His Everlasting Love: 50 Loving States, Virginia Read online

  She smiled, loving that he’d decided to stay on the impromptu grass dance floor with her, instead of returning to the blankets for a breather like quite a few of their guests, including Trevor and Marian.

  His new leg was already proving itself to be a great investment. This latest prosthesis had been made with a titanium-web leg frame that fit around the outside of his ghost leg as opposed to slicing it straight through like the slick carbon one he’d had before. Having a physical therapist for a wife had certainly come in handy. Not only had she consulted on its making with the prosthetist, she’d talked his ghost leg through it, making the whole process easy and smooth.

  After that, Sawyer had insisted she look into going back to med school next fall after Eve was born. And after she finished up her degree, they had a plan to open up a practice where she could do him and other amputees even more good as a physiatrist.

  But now she was only focused on today. On how happy they were. And how handsome he looked in his white suit. And how glad she was that his leg still wasn’t bothering him, despite all the dancing.

  Well, at least one of his legs wasn’t bothering him. From the feel of the bulge against her stomach, Sawyer was more than ready for their honeymoon to begin.

  “I don’t know what’s going on with Thel,” she answered. “But whatever it is, I think it’s bad. And as much as I’m enjoying the music, I’m really weirded out, because I’ve literally not heard her sing anything but opera for six years.”

  She peeped up into what she now thought of as his beautiful swamp-mud eyes. “I know you want to get out of here, but do you mind if I go try to talk to her first?” she asked with an apologetic look. “I won’t be able to concentrate on our honeymoon if I don’t at least try to get her to talk to me again.”

  Sawyer leaned down to kiss her. “That’s not a problem at all, baby. Go see to your sister. I’ll be right here when you get back.”

  Yes, he would. Though she still wasn’t anywhere close to being used to having him around…always there in real, physical form. But they were definitely a real couple now. After resigning his position from Josh’s firm, Sawyer secured another position at a firm that specialized in serving disabled vets. And in a few weeks, they’d be moving into a four-bedroom in a brand new housing development near Falls Church. In fact, they’d signed the closing papers a couple of days ago.

  Yet, she still found it hard to believe. That he was truly hers now, and that she was his. Even after he’d pledged “his everlasting love” to her beneath her father’s willow tree.

  Maybe after the baby came, she thought, rubbing her now swollen stomach as she made her way over toward where her sister was singing with the wedding band.

  But then Thel froze. And she abruptly stopped singing as an abject look of horror came over her face.

  What the…?

  Willa followed the direction of her sister’s frightened gaze, and ended up freezing herself.

  A huge man, wearing a very well-cut suit, was walking toward the picnic reception across their Pappy’s old field.

  A complete behemoth—at least six-six, maybe even six-seven, and covered from head to toe in thick muscles. He had a face that looked like it had been violently carved from stone with a straight-edged razor, a huge hawkish nose, and lips that seemed to be permanently frozen in mid-snarl. Eastern European, Willa thought taking in the very fine suit he was wearing. If not for his eyes, she’d think he was an actor straight out of a movie where the good guys had to face off against the Russian Mafia.

  He had almond-shaped eyes that hinted at possible Asian ancestry, but they didn’t soften his face one bit. Mostly because of the two cold, black stones that lay within. His eyes put her in mind of the extremely violent bad guys in the martial arts movies that Sawyer occasionally liked to watch after Trevor went to bed. Villain eyes.

  And those villain eyes were completely lasered in on her sister.

  The band stopped playing, and the whole wedding went silent with shock, everyone staring at this strange man. It was as if a large and dangerous beast had suddenly invaded their picnic.

  All the while Thel continued to stare at him like he was her worst nightmare come to life.

  “Who is that guy?” she heard Trevor’s voice say from the blanket he now shared with his only living grandmother.

  “That’s Mr. Rustanov, dear, Thel’s husband...” their mother answered from another blanket. “He’s been looking all over for her. And now he’s finally found her.”

