She sighed and shuddered instantly. ‘More,’ she moaned. ‘I need more.’
And, God help him, he needed to hear it.
‘Tell me exactly what you need, zvyozdochka,’ he commanded. ‘I want to hear you say it.’
She groaned again, a low, needy sound which ripped right through him. He couldn’t help it. Nestling between her legs, he flexed himself against her wet core.
‘You, Malachi,’ she muttered, opening her legs and arching as his tip slipped inside. ‘Inside me.’
He couldn’t stand it any longer. He thrust inside her. Slick, hard, deep. Just as Saskia wrapped her legs around him and clung on.
In and out, and she lifted up and met him stroke for stroke. The only sound was their ragged breathing, and every so often a deep, sensual groan. And then she lifted her legs higher, locking them tightly around his waist and twisting, so he plunged in that little bit further, and Malachi knew he was lost.
Just as he reached down between them, playing with the centre of her need, he heard her cry out his name. Her entire body shuddered, then tensed, then stilled, and he flicked his fingers expertly.
Saskia screamed, calling his name and toppling over the edge. And still he kept going, flinging her straight back over every time she thought she was done, until the final time, when she slid her hands down his back and cupped his buttocks, pulling him into her with such force he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began.
This time when she shattered around him his name was on her lips. He drove himself home and followed her into oblivion.
CHAPTER SIX
MALACHI CURSED UNDER his breath. A filthy Russian curse he remembered his mother using—if not in the beginning, then certainly a lot towards the end.
Saskia was carrying his child.
His baby.
And he’d forgotten. All he’d been thinking about was getting inside her again, just like three months ago.
But this wasn’t then—this was now. She was the mother of his unborn child and everything had changed. He was going to look after them. That was his responsibility. But responsibility and personal life were different things, and that meant there had to be boundaries. He couldn’t go blurring the lines by being intimate with Saskia. There had to be rules.
He ignored the voice in the back of his brain asking Why? Needling him. Whispering that if there weren’t rules, he wouldn’t have to keep his hands off the woman who was even now still naked in his master suite.
And, God, how a part of him ached to spin around, go back in there and take her. Over and over again.
‘Weakness!’ he muttered, slamming his fist on the countertop as he marched into the kitchen to get himself a long, cold glass of water, when what he really needed was a very long, very icy-cold shower.
Though privately he doubted even that would do the trick. Saskia had got under his skin the first time they’d met and he’d been trying to eject her ever since.
In some ways the appalling misstep he’d made tonight had been inevitable. And if he didn’t have those rules in place it could just as easily happen again. He couldn’t allow it.
He wouldn’t allow it.
Being out of control was something he would never accept. And there was nothing controlled about this dark, needy thing which swirled inside him whenever he was with S
askia. Hell, whenever he even thought about her.
It felt altogether too much like powerlessness. And he’d sworn, back when he was eight years old, that when he grew up he would never allow anything to make him feel powerless again. Which meant showing no emotion.
Emotions were a bad thing. They were what made things start to unravel. His parents had loved each other—and hated each other, for that matter—with such intense passion that their relationship had been an emotional rollercoaster. And not just for them, but for him and his brother, too.
Malachi didn’t know how much his brother, Sol, remembered about those very early years, if he remembered anything, but for him it had been draining. He’d never known whether their parents were going to be there at any given time, to remember to cook a meal, or give them a bath, or even just tuck them in to bed at a decent hour.
But that had been nothing compared to the powerlessness he’d felt when their father had died. Their mother had been unable to cope with the loss, and spiralling into drug addiction had been the only means of escape she could see.
It had fallen to Malachi to keep things together. From looking after the house to taking care of his baby brother. By the time he’d turned eight he’d been doing whatever it took to survive, to put food on the table for him and his brother, and to keep the local dealers away from his junkie mother.
Something ugly twisted and flipped deep inside him—something which a lesser man might have taken to be regret, maybe sadness, possibly even grief—but Malachi slammed it down in an instant.