Page 37 of Sold to the Bratva Boss
His mouth drops to the back of my neck. "I've been patient with you all day."
"It's noon."
"I've been patient." He turns my chair slowly. "That deserves something."
"You're incorrigible."
"And you love it." He drops to his knees in front of me, and his hands slide under the hem of my dress, and his eyes come up to mine with that particular look—dark and certain and completely without apology.
"Rafail—"
"Let me." He says it quietly. Not a demand. A request, which from him is rarer and more valuable than any command.
I let him.
Later, settled on the small sofa against the office wall, his jacket draped over my lap and his arm around my shoulders, I press my palm to the side of my belly where the baby has started her afternoon percussion.
"She's awake," I say.
He puts his hand over mine without looking up from his phone. A moment later, he sets the phone face-down on the cushion beside him and focuses entirely on what's happening under our joined hands.
"There," I say, when she moves again.
His jaw shifts. Something crosses his face—unguarded, undefended, the expression of a man who did not expect to feel this and feels it anyway, completely.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
I watch him watch our daughter move, and I think about a girl of nineteen who was taken and a man who rebuilt himself from the ruin of it, and a contract that was never really a contract, and three days I spent trying to convince myself I didn't belong here.
I think about the night in the bathroom, his wrists in my hands, his voice stripped down to the bare frame of the truth.
The first I have not wanted distance from.
He's still dangerous. He will always be dangerous. He runs things I don't ask about and protects things I don't see and carries a weight that will never fully belong to the daylight. He is exactly what he is, and I chose him knowing exactly what that was.
He chose me back. Every morning, every noon, every quiet evening when he comes to find me before I've thought to look for him.
He turns his head and finds me already watching him.
"What?" he asks.
"Nothing," I say.
He studies my face for a moment with that particular attention—the kind that misses nothing. Then he pulls me closer, tucks me against his side, and presses his mouth to my temple.
"Mine," he says against my skin. Quiet. Absolute.
Not a question. Not a negotiation. Not the first time he's said it, and not the last.
I close my eyes and feel the weight of his arm and the warmth of his chest and the steady, unhurried beat of his heart.
"Yes," I say. "Always."
