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He shrugged. “Intercept is such a clinical word. I prefer liberated. Makes me sound like a hero.”

I walked around the couch, blocking the light until my shadow cut across him.

“Well?” He finally glanced up over the ledger’s edge. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me? It was a clean operation. Efficient. Elegant. If I weren’t so talented, someone might even think I had inside information about your security.”

I clenched my jaw. Hard.

“You stole from me.”

He grinned—full teeth—infuriating. “Publicly. For realism.”

“Realism,” I echoed, voice flat.

“Yes. God forbid the underworld sees us getting soft.” He lifted a brow. “Can’t have them thinking the mighty Zhukovsky bends over for me.”

My control slipped—just a fraction—but enough for my pulse to pound in my throat. It had been two weeks. Two damn weeks since I’d touched him. Two weeks without his lips on mine, without his laugh in my ear, without his warmth pressed along my body. I hated how much I felt the absence of him, like something essential had been carved out of me and replaced with a slow, hungry burn.

“You’d rather risk war than damage my reputation? You know if I don’t retaliate, my men will think me weak. The last time, I let you get away with kidnapping me for four hours. My men still wonder why I came back in one piece. That took some explaining.”

“Kidnapping?” A slow, wicked grin stretched his lips, stealing my breath. Yuriy dragged two fingers up the armrest, casual, taunting. “I guess it could constitute that when you were tied up, gagged, and whipped until you bled.” He gasped theatrically and shook his head. “But that’s not right. I don’t recall you complaining once or telling me no. Not when I fucked your mouth until you almost passed out. Not when I shoved your face into the pillow and fucked you raw. Not when you clawed my back bloody because you didn’t want me to pull out. Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t your exact words for me to ‘breed your pussy so deep you’d take some of me home with you’?”

My breath hitched.

His grin widened, lazy and lethal. “And those bruises I gave you helped. Didn’t it? Your men thought they were from us fighting.” He clicked his tongue. “You and I know damn well how they came about.”

“Yuriy—”

“No, no.” He leaned forward, eyes heated. “You remember when I wanted to let you go, but you begged me not yet? That you wanted me one more time? You came so hard that second time you passed out. Remember how hot you found it that I was still fucking you when you came to?”

My pulse hammered painfully under my skin, and my cock tightened, remembering every second of those four hours Yuriy had me pinned and begging. Before that, we hadn’t seen each other for six weeks, and I’d been desperate for a taste of him. The kidnapping had been his idea.

“You think this is a game,” I said. “But I’m afraid one day you’ll go too far, and my men will hurt you.”

“Not a game.” He stretched his arms across the couch like he was posing for a magazine cover. “But I think this is foreplay. You’re turned on, aren’t you? Because I know I fucking am.”

Yuriy’s smirk deepened, challenging, taunting, daring me to claim what was already mine. He knew exactly what he was doing, what every word, every filthy memory, every deliberate stretch of his body did to me.

I braced a hand on the arm of the couch and swung a knee over him, lowering myself onto his lap with slow, punishing precision. His breath hitched—barely, but I caught it. Felt it. The bastard loved being pinned just as much as he loved pinning me. For a strict top, he sure loved me being on top.

“Foreplay?” I slid my palms up the front of his shirt until they hooked over his shoulders. “Is that what this is?”

His gaze dropped straight to where I straddled him, where my cock, already hard, pressed against underwear.

“Ah, Stanislav,” he said, voice turning silk. “You missed me?”

I crushed my mouth to his in response. The kiss wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t meant to be. It was two weeks of deprivation, combusting all at once—the bruised-soft sounds he made when my teeth grazed his lower lip, the fist he knotted in the back of my shirt, dragging me closer, the way his hips jerked up, blindly seeking friction.

I groaned into him, the sound torn straight from my chest, raw and hungry. God, his mouth. I could gladly lose shipments to him over a kiss like that.

He tasted like mint and trouble.

And mine.

Always mine.

Yuriy’s hands moved fast, impatient. He tugged my shirt free from my waistband, fingers diving underneath to squeeze the curve of my ass, hard enough to make heat flash up my spine. I rocked into him, slow at first, then harder when he bit back a gasp. His cock throbbed against mine through our clothes, both of us rutting like we’d die if we stopped.

“Fuck,” he whispered against my lips, breath shaking. “I needed this. Needed you. It’s been almost a year since we’ve been together, and I still can’t keep my fucking hands to myself around you.”