Chapter Eighteen
Eleven weeks later
Rya stiffened as someone leaned over and said, “Wow, that’s a great tattoo.”
She glared at her friend, Tawny, a platinum blonde with mile long legs and the mouth of a trucker. Tawny was Rya’s best friend and was even wilder than Rya, a true brat of a submissive. Last year, Tawny landed the cover of Playboy’s Biker Babes edition and had spent the last six months doing a PR tour for the magazine. Normally, guys would be mobbing the beautiful blonde, but Tawny’s dad was the Ice Demons’ Secretary and he was very, very protective of his daughter which explained the group of Ice Demons club members playing pool on the other side of the room while keeping an eye on the women.
Rya hadn’t wanted to come to the bar, she would have been perfectly happy spending another night at home, but Tawny wasn’t having it. Instead she’d been dragged out by her friends who were determined to make her happy. She couldn’t tell her girls about Dimitri, couldn’t tell anyone, so they didn’t understand why she wanted to stay home on a Friday night.
Oh, she probably could have spoken with Tawny about it, but she didn’t want to endanger her friend. One of the first things she’d done when she returned home from the lodge was read everything she could about the Russian Bratva. What she learned scared the shit out of her to the point where she didn’t even talk to Rock about it. He seemed happy that Rya had forgotten about Dimitri and didn’t bring him up either. Thank God he hadn’t said anything to her mother about it. Rya’s mom was a fierce biker chick to the bone. If she thought someone was threatening her baby she was apt to go grab a gun and take care of them herself. It was better for everyone involved if Rya just pretended everything was normal and she wasn’t pining day and night for her Russian wolf.
So now, here she sat in a too-loud club in downtown Buffalo, wearing her backless silver mini-dress, listening to crappy top 40 remix music, with a bunch of drunk people who were getting on her nerves.
She looked over her shoulder at the guy, a cute enough man in his early twenties with a nice, polite college boy smile, and said in a cool voice, “Thanks.”
“I’ve never seen a wolf that realistic before. And the design around it is really cool.”
“Her mom did it,” Tawny piped up, ignoring Rya’s glare.
The blond guy moved around to the side, his arm resting on the bar behind Rya, way too close for her comfort. “Wow, you’re mom’s a tattoo artist?”
Hoping he would get the hint, she merely said, “Yep,” and continued to pretend to watch the dance floor.
Rya had gotten the tattoo a week after she’d returned from the lodge. It was a full back piece of the head of a wolf, beautifully rendered and done with such detail that it looked more like a painting than a tattoo. Rya’s mother had managed to get the exact color of Dimitri’s eyes down, and whenever Rya looked at the tattoo in the mirror she found Dimitri’s wolf looking back at her. She admitted to herself that it was somewhat masochistic to constantly torture herself by wearing what amounted to his brand on her body, but it also comforted her, like he was always with her. Rya’s mom had also included a traditional Russian folk art pattern around the wolf, framing it and giving the image depth.
A week after she’d gotten the tattoo she’d received an email from Dimitri asking how she was doing. She’d honestly wondered if she would ever hear from him again so his email had both elated her and depressed her, but she eagerly wrote him back and Dimitri became her pen pal, in a weird way. While she wished she could talk to him, he said it wasn’t safe and she believed him.
She had an almost—no, there was no ‘almost’ about it—she had a stalker-level obsession with him. Every night she did an internet search for his name, dreading finding out that he’d been hurt but eager for any information she could get. The sight of his face always sent a stab of pain through her heart, but she could stare at his picture for hours and almost feel his hands on her. Unfortunately, her constant searching for his name also showed her pictures of him at various social events with an endless series of stunning women on his arm, and he swore he never had sex with them. Oh, he talked about how much he missed her, said the loveliest things about how much she meant to him, and she knew he had to keep up the appearance of his playboy ways, but fucking hell the thought of him with another woman hurt to the point where she’d been determined to go out tonight and find some faceless guy to try and ease the sting with a night of meaningless sex.
Too bad her heart wasn’t on board with that plan.