Her Russian Billionaire Page 8
She gave him one stiff nod.
“You said earlier this was all about what I want,” he said. “Well, I want you, not that vapid girl you were trying to punish me with. For the next two weeks, I want to be with you. The real you. Do you understand?”
They sat there staring at each other, and this time he refused to command her to answer. He saw several emotions flash through her eyes, defiance, calculation, and even fear, but eventually she nodded her head.
“Good,” he said. “Then you can talk again.”
“I liked you better with the accent,” she said almost before he had finished giving her permission to speak again. Her words were defiant, but he was happy to hear them delivered in her usual Texas-rich voice.
“That’s because when I had an accent, you had me wrapped around your finger. And now you don’t, and I have you at my mercy.”
Before she could answer, he kissed her as he had been longing to since first seeing her in the penthouse of a hotel he’d only bought because of her. And she kissed him back with such passion, he could tell they still set each other on fire even after all this time. He wondered, not for the first time, how she could have thrown what they had away just because her father didn’t approve and because he had been poor.
He’d hated her for so long for leaving him the way she did, not understanding how she could have taken his heart and tossed it back to him in shreds. But now he wondered if what they had hadn’t been what he’d thought.
For him it had been an all-consuming love, but for her, maybe it had just been sex, a way to rebel before she got sick of playing poor with him.
His anger should have flared up again at that point. But as he kissed her in the deck chair, the whole world fell away. For the first time in years, he didn’t feel the bitterness that had been his constant companion since she left him. Instead of revenge, it felt like a dream come true. Like someone had heard his prayers during the bad days when he was still begging God to return his Eva to him and had decided to grant them eight years later.
“I want you again,” he said. “I want to be inside of you.”
“Alexei,” she answered, her voice as hot and raspy as his.
He sucked in a breath when she took him in her hand and guided him toward her. “I want you inside of me. I shouldn’t. I wish to God I didn’t, but I do.”
She enveloped him in her steaming, hot wetness, taking him in with one desperate jerk of her hips. Then she let out a cry of such intense pleasure, he nearly came right then and there. As it was, he had to hold her hips still, not allowing her to move on top of him.
“Let me,” she said squirming against him. “I thought you wanted me.”
“I do,” he assured her between gritted teeth. “Too much. I need a moment or this is going to be over way too soon for both of us. Just give me a minute.” She moaned and let her head fall against his shoulder. Her aching need felt so tangible to him that he released her hips and started to move into her, his desire to give her what she wanted greater than his desire to stay inside of her for as long as possible.
And he was right. It was over much faster than he wanted it to be. They both came only a few minutes later, announcing their twin release against each other’s shoulder. It made him wonder if every time would be like this, fraught with frantic need, like they’d been starved of each other for far too long.
“I really need a shower now,” she said, laughing a little as she basked in her afterglow. They had cleaned up a little after the first time, but here they were again, sweaty and reeking of one another.
“I will show you to your room.”
Her face lit up. “I have my own room?”
“Yes,” he answered. “But it is only for storage. Your vacation wardrobe is in there and a few toiletries. I assumed you used the same hair products as back in grad school and I made Emilio a list.”
Her cute gasp of pleasant surprise made the entire effort worth it. “Look at you, even remembering my favorite hair products!” She clapped her hands together. “Show me, show me, please!”
So he showed her, and he had to fight hard not to get caught up in Eva’s reaction when she squealed upon finding a closet full of designer label, brightly-colored vacation wear. “And here I was thinking you were going to have me running around buck naked,” she said, pulling out a seventies retro-style yellow and orange tunic dress.
He tilted his head to the side. “I had not considered that option. Perhaps I should have the clothing returned.”
She hugged the dress to her and made a mad dash for the bathroom, yelling, “No backsies!”
He laughed and returned to the master suite to take a shower of his own. A certain contentment stole over him as he let the shower spray wash away his last interlude with Eva. Being with her again like this felt more right than he cared to admit, but for once, he refused to obsess over his feelings regarding her or try to quell them with bitter thoughts.
By the time he came out of the bathroom, dressed in another robe, he’d decided to take Emilio’s advice, and try “going with the flow” instead of waging a power war as he’d originally intended.
But then the sound of a cell phone ringing in his suite interrupted his thoughts. The bouncy ringtone definitely wasn’t coming from his smart phone. And he followed the sound to beneath the bed, where he bent down and found Eva’s phone going off. She had retrieved her things earlier, but the phone must have fallen out of her purse. It stopped ringing, just as he reached out and grabbed it.
And he would have delivered it to Eva right away, except a box that said, “Missed call: Aaron” popped up on the display screen.
He frowned, and a memory came back to him unbidden: Eva making a big deal of putting his name into her cell phone while they were eating breakfast in her apartment. “How exactly do you spell your name?” she’d asked, eating the omelet she had made for them with one hand and keying in his information with the other.
He’d spelled his first name for her, but when he tried to spell his last name, she winked and said, “No need. I really like you. I don’t need to put in a last name to remember who you are.”
