Her Russian Brute: 50 Loving States, Idaho (19 page)

S
HE had tried
to walk away from
him
. From him, Alexei Rustanov! The only reason she’d even made it three steps was because it had taken him that long to process what she was attempting to do.

And before he knew what he was doing, he had her pinned against the wall. But when he got her there, he found himself without words. Seeing her like this again, close-up, made it feel like he’d just found the break-up letter yesterday. Opposing feelings warred inside him, effectively striking him mute. He wanted to yell at her for what she did. He wanted to caress her face and let her take him in her arms like she used to. He wanted to show her he had made it and could now do better than her any day of the week. He wanted her to smile at him in that beautiful way of hers and say it had all been a mistake, a huge misunderstanding.

But most of all, more than anything, he wanted to not be hard as a rock after only a few moments in Eva’s presence. He’d been soft just a few minutes ago, even though he’d known what he and Caroline would do once they got back to their hotel room. But now his dick was straining so hard in his pants he could feel the outline of his zipper through his briefs. And he could barely think straight, knowing Eva’s dark triangle was just a few tantalizing inches below his erection.

He had to let her go. He understood it was inappropriate to pin any woman against a wall like this in public, even one who had hurt him as badly as Eva had. But just as he was beginning to get himself under control, she chose that moment to stop looking like a frightened rabbit with her eyes purposefully averted and peek up at him.

Their eyes locked. Hers were curious, like this was some fun little game they were playing. What else could he do but kiss her? It seemed like the natural conclusion, the only way to control her that he’d ever known.

At first she just took his kiss, her shock evident in her non-response. But then she opened her mouth wider and pushed her tongue into his, moaning as she did so, as if she had been waiting years to kiss him. This should have felt like a win for him, but her acquiescence stripped away the last shreds of his usually iron-clad control. And what had started out as a power move on his part became his undoing.

He hiked the soft chiffon of her evening gown up just far enough to position one of her legs around his waist, then he ground his hips against her silk clad mound in a frenzy of need that wouldn’t even allow him to unzip his pants.

For minutes all that could be heard in the darkened alcove was the sound of fabric rubbing together and their frantic breathing as they kissed, her body flush against his, the heat of her hot pussy beckoning him through three layers of clothing. He was a grown man who had made sexual conquests all over the world, but here he was just a few minutes away from coming in his pants.

As if compelled by his thoughts, she moaned against his lips and then cried out in surprise when she climaxed. They were so close, he could feel the orgasm shuddering through her body, radiating from her pelvis, and it caused him to grind against her even harder so he could join her in that special place, self-control be damned.

“Lex?”

She was calling his name. But she sounded irritated, like she wanted him to stop. He slowed down.

“Lex?”

He opened his eyes and found Eva staring back at him, her own eyes wide with confusion, her mouth partially open in an “oh” of surprise.

“
Lex
!”

The voice was much harder now, and he realized it didn’t belong to Eva, was in fact coming from behind him. Caroline. He closed his eyes, slowly blinking himself back to reality, where he could see the scene for exactly what it was: him dry-humping his ex-girlfriend against a wall and getting caught doing so by his current mistress.

Eva seemed to be putting together what had happened, too. She quickly withdrew her leg from around his waist, and tugged her arms down, trying to release herself from his right hand, which was still gripped around her wrists, pinning them to the wall.

In a state of shock, he released her and turned toward Caroline, who took in the scene with cynical aplomb before saying, “Will she be joining us in the hotel room?”

“
W
ill
she be joining us in the hotel room?”

Eva came crashing back to reality with a heart-wrenching thud. She had just let Alexei Rustanov dry hump her to an orgasm against a wall and in public where anyone could see. And now his date or girlfriend or mistress or whatever was proposing a threesome.

This time, she didn’t try to walk away. She ran. And she didn’t stop running until she reached the valet station.

The Pittsburgh winter air hit her with a brutal force, unlike anything she had ever experienced in her hometown, which occasionally got cold, but not this kind of wet, grey cold. Outside, she began to feel even more remorse for what she had just let happen inside. Her thoughts landed on Aaron, the love of her life, the person she’d pledged her heart and soul to. She couldn’t believe she had betrayed him like that.

