I stared at him. “What?”
He pulled me in, and his lips met mine with a force that emptied my lungs. I tried to step back on instinct, but his grip on my waist held the argument closed. He tasted like whiskey and cigarettes. I couldn’t kiss back, couldn’t organize my mouth into anything intentional, not with the wound at his shoulder and the bullet on the sink still sitting at the edge of my vision.
He pulled back a fraction. “Kiss me,” he said lowly, a command wearing the clothes of a request. “Kiss me before I pass out.”
He found my mouth again, and this time the kiss moved slowly with a patience that made no sense, and it undid me completely. His lips drew the breath from mine in measured increments, testing the edges of my resistance. When I finally stopped fighting it and moved my lips against his, the dynamic shifted without warning. He took the opening entirely, his tongue sliding inside my mouth and meeting mine. The kind of kiss that dismantles a person from the inside out.
A sound left me.
My knees softened, and he held me tighter, which was the only reason I was still standing. The fear had gone nowhere; it ran underneath everything. But the kiss ran over it, through it, and somewhere in the middle of that, I lost the thread of where one ended, and the other began. He kissed me with complete and total certainty, as though my mouth was somewhere he always intended to arrive.
When he finally pulled back, the air between us was charged.
He exhaled, holding me in place. “We’re doing that again.” He declared and proved it in the same motion.
His lips returned to mine, and he began walking me backward with a momentum that suggested the injury was either forgotten or irrelevant. I kissed him back, my hands moving up his stomach, feeling the muscle tighten beneath my palms. My butt met the edge of the counter, and I gasped into his mouth, but he didn’t stop kissing me.
We kissed as if he had decided nothing else existed, thorough and consuming, working through me from the inside out until my hands moved purely on instinct. I tried to hold on to him because the floor had stopped feeling reliable. My fingers curled on his chest and found warmth, then wetness, and the texture registered half a second before my brain did.
Blood. I broke the kiss immediately.
My hands hung between us, slick with his blood, and the room rushed back in around me. I was leaning against the sink that had a towel with his blood.
I looked up at him, and he was looking at my mouth.
“Your wound,” I said, the words coming out shaky. I swallowed. “Dmitri.”
“Wife,” he answered, shifting his gaze to mine, and the look in his eyes stopped me. He looked as if he were balanced on a very thin line between consciousness and unconsciousness. Though with how he kissed me, I couldn’t be wrong if I said it was desire in his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-five
Dmitri Konstantinov
A cold touch on myforehead dragged me out of sleep, and my hand moved on instinct. I looked up to find Inna standing over me, and the coldness was a cloth pressed to my skin. I exhaled, releasing her hand. She apparently appointed herself to a position nobody advertised.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
She let the cloth rest on my forehead and sat back in the chair she had brought closer to the bed. “You were burning.”
Her eyes held too much sleep, her brows drawn together as though she were responsible for keeping me alive. It was almost charming and worth correcting.
Gunshot wounds were familiar territory. They were the cost of plans that didn’t go well, and my body understood the terms. A few solid hours of sleep would settle it. Inna, however, was committed to ruining those hours by performing emergency nursing with a basin of water and a cloth. She was also furious at me for not doing whatever she suggested earlier.
She called me a robot because I declined her repeated requeststo go to a hospital.
I let her press the cloth and stared at her lips instead.
Those soft lips were obedient. The way her tongue moved with mine with a particular earnestness, like she was learning a language she already half knew. I could still feel them on mine.
She continued to surprise me. At first, I underestimated her hair, thinking it couldn’t fill my fist, but our moment in the closet proved me wrong. I assumed the mouth would be a disaster, and it wasn’t. The inexperience was visible for only a few seconds before she caught up. What I hadn’t yet resolved was how she would feel when I fucked her, how she would sound, and how she would look at me while I thrust my cock in her pussy.
In my experience, women were not complicated. Sex was direct. I took their bodies and moved forward. But Inna turned me into a man I didn’t recognize, a man exploring smaller things, staying in the earlier chapters because the last one would end the story.
“Normal people go to the hospital.” She caught my attention. She must have noticed I was staring and started that silly argument again.
If she knew the number of men I had murdered, she wouldn’t mention hospitals, let alone police. She believed I was attacked. It was a reasonable conclusion and a wrong one.
Iattacked.
