Page 5 of Her BRATVA Protector
He listens, does not interrupt, and when I’m done, he slightly tilts his head to the side and gives me the smallest smile.
“The contract signature was witnessed by three men; two of them are still alive. The territory and the routes were transferred to my family the day Ray died, lass. The bride is the last term. The only outstanding one.”
My mouth opens and closes.
“Also, the contract promised a Venn.” His blue eyes don’t leave my face. “And you’re a Venn.”
“What?” I squeak out. He can’t possibly mean…
“You took the name when ye married him, aye?”
“Yes, but…”
“Then you’re a Venn… soon to be Maksimov,” he ends with a devastating smirk.
What the fuck…
“That’s not…that’s not what the contract intended,” I say, stuttering. “It was clearly written for Jasmine. Ray and your…Pakhan, or whoever… they had his daughter in mind. Not hiswidow.”
He drags a hand over his beard, slowly, like he’s studying me. This man is sitting in my living room, telling me calmly, with an arm along the back of my couch, that he’s gonna marry me!
My pulse is beating out of control.Think, Lisa. Think!
“You came here for Jasmine. She…”
“I dinnae want Jasmine.”What?!“She’s a child,” he adds. “I have nae interest in marrying a child. I will not be putting my hands on a twenty-year-old lass. She can keep her life and whatever she’s got going on. I dinnae want her.”
“Then…then you agree there’s no contract.”
“Aye, there is, love. I wantyou.”
Oh, sweet Lord…I’m going to faint.
My voice is barely audible. “We met ten minutes ago.”
He nods. “Aye.”
“You can’t…you don’t decide something like that in minutes.”
“I dinnae need ten minutes, lass.”
He says it so casually that the air goes out of the room. Then he stands. He moves like a fucking storm; I felt it the second I opened the door. He’s quiet, fast, and on me before I’ve registered he’s left the couch. Three steps and he’s right there, towering over my seat, all beard and shoulders and three-piece-suit menace blocking out the light. Then he raises his hand, and I hold my breath. But before I can recoil, he softly runs his knuckles down my cheek. Slow. Just the lightest drag from my temple to my jaw. Impossibly tender. His mesmerizing blue eyes never leaving mine. Standing so close, his spicy scent is all my lungs can inhale; the heat from his massive body reaching mine.
Shit, shit, shit.
His knuckles are warm and rough. And I instinctively think: Ray’s never felt like this. Ray had the soft hands of a man who paid others to do his dirty work; this man’s hands havedonethings. I can feel the calluses on the ridges of his fingers, the slight catch of a healed scar. Heat radiates down my neck, spreads through my chest, and settles in places I will be answering for later in the privacy of my bed.
Up close, he’sworse. So much worse. The pale blue of his eyes is ringed around the edges, and his lashes are insultingly long, thick, and dark. The kind of lashes any woman would kill for. His beard is thick and neatly trimmed, close enough to hint at the cut of the powerful jaw underneath. There’s a small scar running through one of his eyebrows, pale skin against thick, inky slashes, and another at the corner of his mouth I want to put my tongue on. Oh God! And his smell… He smells like cedar and clean cotton and something warm and male that has no business standing this close to me.
His thumb brushes my cheekbone one more time, and my whole body lights up.
I don’t move. I am pinned to the armchair.
“Mr. Maksimov,” I croak out, “I have spent ten years in a marriage I did not choose, to a man I did not love, and I buried him only weeks ago. I am not getting into another one.Especiallynot with you. And especially not because of a piece of paper Ray signed out of desperation. No one in this house is fulfilling that damn contract. So you can take yourI want youand go back to wherever you came from. Because that part of the deal is off.”
I’m breathing hard by the end of my tirade.
Adam Maksimov looks at me for a long time. Then his fucking sexy mouth twitches again.
