Page 134 of Cruel Demands

“The threat has not been eliminated yet,” he says, looking up from the papers spread across his desk, his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. I didn’t realize that he wears glasses to read until I started living with him. It is yet another trait that makes Mikhail frustratingly sexy. “Orlov is in hiding.”

I shake my head and look away purposefully like he’s the sun in my eyes. “I need to go outside somewhere. Get out of the house. Just me and you.”

He tosses his pen down, leans back in his chair, and holds his hand out for me. “Where do you want to go?”

I let him wrap an arm around my waist and pull me between his legs. “I don’t know. Somewhere normal,” I say, my stomach fluttering.

“Define normal,” he mumbles, running his nose along the waistband of my shorts and swaying me.

I rest my hands on his shoulders and try to ignore that the fluttering has traveled between my legs. “I saw an advertisement for a flea market happening today. It’s once a month. That would be normal.”

Mikhail pulls the waistband of my pants down, just a little, and kisses my hip bone. My stomach dips like I took a drop on a roller coaster.

I swallow and sink my fingertips into his shoulder, ignoring the groan my fingernails elicit from him. “I want to go anywhere that doesn’t have men standing silently in corners.”

“The men would have to come with us,” he mumbles into my flesh, pushing my shirt up and kissing my stomach. His hand slides under the back of my bra strap so easily it could be mistaken for an accident until he pulls down one of my bra cups, freeing one of my breasts.

“But why? There will be so many people there,” I groan, trying to focus on my mission of getting us out of the house even as his hands make it so hard. It always goes back to those hands, so strong and big…

“They are not decorative, Taylor,” he says, his fingers curling around my nipple. I sigh at the gentle touch and gasp when he pinches it. “You truly want to spend the afternoon looking through other people’s discarded possessions when I could buy you anything you want? I know something we could do just the two of us that you always like.”

His word choice triggers a memory. I flash back to the last time I asked about leaving the house and going on a date. He told me that was a great idea and asked where I wanted to go while his hand made circles on my upper thigh, his pinky sneaking into my underwear…

“Oh my God!” I yelp, pulling back.

“What?” he asks me, his hands dropping dramatically to his knees like I have left them empty.

“You’re using sex to distract me from leaving!” I accuse, pulling my bra back up and over my chest.

“That is…someone who would do that would be a truly…messed up individual.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Yeah, we’re going. Get ready.”

I stride toward the door and Mikhail teases, “So I have an hour before you make it back to your room then.”

I whirl around and explode, “I’m getting better! Be downstairs and ready in ten minutes or I’m going without you and who knows if I’ll come back!”

The market is held beneath a long iron roof at the edge of the city, though the word roof is generous. It does very little against the wind, and the crowded stalls shudder against it.

It’s perfect.

It would be more perfect without the guards, but they at least hang back far enough that I can pretend that Mikhail and I are just a man and woman on a date, something I have never once been able to do.

I stop at a table covered in costume jewelry. Tarnished chains. Mismatched earrings. Brooches. I pick up a small ceramic pin of a red fox. Its paint is worn around the edges, and one of the ears is chipped. “This is cute,” I say.

Mikhail glances at it. “It is damaged.”

“It has character.”

The woman behind the stall names a price before I’ve asked. I reach for my wallet. Mikhail says something in Russian before I can open it. The woman blinks. She looks at the table, then at him, then back at the table. She begins gathering jewelry into a wooden box.

“No,” I say. Mikhail ignores me. “What are you doing?”

“Buying it.”

“The pin?”

“The stall.”