Page 26 of Pay the Piper

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”

“The kid that blew past me couldn’t have been more than four years old! I swear I heard him laughing at me as he went by. When Teddy told me the only event that they couldn’t reschedule to give us the arena to ourselves was a kid’s birthday party, I didn’t expect to be humiliated, or I would have put up more of a fight!”

Abby’s laughter is infectious, and I can’t help but join in her chuckle as we change out of our skates. It’s new territory for me to pursue someone, but after taking the guys’ advice, I’m more certain than ever of my path. Especially after our impromptu evening together at her condo. I almost feel bad for adding myself to her security system without her knowledge. I definitely feel bad about scaring her and making her feel unsafe in her home. Maybe it was too soon to ask her to move in, even if she thought it was a joke. But if this could be my future…

“He was laughing because he was having fun, not laughing at you. I don’t think anyone would laugh at you. You’re too…”

She looks up, realizing that between slipping on her sneakers and pulling her hair into a loose bun, curls spilling out to frame her face, she’s migrated. Now, instead of sitting beside me on the bench in our favorite quiet corner of the rink, she’s standing between my outstretched legs. My lesnaya is a spritely thing, and I make no effort to hide my gaze as I widen my thighs to allow her to step even closer.

She’s small enough to envelop. To hide from the world, like a dragon over his treasure.

Her pulse is elevated, skittering under the skin of her neck faster now than at the most strenuous point of our workout. The green eyes I see when I sleep at night twinkle, though, and I’m looking forward to coaxing out more of her playfulness. She’s the most intoxicating mixture of shyness and confidence I’ve ever encountered. It’s unimaginable that someone hasn’t snapped her up, but that’s the world’s loss and my gain.

“I’m too…what, lesnaya?”

Scary? Scarred? Monstrous?

As still as a statue, she inevitably feels the goose bumps that pepper my skin at her touch. She’s close enough now that her outer thighs brush my inner, and I fight the urge to spring from my seat and take her to the ground. With all my limbs wrapped around her, she’d be trapped, safe, with nowhere to go.

For now, other than the traitorous relic of my ancient fight-or-flight system alerting her to the effect she has on me, I stay frozen. Her touch is light, teasing, but probing, as if she wants information. As if she cares to know why my knuckles are crisscrossed with white, the scar tissue spanning my life from childhood street fights to the not-so-distant past when I was still taking my frustrations out on men using my hands.

Up and across the back of my hand now, fingers fluttering across the faded, amateurish ram tattoo that Mila agreed to do just before we left Russia. It was important to me, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, to mark myself as her family before we did what we had to do and fled.

“What if you need to be a CEO one day, moya sila?” she’d asked. “Don’t you want to be able to hide everything under a suit and tie?”

“I’ll wear a suit and tie if you demand it, moya tsaritsa. But if anything, you can be a CEO, and I can be your assistant, and nobody cares if an assistant has ink.”

We knew, even then, that there was no reason to truly care about decorating my hands. They were destined to be coated in the blood of my enemies more often than not, and tattoos don’t offend dead men.

Back down, Abby trails across the hairs of my knuckles again, lightly tracing the Cyrillic script on each of my fingers before turning her attention to my right hand to see how it compares. Similar scars, complementary lettering across my fingers, but with an open space on the fourth finger. She doesn’t realize it now, because for her traditions, it’s on the wrong hand…but it’s blank for a stupid, romantic reason that’s been buried within me since these were done twenty years ago.

With characteristic tenderness, she flips my hand to explore my calluses. The heel of my palm is thicker where the grip of my gun rests, and the bases of my fingers are hardened but smoother from years of hoisting dumbbells. In the center of my palm, a smoky swirl begins, and she uses this as her North Star, following it up and around my wrist and forearm.

Her exploration is unhurried, and I know she’s seen my inked arms before, but never this close and with unfettered access. Much of my work won’t mean anything to her—either in a language she can’t understand or in representing overcoming horrors she can’t imagine. I’m sure she’ll ask, one day, what each means, and I’ll tell her half-truths about many. My green-eyed girl, my lesnaya, doesn’t need to know the depths of depravity that exist in the universe.

If I ever had any hope of hiding my body’s reaction to her ministrations, it’s out the window as soon as she runs a single thumb across my brow, following the craggy scar at its end down my cheek and into my short beard. Her touch was electric on my hands and arms, but on my face, it’s incendiary. If she feels my erection, hard and pulsing down the leg of my sweatpants, she doesn’t react.

Something about the furrow of her brow and the sharp, investigative light in her gaze makes me think she’s too enthralled by whatever she’s found in her examination to notice what’s pressing against her thigh. Just as she hesitates, deciding against brushing her thumb across my lip and pulling her hand back, I strike, gripping her wrist in my hand and holding her close.

“Too what, Abby?” My question is barely more than a whisper, voice low and ragged from the sweet torture she just put me through.

Now it’s my turn to feel her skin pebble under my touch, and her heartbeat is rapid under my thumb. Her wrist is so small in my grip that I consider measuring every inch of her by how readily my hands cradle her waist, thighs, neck…

The revving of a Zamboni engine startles Abby, and she steps back and out of my reach in an instant. To her credit, despite her blush, she recovers quickly, clearing her throat and moving back into safer territory.

“Make sure to stretch tonight. And try the Epsom salt bath, like I mentioned earlier. If you have a bathtub big enough.”

Grabbing her bag along with my own, I ignore the eye roll at my courtesy that’ll get her spanked sooner rather than later and hold the door open as we leave the rink.

“All of my furniture is custom, so I do indeed have a bathtub big enough to soak. I’ll give it a try.”

Placing her bag in the back seat, I open her door, and luckily for her ass, she doesn’t roll her eyes.

“Thank you,” she says with a soft smile. “And you did great today, really. We’ll build on this, and you’ll be dodging NHL players during warm-ups in no time.”

“I have the best coach around.”

She blushes at my wink, and I tap the top of her SUV before closing the door as she clicks her seat belt into place. I’m not parked far, and as my bike growls to life, I notice Abby hasn’t left yet.