Page 49 of Wicked Refusal

But God help me, I do.

I kiss back once, twice. I kiss back a thousand times, until numbers stop making sense and all that matters is his lips on mine.

I can’t help it. He’s all I ever wanted. All I never wanted to lose. And after months of absence, being touched by him again—it’s like coming home.

You. You are my home.

I don’t realize we’re tumbling backwards until my butt hits the couch.

“Yulian—”

“Tell me you don’t want this,” he rasps, voice like sandpaper. “Tell me, and I’ll stop.”

Say it.It’s the rational part of my mind speaking—the one that remembers how painful it was to let go the first time around.Say you don’t want it. Tell him no.

But I can’t.

Because it would be a lie.

And there have already been enough lies between us.

“Don’t stop,” I gasp. “For the love of God, just don’t stop touching me.”

Yulian bites a Russian curse between his teeth. “Blyat’.”

Then his hands are on me.

They slide down from my face, hot like coals, and rip open my nightshirt. I’m left half-naked, with a flimsy pair of panties and nothing else, my breasts bare.

Yulian’s mouth claims them immediately.

“Fuck,” I gasp. “Yulian…”

It feels terrifying to be doing this with him again. To bare myself to him, let him see every vulnerable inch of me, let him kiss and bite andclaim.

But it feels right, too.

It feels more right than anything else.

I arch into his mouth, losing myself to the feeling. Yulian’s tongue is sinful, his teeth dragging gasp after gasp out of me. I can already tell my nipples will be swollen and bruised in the morning, but right now, I can’t bring myself to care. All I can do is toss my head back and bite my tongue.

But how can I keep it down?

“Yulian,” I whisper, “m-maybe we should move to?—”

Suddenly, Yulian yanks me forward. I fall off the couch and into his arms. Softly, he lowers me onto the Persian rug.

“No,” he growls. “Want you now.”

Heat rushes to my cheeks. Then it rushes lower, too.

“But Nikita, Eli—they’ll hear?—”

“They won’t.” He sounds so confident—so sure of it. “Do you trust me?”

How can I?my heart screams.How, when you’ve shattered that trust into a thousand pieces?

But my heart isn’t calling the shots right now. My body is.