Page 42 of Forced into a Bratva Marriage
This is bad. This is really bad.
Considering how much his shirtless body was affecting me, I knew I was in much deeper shit than I imagined.
Dang it.
Chapter 14 – Karik
It had been a week since the wedding, and we barely saw each other. I let her sleep in her old room because she wasn’t comfortable sharing my bed. I could’ve easily forced her to, but I didn’t.
She spent most of her time in that room, as though she were still my prisoner. Although a part of me didn’t mind her withdrawal, another part wished she’d accept her reality.
I wasn’t going to push her to act like the wife she was. But there was also a limit to what I could take. If she dragged this attitude on for too long, I might be forced to intervene.
Two days ago, I caught her staring at me from the doorway. I’d just stepped out of the shower, a towel around my waist, bare-chested. The look in her eyes was familiar. It was the same look I had in mine the night I stood at her door, watching her sleep.
Desire.
It was all over her face. The craving. The need. It was subtle, but present. She stared at me as if she were pleased by the sight, maybe even aroused by it. My assumption wasn’t far-fetched, because if she wasn’t drawn to me, she wouldn’t have bothered to feed her eyes.
The shock in her gaze when I caught her staring was satisfying. The way her breath hitched and the speed with which she immediately disappeared curled my lips into a faint smirk. Even now, thinking about it prompted the same reaction.
Ellie was just as drawn to me as I was to her, but she wasn’t ready to admit it. That was one reason she chose to sleep in separate rooms. She didn’t trust herself around me. Good. That was the plan anyway, a subtle seduction until her own body betrayed her.
I told her a week ago that I wasn’t going to touch her until she begged me to. At first, I thought I might have been overly confident in my claims. But after seeing that flash of desire in her eyes, I knew for sure that it was only a matter of time.
Some feelings were meant to be acted upon. Not suppressed. This was one of them.
Since it was obvious now that she’d planned to avoid me as much as she could, I decided to change the game. Ellie was bored most of the time, and I wasn’t ready to release her phone or give her another one.
To keep her mind occupied, I allowed controlled access to certain information. I had some documents and old case fragments taken to her room yesterday. Nothing that compromised me directly, but enough to help me understand her thinking.
I knew she was smart, so I was waiting to find out what she’d make out of those cases.
After work that evening, I headed straight to her room, using the case files as an excuse to be around her. Agata told me that she wasn’t in there, that she’d been in the library the whole day.
I wasn’t surprised.
This was the closest she’d been to being productive since her arrival. Of course, she jumped on it with all she had.
I changed my route and strolled down to the library. It was quiet inside, with soft light filling the space. At the table by the round window, she sat, surrounded by scattered books and loose documents.
Her hair was piled high in a messy bun, a few strands escaping to frame her face. A pen was tucked behind her left ear, forgotten as she buried herself in work. Her eyes stayed locked on the pages in front of her, her fingers shuffling through the papers with focused urgency.
She was wearing an oversized T-shirt with long sleeves that swallowed her hands. The top three buttons were undone, revealing a glimpse of her skin.
I walked inside, between two towering shelves on both sides, each packed with meticulously arranged books. My shoes scuffed against the floor as I neared her table, one hand in my pocket.
She heard my footsteps but didn’t look up. Either she deliberately refused to acknowledge my presence, or she was simply too engrossed to notice me.
Inmyopinion, the former was the most likely.
“I don’t know what you had in mind when you forwarded these files to me, but…” she began, her eyes scanning the papers in front of her, “…the inconsistencies here are alarming.”
She had heard me come in but chose to ignore me. Deliberately.
“Good evening to you too,” I said, my voice laced with sarcasm.
“This.” She tapped a finger on the file before her, ignoring my greeting. “This is very similar to the Vetrov case, and I think that’s why you had it brought to me.”
