What's Left Of Me (The Firebird Trilogy Book 2) (19 page)

Alex stared at her, his green eyes asking their silent question.

“Come in,” she said, as though he were a vampire she’d invited to seduce her.

And seduce her he did, as he removed his clothing piece by piece until he stood naked before the glass partition, his cock standing at attention. She let her eyes slip shut.

He started behind her, washed her neck and shoulders first, her arms and back next. Then bathed her buttocks in slow circles, cupping each cheek, lifting, washing her thoroughly. Alex ran a finger between them, pinched them. He stroked her with his lips, probed her newly polished cleft with his tongue and worked it around the edge of her hole, up and down the insides of her cheeks. Her legs were forgetting how to support her.

Alex pushed her against the tiles, one hand holding her shoulder and the other grasping her hair. “
Ty moy.
You are mine. You have always been mine, and you always will be. Do you understand?”

She did, quite clearly. He was testing her. Alex had never before expressed the desire for domination, precisely because he knew it horrified and revolted her. Especially now that she had exposed the true extent of her father’s predations.

He was scared. All other conditions in which they might exist together had collapsed, leaving their only potential reality on life support. Each second counted. Each word, each signal must be the correct one.

“Only if you’re mine.”

The ice in his eyes thawed. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it over hers and let his tongue interpret for him. She reached for his cock, keeping him hard, focused on his craving.

Alex hooked his forearm under her leg and raised it, her back flat against the tiles, so he could sink into her. He moaned close to her ear and squeezed her ass. Hammered her. The rainfall showerhead unleashed an endless cascade, filling the room with steam. He moved his mouth to her neck, panting.

She wrenched her face away from his and gasped for air. “Stop,” she wheezed.

With a discouraged grumble, he pulled out and let her go. Stephanie swiped at her eyes and hurried into the bedroom where, dripping, she sucked in huge drafts of cool air. She inserted the cannulas into her nostrils, set the concentrator to pulse mode, and inhaled as she dropped onto the bed. Oxygen flowed in. Her unsated pussy throbbed like a fresh bruise. Longing for his cock inside her, for his hot skin and tempestuous kisses.

Her tears made dark spots on the comforter. She cried harder, oxygen pulsating through the cannulas with each ragged gulp.

Alex sat behind her. He said nothing, and she welcomed the silence. There was nothing left to say.

Chapter Nineteen

Alex

Her shoulders were shaking. He imagined that if one were to cut the wings off an angel, the large, prominent scar would look like this only in reverse. Shoulder blade to ribs instead of the other way around.

He laid a fingertip on it, and she stiffened. He traced the raised welt’s length. She was holding her breath, the worst thing she could do. He kissed the scar, lingered over it, drew its shape with his tongue. He hated what it stood for but loved it because it was hers. She had done battle and won.

“Breathe,” he whispered.

Her body heaved with the effort. She hunched forward with her face in her hands.

“I love you,” he said, because he did more than anything, and because he did not know what else to do. Because they were two broken things meant to repair each other’s empty spaces, and he had somehow failed her. “Nothing else matters. It never did.”

She faced him, finally. A tear raced down her cheek. He wanted to sow her fallow body with kisses that would grow into love for herself, if his was not enough.

“We were perfect once,” she said quietly, as if revealing a tragic secret. “And everything ahead of us was bright and full of potential.”

“We were kids. We didn’t know any better.”

She sniffed and rubbed the heel of her palm against her chest, leaving a red splotch.

“Please tell me where you went this morning.”

“If I tell you, you have to promise you won’t get upset.”

She’d sworn she wasn’t going to see Brandon. Alex made a noise in his throat, teeth gritted. “All right.”

“I talked to Katherine Miller.”

“You…what?” He’d rather it had been Brandon after all.

“I’ve been doing a little investigation of my own. By the way, my contact told me
you
were fishing for her information. Do you have any idea what that could do? They’d put you away longer than for rape if they thought you were intimidating her.”

“I didn’t go through with it—”

“Thank God.” Stephanie shoved her damp hair out of her eyes and, staring at the ceiling, poked her tongue into her cheek. “I was right. She drugged you, Alex. And had sex with you, knowing you wouldn’t remember. She’s deep into her illness, and she believes you were ‘mean’ to her. There’s so little happiness in her life she wanted to take yours. So she decided, because you couldn’t remember what happened anyway, that you had raped her.”

Anya summoned them with a hungry cry through the monitor. Terrible timing. She reminded him of Danny, who he suddenly missed. He’d pushed him away precisely because of the intolerable pain Danny, a relic of his old life, represented. Alex had hired a manager instead, a middle-aged woman who reminded him of nothing.

“I’ll feed her.” Stephanie turned off the concentrator and yanked out the cannulas, then wrapped herself in her robe. At the door, she looked back over her shoulder. “Stay. Just like that. Please.”

“Oh—Okay. I, uh, have to process this anyway.”

Probably for the first time in his life, his nudity embarrassed him. It felt inappropriate somehow, for a conversation of this weight. Disrespectful.

