when she bucked against him.
“Concentrate, solnyshka.”
She ripped open the foil packet, then took her time rolling it down his velvety length, until he cursed beneath his breath.
Alicia liked the evidence of his own pressing need. She liked that she could make his breath catch, too. And then he stopped, braced over her, his face close to hers and the hardest part of him poised at her entrance but not quite—
He groaned. He sounded as tortured as she felt. She liked that, too.
“Your name.”
She blinked at the short command, so gruff and harsh. His arms were hard around her, his big body pressed her back into the soft leather seat, and she felt delicate and powerful all at once.
“Tell me your name,” he said, nipping at her jaw, making her head fall back to give him any access he desired, anything he wanted.
Alive, she thought again. At last.
“Alicia,” she whispered.
He muttered it like a fierce prayer, and then he thrust into her—hot and hard and so perfect, so beautiful, that tears spilled from her eyes even as she shattered around him.
“Again,” he said.
It was another command, arrogant and darkly certain. Nikolai was hard and dangerous and between her legs, his eyes bright and hot and much too intense on hers. She turned her head away but he caught her mouth with his, taking her over, conquering her.
“I don’t think I can—” she tried to say against his mouth, even while the flames still licked through her, even as she still shuddered helplessly around him, aware of the steel length of him inside her, filling her.
Waiting.
That hard smile like a burst of heat inside her. “You will.”
And then he started to move.
It was perfect. More than perfect. It was sleek and hot, impossibly good. He simply claimed her, took her, and Alicia met him. She arched into him, lost in the slide and the heat, the glory of it. Of him.
Slick. Wild.
Perfect.
He moved in her, over her, his mouth at her neck and his hands roaming from her bottom to the center of her shuddering need as he set the wild, intense pace. She felt it rage inside her again, this mad fire she’d never felt before and worried would destroy her even as she hungered for more. And more. And more.
She met every deep thrust. She gloried in it.
“Say my name,” he said, gruff against her ear, his voice washing through her and sending her higher, making her glow. “Now, Alicia. Say it.”
When she obeyed he shuddered, then let out another low, sexy growl that moved over her like a newer, better fire. He reached between them and pressed down hard against the heart of her hunger, hurtling her right over the edge again.
And smiled, she was sure of it, with his warrior’s mouth as well as those winter-bright eyes, right before he followed her into bliss.
Nikolai came back to himself with a vicious, jarring thud.
He couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure he breathed. Alicia quivered sweetly beneath him, his mouth was pressed against the tender junction of her neck and shoulder, and he was still deep inside her lovely body.
What the hell was that?
He shifted her carefully into the seat beside him, ignoring the way her long, inky-black lashes looked against the creamy brown of her skin, the way her perfect, lush mouth was so soft now. He ignored the tiny noise she made in the back of her throat, as if distressed to lose contact with him, which made him grit his teeth. But she didn’t open her eyes.
He dealt with the condom swiftly, then he found his trousers in the tangle of clothes on the floor of the car and jerked them on. He had no idea what had happened to his T-shirt, and decided it didn’t matter. And then he simply sat there as if he was winded.
He, Nikolai Korovin, winded. By a woman.
By this woman.
What moved in him then was like a rush of too many colors, brilliant and wild, when he knew the only safety lay in gray. It surged in his veins, it pounded in his temples, it scraped along his sex. He told himself it was temper, but he knew better. It was everything he’d locked away for all these years, and he didn’t want it. He wouldn’t allow it. It made him feel like an animal again, wrong and violent and insane and drunk....
That was it.
It rang like a bell in him, low and urgent, swelling into everything. Echoing everywhere. No wonder he felt so off-kilter, so dangerously unbalanced. This woman made him feel drunk.
Nikolai forced a breath, then another.
Everything that had happened since she’d tripped in front of him flashed through his head, in the same random snatches of color and sound and scent he remembered from a thousand morning-afters. Her laughter, that sounded the way he thought joy must, though he’d no basis for comparison. The way she’d tripped and then fallen, straight into him, and hadn’t had the sense to roll herself as he would have done, to break her fall. Her brilliant smile that cracked over her face so easily. Too easily.
No one had ever smiled at him like that. As if he was a real man. Even a good one.
But he knew what he was. He’d always known. His uncle’s fists, worse after Ivan had left to fight their way to freedom one championship at a time. The things he’d done in the army. Veronika’s calculated deception, even Ivan’s more recent betrayal—these had only confirmed what Nikolai had always understood to be true about himself down deep into his core.
To think differently now, when he’d lost everything he had to lose and wanted nothing more than to shut himself off for good, was the worst kind of lie. Damaging. Dangerous. And he knew what happened when he allowed himself to become intoxicated. How many times would he have to prove that to himself? How many people would he hurt?
He was better off blank. Ice cold and gray, all the way through.
The day after Veronika left him, Nikolai had woken bruised and battered from another fight—or fights—he couldn’t recall. He’d been shaky. Sick from the alcohol and sicker still with himself. Disgusted with the holes in his memory and worse, with all the things he did remember. The things that slid without context through his head, oily and barbed.
His fists against flesh. His bellow of rage. The crunch of wood beneath his foot, the shattering of pottery against the stone floor. Faces of strangers on the street, wary. Worried. Then angry. Alarmed.
Blood on a fist—and only some of it his. Fear in those eyes—never his. Nikolai was what grown men feared, what they crossed streets to avoid, but he hadn’t felt fear himself in years. Not since he’d been a child.
Fear meant there was something left to lose.
That was the last time Nikolai had drunk a drop of alcohol and it was the last time he’d let himself lose control.
Until now.
He didn’t understand this. He was not an impulsive man. He didn’t pick up women, he picked them, carefully—and only when he was certain that whatever else they were, they were obedient and disposable.
When they posed no threat to him at all. Nikolai breathed in, out.
He’d survived wars. This was only a woman.
Nikolai looked at her then, memorizing her, like she was a code he needed to crack, instead of the bomb itself, poised to detonate.
She wore her dark black hair in a cloud of tight curls around her head, a tempting halo around her lovely, clever face, and he didn’t want any part of