Page 103 of Captured By the Pakhan

"All right."

"I'm pregnant."

And I watch Ilya Yaroslav receive information he has been carrying for several days as though it has just been handed to him.

He does it perfectly. That's the thing. His face does exactly what a man's face does — the calmness, then the disbelief, then something breaking open behind the eyes — and it is completely genuine, because none of it is about the fact and all of it is about me telling him.

"Say it again."

"I'm pregnant. About nine weeks. It's — "my voice goes to a near whisper "— Ilya, they told me I couldn't. Two doctors told me I couldn't, and I've been walking around with that since I was twenty-three, and I sat on the floor of that gas restroom on Florida Avenue and⁠—"

He kisses me.

He gets both hands into my hair and pulls me across the seat and kisses me like a man coming up out of water, and I make a noise into his mouth that has three months in it.

"Careful — your side⁠—"

"My side can go to hell."

"You've got a hole in you⁠—"

"Raven," he says, against my mouth, "I have been standing in car parks for days."

And that's the end of the conversation.

He gets me across his lap, which isn't sensible for either of us, and his hands are under the courthouse skirt and up the backs of my thighs, and there isn't anything patient about him at all — no feather, no counting, no unbearable stillness. This is a man who has been holding something in both hands for days and has just been given permission to put it down.

"The divider," I get out.

"Is up."

"Grigor—"

"Has been told."

I get his belt open, and he says something in Russian into my throat. I stop caring about Grigor, the courthouse eleven blocks behind us, and the fact that I have been legally a person again for approximately forty minutes.

He does it with his mouth first, with my back against the door and one of my heels somewhere near the ceiling, and I have my hand over my own face because the divider isn't soundproof and I am not going to be able to look Grigor in the eye for a year.

Ilya takes his time despite the fact that neither of us has much patience right now. His mouth moves over the soft skin between my thighs, slowly. Hooking one hand around my hip to keep me exactly where he wants me while the other braces my leg high against the seat.

Every deliberate pass of his tongue pulls another moan from me, and I bite down agains the heel of my hand to try to keep quiet. Uselessly, I might add. By the time my fingers find his hair I am shaking hard enough that he tightens his grip in response.

He hold me there until I come apart against his mouth, the satisfied chuckle he gives in response is almost insufferable.

Then I get him down onto the seat and take my turn, and the sound he makes is one I intend to remember for the rest of my life, and about four minutes in his hand comes into my hair and holds — not pushing, just holding — and he says my name once, wrecked, like a man losing an argument.

Afterward we are an absolute disgrace.

I am sideways across the back seat with my head on his thigh and my hair destroyed and one shoe somewhere near the divider, and he has a hand flat on my stomach, low, and has had it there for about eleven minutes without saying a word about it.

"He'll be pleased," I say.

"He will be insufferable."

"He's going to want to name it."

"He is going to want to name it after a boat," Ilya says, with genuine alarm, "he has been reading about the Cutty Sark for a fortnight⁠—"