The Russian's Acquistion
“Oh, Aleksy,” she murmured, hating to hear of his suffering. Drawing back, she reached to cup her hand against his scarred cheek, feeling the muscles tense beneath her touch. She almost pulled away, but he covered her hand and closed his eyes. Turning his mouth into her palm, he pressed a kiss into her hand before letting her touch settle against the jagged line again.
“Are you really able to accept all that this scar means?” he asked with a mixture of anguish and hope.
“It means you’re a man who would fight to protect the people he loves. That’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“I am. That’s what I came here to tell you. I would die protecting you.”
His image blurred as her eyes filled with tears, afraid to believe what she was hearing.
He moved his hands over her with fervent possession. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath, especially when he looked at her with uncertainty edging the blaze in his eyes.
“Can you imagine for a minute how difficult it has been for me to know that you deserve every type of happiness and be completely convinced I’m the last man who can give it to you?”
“About the same as it feels for me?” she suggested, feeling something crazy and optimistic battering at the thinning shell she’d always held tightly around her heart.
He shook his head. “All you had to do was stay and I would have been the happiest man alive.”
The feeling inside her became massive, too big to be contained. “How could I stay when you didn’t seem to w—” Her chin crumpled and she bit her bottom lip, vision blurring again.
When she would have drawn back, he hugged her close, his thickly accented words breaking her open. “I want you, Clair. Of course I want you. I love you with all my heart.”
She shuddered at the cataclysm of hearing him say that, at feeling love all around her as he held her tightly and pressed hot kisses to her wet face. Her hands sought to grasp all of him, sliding up his chest, over his flexing shoulders, following the line of his tense neck, smoothing over his hair…. Their mouths met in damp, sweet, poignant ecstasy. Clair’s heart was so full it was going to explode.
In a move of agile, male strength, he hitched her to sit on her desk, sending files skating to the floor. Bracing his hands next to her hips and his forehead sternly against hers, he said, “Tell me you’re not just reacting to the first man to tell you that. I don’t have it in me to be noble and give you up again, Clair. A man like me loves for life, and this is it.”
Life. She smoothed his bottom lip with the pad of her trembling fingertip. “Just because I’d never had sex before doesn’t mean I didn’t know what it was or ache deep down to experience it. It’s the same with love. I don’t need a hundred men to compare to in order to be sure what I feel for you is the real thing.”
“Good, because you’re not getting a hundred. You’re not even getting one other man,” he muttered with a self-deprecating curl of his lip. He tilted her chin up, his gaze so tender it warmed her to her soul. “Are you too shy to say it properly?”
She smiled, stunned by how easily the words formed on her tongue. “I love you.”
The expansive emotion seemed to fill the room. The adoring smile he gave her as he stroked her cheek made fresh tears spring to her eyes, happy ones. His kiss was reverent and full of longing.
“Aleksy,” she said, reluctantly breaking a kiss that so easily could have spun into something very compromising. “This is my work. There are children here. We have to take this off-site if we’re going to keep this up.”
He sobered. “Can you leave? In the long term, I mean. Can you—will you—work from Russia or must you stay here? We can come back whenever you’re needed,” he promised.
She melted, thrilled but at the same time incredibly touched by his understanding. “Thank you for seeing how important the foundation is to me.”
His ironic expression made her chuckle.
“I didn’t sleep with you just for the foundation,” she insisted.
“I’ll choose to believe that,” he said with disgruntlement. “But you’ll marry me for no other reason than that you want to.”