she cried.
Almost immediately he felt her begin to pulse around him. She ground back against him as she came, her hot juices coating his cock, easing the way for him to move faster, harder. In seconds he joined her, groaning her name as he came.
They rolled onto the bed together and he pulled her to his chest, muttering things in his mother tongue he was glad she couldn’t understand.
“I love mornings that start like that.” She sighed against his chest, snuggling closer.
“I love everything I do with you.” He kissed the top of her head, his heart pounding faster as her breathing slowed and she drifted back to sleep.
Love. He’d said it, and what’s more…he’d meant it.
He couldn’t deny it any longer. He was in love with her. He was in love with a woman he wasn’t even sure he knew, at least not completely.
Kat was so many different people. She was the charming contestant who had won over the crew and the Kingdom, the feisty, smart-mouthed hellion who handed him his tail when he stepped over the line, the generous lover, and the companion who touched his heart like no one else. She had let him see the scared, vulnerable woman behind her mask, the woman who regretted her mistakes so deeply, and he loved her for it.
But those mistakes…
Such big mistakes.
He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d finally read the file Matthew had compiled after Katarina was signed to the project. He hadn’t bothered before. In his mind, there was no reason to know every detail of her past. He had known what the public knew and that was enough.
At least it had been until he started thinking about Kat in ways that weren’t purely professional, and imagining a future for them that went beyond a reality television show.
He had heard the stories, of course. She’d hired a woodsman—who also happened to be her pixie dust dealer—to kill her husband’s lover, but had later called off the hit. Her second thoughts had kept Snow White from death and Katarina from a life sentence in the dungeon. But what Serge hadn’t known was that Kat had been a pixie dust abuser for years. No one except the dungeon doctors knew that Kat had almost died from withdrawal during her first month as an inmate.
Not even her late husband—who had passed away while Kat was in the second year of her sentence—seemed to have had a clue about the severity of his wife’s addiction, though they’d had magic mirrors in every room of their home. Magic mirrors were the only way pixie dust could be transformed into its highly addictive liquid form. The man must have been a fool not to see the connection.
Still, Serge had to give the king the benefit of the doubt. He hadn’t thought it possible for such a strong woman to succumb to addiction. Learning Kat’s secret had made him want to change the way he ran his businesses. He had stopped selling pixie dust, and made plans to sell the dance clubs in the near future.
He was tired of being known for his seedier endeavors. He was r
eady to clean up his act and start fresh.
That, of course, was where his problem lay. Katarina was an unknown. He had never been intimate with an addict, let alone one who had once been in deep enough to allow her addiction to cloud her judgment so profoundly. She had tried to kill another human being; there was no way to sugarcoat it. And though he believed in second chances, what he’d read in the file had raised questions he didn’t want to answer.
Kat had been in and out of treatment facilities since her eighteenth birthday. She had given in to her addiction again and again. Sure she’d been clean for five years, but how much of that was simply due to the fact that she’d been in the dungeon where pixie dust was hard to come by? How long would she be able to resist the temptation to fall back into old habits? She had only been free for a little under eight months. It wasn’t long enough to know if she could go the distance.
Could he build a family with a woman like Kat? Could he deal with his children being known as the ex-con’s kids? It would be bad enough being the offspring of a seedy strip club owner, but having a seedy strip club owner and a would-be murderess for parents would doom his kids from the cradle.
It was the kind of stuff that could ruin a person’s life before they even got started.
He ought to know. He’d gone through hell trying to fix his parents’ mistakes, finally choosing to immigrate when he couldn’t break free of the mob life he had been born into. It had been hard those first years, but he had succeeded, and built his own empire here in sprawling Kingdom City. Sergei Sokolnokov came from a long line of losers and hustlers, but he’d made something of himself within the confines of the law.
Was he willing to risk all of that for a woman, even a woman he loved more than any other he could remember? Was he willing to jeopardize his own security, the very thing he’d worked so hard to achieve, in order to make a life with someone he wasn’t sure he could trust?
Was he willing to gamble the welfare of his future children?
No. He wasn’t.
