But she believed now. Oh God, did she believe. Her hands found his hips and held on tight. To Sam this felt like more than sex. It felt like healing. Like Nikolai had somehow figured out the one way to keep her from completely unraveling after what had nearly happened earlier that night.
The way he moved inside her, like an animal, his strokes, powerful and crude. Yet each stroke took away the ugliness of the nightmare that had brought him to her. Sam had always taken pride in being an independent woman when it came to relationships. The total opposite of her mother, who’d only seemed to exist to be at her stepfather’s beck and call. But in this case, all her independence flew out the window. She clung to him, drawing on his strength, greedily receiving everything he was giving her.
And then she came. So violently, the fiery blast of ecstasy completely seized up her body, making it so she couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. The sensation was so overwhelming, it almost felt like choking to death. The best way ever to die.
The only part of her she could still feel moving was her core, which squeezed around his thick length with fervor, milking his cock with urgent insistence.
Her mind blowing climax seemed to break Nikolai. More clipped Russian words, and then he lost all control, driving his shoulder into the back of her knee and hammering into her even faster. Like he was running to catch up with her. Getting closer… and closer… until he was right there with her.
It was a strange magic, feeling him come. His strong body jerked above her, then went just as rigid as hers had, right before he released into her with a helpless yell. His eyes were squeezed closed, she dimly noted. As if however hard it had been for her to bear the onslaught of such a pleasurable climax, it had been twice as hard for him.
Obviously she wasn’t the only one who’d been overwhelmed by what had just happened between them, she thought with a small amount of pride, watching him weather the same storm of sensation.
It felt like eons had passed when he finally relaxed, his breath whooshing out as he dropped her leg. But it still wasn’t over. He released her leg, but recaptured her lips, scooping her up so her breasts were flush against his chest as he kissed her with such rough desperation, Sam could tell it had been just as good for him as it had been for her.
But then he said, “Samantha,” against her lips. “Samantha…” Over and over again. Like a prayer.
Sam froze.
She hated being called Samantha. She never allowed anyone to call her that. Not even Josie. No one. Hearing her full name on his lips completely vaporized the cloud of ultimate satisfaction she’d been floating on and she tumbled out of the sky. Falling down to Earth hard as she realized what she’d done. Exactly what she’d done.
She’d had sex with Nikolai Rustanov. Nikolai Rustanov! A man she barely knew and had only met a few days ago. And Pavel’s soon-to-be guardian.
Oh, God! Oh, God! This is bad, so bad.
She pushed against his chest in a panic, desperate to get out from under him. He immediately stopped kissing her, and lifted up.
“What is wrong?” he asked her, his accent even thicker than usual as he pulled all the way out of her. “Did I hurt you, Samantha?”
“Don’t call me that!” she answered, scrambling to sit up. Only to freeze again when she felt something that shouldn’t have been there.
And that was when the real horror of what they’d just done hit her as hard as a tractor trailer with a full load. No, he hadn’t hurt her, but even though he was fully removed from her now, not even touching her, she could still feel him. Inside of her. So much of him that he was leaking out onto her thighs.
Sam cursed and covered her face with her hands. They hadn’t just had really inadvisable hot sex. They’d had really inadvisable hot sex without a condom.
16
Nikolai had assisted in helping his father kill over a dozen men by the time he turned fifteen, but he’d never done anything as hard as listening to his mother cry in their apartment bathroom.
It had been a bad month for Natasha. One filled with a stomach flu that wouldn’t abate. His mother, who had always been a generally healthy person, complained bitterly at first. Not used to being waited on by her sons, who cooked dinner and cleaned while she recovered.
But then the stomach flu, which Natasha had assured them would only last for a couple of days, lingered for a couple of weeks. By the second week of her illness, his mother grew quiet, her complaints coming to an abrupt stop. Eventually she’d called Nikolai into her room while Fedya was in the bathroom. She told him to walk with Fedya to school, but to leave halfway through the day and take the bus to a smaller town about an hour away from theirs. One of the ones the Rustanovs didn’t bother with because it was known as a place where older people went to live out the rest of their lives in cheap apartments. His mother insisted Nikolai must go there to get the test she needed, to a place farther away where no one would recognize him as the bastard son of Sergei Rustanov.
Getting the test hadn’t bothered Nikolai. Much like when he accompanied his father on hit jobs, he froze himself on the inside, divorcing his actions from his emotions. He’d refused to feel anything as he did exactly as his mother said. He delivered the test to her in a white paper bag and he’d watched her disappear with it into their shared bathroom with the dispassion of a morgue clerk.
However, the scream that came from the bathroom a few minutes later, followed by wild sobbing and a long wailing, “Nyet!” —those sounds he’d never forget. He could still hear them sometimes, when things got too quiet inside his head.
And he could hear them now, over two decades later, as he once again stood outside the bathroom door, this time dressed in the Polar robe he’d so quickly discarded in order to get Samantha underneath him.
Samantha hadn’t been nearly as dramatic as his mother, merely covering her face before running into the bathroom without a word. The shower had come on just a few seconds after the door closed behind her. But that hadn’t been enough to keep him from going to the door, from standing outside of it like her useless dog. He looked over his shoulder at the digital clock on the bedroom’s nightstand.
She’d been in there for over twenty minutes, the shower running at full blast. Meanwhile, he’d been standing there, trapped in the memory of what would turn out to be the death nail in his mother’s coffin.
Just as he was thinking of going to check on her, the shower finally stopped, and soon after he could hear her moving around, probably drying off. Nikolai drew himself up and waited. But then, nothing. Everything went quiet. And somehow that made it even worse than the wild sobs that had come from his mother.