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It suddenly feels too easy that I’ve got everything I ever wanted. What if having sex with her now is what undoes everything? If I’m too rough with her, Zenya could lose the baby and she’ll never be able to look at me ever again.
I feel Zenya’s hand on my cheek and she draws my gaze up to hers. “You look like you’re getting in your own head. This isn’t like you.”
It’s not. I rarely think about the consequences of anything, but I’ve never had this much to lose before. “What if I hurt the baby?”
Her eyebrows lift in surprise. “By us having sex? I don’t think it works like that.”
No, it probably doesn’t, but there’s an ominous feeling in my gut and it’s paralyzing me. “Don’t you think we’ve had it too easy and something’s going to blow up in our faces?”
Zenya’s mouth falls open and then she gives me a severe look. “Kristian Belyaev, we spent the last two years being separated and miserable every second of it, and you think we’ve had it easy? Are youcrazy?”
I laugh and shake my head. She’s got a point there. “I’m just so stupidly happy right now, and I don’t know if I deserve it.”
Zenya wraps her arms around my neck and draws me down for a kiss. “I think you do. I think you deserve all the happiness that this baby and I can give you and more. Does anyone else’s opinion matter to you?”
No, it fucking doesn’t.
I push her thighs up to her chest, line myself up at her entrance and sink into her. She gasps and her head tips back, and I drink in the long, lovely line of her throat, and I can’t stop smiling the whole time I fuck her because she’s mine now. Mine, and we don’t have to hide it anymore. My ring is on her finger and my baby is in her belly and soon the whole world is going to know that Zenya Belyaev belongs to me.
I cover her mouth with my hand as we both climax, because suddenly she’s the one who’s forgotten we need to be quiet and I have to remind her.
* * *
Over the following weeks,I become addicted to touching Zenya. I already enjoyed putting my hands on my woman, but now not a minute goes by in her company that I’m not caressing her cheek, her lower back, her stomach.
Every morning when I wake up with Zenya or pick her up in my car, the first thing I do is get my lips on her mouth and my hands on her belly. I swear that when she’s six weeks pregnant, I can feel the tiniest, tiniest of bumps.
Zenya’s living at home at the Belyaev mansion, and I did briefly entertain the idea that she would move in with me, but I quickly discarded it. Zenya needs to be with her family, now and after Troian passes, so we’ve decided that after we’re married, I’ll move in with all of them.
With Troian’s permission, we’ve asked her brothers and sisters if we can become their legal guardians in the future, and they’ve all agreed. I think Eleanor found that difficult to take as she’s so close to Chessa’s children, but it would hurt them all so much to be separated from each other. Legally, they’re all Troian’s children, which makes them mine and Zenya’s responsibility after he’s gone as we’re his next of kin.
Eleanor doesn’t say anything, but Zenya sensed her grief and reluctance and hurried to assure Eleanor that she can be part of the children’s lives as much as she has always been.
By Zenya’s tenth week of pregnancy, we’ve made all the wedding plans. We’re to be married in two weeks’ time, just after her twelve-week scan.
Troian’s health hasn’t deteriorated any further, and I hope for his sake and Zenya’s that he’ll be able to walk her down the aisle as planned. We’ve moved his bedroom into the downstairs study because he can’t manage the stairs any longer, but he can still walk without getting too out of breath.
I drop Zenya off at the Silo one morning, and Mikhail eyes me from the doorway before following me out to my car.
“Look at you, Mr. Family Man,” he says, a taunting smile on his lips. “What happened to the Kristian who told me,This will all be mine, the city, the daughter, the power?”
I push my sunglasses over my eyes and grin at him. “Itisall mine. Everything I wanted. I’ve just reordered my priorities a little.”
“No one’s calling youPakhan,” he points out. “Are you going to be all right with that for the rest of your life?”
“Zenya’s dropped theuncleand just calls me Kristian. Soon I’ll be called daddy. That’s more than enough to be getting on with. Watching the assholes in this city bend their knee to my woman? That’s something money can’t buy.”
Mikhail stares at me in shock. “Fuck, you really do love her.”
“I really do.” I pat his cheek and then turn away and get into my car.
There’s a smile on my face as I head to my own house. Ambition has been a big driving force in my life, but I don’t need to be leading the Belyaevs to feel like a man. Zenya makes me feel like a man every day when she allows me to love and protect her.
Nothing, it seems, can break my happy bubble. I park in my driveway and get out of my car and stretch my arms overhead.
I sense movement behind me and see a flicker out of the corner of my eye.
Pain explodes on the right side of my skull. I’ve been hit with something hard and heavy.
