Page 43 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

She stills the second she sees me, tipping a look over her shoulder, as if she sensed me in the room. Fuck. I can’t even think about that without a hot buzz spreading across my body.

“What,” she says, all her eloquence shot to hell.

I grin down at her. “Good afternoon.”

“What—what are you doing here?” she forces out, like her shock is a lump in her throat. She looks overwhelmed. No matter what point on the spectrum of emotions she’s at, she manages to be fascinating. A sight worth never looking away from, if there ever was one.

“I was curious about your world,” I answer honestly.

I’ve learned that pushing or rushing her won’t achieve anything; I’ve learned, watching her process my presence here. Until finally, she says, “You realize you’re likely going to be bored out of your mind, right?”

I toss her a confident wink. “I’ll take that bet.”

I’d figured the wink would earn me a whack with the rolled-up catalog—but I still don’t step out of the way. Why would I, when it’s much more gratifying to use the contact to steal a hold around her wrist and tuck her hand into mine.

For as many ways as I’ve been buried to the hilt inside her pussy by now, one would assume there would be no novelty left to such little actions. They would assume wrong. If my heart rate is prone to soaring when I get her bare skin beneath my hands, it also stammers as she relaxes her hand into my hold, lacing her fingers through mine, encouraging it.

It would be fucking embarrassing if it weren’t so busy being too much else. But, fortunately or not, I’ve got no room for that juvenile sentiment. My attention is otherwise occupied by how different Darya is here, in her element. If there’s anything to be embarrassed about, it’s belittling her to being nothing more than a party planner. What I’d mistaken for her performing Bratva princess at galas is just an extension of her personality. But there’s no bravado with her. She preens and pivots as she’d like, because she can back it up.

Everywhere she goes in this building, she is known. She is perceived with respect. And it has, unlike with her brothers and me, nothing to do with her last name. It has everything to do with her.

And she doesn’t reduce me to a shadow as she basks in that spotlight.

She explains things to me without being asked to, sensing where I’d be lost. She enjoys sharing her thoughts on people and pieces alike. Meanwhile, I enjoy her passion and the sweet, husky timbre of her voice, often fanning breath just beneath my ear as she whispers secret intel to me.

To think, I’ve had her in ways that would make a lesser man feel unsteady. Yet it’s this—the warm press of her palm against mine, in a room full of her peers, where I’m only an extension of her, and she’s inviting me to stay and be that—that feels more jarringly intimate than anything else we’ve shared thus far.

It makes me hungry to keep that thriving, delighted glint in her eyes every time they land on me anew. That’s why I pay such close attention—and why, when a still life painting comes up next on the auction block, I can tell from the look on her face that this is what she came for. Maybe not this exact piece, but the feeling it inspires in her.

While I may not get the nuances of the art world, I understand desire thoroughly. It is Darya’s desire to have this piece, to the point where her paddle goes up again and again—and it is my desire for her to have whatever her heart fucking desires.

I try to stay out of it. I watch her go back and forth with a man two rows behind us, hiking the price for the piece ludicrously high, until her hand is a white-knuckled fist around her paddle. Her face remains carefully neutral. She turns her face away from the piece.

When I’d been handed a paddle, I’d questioned why I’d need it. Auctions are hardly my style. But here I am, raising it, countering back and forth, tuning out the fierce dig of her nails into my forearm and glowering at the man until he forfeits.

The gavel comes down on my side.

On hers.

Because they are the same thing.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Darya rasps, her voice twisted in disbelief. At the sum I’ve just tossed at a painting I feel nothing for, probably. She’s stunned as the lot number is recorded, and the room moves on to the next item.

Eventually, accepting it’s all she can say, I have to shrug. “A rare thing, that,” I quip.

When she says nothing, my gut twists wretchedly. I have to make myself look at her, to search for whatever words aren’t making it to her lips. What I find is—

Something so fucking open and undefended and devastating, like a window’s been thrown all the way wide in a room that’s been sealed shut for years. I have no name for it. Tenderness?

Whatever it is, it crawls into my chest, curling into a ball beneath my sternum. It is as warm as her head when she rests it against me.

The rest of the auction roars on around us.

Chapter 15 - Darya

We never go to bed together, technically speaking. But when I wake up, there he is—flat on his back and still as a damn corpse, save for the sturdy chest beneath my head, rising and falling as he snores softly into the crown of my head. I never feel myself moving in my sleep. Yet, when I awaken, it’s with my body draped across his body like a blanket.

Each day this week, I’ve gotten more and more on top of him than I am on the mattress. It’s distressing. The only small mercy is that he goes to bed later than I and, thus, wakes up after me. He’ll jolt upright soon enough, but it gives me a chance to scramble back to my side of the bed.