Page 68 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“How?” she asks, voice precarious.

“You saved my heart from what I thought was its fate. And for it, it now belongs to you,” I say. “Every part of me belongs to you. If you’ll still have me.”

She looks at me with something that might be the beginning of a smile. That smile has always been her weapon. “I’m not saying it back,” she says conversationally. “Not in response to an apology. Even if it’s a good apology. That I accept.”

“Darya—”

“You’ll have to earn it.”

I look at her. At this woman who walked down an aisle toward me like she owned every inch of the ground beneath her feet, who dismantled my house and rebuilt it into something that felt like a place people actually lived, who sat across from me in my library and demanded I light a fire for her, who has never in her life given me a single thing I didn’t work for.

“All right,” I say.

I can feel her eyes on me, can tell her smile sprawls wider, and I get out of the car and round it, taking it all in as I round the hood of it. It’s an outright grin when I open her door and hold a hand out to her—a hand she slips hers into without hesitation.

She comes easily when I pull her into the backseat.

The press of her lips molding against mine is the best homecoming. I taste the salt of our tears in our kiss, until it’s gone, until all that remains is sweet relief. A sweetness that fractures when she turns whining, her hips rolling into mine, in the universal signal for Get a move on.

I refuse to heed it.

She’s made me spend all these days missing her. I’m going to take my fucking time. And I don’t give a shit if we’re in the backseat of my car.

“Hurry up,” she mutters, and it earns her a slap to the ass that just makes her squirm happily against me.

“You know,” I say, voice muffled as I let Darya pull my sweater and the shirt beneath it over my head, “women usually enjoy a little foreplay.”

It’s endlessly entertaining, feeling her frown against my mouth. I should see it coming when hers tapers lower, before she sinks her teeth into the side of my neck until her point is made. But I suppose I’m too busy enjoying the way she marks her territory. I belong to you. Every part of me.

Her breath hitches over the look on my face, and I can barely give her a chance to get her coat all the way off before I claim her mouth again. I can’t believe I ever went without kissing Darya, can’t believe I made it through forty-four years without knowing her kiss, and I can’t believe I almost lost her kisses forever once I’d had them. Can’t believe there could be a world where I let myself go without them for the rest of my life.

Darya is just as desperate, judging by her gasping moans when I reposition our bodies and lay her out on the seat, bearing the full length of my body down on her, wasting no time getting my hands on the swell of her ass when her leg wraps around me and presses up into me.

We are making up for lost time. I have to force my hands to slow down, working my way down the buttons holding together the silken shirt of her pajama set instead of ripping them open like a caveman. My body doesn’t fit in this space, but I’ll bunch and contort whichever way I must, if it means I get to take her nipple into my mouth and reclaim the freckles smattered over her body with my tongue.

I claim her until she’s writhing from it.

“Anton,” Darya pants, and I nip at her hipbone, nuzzling my cheek against her belly, where she’s growing our child. “Anton, please,” she whimpers, her hips snapping up again. I can feel the dampness at the V of her shorts, and I palm her pussy through the fabric. I hiss a breath through my teeth. But I let her hands twist in my hair and pull me back up her body, just so I can capture her mouth in a careful kiss. A kiss that’s slow and thorough, and leaves her looking utterly starry-eyed when I rear back.

“I fucking love you,” I say. “So fucking much.”

Darya lifts a hand to my face, her thumb running beneath my eye. “I know you do,” she says, her voice low and just a little bit broken. I turn my face into her touch and graze my teeth over the heel of her hand. My hips buck against her, giving her the friction her pelvis pursues so needily.

It isn’t enough, not for her, and not for me.

I’m almost surprised she tolerates it for as long as she does before her hands start impatiently fumbling with my belt, then the button of my trousers. I’m quick to pull down her shorts, just in time to sigh through a hiccup of pleasure when her fingers finally wrap around me, hot and sure. Oh, God.

My head falls against the crook of her neck with a groan.

I’d been so lost in having her beneath my hands again that my own body had become an afterthought. My cock makes up for it now, leaking over her fist. A fire blazes low in my belly, and every time I grind down against her simply stokes it. Makes it hotter. Burns me alive.

“Fuck, Darya.”

She’s fucking relentless, her strokes unceasing, even as she notches my tip at her entrance. Her cunt is already so slick, so hot, so fucking ready for me. I try to slide in slowly—and her ankles lock behind my back and viciously drag me all the way home. Like she didn’t hit the nail into her own coffin, she cries out at the fullness; the sound nearly drowned out by my own moan.

I mouth along her collarbone. “I’ve got you,” I swear, pulling an arm back to circle at her clit, rubbing her until she’s squirming, her muscles tremoring with need.

“Fuck me,” Darya says, leaning up on her elbows to suck at my lower lip. She fucking bites down on it, pulling another groan from me, before she lets it go. “Now, baby. Please.”