Page 150 of No Longer Mine

I no longer looked over my shoulder when I walked alone. Vance or Don were always nearby. It helped.

I never thought I’d return to my penthouse, but Dimitri hated the brownstone. He said he missed the chaos of the city. Two weeks after the NYPD press release, he moved in without asking—and I didn’t stop him.

He never stood behind that podium and never took credit for the fallout. I was thankful. As much as he’d done, as many lives as he’d saved, putting his face out there would’ve made him a target. And after everything, I couldn’t lose him.

Now, I played chess with Don in the mornings while Dimitri worked. Vance couldn’t sit still long enough to be a worthy opponent, so he went with Dimitri instead. Sometimes they traded off. I never complained. I had peace. I had safety.

It had taken far too long.

But every so often, when the apartment was quiet and the city buzzed outside my window, I’d open the drawer where I kept my old lockpicks.

Just to make sure my fingers still remembered.

I still went to my kickboxing and MMA classes. I still remembered how to take down a man twice my size and I was working on being able to fight off several at a time.

Because one day… I was going to find Sinclair Cristof and I was going to make him pay.

I was taking my earrings out when Dimitri came up behind me. He pressed a kiss to my shoulder as he pulled my sleeve down. I was wearing his favorite dress with the green silky material and two slits that went up my thighs. He’d taken me to my favorite restaurant and let me eat dessert for dinner.

His lips brushed the shell of my ear. “You didn’t eat enough.”

“I had three crème brûlées,” I murmured, smiling despite myself.

“And you shared two with me.”

I turned, catching the curve of his smirk, that impossibly arrogant one that made it hard to breathe. “You’re insatiable.”

“Only when it comes to you.”

He kissed me again—lower this time, over the place where my pulse beat steady against my collarbone. I leaned into him, into the safety he wrapped around me without even trying.

He unzipped the back of my dress and the material pooled around my waist, freeing my breasts to his gaze and his wandering hands.

His eyes dropped, his fingers following the path the dress had taken, skimming over my ribs before rising to cup me with a reverence that still disarmed me—even now.

“Still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he murmured.

I let my eyes flutter closed for a second as his thumbs brushed over my nipples, slow and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world. Like he wanted to memorize every inch of me all over again.

“You always say that,” I whispered, my voice already losing steadiness.

“Because it’s always true.”

He bent down, his mouth closing around one of my breasts, his tongue flicking softly before he sucked just hard enough to make my breath catch. His other hand roamed lower, dragging along my hip, the outside of my thigh, down to the slit in my dress. When he looked up into my eyes, there wasn’t lust there or pride… it was devotion. My head fell back and a moan escaped my parted lips. I couldn’t believe I got to come home to a man who adored me, cherished me—worshiped me.

His fingers hooked into the waistband of my panties, dragging them down my thighs. “I love you.”

I gasped and my eyes flew open. I didn’t think I would ever get to hear him say the words. I didn’t exactly need to hear them as he showed me almost every day his love through his actions, but him saying them? It was erotic. When he pressed a kiss to the soft skin between my thigh and my hip, a sigh escaped me. I sunk down to the floor beside him, instead of letting him taste and worship me, I straddled his thighs.

His hands gripped my waist instinctively, but he didn’t try to take over. He just looked up at me like I was everything.

“Say it again,” I whispered, my fingers curling into the back of his hair.

His jaw tensed as if saying the words once had cost him more than he expected. But then his voice broke through the quiet, steady and wrecking.

“I love you.”

This time, I kissed him.

---