She pulled her claim ticket out of her clutch and handed it to the valet. “Please hurry,” she said, hugging herself and running her palms up and down her bare arms. “I left my coat in the car.”

That wasn’t true, but she was more than willing to abandon her favorite long coat inside the Sinclair Mansion if it meant getting away from Alexei.

To her great relief the valet guys took pity on her and brought around her economy rental in record time. She sped away, just as Alexei was coming out of the mansion, that gorgeous woman by his side.

Eva tried not to look, but once again, she couldn’t help it, even though she had just been berating herself for this same kind of nonsense a few moments ago. She looked anyway and what she discovered was Alexei staring right back at her, his scowl set in stone.

S
he’d run
. The first chance she’d got, she’d run again. He would have gone after her, but Caroline caught his arm before he could.

“Lex, what’s going on?” she asked. Even seasoned mistresses didn’t expect to come out of the bathroom to find their dates on the verge of an orgasm with someone else.

“I’m sorry,” he said, turning back to her, despite wanting nothing more than to hunt down Eva, throw her on the ground, and bury himself inside of her. One of his business rules was he could be an asshole all he wanted to his peers and rivals, but he treated those who worked for him with respect.

Caroline didn’t necessarily work for him, but he did have the upper hand in terms of their relationship. He’d bought her a two-bedroom on the Upper East Side in a building with a doorman, and put a substantial sum of money in her bank account each month to keep her in designer clothes, gourmet meals, and whatever other luxuries she wanted. In exchange, she made herself available as his date or bed partner wherever and whenever he wanted her.

But standing there in the hallway with her in the wake of what had just happened with Eva, he knew that they would be spending the rest of the evening together.

When their limo arrived back at the hotel, he said, “I’m sorry, but some unexpected business has come up. I won’t be available tonight. You can stay in the hotel and I’ll send the jet to take you back to New York first thing in the morning. Call Emilio. He’ll set it up.”

She cut her eyes, obviously stuck between the understood terms of their relationship and her own confused annoyance.

“Are you dumping me?” she asked, disbelief ringing in her voice. For Caroline, who could have just about any man she wanted due to her looks and general mien, it was probably hard to fathom being dumped for some random woman in cowboy boots and a yellow party dress. “Who is she?”

“She’s unfinished business. And I’m not dumping you for her. I want to take care of this tonight, but Emilio will call you when I get back to New York and we’ll go out to dinner.”

Caroline gritted her teeth. He could tell she craved answers, but didn’t want to press for them for fear of talking herself out of the set-up she had with him. But he knew she would cave to his commands. All women could be manipulated with money. Eva had taught him this the hard way.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call your assistant when I get back to the room.”

He nodded to the hotel’s doorman who had been standing patiently on Caroline’s side of the limo for a few minutes. He opened the door for her, and that was it. She was out of his space, leaving him free to deal with Eva St. James.

It only took his assistant, Emilio, about thirty minutes to track down Eva’s reservation at a chain hotel just a few blocks away from the one he’d just abandoned Caroline in. But a few minutes later, Emilio informed him she’d already checked out and a few minutes after that, Alexei found out she was on a plane back to Dallas.

Hearing this made Alexei’s usual scowl deepen. Just like eight years ago, when Eva ran from him, she really ran. Back then he hadn’t been able to track her down, as much as he had embarrassed himself trying, calling her closest friends over and over again and haunting the School of Social Work outside his shift hours, hoping to catch her on her way in or out. But she never showed up and a few weeks later one of the social work students took pity on him and let him know she had transferred to another program.

After that, he couldn’t study. He couldn’t sleep. If not for Emilio, who was back then his fellow minimum-wage security guard and three years his junior, he would have gotten fired from his job and kicked out of the MBA program. But after the third time he’d shown up for their shift switch, hungover from the night before because he’d drunk himself into a stupor over Eva, Emilio had abandoned the front desk, taken him to his nearby dorm room, and thrown him in a cold shower. From that point on, he made sure Alexei ate and studied and didn’t keep any liquor in his apartment until the worst of the heartbreak passed and he could move on.

