Page 16 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

I kissed him back, my hands finding the front of his shirt. His tongue parted my lips and gained entrance into my mouth, deepening the kiss that started off careful.

Still, I didn’t pull away.

He walked me backward toward the couch without breaking the kiss, his hands finding my waist, careful in a way that felt deliberate rather than hesitant, like he was reading every small reaction I gave him and adjusting accordingly. Nothing about the last two years of watching wealthy, careless men move through my life had prepared me for the intensity of someone paying this much attention to me.

His mouth moved from mine to my jaw, unhurried. I felt something unravel low in my stomach that I hadn’t let myself feel in longer than I wanted to admit. His hands were gentle as they moved from my face to my neck and my arms. The patience with which he touched me contradicted everything I thought I knew about him.

His eyes locked on mine as his fingers moved from my waist to the hem of my blouse. My breath hitched in anticipation as the heat in his eyes told me what he was planning to do. When his fingers hooked into the waistband of my joggers and went lower, he swallowed my gasp in a kiss. I let him, some instinct older than fear taking over entirely.

His fingers were cool against my pussy, but the temperature difference wasn’t what made the hairs on my skin stand on end. He rubbed my clit slowly, in circles, like that was all he wanted to do. His lips left mine, but his eyes didn’t as he slid a finger into me, making my hips buck off the chair. His other hand held me down as he added another finger. My chest heaved, and I sucked in my lower lip.

When he started moving his fingers, I pulled him close, claiming his lips like they were a lifeline. His fingers moved faster even as he dominated the kiss, his free hand cradling the side of my face. My hands were all over his body, from his back to his shoulders, each movement of his fingers driving me to a higher state of pleasure and hunger at the same time.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I let myself want something without immediately talking myself out of it.

I felt him lose some of his usual composure too, his breathing rough against my ear as we broke apart for air, his hands slightly less steady than before, like my responses were affecting him more than he’d expected them to. There was something in the way I touched him back, tentative and trusting all at once, that seemed to catch him off guard.

I felt everything in my body tighten and quake as ecstasy bloomed and exploded all at once. He continued moving his fingers as warmth flooded my pussy and my breath came in gulps.

Then, as his hand moved further and his mouth found mine again, something in me went suddenly nervous, a different kind of fear rising up underneath the desire.

“Wait.” My voice came out shakier than I wanted it to. “Dmitri, wait.”

He stopped immediately, pulling back to look at me, concern replacing the heat in his expression. “What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”

“No, it’s not that.” I felt my face go hot, the words sticking in my throat even though I’d already decided he needed to know. “I need to tell you something, and I’m scared of how it’s going to sound.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve never done this before. Any of it. I’m a virgin.”

“What?” he asked, his voice quiet.

I nodded in affirmation.

He completely froze.

For a second, I genuinely thought he might laugh, that he might think I was joking given everything about the world he lived in. But he didn’t laugh.

He looked at me instead, and the vulnerability I hadn’t shown anyone in years seemed to slow him down considerably.

“Okay,” he said quietly.

“I grew up in a religious household. They would have been horrified at half of what’s already happened between us tonight. And beyond that, I just never met anyone I trusted enough. I couldn’t separate it from something deeper. I still can’t.”

I braced myself for disappointment when he didn’t say anything for a while. Instead, something in his expression went unexpectedly tender.

He leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to my forehead, his hand coming up to cradle the side of my face gently. “We can wait,” he said. “Until we’re married.”

In that moment, the word ‘married’ didn’t sound like a bomb. The gentleness he exuded caught me completely off guard, more than anything else that had happened between us tonight. I’d expected recklessness from Dmitri Golovin, expected a man who took what he wanted without much thought for what anyone else needed. Instead, here he was, offering restraint I hadn’t known he possessed, patience that revealed something underneath all that careless charm I’d never once given him credit for.

He moved beside me on the couch, wordlessly pulling me into him. We stayed there a long while afterward, tangled together on the couch, my head resting against his chest while his fingers traced slow patterns along my arm.

“You’re not disappointed?” I asked, needing to hear it out loud even though his actions had already answered the question clearly enough.

“Why would I be disappointed?”

“I don’t know. It feels like the kind of thing men like you usually feel about women like me.”