  Everyone, including Willa, looked from the man to Thel then.

  Well, almost everyone. Marian just rubbed her hands together and said, “Now sssshhhh, everybody! This story is going to be sooooo good!”

  Thel’s story will be told in Theodora Taylor’s next smoking hot contemporary, Her Russian Beast, (coming soon!)

  Dearest Readers,

  Just a little note to say how grateful I am for your continued support and readership. These characters came to me in a dream and would not stop haunting me until I agreed to tell you their story. But after getting to know Willa and Sawyer, I harbor no bitterness whatsover. And I hope you loved this couple as much as I now do. If so, please do us the further favor of leaving a review for this “rather unusual” paranormal at Amazon.

  And if you’re seriously jonesing to find out what’s going to happen with Thel, keeping reading! To tide you over, I’ve included an excerpt from the tale of Bair Rustanov’s older brother, Her Russian Billionaire, after the sign off!

  So Much Love,

  Theodora Taylor

  HER RUSSIAN BILLIONAIRE

  A Smoking Hot BWWM Romance from the 50 Loving States Series [Texas]

  Prologue

  ALEXEI Rustanov hailed from a land where one could spot ex, current, and future supermodels walking down the same busy Moscow streets. But in his opinion, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was currently sitting on the mattress they called their bed in his dumpy efficiency apartment.

  When he came out of the bathroom that morning, he found her in nothing but the bikini bottoms from her yellow, polka-dot swimsuit, leaning into the nearby fan’s direct path, blissfully receiving its lackluster breeze on day six of one of the hottest heat waves on record in Dallas history. He ran a hand over the dark beard he’d been considering cutting if the heat wave didn’t break soon, and let his eyes roam over his girlfriend in quiet appreciation. Her ebony skin glistened with damp heat, and her thick, natural hair had been thrown into two haphazard, chunky French braids that barely reached below her ears. It wasn’t the most glamorous look, but he still felt himself go instantly hard, envisioning taking each of her breasts, which were beaded with sweat, into his mouth and lavishing them with the attention they deserved.

  Though they’d been living together for almost three months, he could barely believe she belonged to him, that this beautiful and kind woman had chosen him, despite the shabbiness of his un-air conditioned apartment and the two-digit state of his bank account. She made him feel like the luckiest guy in the world.

  As if sensing his gaze on her, her own eyes popped open and she unleashed that gorgeous smile of hers, the one that always stopped his heart.

  “Hey, baby,” she said, her Texas accent lively as always despite the heat. “I didn’t hear you come out of the bathroom. You know, for such a big guy, you move like a cat.”

  “I will replace your female-sounding ‘cat’ with ‘panther’ and agree,” he said, moving his six-foot-six frame to stand closer to the edge of the bed.

  He wanted badly to join her in front of the fan, but he still had to get in his daily workout and another shower after that before his security guard shift at the School of Social Work began.

  However, she made it hard for him to stay focused on his plans for the day when she looked up at him with a sexy grin and asked, “Are all you Russians trained to move like panthers?”

  That gave him a moment of pause. Having grown up the scion of the Rustanov crime family, there were
indeed talents he had that many other Russians did not. He could shoot several different kinds of guns, from the simple-to-shoot but easy-to-hide Walther PPK to the much more complicated Uzi. Thanks to the tutelage of his father and uncle, he could also sell those same guns to any interested party with a mixture of charm, marketing, and not-so-subtle aggression.

  The reason he moved so quietly was because his father had made him start accompanying his uncle, Sergei, their family’s main enforcer, on retaliation killings at the age of twelve.

  “The secret is to value the quiet above all things,” his uncle had told him outside the apartment of a man who had sold valuable information about their organization’s inner-workings to another crime family. “Become the quiet. People cannot prevent what they cannot hear coming.”