But not forget. No, Alexei would never forget that condescending note she left on his refrigerator door. He eventually had it framed, and he kept it in the bottom drawer of his work desk in his New York offices. Whenever he felt his energy wane for the legitimate business world—which turned out to be in some ways even more cutthroat than his former crime world—he took the letter out and re-read it. That was all it took to feel his angry ambition spike again.

“I want Drummond Oil,” he told Emilio over the phone. “Set that in motion.”

A long silence came from Emilio’s end. “Are you sure about that, man? You’ve come a long way, buddy. She’s not worth going off the deep end again.”

“I know she’s not,” Alexei said. “That’s why it’s the perfect time to get my revenge. Now make it happen.”

Emilio sighed, but didn’t say anything else before hanging up. He now made more money than he could have ever dreamed of back in the day when he and Alexei had been unarmed security guards just trying to scrape by. Like most people in Alexei’s life, he didn’t poke the dragon if he didn’t have to.

Alexei hung up, just as the driver pulled into the private field from which his jet would be taking off. Oh, yes, Eva might have run, but this time she definitely wouldn’t be able to hide.

E
VA ended
up spending more to get on the last direct flight of the night from Pittsburgh to Dallas than she had on her entire Pittsburgh vacation package. And she’d also have to deal with the three-hour drive back to Drummond when she got in, but it was worth if it meant she’d be back with Aaron tonight.

Guilt gnawed at her, making her desperate to see him, to remind herself how much she loved him and what a wonderful life they had built together.

An image of Alexei lifting her leg around his waist suddenly seared through her mind. Without warning, she felt her pussy moisten at just the thought of him bringing her to release with her arms pinned above her head like that.

She cursed herself and her treacherous body, but it had always been like that with Alexei from the very first kiss.

She could still remember being taken by surprise when she stopped by his security desk the night before Christmas break.

“Hey, Lexie,” she’d said, tapping on his business book to get him to look up at her. She’d had to use this tactic often, because Alexei was almost always studying whenever she saw him. Unlike her, who only cracked open her books a couple of nights before a paper was due.

“I can see you’re studying and I don’t want to disturb you…” she started to say.

“You disturb me every night with the tap, tap, tap on my book while I am attempting to make study,” he pointed out. “I think this is maybe hobby for you.”

She continued on like he hadn’t said anything. “…but I know you’re going to be here all alone over the holidays, and I wanted to give you your Christmas present before I left.”

“My Christmas present,” he repeated, his usual scowl deepening even further.

“Yes,” she answered. “I’m sick of seeing you sitting around here looking like an angry bear all the time. So this Christmas I’m going to give you a hug. It’s more than obvious you need one.”

He looked up her from his sitting position, his hulkish body completely eclipsing the tiny rolling chair he sat in. “You want to give me hug.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, we will not hug.”

“Boy, I am Texas born and raised. We do not take “no” for an answer,” she informed him. “Now you can either get over here and let me give you this hug, or you can argue with me. But if I were you, I’d just give in. That way you can get back to your book.”

“I am not boy.” Alexei slammed his book shut and came around the desk to confront her.

“You are friendly,” he said, pointing at her in a way that made his observation seem more like an accusation than a compliment. “You come here to say good night and make, what is it called?
Small talk
every night because maybe you want to be friends. You are not like me. You have many friends. And I see you also talking and smiling to other guard, Emilio, too. Maybe you are girl who does not like when man not friendly to you. But I am man, and I do not want to be your friend. No hug.”

For a moment she stared at him in shocked silence. “
Okay
,” she said, drawing out the word. “Well, I think this proves two things. One, you’re really rude in a way that goes way beyond all that stuff we learned about in my Cultural Sensitivity seminar and two, you really, really need a hug.”

Before he could offer any more protest she slipped her hands under his arms, which were clenched into fists at his sides, and wrapped her own arms around his wide torso. She laid her soft head against his massive chest and squeezed as a hard as she could given their size difference and the fact that he was built like a stone statue. “Merry Christmas, Lexie—“

And that was when she felt his insanely large erection press into her stomach. She froze, her eyes popping wide.

