Nadia shook her head.
“I’m starting to think I’m barely Russian at all,” she said, “now that I’m face to face with the real thing.”
“Well, come on then,” Nikolai said, taking her hand. “You’re going to love it.”
Nikolai had booked the poshestbanyain the city, in the hopes that the day would go well enough to bring Nadia there.
Now he found his heart racing, and his skin sweating ever so slightly as he led her back to the car.
He’d formulated this idea with strategic intent. But now that he was actually with Nadia, in person, he was so nervous he could hardly stand it.
The Russianbanyawas a traditional bathhouse. In the medieval era they were more like wooden huts, but the modernbanyascould be luxurious stone palaces. Their key components were the fine, moist vapor of the steam rooms, and then thevenik,which was a branch used for flogging.
While plenty of thebanyaswere public spaces, Nikolai had deliberately booked the whole of a privatebanyaat one of Moscow’s finest spas.
They walked into the lovely, bright lobby, where the receptionist greeted them with glasses of cucumber water and showed them where they could change out of their clothes into soft white Turkish robes.
Once Nadia had put on her robe and tied up her hair, Nikolai met her at the entrance to the stonebanya.
“What do we do now?” she asked, biting her lip.
“Well, first we take a shower,” Nikolai said, gesturing to the shower heads against the wall. “Then we lay in theparilka—the steam room.”
“So, I should just...take this off?” Nadia asked, gesturing to her robe.
“That’s right,” Nikolai said. He tried to hold back his grin. “Don’t worry, this is a completely normal cultural experience. It’s nothing to be shy about. Whole families do it together.”
“As normal as brushing your teeth, huh?” Nadia said, also trying not to smile.
“That’s right.”
“You first, then,” she said.
Nikolai stripped off his robe and hung it on a hook on the wall, standing completely naked in front of her.
He knew he had a body that made women go weak in the knees—tall, broad, and thickly corded with muscle. The slightest movement sent ripples across his chest and shoulders, and caused new bulges to appear along his traps, his biceps, and his quads.
He could see Nadia’s mouth hanging open slightly, color rising in her cheeks.
Though he knew she was used to the ink on Bratva men, she still swept her eyes over the pair of eight-pointed stars on his shoulders, the double-headed eagle on his shoulder, and the various skulls, roses, knives, and cathedrals that were all traditional tattoos.
Nadia would know their meanings. She would know the skull meant that he had killed before, that the eagle showed his loyalty to Russia, the cathedral his loyalty to the Bratva. She would recognize the large wolf’s head on his chest as the symbol of house Markov. And she would note the absence of the tattoos given as punishment to rapists, liars, and betrayers.
The stars were only permitted to high-ranking family members, to Bratva bosses. Nadia would have seen those on her own father and grandfather’s shoulders.
Once he had allowed her to look him over, he quirked his eyebrow and said, “Your turn.”
Now she blushed harder than ever. But, bravely, Nadia stopped off her robe and stood nude before him.
Whatever he had imagined under her clothes, he could not have prepared himself for this.
If there was a mathematical equation calculated to make the most perfect female proportions imaginable, that’s what created Nadia. The full, round breasts, above her tight little waist, flaring out to voluptuous hips...it had an intense, primal effect on Nikolai. Every cell in his body was screaming out to him to grab her, take her, and make her his....
Besides the sensual shape of her body, her skin was the loveliest he’d ever seen. It was a smooth, silky coffee-and-milk color, beautifully rich, and glowing with health and vitality. Her cheeks and lips had a natural red flush to them, and her pert little nipples were a darker brown. All this, combined with her thick, dark hair, and the unusual green of the famous Turgenev eyes, made a vision of beauty that seemed almost too much to take in. And yet he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.
Nor could he prevent the effect her naked body was having on his.
He tried to control himself, but he could feel the blood rushing to his cock. It began to swell between his legs.
