Page 76 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“If Orlov moves?—”

“They won’t reach her door.”

“Pride,” he said quietly, “is a bad perimeter.”

I sighed. I hated when my brothers were right. It happened more often than any of us deserved.

“I can’t help but protect her myself,” I said.

Sergei looked at me for a long moment, then nodded once. “Call her. Then call me.”

He walked away before I could answer, leaving me alone in the back hallway with my phone in my hand and Kit’s number on my screen.

She had given it to me after coffee without making it look like a concession. One message sent to the number on my card, no greeting, no softness, no unnecessary punctuation.

Now I pressed call. She answered on the fourth ring. I knew it wasn’t because she was asleep, but because she was deciding whether to pick up or not.

“Morozov,” she said.

My name in her voice at three-thirty in the morning did something to me I did not have time to indulge.

“Kit.”

A pause.

“Nothing good starts with that tone.”

“Are you in your apartment?”

Another pause.

“Yes.”

“Door locked?”

“Excuse me?”

“Door. Locked.”

“You called me at three in the morning to check my deadbolt?”

“No.”

“Then try again.”

There she was. My palm twitched again, and this time the imagined crack of my hand against her ass came with such vivid force that my cock hardened beneath my trousers. She would glare over her shoulder, outraged and breathless. She would accuse me of being impossible. I would tell her impossible girls earned impossible consequences when they ignored danger just because no one had ever held them accountable.

Focus.

“Lock it,” I said.

I heard the sound of her breath catching in her throat.

“You don’t give me orders.”

“Not usually.”

“Not ever.”