“I told you, I do not want be friends,” he said above her, his voice quiet and furious.

For some reason, she still felt compelled to cling to him, if only to prove her point. “I still maintain that you really needed this hug,” she said, from the relative safety of his chest.

They stood there like this, her hugging him, him not hugging her back, neither of them saying anything, his erection filling the silence louder than a scream.

“You are adult woman but like
kotenok
, you do not listen. Like kitten, you do what you want and are surprised when your actions make trouble.”

She kept her face pressed to his chest, even though this position had become more than awkward at that point. “Am I in trouble?” she asked, her voice as shaky as her nerves.

“If you had listen when I say no, you would not have to know what you know now,” he pointed out.

“Listen more, yes. Less kitten, more listening.” Finally she mustered up the courage to draw away from him. “I’ll keep that in mind for the future, Lexie.”

She began to take back her arms, but he kept them pinned underneath his own and said in that stern way of his, “I do not think you have really learned this lesson. I must teach you.”

He lowered his face and kissed her hard and sure, cueing the all-consuming passion that would become the hallmark of their relationship. The kiss soon turned into groping and the groping turned into stumbling into a nearby supply closet where they consummated their fledgling attraction just five minutes after she accidentally found out it existed. That had led to a less frantic session back at his place. And then Eva lost count of how many times Alexei initiated another session and how many times he sent her over the edge with his deft fingers, his tireless tongue, and his heavily muscled body that just kept going and going and going…

She’d woken up late the next afternoon to a cell phone filled with angry messages from her father. Where was she? She was supposed to have arrived late the night before and he and her mother were worried sick. According to the last message, they were thinking about sending her perfect older brother, Steve, to Dallas to make sure she was all right.

She shook Alexei awake, and then playfully squirmed out of the way when he reached up to pull her back down on the mattress. “I’ve got to go, Lexie,” she said. “I was supposed to drive home last night and my parents are mad as a house of cats.”

Alexei regarded her through hooded eyes, heavy with sleep. “This is fine. When I see you next, we will be at your apartment. You will cook dinner for me and I will thank you for food all night long. We will sleep together and next morning we will fuck again in shower.”

He then kissed her mouth, which had fallen open with shock and said, “Go to your family. But come home to me,
kotenok
.”

The sharp ding of the captain turning on the seatbelt light jolted Eva out of this memory. They were beginning their descent into Dallas. With another spike of guilt, she performed a mental scrub, wiping away the memory, and instead concentrating on Aaron’s handsome face. He was the one she loved, the most important person in her life, she told herself.

Four hours later she arrived home at the sprawling villa she and Aaron shared with her parents. No one knew she was coming home early, so no lights had been left on. It didn’t matter, she had grown up in this place, and she easily picked her way through the living room and up the stairs in the dark. She took off her heels at the top of the stairs and padded past her parents’ room to the second door on the floor.

Though she’d tried to be as quiet as possible, Aaron must have heard her because he was sitting up in bed when she opened his door.

“Mama, is that you?” he asked, his little voice sleepy but strong in the darkness.

“Yes, it’s me.” She walked into the room and turned on the bedside lamp so she could see him and he could see her.

He spoke to her with half-mast eyes, just like his father used to when he was tired. It was even more eerie, because though Aaron inherited most of Eva’s facial features, including her full lips, high cheekbones, and wide nose, his eyes plainly revealed who he really was, the son of Alexei Rustanov.

She hugged him to her with fierce love.

“Mama, I’m sleepy,” he said, disengaging from her overly cloying hug after about thirty seconds.

She chuckled. She had probably only gotten that long of a hug because he was tired. Lord knew he didn’t put up with too much affection from his mother when he was awake, especially if they were out in public. Like most boys his age, he spent a lot of energy trying to prove to the world he didn’t need a mother, even if he did.

“Do you want a glass of water?” she asked, though he was already beginning to curl back up under his X-Men sheets.

“No, thank you,” he said. “Night-night, Mama.”

“Night-night,” she said.

She turned off the bedside light and left, but as she did, she looked back at her beloved child and reminded herself how hard she had worked to keep him a secret from Alexei, and of all the reasons she must continue to do so.