Page 12 of Arranged Marriage to the Brutal Bratva King
I expect him to pull back. To change his mind, maybe realize I’m too young, too inexperienced, too much trouble.
Instead, he cups my face in his hands, tilting my head up. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”
“I want to. I want this. I just… I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Then I’ll teach you.”
The promise in those words makes my knees weak.
Dimitri kisses me again, slower this time, thorough and devastating. His hands find the zipper at my back, lowering it inch by careful inch. The dress pools at my feet, leaving me in nothing but my underwear and sudden, crushing self-consciousness.
I fight the urge to cover myself, to hide the soft curve of my stomach, the generous swell of my hips and thighs. Every insecurity I’ve ever had about my body surfaces at once.
“Look at me,” Dimitri commands softly.
I do.
“You’re beautiful.” He says it like fact, not flattery. “Every inch of you.”
His hands map my body with reverent precision, tracing the curve of my waist, the flare of my hips, the soft flesh of my thighs. Everywhere he touches sparks to life, nerve endings I didn’t know existed suddenly screaming for more.
He guides me to the bed, lays me back against expensive sheets, and I watch him strip with the same controlled efficiency he brings to everything. His body is lean and hard, marked with scars I want to catalog with my fingers and mouth.
When he settles over me, the weight of him feels right in ways I can’t explain.
We kiss until I’m dizzy with it, until my hips are rocking against his without conscious thought, seeking friction, seeking more. Dimitri’s hand slides between us, finding me through the fabric, and I moan into his mouth.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmurs against my lips.
“I don’t know. Everything. You.”
“Not yet.”
Frustration spikes through desire. “Why not?”
“You deserve better than rushed and reckless.” His thumb circles, slow and maddening, and my back arches off the bed. “I want to take my time with you.”
He strips away my remaining clothes with careful hands, then his own, and returns to map my body with his mouth. He learns what makes me gasp, what makes me writhe, what makes me beg in broken syllables.
When his mouth finds me, I nearly come apart immediately.
He takes me apart piece by piece, building pleasure so intense it borders on pain. I come twice under his mouth and hands, trembling and gasping.
Then he pauses, lifting himself off of me to rest on the mattress beside me.
I don’t understand. Don’t understand why he’s stopping when we’re both clearly desperate for more. Don’t understand the sudden distance in his eyes even as he holds me close.
“Dimitri?”
“Sleep for now. We have time.”
Even as he says it, I hear the lie underneath. We don’t have time. Whatever this is, it exists in borrowed moments, stolen hours that can’t survive daylight.
I curl into him anyway, feeling his heartbeat against my cheek, his hand stroking lazy patterns down my spine. Exhaustion pulls at me, the kind that comes from emotional overload more than physical exertion.
I’m already half asleep when I feel him press a kiss to my hair.
“This was a mistake,” he murmurs, so quietly I’m not sure I’m meant to hear it.
