“First, I want to lay you down and strip the clothes from this body. I want to get inside you and fuck you for hours and hours until neither of us has the energy to move.”
She was mortified to realize she was nodding. She didn’t know why she bothered when he’d just witnessed it, but she stilled her head immediately. When a third face joined in on their almost-kiss, Lekzi pressing her open mouth to Sacha’s cheek, she laughed in a nervous burst.
Alekzander’s smooth chuckle was the equivalent of fingers stroking between her legs. “You can’t get enough of her either, ptichka?”
Him addressing the baby in Russian—he’d called her little bird—was the sexiest thing Sacha had ever heard.
“I know the feeling.” He straightened and moved away, taking their kissing birdie with him. “At the same time,” he continued, passing his wide palm over the crown of Lekzi’s head. “I want to kick your beautiful ass out the door and watch you beg for the right to see this precious little thing in my arms. I want to keep her all to myself for sixteen months. Until she’s almost two years old. Can you image the things you’d miss? Can you image how helplessly enraged you’d feel knowing there was no way to get that time or those moments back? That’s where I am. One minute wanting you because I need you like the air I breathe, and the next, wanting you gone because you showed me a side of you I didn’t want to know you had. A vindictive, calculated, deliberately deceitful side you weren’t supposed to have.”
As guilt withered her heart, he turned to show her his forehead was creased with a confusion of sorts.
“In my eyes, you were perfect. Flawless. You sat on that pedestal, and I worshiped at your feet. I’m fucking furious you dared step off where I need you to be.”
She watched the way his big body moved as he prowled the room, no longer looking at her. Why was he being so forthright? It was baffling. She’d assumed he’d want to keep her in the dark regarding a variety of things. His intentions. His feelings. His life. His business. She thought he wanted to have her here because of Lekzi, and maybe for some sex. She hadn’t expected him to open up to her. First at her apartment regarding the explosion, and now.
He’d made his way around the leather sofas and dark furnishings to stop with a few feet between them. The golden edge of a massive mirror on the far wall made it look as if he was wearing a crown. He’d been well named.
“I was a better man when I endeavored to be worthy of you,” he floored her by saying. “Now I’m just like everyone else. You should find that disturbing.” He shifted Lekzi to his other side. “But those who should really fear it are the ones who would dare threaten you or my daughter, because if they become my target, they will be shown no mercy.”
She looked up at him through her lashes, stunned more by the way he’d viewed her than by the shadowed resolve that resonated in his voice when he spoke of protecting them.
He scrutinized her. “Does that frighten you?”
It should, but it didn’t. “No. For some reason, it does not.”
He tipped her face up with a knuckle under her chin and kissed her. “That only proves something I was already aware of; you understand me better than any other woman ever could.”
Whether he’d intended to make her happy with that statement, she couldn’t be sure. But the result on hearing it had a glow lighting in her chest and a smile pulling up the corners of her mouth. She was falling again, and she was too enamored to care.
TWENTY
After an interview-like conversation that consisted of Alekzander grilling her about every aspect of her daycare business and the lecture transcript he’d seen from her open Yale course, Sacha once more found herself on the defensive when things took a turn.
He was frowning at her from where he was now perched on the arm of a comfy looking chair, balancing Lekzi on his knee. She liked the way he kept staring at the baby, as if he was trying to memorize her every feature and expression. Which he probably was.
“From what I understand, daycare is not cheap. If you have more than a half dozen children, you must earn a comfortable living. Why are you living in squalor? Are these parents taking advantage of you?”
“I am not living in squalor,” she protested, insulted that he would be so blatantly rude. She waved a hand around the room. “I do not need two sofas, and chairs no one sits on to prove I make a decent living.”
“You don’t have a chair someone could sit on,” he said, his tone and expression so snobby she just stared. “And that sofa in your barren apartment looks as if it saw its best day about fifteen years ago.”