Dimitri sighed, glared, and finally shrugged. “Fine. I’ll go get you some coffee and a bite to eat downstairs.”
Would he really drop the subject so easily? It roused my suspicions, but when he stepped to the side and opened the door for me, it vanished from my mind in the time it took to get out of the filing room and start striding toward my office. Three clients. One hour. Too little time to get things done, and with my father’s sneers still ringing in my ears…
Dimitri’s distaste for my family had made him paranoid, I figured. And not that I blamed him. Not in the slightest.
But whatever bee he had in his bonnet, I simply didn’t have the energy to participate in the insanity.
Chapter 17
Something Brewing
Dimitri in a tux turned out to be ten times more devastating than I’d expected.
“What?” he demanded, sounding cranky as hell, tugging at his bow tie—which I’d just gotten perfect, dammit! “Why are you staring at me? Do I look that stupid?”
“Stop that!” I lunged, trying to yank his hand away, and he dodged me.
“This thing is fucking choking me.”
“No, it fucking isn’t. Quit acting like a toddler.”
Dimitri glared at me so ferociously I might’ve quailed if I hadn’t had his tongue in my ass and his big, claw-tipped hands cradling my hips with impossible gentleness a few hours before.
I had to turn away and pretend to need to brush dust off my shoes to hide my blush. Or try to, anyway. He could probably smell it on me, the bastard.
Of course, I hadn’t smelled like much besides the adrenaline-tinged irritation of a workaholic with too much on his plate and the arousal of a man with an extremely attentive mate for the past week.
We hadn’t talked about it. In fact, the night after that bizarre conversation about how my father smelled, he’d come to my room after I’d already gone to bed with the lights out—and when I’d tried to ask what he was doing, he’d put his hand over my mouth, yanked the blankets off of me, and proceeded to fuck me through the mattress without a single word of his own.
I’d gotten the message.
And when he repeated the performance the next night, I’d bitten back anything I longed to say or to ask, whimpering quietly into the darkness in lieu of any other communication. The bulk of his muscles and his hot, overwhelming presence made those nighttime visits dreamlike, as in one of those torrid novels with possessive demon lovers coming only when their (mostly willing, let’s be real here) victims had fallen into a restive sleep.
Not that I’d ever avidly, secretly read anything like that in college or anything.
Anyway, Dimitri fucked me every night, and once his knot had gone down, he left without speaking. And he didn’t acknowledge it in the morning. A couple of times, like last night, he’d eaten me out with hungry, breathtaking force, drawing sounds out of me I hadn’t known a human-adjacent being could produce.
Andthenhe’d fucked and knotted me. By then, I’d been sobbing with frustration, because every time I tried to beg he put his hand over my mouth again.
We didn’t discuss it in the morning, or during the days we spent at the office or ducking out to visit various upscale men’s clothiers. Or in the evenings, either, because he’d borrowed a laptop from me and had taken to closing himself up in his bedroom after dinner. Sometimes I heard him on the phone, but he was always speaking Russian.
My one attempt at delicately inquiring had been met with a stonewalling I’d never seen equaled even by a client with a past-due invoice.
Now Saturday had come, and we were due at the club in half an hour, with the guests arriving an hour after that. And we still weren’t talking about it. Hundreds of people were about to descend on us, all congratulating us (more or less sincerely) on our mating, and I couldn’t even get my own head on straight regarding what our mating really meant.
What it meant to me had changed. That I couldn’t deny any more. Every time Dimitri touched me, my skin fizzed with awareness; my whole body lit up like a giant firecracker. His smiles drew answering smiles out of me, welling up helplessly from some place inside me that I hadn’t realized could be such a reservoir of effortless happiness until he came along. Even trading grouchy semi-insults with him cheered me up, because the bastard could piss me off and make me laugh simultaneously.
But to him, this was all an unpleasant charade. Even if he came to me every night and fucked me. What he’d said to me when I tried to convince him my pleasure had been a fluke kept running through my mind in an increasingly painful spiral:Yeah, it got me off. A tight hole will do that. Fucking you is kind of adjacent to what I usually enjoy.
“Brook? You ready? You okay? Those shoes are pretty fucking shiny already. And this party is exactly the kind of shit that gives you seizures.” I jumped and looked up from my very, very shiny shoes, the tissue I’d been using to dust them clenched in my fist. God, he probably thought seizures were the least of my issues.
“I’m fine. Yeah. There was a, a spot on the toe.”
He frowned down at me, shrugged, and said, “Well, then let’s go. If we’re late we’re going to hear about it.”
I shuddered. If we were late, we might as well be dead, because no other excuse would be sufficient. And my mother would find us beyond the grave to make our lives hell, anyway.
The club wasn’t far away, just a couple of miles around the edge of town, nestled between some manicured hills. A golf course, a restaurant and bar, tennis courts and a pool. All the amenities, dressed up in lots of stonework façade and huge shiny glass windows, with antique-looking clocks and lamps and bullshit like that to add what they probably hoped was old-world ambiance. My parents loved this fucking place.
