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“I got your message loud and clear, Bree.” He pushed the top paper aside. “You don’t want anything from me. You can’t even bear to look at me—”
As he reached, unseeing, for Kasimir’s contract, Bree suddenly knew.
She couldn’t let him sign it. She couldn’t betray him.
She couldn’t.
With a choked gasp, Bree flung herself across his study and blocked him the only way she knew how. Shoving his chair back, she threw her leg over him, straddling him, separating him physically from his desk. Tangling her hands in his hair, pressing her body against his, she leaned forward and kissed him.
At first he froze. For one dreadful instant she thought he would push her away. Then a sound like a low sigh came from the back of his throat, and his powerful arms wrapped around her. His lips melted roughly against hers.
The pen in his hand dropped to the floor. The pile of papers on his desk was forgotten.
Holding her against his chest, Vladimir rose and, in a savage movement, swept the papers off his desk. Pressing her back against the polished oak, he looked down at her with eyes so full of emotion that her heart caught in her throat.
“Now, Bree,” he said hoarsely, as he lowered his mouth to hers. “I need you now.”
CHAPTER TEN
VLADIMIR had never felt such fire.
Bree had never initiated lovemaking before. The heat of her passion, in contrast to her earlier ice, burned through his body, incinerating his soul. Moments before, he’d felt dark and angry, rebuffed in all his efforts to show he cared, to make her birthday special, and to compensate for those three little words he could not say.
But now, as they desperately ripped off each other’s clothes on his desk, as they kissed and suckled and licked, he felt her soft body move and sway beneath him, pulling him deeper, deeper. And suddenly those same unthinkable, forbidden three words rose in his heart, like sunlight bursting through a dark cloud.
Could he…? Did he…?
Bree moved, rolling him beneath her on the desk. Her silken thighs wrapped around his hips. He looked up at her expressive face, at her breasts swaying like music. A glowing sunset through the study’s window washed her pale shoulders red, the color of a ruby.
The color of his heart.
With a gasp, she impaled herself upon him, pulling him deep inside her. As he filled her completely, for the first time in ten years everything was clear.
He loved her.
He’d been afraid to see it. He’d tried to deny it, to ignore it. He’d buried himself in work, in sex, in dangerous sports. But he could not deny it any longer.
He loved her. The truth was he’d given her his heart long ago. When he thought she’d betrayed him, his heart had simply frozen, like an arctic sea. But from the moment he’d seen her again, across the poker table at the Hale Ka’nani, his heart had begun to thaw. Feeling the sting of her cold rejection today had taught him that he still felt pain. He still had a beating heart.
A heart that loved her.
Whatever the cost. Whatever the risk.
His love for her was absolute. He could not change it.
He wanted to go back in time and be the generous, trusting man he’d once been. He wanted to be the man who deserved Breanna Dalton.
When she gasped with pleasure, he tilted back his head and the first hoarse cry escaped his throat. Their joy built together, until he could no longer tell where his voice ended and hers began.
With a final cry, she collapsed in his arms. He held her tightly, both of them still sprawled on his desk. As he stroked her naked back, his heart pounded in his chest. He wanted to blurt out the words. But words were cheap. He would show her, the only way he knew how. He would do what terrified him most.
“I’m letting you go, Breanna,” he said quietly. “I’m setting you free.”
For a moment, he thought she hadn’t heard. Then she lifted her head to look into his eyes. He’d thought she would be happy. Instead, she looked stricken, almost gutted.
Vladimir frowned.
“Don’t you understand?” Reaching up, he caressed her cheek, tucking wild tendrils of sweaty blond hair behind her ear. “You’re no longer my property. You’re free.”