His heart turned to stone in his chest as he looked at the one name on the screen. And it felt like he was walking through a room with no sound as he made his way back to the living room and stood there, waiting, until she finally appeared, now wearing the tunic dress she’d been so excited about.
“Hey, you’re not dressed yet,” she said. “Does that mean we’re not going out?”
He held up her phone. “Who is Aaron?”
Her eyes widened when she saw her phone in his hand. “Why do you have my phone?” She ran over to him and tried to snatch it from him, but he held it above his head, too far for her to reach.
“Give it back. Give it back right now. This isn’t funny.”
He didn’t find anything funny about this situation either and his voice was much harder when he asked again, “Who is Aaron?”
Chapter Eleven
“WHO is Aaron?” he asked, confirming Eva’s worst fears after she found him in the living room, his countenance changed from relaxed and sexy to stiff and angry.
A cold hand closed around Eva’s heart and she scrambled to think how to answer his question in a plausible way. “Nobody,” she said, trying to relax her own posture.
“Eva, I operate in a world filled with sharks and snakes. I deal with half-truths on a daily basis. Do you really think I cannot tell when someone is lying to me? Who is Aaron?”
Her heart beat louder than thunder in her ears. She didn’t know how to answer this or what to say, because he was right. He’d be able to see through whatever lie she told. The safest bet, she decided, was to say nothing at all, so she clamped her lips tight.
“Answer me,” he growled, still holding the phone in the air.
“No.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“You have to do what I say if you want to save your town, so tell me who he is.”
; Eva glared at him. He thought he had her with that one, but what he didn’t understand was the only thing she cared about more than Drummond was Aaron. And she’d protect him at any cost. “Fine, then. Close Drummond Oil. I’m not talking about him with you. Now give me back my phone.”
His eyes narrowed. “You love this man that much?”
She didn’t answer.
“You love this man that much, but you are here with me?”
She shook her head. “Not for much longer. May I have my phone, so I can leave?”
He studied her for a long time before lowering the phone and placing it in her palm. “You know, I do not need that. There are people I can call. I will have a dossier on this Aaron within forty-eight hours.”
“No!” she cried. “You leave him alone, Alexei Rustanov. I was stupid enough to get caught up in this with you, but he’s innocent. Just like all those people in Drummond you keep threatening to put out of work because you’re mad at me.”
His only answer to this was “Does he know you’re here with me?”
She gave him a wry smile. Finally something she could answer truthfully. “No.”
“What would he do if he found out?
Again, she told the truth. “I don’t know.”
“If you two are in love, why are you not married?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I told you, I’m not going to talk with you about him. Either you drop the subject and agree to leave him out of this, or we end this—whatever it is—right now.”
She was leaning toward the latter, but then he said. “Why did you nod?”
“What?”
He folded his arms over his chest.
“If you are in love with him, why did you not take the out I gave you?” he asked. “Why did you enthusiastically have sex with me again by pool? Are you unhappy with him?”
She saw his questions for what they were. An opening. An opening she could work with. “Listen,” she said, stepping closer to him. “I know what you want from me. You want me to be the person I used to be, the one who left you, so you can get your revenge. I can be her for you. Look…”
She hurled the phone and it arced into the pool. “It’s gone. No more Aaron. For the next two weeks, I will be who you need me to be. You just have to agree to leave him alone and never, ever tell him this happened.”
* * * *
Hot fury swirled around with cold calculation inside Alexei’s brain. And soon a new plan was forming in his head, one that would allow him to have his Eva and destroy her current relationship, too.
“Fine,” he said, borrowing a page from her acquiescence script. “We will do this.”
She licked her lips, obviously unnerved by his quick agreement. “You—you still haven’t promised me you’ll leave Aaron alone. That means you won’t get a dossier on him, or try to hunt him down, or tell him what happened between us then or now. If you don’t promise me that, I’m going to have to leave.”
“If you leave, I will close the headquarters and I will tell your precious boyfriend about us anyway.”
“Sure you can kill Drummond and really fuck up my relationship with Aaron, but that won’t be enough for you. I’ll be really upset, but you still won’t have closure. Only I can give you that. I’m the only one who knows how to help you achieve it. Believe me when I say what happened between us will just continue to haunt you, unless you let me help you.”
Curiosity now bled into the mix of cold fury. “Okay,” he said after a few moments of consideration. “I will not seek out Aaron in any way. And I won’t close the Drummond Oil headquarters. But if I am not completely satisfied at the end of these two weeks…”
He let the threat hang, but she responded with a huge, “Thank you!” She clasped her hands in front of her chest. “You will be satisfied. I promise.”
She closed the space between them and caught him completely off guard, pulling him down by the scruff of his neck. For the first time in eight years, she kissed him, rubbing her body against his and leaving no doubt she burned for him as hot as he burned for her.
Then she leaned back and said, “I’m going to tell you why I really dumped you.”
