Rough Exile

I woke in the night, naked, needing to pee and surrounded by mounds of muscle. Quietly, I slid over Ilya and made my way down the hall to the bathroom.

When I came out, a dark shadow waited for me.

“Bron?” I guessed.

The shadow didn’t say anything.

“This isn’t funny.” This was a scene from every second horror movie I’d ever seen.

Adrenaline tried to convince me to run.

He grabbed my wrist and pulled me to him. Bare skin brushed against bare skin. I put my hand to his chest and gazed up at him.

Definitely Bron.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can’t sleep,” he admitted. He slid his hand into my hair and gripped it gently at the scalp, hard enough to make me feel trapped in the shivery kind of way.

He used his grip on my hair to tip my head back, then kissed me leisurely. His hum of pleasure had me wrapping my arms around him, too, grazing his back with my nails. “Woman, you’ll be the death of me.”

I could feel his interest growing, digging into my stomach.

“What’s keeping you awake?”

He shrugged. “Go back to bed before he realizes we’re missing. He’ll think we abandoned him.” Rather than let me go, he stole one last kiss.

“Where are you going?”

“I need to add a few more things to the note for Lev.” The ‘note’ for the man who took care of the farm when they were gone read more like a book at this point.

“About the new goat?”

“Yes, she’s not getting along well with the others. It was a bad time to bring her over.”

He gazed out the window to the kitchen garden like a father who was leaving his newborn with a stranger.

Bron kissed me on the forehead, and let me go. “Go on, my Queen of Whores. Don’t let me keep you up.” He slapped my ass. I went.

If none of us were going to live here anymore, nothing about the farm mattered, did it? And yet both men were still talking like they were moving back to Moscow and never looking back.

Sighing, I crawled back in beside Ilya, buried my face in his chest, and tried to dismiss all the uncertainty from my mind.