  Five minutes later, he’d watched from a dark corner as his uncle snuck up behind the target in his own kitchen and slit his throat with only a whisper of sound. He’d then pulled out a GSh-18 with a silencer attached to it and shot the man, who was grasping at his bleeding throat, twice in the chest and then once in each knee cap, an intentional style of killing that had been in the Rustanov family since the early 1960s.

  Alexei had barely made it to the street below the apartment before losing his dinner on the sidewalk. But his uncle had given him a few hearty slaps on the back, congratulating him on throwing up outside of the apartment, and therefore leaving no DNA behind for the Russian police. As with most of their killings, Sergei wanted everyone to know they’d done it, but they didn’t want any evidence left behind to officially attach the Rustanovs to the crime. Later, Alexei’s father told him he had also thrown up after witnessing his first killing.

  “I will tell you as your grandfather told your uncle and me, if you are to order an execution, you must understand what you are doing. I will not have you be one of those spoiled princes who tell their men to murder like they are putting in an order for lunch.”

  Six years later his father had been killed by one of those spoiled princes, a young man, Igor Stavnof, whose own departed father had been considered a friend to the Rustanovs. Igor and Alexei had attended the same private secondary school, and had even shared a bodyguard for a few hours once, when Igor’s fell sick during a snowstorm and a new one couldn’t immediately be sent out. But the Rustanov-Stavnof alliance came to an abrupt end when Igor had Alexei’s father gunned down outside a restaurant where they were supposed meet. Igor had meant this as a display of power, a warning to any enemy who thought his young age might make him any less of a force to be reckoned with than Stavnof senior. However, the move only served to seal Igor’s fate as someone who would die young.

  After putting his father in the ground, Alexei had quietly hunted down the new crime lord, slit his throat, shot him twice in the chest and once in each knee cap.

  His uncle had been very proud of him, but in order to avoid a full-out war with their former allies, he’d taken over as their family’s interim head and arranged for Alexei to come to the states for college. Sergei found the day-to-day business affairs of running a mostly criminal organization distasteful, so the plan had been for Alexei to come back and take his place in four years. Staying on for grad school had been Alexei’s idea, and his uncle had not approved. He’d withdrawn all financial support, telling Alexei he could either come home and take his rightful place in their family’s organization or starve in America.

  Alexei had enrolled in UT Dallas’s MBA program anyway, vowing to get the education necessary to make his family’s business legitimate and stop the killings that had claimed the lives of both his parents, and many of the people who worked within the Rustanov organization. But then he met Eva and a whole new path opened up for him, one in which he left the family behind forever, forging ahead as a businessman in America, someone who had nothing to do with the Rustanov crime family, someone who could live a simple life right here in Texas with the woman he loved most in the world.

  “Lexie?”

  He came back to the present day with a jerk. Only his Eva called him by this nickname. No one else would dare. His size and general demeanor didn’t invite joking or teasing of any kind from most people. But from the moment they’d met, Eva had displayed a talent for crossing him on certain things, and somehow getting away with it.

  “What were you thinking about?” she asked.

  He pushed thoughts of the life he’d lived before coming to Texas to the back of his mind. “I am thinking you deserve more than this shit apartment,” he said.

  “Stop it,” she answered with a roll of her eyes. “A few of my clients would consider this place a palace. At least you have heat in the winter.”

  That was Eva’s answer to everything meager in their lives, to joke that at least they had it better than the people she worked with in the field as a grad student, finishing her Masters in Social Work. But he knew better. She had grown up the pampered youngest daughter of the mayor of Drummond, a small oil town about three hours away. Before her father had cut her off for dating Alexei, she had lived in a two-bedroom apartment with air conditioning and hardwood floors, in a building with an onsite gym and several other amenities she no longer had access to thanks to falling in love with him.

  “I will pay to landlord visit before I go to gym.”

  “Why? He said the repairman can’t get to us until the end of the week. It’s a heat wave, so it’s got to be hard to get them out to fix one lil’ old window unit.”

