“I was dressing,” my voice came out thin.
He stepped inside and walked toward me. I backed against the mirror, the glass cooling my bare skin.
Dmitri closed the distance, and before I could process, his hands rose to my shoulders. My breath caught in my throat. He pulled me off the mirror and held me against his chest. His cologne wrapped around me the same moment his body’s heat did. I stood very still and told myself this was a normal situation.
“What are you doing?” I managed. His fingers brushed along my shoulder, tracing the path of the stubborn strap. He caught the clasp and began working on it. “I think I can do it.”
His fingers moved against my skin, and the adjustment shifted.
“How is that?” His voice reached my ear, the warmth of his breath sliding down my neck. My eyes closed. “Tight?” he asked.
I exhaled. “Yes. No.” I didn’t even know. “Yes.”
He made a soft sound in his throat, but I didn’t try to figure it out because his lips brushed my earlobe. I could have argued that it was accidental, but the position he was holding me in was just as intimate as what he was doing to me. His fingers moved along the strap again, and I genuinely could not tell what he was adjusting anymore.
“How about that?”
“I think—” My body shifted, and I froze when I felt something pressing against my stomach. My entire nervous system sent upa flare. I swallowed. “Good.”
“Good?”
I nodded, understanding that I needed to create distance before my body signed me off. My hands moved to his chest to push him back and met a wall of muscle that stopped the plan entirely. My fingers spread across him, and the shirt did very little to conceal what was underneath. Each muscle pressed back against my palms. I forgot what I wanted to do.
“So, you like what you are touching?”
I pulled my hands off his chest and stepped back. “No. No. Thank you.” I said it fast, hoping the momentum would carry him out of the closet.
He didn’t move. I looked up and found him already watching me, his eyes aimed at my mouth. A thought occurred to me, and I wondered what his lips would taste like. Would he kiss the way he did everything else, with that infuriating certainty? It had been long enough since I kissed.
“Is your mouth a virgin?”
I blinked away from his lips when he asked that. He was still looking at my lips, which meant I stared at his lips long enough for him to ask that.
“I know… how to kiss,” I said.
The faint smile that crossed his face suggested he found that stupid.
“Very funny.” His hand moved along my jaw until his fingers curled around my throat. The pressure wasn’t a grip and wasn’t very comfortable. I tilted my chin up, and we stayed there, his eyes dropping to my lips before coming back to mine.
“Have you ever been fucked in your mouth?” he asked, and I shook my head. “Still a virgin.”
He leaned in, and my lips parted on instinct, embarrassingly ready. He stopped just short of closing the distance and stayed there for a few seconds.
“I want to fuck your pretty mouth.” His words dropped into my stomach and pooled there. “You can leave or get on your knees,” he declared, stepping back to give me the space to make a decision, which was somehow worse than not having one. “Get dressed and walk out before I finish undressing, and I’ll take that as a no.”
His fingers moved to his shirt buttons and worked through them. I stood on the same square foot of floor, telling myself to move, to reach for the dress, to be a reasonable person who made reasonable choices.
He dropped the shirt.
I didn’t move.
His hands moved to his belt with the same calm, and I told myself I was simply processing the situation. His trousers fell, and the situation became clearer, making my stomach drop. He was naked, not decoratively so; he was thick, heavy, and already certain of himself. That explained entirely what pressed against my stomach earlier.
“On your knees, Inna.”
My chest rose and fell. I looked up at his face and found desire sitting openly. I wanted to name this as gratitude, a reasonable accounting of everything he’d given Cole and me. But that accounting didn’t hold. I knew it because of the heat moving through me. It had nothing to do with debt.
I wanted to. That was the whole truth.
