A slow smile worked across his lips. “Don’t you know? Planning’s half the fun.”
34
Vasilije
I jolted awake.
The sheets were tangled around my legs, I was cold with sweat, and the bed beside me was empty. Shouldn’t have been a surprise. It’d been four weeks since I’d ‘rescued’ Oksana from the warehouse, and she hadn’t slept a full night in my bed once. Every once in a while one of us would fall asleep after we’d fucked, and it’d be late before she snuck off to play the piano or go to her own room down the hall, but we didn’t cuddle after.
I always woke up on my own. I’d told her that was how I wanted it because I didn’t trust her, but as the weeks went by, my stance began to shift. I wasn’t going to kill her, and she wasn’t going to kill me. Maybe I wouldn’t mind if she stayed in my bed.
I glanced at the clock on my nightstand and scrubbed a hand over my face, trying to organize my thoughts. The weed I’d smoked last night had made me paranoid. That had to be what this feeling was. Everything was fine.
But there wasn’t piano music wafting up the stairs.
I was out of bed and moving swiftly down the hall to the bedroom on the other side of the house, nervous. What if she wasn’t in there? I threw open the door to her bedroom, and when I saw the splash of blonde hair on the pillow, the tightness in my throat eased.
Fuck me, she was beautiful, and she was still here. Still loyal.
Still mine.
“Oksana.”
She stirred. Her head lifted and she peered at me with bleary, disoriented eyes, then her gaze went to the clock. She launched upright in the bed, her posture stiff because it was three in the morning. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” And everything. “Come on. You’re sleeping in my room tonight.”
She stared at me like I’d just burst into song. “What? Why?”
My eyebrow shot up. “Because I had a dream you left, and it’s stupid I had to come all the way over here to figure out if it was real or not.” In the nightmare, I’d spanked her so hard, she’d screamed and run from me, and I remembered it in vivid detail. When I got up and she hadn’t been at the piano, I was half convinced her room would be empty and all her shit gone.
“Get up,” I ordered. This wasn’t a discussion.
Her mouth dropped open, but no words came out. Why wasn’t she moving? Couldn’t she see how worked up I was? Finally, she swung her legs out of the bed and stood. She had on an old Randhurst t-shirt from some rush event my sophomore year, back when I still gave a fuck about going to school, and it was so large on her, it was like a dress.
She looked sexy as fuck in it, even with her hair a mess and indentations from the wrinkles of the pillowcase pressed against her face. We’d been together a month. A whole freaking month. If she was conning me, she was playing the long game, but I felt in my gut she wasn’t.
She hadn’t told me a lie since, and got more interesting the deeper I dug.
Oksana padded over in her bare feet, and when she tried to get past me in the doorway, I snared her in my hands. “After you told me about your father, I told you to get the fuck out of my house.”
Her eyes filled with confusion.
I wanted to stop talking, but my mouth kept going. “I changed my mind. If you leave me, we’re going to have a problem.”
It was a threat, but she didn’t treat it like one. She placed her soft hand on the side of my face. “I told you. I’m not going anywhere, Vasilije.”
I was done with this shit. She was right, after all. She couldn’t change who her father was, but she planned to do something about him, and I enjoyed how she wanted me to be a part of it. Besides our plan, I liked coming home to her. I cooked dinner for us while she played her songs on my mother’s piano, and after we’d eaten, we’d watch movies and talk, or I’d smoke weed and fuck her until she nearly passed out from an orgasm. Being with her was . . . easy. I tried not to feel anything, but it was getting harder every day.
She didn’t make a sound as I picked her up. Her arms banded around my shoulders and her legs wrapped around my waist, holding on as I carried her down the hall and into my bedroom. We fell in a heap onto my bed, our mouths slamming together.
I knew all her noises now.
When I scraped my fingernails over her tits, clawing at her nipples through the thin t-shirt, the whine she made was need. As I sank one finger into her damp body, her cry was desperation. And when I withdrew, she delivered a sound of pure frustration.