“No. I mean, yes, my sperm are obviously super, but no to the rest of it.”
After a moment of examining his expression, I say, “Because your sperm don’t laugh is what you’re saying. Your sperm have resting bitch face, like you.”
His brows shoot up. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t get all in a kerfuffle.”
“Kerfuffle?”
“If you’d like a definition, it’s exactly what you’re doing now.”
“I’m not in a fucking kerfuffle!”
“Sure. Let me just wait a sec while my ruptured eardrums heal and we can continue this discussion.”
His face goes through a few expressions—fury, amusement, disbelief—then he flips me onto my belly and spanks my bare ass five times in quick succession.
It’s shocking.
Hard, stinging, and shocking, primarily because of how much it turns me on.
Heat blooms over my skin. My bottom feels like it’s on fire. Then the rest of me does, too, because Mal is looking at my wide-eyed face with hunger in his eyes.
“You liked that.”
His voice has gone low and gravelly. He watches me, licking his lips like a predator before a juicy meal.
My heart thrumming, I say breathlessly, “I’ll have to break my answer into two parts, because first, no, I didn’t like it. My brain is judging us both very harshly. My women’s studies professor from college is, too. But secondly, holy fuck, that was hot.”
“You’ve never been spanked before?”
I give him an incredulous look. “Who would dare spank the mouse deer with the tiny tusk-like fangs?”
The smile that spreads over his face is utterly debauched. He drawls, “What else have you never done?”
“None of your business, Romeo.”
He smooths his palm over my burning backside and kisses me gently on the shoulder. Turning his mouth to my ear, he murmurs, “You liked it when I had my hand around your throat, yes?”
I think of when we had sex on the living room floor. I attributed the intensity of that experience to the bear attack, but maybe having him squeeze my neck had something to do with it, too.
I came so hard, I saw stars.
He also did that when he broke into the safe house in Boston. Put his big rough hand around my throat and squeezed, threatening to choke me.
Right about then is when I stopped being scared and started acting feisty.
Holy shit.
Are Twizzlers not my only kink?
Biting my lower lip, I look at him and nod.
He lowers his head to brush his lips against mine. “Okay. That’s a good starting place.”
Do I die now, or wait until later when we’re doing whatever kinky fuckery I suspect he’s got planned?
I don’t have time to ponder it, because he rises from bed, picks me up, carries me into the bathroom, and fucks me again in the shower. He holds me up against the wall as he drives into me, biting my neck.
Maybe being adorable isn’t so bad after all.
Days go by. Mal doesn’t leave for the city again.
Our nightly bath ritual continues, only now Mal speaks in English instead of Russian as he washes me. He tells me about his childhood. His family. His friends. His pets.
His brother, Mikhail.
He tells me how he saw a Clint Eastwood movie when he was little and decided he’d be a cowboy when he grew up. Then, later, he got into boxing and thought he might have a chance to do it professionally.
Until that night at the bar. Until that fateful punch.
Until he met Pakhan, and all his dreams were crushed.
He paints a picture of a man living wholly alone, in both mind and body, existing only to carry out orders handed down from above. He never had children or married, because it wasn’t allowed.
His life wasn’t his own.
Bratva first and forever.
Duty or death.
Sometimes I go cold as I listen to his stories. Sometimes I want to cry. But always I wonder what he might have been, had his life taken a different path.
But I’m perversely glad things went the way they did, because if his life had taken a different path, we never would have met.
I feel guilty about it, and I know it’s wrong, but it’s the truth. I’m glad for all his dark, twisted roads, because they led him to me.
It’s a secret I guard carefully.
One day as we’re finishing breakfast, he asks me out of the blue if I’d like to learn how to shoot a gun.
It frightens me. His answer doesn’t reassure.
“Why would I need to know how to shoot a gun?”
“Better to know how and not need to than need to and not know how.”