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I shook my head and blew out a breath. “I’ll go down there tomorrow afternoon and try to convince…what is her name again?”
“Irina.”
“Right, try to convince Irina that being the girl of a fucking creep like Yevgeny is a great opportunity.”
“Watch it, Ivan,” Mikhail said, but without much heat. He and Yev had grown up together and were more like brothers, but Mikhail was well aware of Yevgeny’s flaws.
“Right, I’ll handle it.”
“I know you will,” he said confidently.
I hung up and threw myself down on the couch. I briefly allowed my thoughts to float back the night’s activities, how fucking good it had felt to finally touch Emmy in all the ways I’d fantasized. Being inside her was more potent than I could have imagined and as addictive as I feared.
I already wanted her again. Couldn’t imagine not craving her every day. Breathing out a huge sigh, I tipped my head back and closed my eyes. I needed to make some fucking decisions, I mentally chided myself.I shook my head as soon as I had the thought and looked toward my bedroom.
I was afraid my decision had already been made.
Chapter 27
Emmy
I rolled over in Ivan's empty bed. I knew he’d been lying about going back to sleep. Not that I blamed him as I remember the wild, haunted look on his face when he woke from his nightmare.
Something had obviously happened to make him this way—hypervigilant, guarded, suspicious. Something that made him feel the need to restrain people who are in close physical proximity when he’d consider himself to be vulnerable.
A lot of his behavior fell into place.
Obviously, I knew something had happened to him, but once my own severely jolted nervous system calmed down, I was staggered with compassion at the severity of his reaction to a small touch. I desperately wanted to learn more about his past and what made him this way, but he didn’t appear even remotely receptive to that conversation.
I got out of bed and cringed, feeling the residue of last night’s events sticky on my body. I needed a shower before I did anything else.
I grabbed some clothes and toiletries from my suitcase and darted into the bathroom. I was relieved to get into the bathroom before Ivan saw me because I was certain I looked horrific. One glance in the mirror confirmed it—yikes.
My hair was knotted and tangled and the small amount of make-up I’d worn yesterday was smudged under my eyes. I inspected myself more closely, as if searching for some physical indication that I’d had sex for the first time, but other than my day-old make-up and ratty hair, I looked pretty much the same.
I quickly hopped in the shower, grateful for my own products as I saw Ivan had a single bar of soap and that was it. He didn’t even have a bottle of shampoo. What the hell?
I heard the door open and saw his outline on the other side of the frosted glass, warmth suffusing my body as I remembered that body against me last night.
“Hey, I have some things to do this morning and afternoon. I’m going to drop you off at school, but you can’t go back to your room, and you need to tell your roommate to stay out, too.”
How the hell was I going to do that? “What am I—?”
“Just tell her you found a mouse or roaches or something, and the school has blocked off the room until they can take care of it,” he replied smoothly.
“Oh, that’s good,” I said, rinsing the conditioner out of my hair. “She can ask her boyfriend to sleep at his house since she’s so eager to live with him.”
Ivan grunted, obviously not very interested in Delaney’s boyfriend drama.
“I also have something to do this afternoon, too, so I’m going to send someone to pick you up after your class.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I’m meeting Hannah and she’ll probably have Nikolai with her, so I’ll be fine.”
He grunted again, but it sounded more like a grunt of appreciation. This was where I was—dissecting the emotional nuance of Ivan’s grunting.
“Can you hand me a towel?” I asked, realizing I didn’t grab one in my mad dash in here and had no idea where he kept them. Knowing him, he probably only had one.
Ivan suddenly slid the shower door open, holding a towel just out of my reach, his eyes hotly raking over my dripping wet body, watching various drops of water slide down my skin. I couldn’t help but return the favor as my gaze roamed over the hard planes of his body, devouring the sight of hard muscle and inked flesh as he stood there in only a pair of jeans. My eyes noticed the four gouges my nails left on each of his biceps and heat flowed through me as memories of last night filtered through my mind.