Chapter Twelve
“I’M going to tell you why I really dumped you,” Eva said.
When Alexei agreed to her deal, he’d been half-furious and half-bemused that she thought he could be so easily assuaged with her New Age-notion of closure. But when she said those words, a strange chill ran down his back.
She took a few steps back after speaking, as if she needed to put distance between them before telling him the truth.
“This whole thing with my father started before I met you. As long as I can remember, my brother has always been my parents’ favorite. And as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to measure up. The night Daddy, you, and me went to dinner, it all came to a head. Daddy and me got into that stupid fight about you. He said, ‘either you dump him or I’m going to cut you off.’” Eva shook her head, caught up in the memory. “I was so sick of him. He acted like every decision I made, everything I did outside of getting my social work degree, was wrong. So I decided to show him. I moved in with you. I thought that would make him see I wasn’t some dumb little girl he could boss around because he bought me everything and was paying my rent. The truth is, I moved in with you to get back at him.”
She hugged herself and rubbed her arms, as if to ward off some invisible chill. “And the stupid thing is, I didn’t even like you that much. I mean yeah, you were good in bed. But you barely spoke English, and your apartment was so crappy. I tried to pretend like everything was okay, but then that heat wave hit, and it was like, ‘What am I doing? My dad’s not that bad.’ So I left you. I tried to let you down easy—“
He stopped her right there, and unbelted his robe. “Drummond,” he said.
She came out of her story with a confused look, her eyes traveling downward to his straining erection. “What?”
“That is the safe word. If I hurt you, say ‘Drummond.’”
* * * *
That was all the warning Eva got before she found herself pushed face-first into the nearest wall with Alexei’s naked weight crushing her from behind.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
The weight of his body pressing against hers let up, but only a little bit. He pulled the tunic dress up over her head and flung it aside, before undoing the back clasp of her bra and whipping it to the floor as well. He used his strong, hard body to re-pin her against the wall, manacling her wrists above her head with one hand and using the other to rub her mound in slow, hard, punishing circles. To her great embarrassment, Eva felt her pussy start to drip from his first touch.
“Go on, finish your story,” he said in her ear, employing his middle finger to rub her own juices over her clit. “You used me to get back at your father. It was all a game to you.”
“Yes,” she said, so turned on she could barely think straight enough to speak. “I mean, it was grad school. It was fun to pretend to be in love for a while, but then when that heat wave hit, things got too real. The sex was great, but I just wanted my own place back with air conditioning and a full kitchen. I was so sick of cooking on a hot plate—”
She cried out when he removed his hand from her pussy and rammed into her from behind with brutal force, filling her with his thickness, but not allowing her enough room to move as he started rocking into her, bent at the knees, so her body jerked up and her pussy and pebbled nipples rubbed against the smooth wall with every thrust.
Immediately it was too much, stuck between a wall and Alexei’s extremely hard place. Before she was ready, she felt herself begin to orgasm. “Please, stop,” she panted, “If you don’t, I’m going to…”
“You are going to come,” he said, still fucking her from behind. “You dumped me for not being rich enough, and now you will come on my cock, spreading your pussy juice all over my hotel wall. You are creaming so much, I will have to call someone in to clea
n the wallpaper before we rent it out to the next guest. That is how hard you are about to come.”
And he was right. She felt a gush of liquid issuing from her pussy before the orgasm took her over, temporarily blinding her so she could only see stars. She screamed. The pleasure was too intense. She didn’t think she could take any more without passing out.
But then he suddenly pulled out and turned her around to face him. He kissed her, biting her lip hard enough to bring her out of her post-coital daze. “No, stay with me,” he said. “I want you to finish the story.”
* * * *
He was out of control. Somewhere in the back of his head, Alexei realized he was acting like a wild animal instead of the dispassionate businessman he had trained himself to become. But he couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t leave her alone, but also couldn’t come no matter how much his balls strained for release, because he was so unbelievably out-of-control angry at the woman who had just admitted what he thought of as his one great love was nothing more than a rebellion that went too far.
“That last week,” he heard himself asking her. “I thought you were happy. It was hot, but you kept on finding excuses to have sex with me.”
She looked at him with eyes that held both embarrassment and pity. “Yeah, I got my transfer acceptance to Arlington and my student loan money came through. That meant I could transfer to finish up my degree at UTA, which was cheaper than UTD, and I’d have enough money to get my own apartment with a real stove and an air conditioning unit that worked.”
And before he knew it, he was in her again, rutting like an animal, taking her without regard or permission, lost in a haze of memory. He had been so confused, so desperate to get her back, and she had been all too glad to be rid of him.
She clung to him now, her legs wrapped around his waist, panting as she continued on with her confession. “I would have just broken up with you, but I could already tell that was going to be hard. I mean an American guy would have taken it on the chin, but you were way more into me than I was into you, and I didn’t want there to be a scene. That’s not how I was raised, but I could tell you were the kind of guy who wouldn’t just let me quietly dump you.”