Page 91 of Forced By an Obsessive Bratva Stalker

“Rodion.”

He looked up.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.

He held my gaze for a long moment.

“I know,” he said, smiling.

Elena stirred softly in the bassinet. We both looked at her at the same time.

When I glanced back at him, he was already looking at me.

“I love you, Aria Tarasov,” he said, simply, as if it were the most natural thing he’d ever admitted.

I exhaled slowly, rising to my feet. “I love you too, Rodion Tarasov.” I pulled him to me. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“I’m afraid it already has.” He leaned, sealing my lips with a slow, passionate kiss.

“Careful now,” I whispered in his face. “You’re gonna make me wet.” I bit my lower lip. “And when I’m wet, we’ll end up making another baby.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what I want,” he teased, his nose brushing against mine.

“Well, I’m not spending another nine hours in a labor room any time soon,” I teased him, kissing his mouth and cheeks.

“It’s a good thing my pull-out game has improved.” His hands found the small of my back.

I laughed, throwing my head back. “I highly doubt that.”

“I can prove it to you,” he said, tucking my hair back behind my ear. “When you’re well rested and completely healed.”

“What a caring gentleman you are.”

I locked my arms around his neck and kissed his lips.

Epilogue – Rodion

The conflict ended quietly. The rest of the traitors were tracked down and neutralized.

The Bennett legacy—the damage Charles had seeded twenty years ago, the exposure it had created, the men who’d spent two decades quietly nursing grievances about it—was neutralized. Completely. Never to be raised again.

Aria had learned, somewhere across the months we’d spent inside the same walls, that some things were simply resolved rather than celebrated. I had learned, over the same months, that there were things worth resolving that I would never have considered worth the effort before her.

We were different teachers for each other. We made it work.

Elena was four months old and already running the estate.

Not literally. She couldn’t hold her head up without assistance and had strong opinions about the indignity of it.

But the staff moved differently around her. Spoke at lower volumes. Left wider paths through corridors they’d previously cut across without thought.

Yuri had reorganized the morning briefing schedule twice to accommodate feeding windows he claimed to have calculated himself, even though I had not asked him to. I appreciated it more than I told him.

She had her mother’s eyes. Blue and sharp and already watching everything with an attention that suggested she had opinions she would one day make everyone aware of.

She had, apparently, my capacity for stillness. She observed. She assessed. She determined the nature of things before reacting to them.

Aria said this would be a problem when she was older.