  “I will talk to landlord and he will fix window unit today. I do not like to see you suffer.”

  “I’m not suffering, baby. The only reason I’m still sitting here is because I don’t have anything clean to wear, except for a miniskirt and a couple of tank tops. I have no idea what I’m going to do for underwear.”

  His dick pulsed at the image of her in a miniskirt with nothing on underneath.

  And as if sensing his desire, she crawled over to where he stood at the edge of the mattress and unwrapped the towel from around his waist. “Maybe instead of talking to the landlord, you could be my honey bee and do a couple of loads of laundry for me before you leave for work?”

  She brought her face just close enough to his penis that he could feel the heat of her breath as she spoke.

  Few people hated doing laundry as much as his Eva did, and after three months of living with her, he had learned to recognize the beginning of a negotiation to get him to take care of her dirty clothes yet again.

  “Now you don’t want me prancing around the School of Social Work in a miniskirt with no underwear, do you?” she asked, her Texas accent become even sweeter as her words got dirtier. “What if I forgot I wasn’t wearing any and accidentally bent over in front of one of them horny security guards there?”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “You are using sex to ask me to do laundry again?”

  She shook her head, grazing his dick with her cheek as she did so. “No, darlin’, I’ll have sex with you even if you don’t agree to be a prince and do my laundry instead of threatening your landlord.” She stuck out her tongue and ran it across the sensitive ridge of his large penis, taking its bulbous head in her mouth for just a second before saying, “But if you agree to wash just two loads of my clothes, I can guarantee the sex will be even hotter.”

  He wasn’t a laughing man by nature, but he’d be damned if Eva didn’t make him smile. “In my country, the girlfriends not only do their own laundry, but also that of their boyfriends.”

  “Mmm-hmm…” This time she took his dick in her hand and closed her mouth around it, giving it three languorous sucks before letting it go again. “You probably wish you had one of them Russian girlfriends right now, don’t you? I’m sure they always have clean underwear to wear under their miniskirts.”

  “You are vixen. You should wash own clothes every week as I do. And not wait until last minute.”

  She took him in her mouth, and this time she suckled him for long minutes until he forgot all about the gym and instead took her by t
he back of the head, holding it steady as he pumped himself into her mouth, while an urgent need built up inside his groin.

  But all of a sudden, she stopped and forcibly withdrew her mouth from his penis. She then dodged his seeking hand when he tried to pull her back down to finish what she had started.

  “I think I should demonstrate what might happen if you send me off to school with no panties today,” she said before dancing away to open a dresser drawer, from which she pulled out a miniskirt. She turned her back to him and hooked her thumbs into the sides of her bikini bottoms, pushing them down over her hourglass hips and deliciously round derriere, before stepping out of them and pulling on her miniskirt.

  “Cuz maybe I’m just being silly. I might not have anything to worry about, right?” She knocked a pen off the dresser and gasped with a faux innocent look. “Oops! I dropped this pen. I better pick it up.”

  She bent over at the waist, giving him a tantalizing peek of her glistening wet pussy. “You can’t see anything can you? Nothing that would attract any unwanted attention from a School of Social Work security guard, right?”

  Before he could even try to reason himself out of her sexy trap, he was behind her, sinking his dick—still wet from her mouth—into her soaking pussy. “I will do your laundry, kotenok, but only if you promise to be waiting for me in this exact same position when I get home.”

  She braced herself against the dresser as he pistoned into her. “Oh, baby, I will let you do whatever you want to me tonight. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she said, in such a way that Alexei couldn’t be sure if she was talking about the laundry he’d just agreed to do, or the sex they were currently having.

  He pulled her skirt-covered hips into his, riding her and loving the way she let her chin drop to her chest in delicious abandonment, as if his sex was some kind of heroin-like drug that made her feel loose all over. The wet sounds of their bodies slapping together filled the apartment until she came with a loud cry and he released into her with a stream of Russian words.