Page 4 of Roma Queen
His thumb rubs a small circle against my cheek, and a flurry of goose bumps break out across my shoulder blades. “I get caught,” he murmurs. “You’re just like Medusa. Beautiful. Dangerous. You turn me to stone.”
I dismiss the urge to make a joke out of his comparison. It’d be easy enough to come up with some self-deprecating quip about my hair bearing some resemblance to a nest of snakes, but that’s not what he meant and I know it.
“I’m sorry, Firefly. I was a fucking asshole earlier. I’d love to say I’m not the kind of guy to make demands on people, but sometimes I am. Shelta taught me to command everyone around me. I’ve done my best to shake that trait over the past three years, but it’s tough with you. You’re…you’re fuckingimportant. Precious. Makes it much harder to rein in my need to control everything when it seems like you might get hurt if I don’t.”
An apology. An apology from a man like Pasha is no small thing. In college, I dated guys who did far worse than tell me what to do, and they weren’t able to swallow their own pride for five seconds to tell me they regretted their actions, let alone say they were sorry. Pasha’s far more arrogant than any of those guys. Far prouder. But he’s far stronger, too. I don’t mean physically stronger (even though he is by far). I mean his strength of character.
It takes an incredibly strong man to see a fault within himself, and to voluntarily step forward and take responsibility for it. It takes an even stronger woman to do the same.
I lean my forehead against his. This close, his pupils look like bottomless black wells, and I’m fully prepared and willing to fall into them. “I’m never going to give you shit for wanting to make sure I’m safe,” I tell him. “I probably…urgh, Idefinitelyreacted a little…sharply.”
His mouth quirks up into the faintest suggestion of a smile. “You straight up eviscerated me, Zara Llewellyn.”
He’s exaggerating, really. I could have left his entrails in a bloody pile on the sidewalk for telling me what do like that, but I didn’t. “The General. That’s what people call my father. When he gives an order, he expects it to be followed immediately and without question. Took me years before I finally stood up to him and told him where to shove his commands. I decided I wasn’t going to let anyone ever order me around again. And when you told me what I was going to do and how, without leaving room for even a sliver of my own free will…well, I guess I might have responded a little harshly. So, I’m sorry, too. I won’t do that again.”
Pasha brushes my lips with his own one last time and then sinks back into his seat, starting up the engine. “Feel free to call me on my shit whenever you like, Firefly. It was hot as fuck. My dick’s still raging hard from the telling off you gave me.”
The sidelong look he shoots my way has my stomach doing backflips. God, this is so ridiculous. I can’t spend too much time thinking about any of this, because if I do, my brain is going to melt out of my ears. The dreams I had for so long feltrealto me in a way that I couldn’t reconcile, and now the star of those dreams is sitting less than a foot away from me, and he just fucking kissed me and told me I made his dick hard. In the briefest time, he’s addled my brain, turned me inside out and upside down; I can’t even begin to imagine what he’s going to do next.
Pasha guns the Mustang’s engine, and we peel out of the parking lot. His smile turns into a full-on shit-eating grin.
“Why do you look so pleased with yourself?” I ask, fighting back a smile of my own.
His eyes remain on the road. “Because you’re blushing. You like me, don’t you. Just a little.”
“You’re not even looking at me. You can’t tell that I’m blushing.”
“Firefly, I could make s’mores over your face. I can feel the heat coming off your cheeks from here.”
I thump him in the arm, the crimson coloring my cheeks worsening by the second. “You are so full of shit.”
“You do. You like me. More importantly, you like mydick.”
If there were some way I could stop him from saying ‘dick,’ I’d do it. My heart needs a break. The palpitations that send my pulse skittering all over the place every time he utters that word are going to end me any second now.
I clap my hands over my cheeks. “Just drive, you idiot.”
“Admit it. Tell me the truth. You liked having my cock inside you, didn’t you? You want me inside you again.”
I can’t very well tell him I didn’t like it. That would be a flagrant, barefaced lie. He made me come enough times to know just how much I liked not just his cock, but his fingers and dirty fucking mouth, too. And I do want him inside me again. More than anything. I straighten up in my seat, removing my hands from my face, and pinning them underneath my legs, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me squirm. “If you must know, I did like it,” I say. “It felt…it felt incredible. Amazing. That was easily the best sex of my life. I’ve never lost my shit like that before. Having you inside me made perfect fucking sense. Everything else is so messed up right now, but while we were naked together on that couch…” Oh god. This is taking an unplanned turn for the worse. I wasn’t planning on being so damn honest, but now the words are half out, suspended in mid-air, and Pasha’s hands are gripping the steering wheel so fucking tight that I know I can’t stop now. What the hell iswrongwith me? Fuck.
I clear my throat, looking out of the window to my right. “While we were naked on that couch together, I felt like at leastonegood thing was happening to me. I felt safe. I felt like everything was going to be okay. I felt like, so long as you stayed with me, there was nothing to worry about, and all I had to do was keep holding onto you, and…” I run out of steam. Jesus. Of all the dumb things to say to the man you only just hooked up with for the first time a few short hours ago. I can’t keep staring out of the window. If I do, I’m only going to make it worse. I plaster a slightly mad smile onto my face and turn back to Pasha. “There. Happy now? Your dick must be really fucking magical if it’s capable of making me feel all of that.”
I laugh. Mercifully, the sound is light and carefree, filling the Mustang from floor to roof. Pasha’s not smiling, though. His amusement has vanished, replaced by a seriousness that makes my head pound and my palms break out into an instantaneous sweat. Shit, he looks like he wants to pull over and boot my crazy ass out of the car. I’m cringing internally when he opens his mouth and says, “My dick had nothing to do with that, Firefly. That was my heart.” Slowly, he turns back to the road, his sharp jade eyes, so pale in the early morning light, fixed straight ahead.
He is the most beautiful, savage creature I have ever seen.
Three
PASHA
Most people remember losingtheir virginity.
Not me.
I was fifteen-years-old and my father had just died. The old man was bound and buried, lowered into the ground, and I’d stared at Shelta’s blank, emotionless face throughout the whole process, and it had fuckingdestroyedme. The wake was loud and boisterous, full of drunk men and women shouting over the top of one another, crying, and laughing, and arguing, and telling stories, and I couldn’t bear it for one more fucking second. I stole a forty of Jack from my uncle’svardo,and I slipped off into the night with it, dead set on drinking every last drop inside the bottle.
It was Christmas break and school was out; I’d only been home three days when my father keeled over, dead as dead could be. We were renting temporary space on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, and the ground was so frozen it took three grown men wielding pickaxes to dig the damned grave.
