The Russian's Acquistion(76)
She stared for a moment, thoughts contained behind her slightly flushed cheeks and sober expression. “Throwing your jeans into the laundry with mine wasn’t exactly a strain. How is…everything?”
Yet again he appreciated the way she took care to probe gently. Many times she’d let him get by with a grumbled “Fine.” He had the strongest urge to lean across, brush her hair back from her cheeks and kiss her.
He hadn’t touched her since that first evening when he’d almost taken her in the lounge. In truth, he hadn’t trusted himself. His emotions had been all over the place and he’d still been hurting from her initial reaction and angry with her later one. He had needed to shove the entire world away while he dealt with old pain and the lurid interest in his past.
Now he was overwhelmed with a sense of indebtedness along with a desire to be close to one person: Clair. As close as physically possible. He wanted to make love to her, tenderly and thoroughly.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want,” she said, dabbing a fingertip onto a fallen sesame seed and touching it to her tongue.
Her words snapped him back to the kitchen, but his libido remained transfixed on the action of her tongue, the press of her lips, the faltering curiosity in her gaze as she looked at him.
He didn’t disguise the heat rising in him. When she saw it, a flush of desire blossomed on her cheeks, but her eyebrows came together in confusion. She skittered her gaze away and held herself still, not rejecting him, but not screaming with receptiveness either.
Sweat broke out on his brow.
In the space of a few minutes, he’d convinced himself that she’d merely been waiting for him to warm up to her again. She was here, wasn’t she? But he hadn’t given her much choice in the matter. At any time, as she’d ferociously pointed out the other day. Would she even have become his mistress without his high-pressure tactics?
His center of surety, slowly coming back online after this horrific week, backslid a notch. With aggressive determination he leapt to thoughts of how he might continue buying her affections, but that route was distasteful now. He pushed a frustrated hand through his hair, answering her because he didn’t know what else to do.
“Today was the worst, but it was my last word on the subject. The result doesn’t look like it will be as bad as I feared.” He supposed a part of him had expected police to knock on his door to take him away in handcuffs again, but it was all in the past. Just a story that had needed to be repeated until a different story drew interest.
Her expression softened. “You thought you’d be vilified, but two decades of proving yourself as a man of principles couldn’t be completely discounted, could it?” she challenged quietly.
He felt cornered by her words. She kept trying to frame him as good and honorable when he had always known he was bad and needing to repent. That was why he didn’t cheat or steal, but even at that, he had resorted to bribery with her, hadn’t he? He was sitting here plotting how to coerce her to stay in his bed.
Shame pinned his gaze to the food she’d prepared for him. “You’re imbuing me with a much higher character than I possess.”
“Aleksy, don’t. You’re a good man. You deserve to be happy. If you cut yourself off from the life you once thought you’d lead, you’re letting Victor win.”
So earnest. So blind. So determined to turn him into something admirable.
Some of his hopelessness must have shown in his face, because she blurted, “I’m not trying to persuade you into anything, not with me. I’m just saying you shouldn’t write off a meaningful relationship because you think you gave up the right.”