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"Because you love—"
Twelve
I froze.
My eyes flew open.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck!
How could I be so stupid!
His fingers tensed. A solemn pause. I could feel the tension and electricity in the air, and the deep pull of oxygen into his lungs like it was my own. Sixty seco
nds of dead silence passed. My heart was going five hundred miles an hour.
Trembling to the bone, I sat up and rolled his shirt down. "I have to go." My voice came out shaky, but I didn't care. "I have to go. I have to go. I need to go." I kept repeating.
I was definitely going to be sick now. I leaned on the side of the couch to push myself up, but I wasn’t quick enough.
Kova grabbed my hips. “Wait.”
My entire body shook. Goddamn it! I couldn’t believe I’d said what I did.
“No, I need to go.”
I pulled away and slipped out of his grasp, but he grabbed me again and pulled me toward him.
“Adrianna, please, just wait.”
The urgency in his voice did not go unnoticed. It was getting harder to breathe. My throat was closing up. How could I have been so stupid? Kova didn’t love me. He didn’t love anyone but himself.
“Why must you make me get rough with you?"
With one firm tug, he pulled back and I fell into his chest. A lungful of air gushed from me. Automatically I tried to spring forward and reach for the couch as leverage to pull myself away.
Embarrassment flooded me. I had to get out, but Kova refused and wrapped both his arms around me until I was securely in his lap. He enveloped me completely and brought his face to the curve of my neck.
My arms were stuck to my sides, my chest rising and falling fast. The warmth of his skin and the comfort of his body ignited my own. I struggled against his hold, but his thumbs began a soothing rub on my hip and shoulder while his fingers gripped me for dear life. The steady rhythm of Russian whispers against my ear calmed my rattled nerves.
"Kova…" My voice shook. "I didn’t mean what I said. I didn’t mean it."
"Ria." I squeezed my eyes shut.
"Please. I want to leave." And roll off a steep cliff and die.
But he surprised me. "Do you remember the first time I called you malysh?"
Flustered, my eyes bounced around the room. I swallowed as I thought back to that day shortly after I started training at World Cup.
"Yes." My answer came out in a broken whisper. "We were standing right outside your office in the hallway. You laid into me afterwards."
Kova tightened his embrace. "You had already begun to affect me." His breath tickled my skin. "I could not stop what I already felt for you and it fucked with my head every day, because every day my need for you grew. Calling you malysh felt so natural that it just slipped out. I was shocked and could not believe I’d said it, especially in public. I knew I had to fix it, even if you did not know the meaning, and what I said after came out harsher than I meant it to, but that was because I was so upset with myself for slipping."
"I’d always wondered why that happened, why you called me malysh, I mean."