Katherine Miller could have destroyed his life, and yet he wasn’t angry, when once anger had been his immediate and resolute companion, who would have ensured she paid for it one way or another. But he was no longer young enough to use youth as an excuse for that kind of behavior; the crops he had sown were his to harvest, no matter how weary he had become. The person he had been—persons, and there were thousands of him, each one someone else’s conception—was buried in that field, its bones the framework to support a new man cultivated from the bits of him worth preserving. For too long others had defined him while he stood mute, afraid to challenge them. Better to be no one than continue to be a lie.

Stephanie shed the robe as soon as she returned, and sat beside him again on the warm indentation she’d left in the comforter. Apparently, she did not share his concern, and he stared at the gorgeous, rosy peaks of her nipples.

“So what happens now?”

“There’s no way of knowing, but I think she’ll do the right thing and drop the charges. I may have…persuaded her.”

“You mean threatened.” Alex chuckled and gave her a sidelong look. Their nudity was growing more awkward, and he considered grabbing a pair of underwear from the dresser.

“I didn’t. I just told her what might happen if it went to court, especially if people found out the truth. I don’t think she’d hold up in prison.”

“You’re vicious.”

“It’s weird, though. The more I think about it, the more I feel sorry for her. I don’t think she understands consequences at all. She was acting out some personal reality show, and she cast you against your will. I’m not sure she sees you as an actual person.”

“Not the first.”

“Like I told her, I’ll do what I have to do to protect my family. And if you want to press charges—”

“No. I…
Nyet.
Let’s move on.” He had spent enough time in the spotlight for his personal problems, and this was too emasculating to wrap his head around. Call it a false accusation and leave it at that. “What about you? Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.” She dipped her head toward her chest, her hands limp in her lap. “I wish I did. The girl you fell in love with wasn’t…this. Weak and disfigured. You deserve more than what’s left of me.”

“I didn’t fall in love with one part of you, Stephanie. It was all of you. I married that girl. She’s the mother of my child. She’s right here in front of me.” He swiped his thumb over her cheekbone. “If the most I could ever do again was just hold you every night, I’d take a vow of celibacy. I want to spend my life with you. For better or worse, whatever that life is.”

She took a halting breath. More tears streaked down her face. “Why do you stay? After everything, why?”

“Because living without you is like dying, except it never ends.” His eyes smarted. He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “You loved me when no one else did. You were all I had to hold on to for a long time.”

Her shoulders shook as though she were about to break into sobs. “I’ve always needed you to save me. Like some helpless fucking princess, always waiting for you to sweep in and take me away from everything. I give all the control to other people. How long have I let my father control me, and he’s fucking dead?”

“You came here, started a new life, did all the things you wanted to. All on your own. You chose what was best and right for you. You saved yourself, and then you saved
me
without even knowing you were doing it. I’m not trying to put another burden on you that you don’t want to carry. You asked me to marry you, and this is me thanking you for believing in our dream. For believing in me.”

She jerked her tearful gaze away from him. “When you finally have everything you want, you spend so much time fearing it’s all going to disappear one way or another. You were right about that. I’ve always been afraid of the way you make me feel. Of loving you this much.”

“One thing I can promise you is that I’m not going anywhere. Ever.” He bowed his forehead to hers. “It breaks my heart,” he whispered, his throat scratchy, his voice cracking, “to see you like this and not know what to do.”

Stephanie blotted her face with her hands. When she raised her head, her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. “Then you finally understand how it feels to love you.”

He understood something else too. That from this point forward, they had banished secrets from their relationship. No more blockades between them constructed by their independent, lonely torments. “I’m sorry, Steph. I am so sorry.”

“I don’t want you to apologize. I want…I want to go back to that park. To the waterfall and the flame.” She floated her fingertips over his cheeks, his lips, down his throat and chest. His body rewarded him with a fledgling erection growing harder by the second, throbbing at the sight of those dark blond curls, that glorious pink slit. “I want to make love in the sun, and watch the stars come out, and I want it to be with you.”

“You
are
with me,
devochka
. You have always been with me.”

“My first love,” she whispered against his lips.

He ached all over for her. She had gotten into him and yet he could not have enough. “Then let me love you, Stephanie. Please. Like you did for me.”

She pressed her hands into his shoulders and with determined strength shoved him onto the bed. “My only love.” Stephanie straddled him and eased herself onto his cock, enough to take in the head, to pump it a few times and release him.

“
O Bozhe
,” he gasped, squirming beneath her. He sank his teeth into his lip. Slick and tight, she lowered herself down his shaft, swaddling him. Alex spread his legs and, bucking his hips, slid deeper into her. She hunched forward. With his hands on her ass, he thrust harder, her breath scorching his neck, his shoulder, heavy with pleasure and her breasts a delicious weight on his chest. He curled a fist in her hair and plunged his tongue into her mouth, worked his lips over her neck and throat, biting, licking. She pushed back with each lunge, then sat up straight again, hands flat on his chest, pinning. Reclaiming power.

She closed her eyes, her body like breakers before a storm, his like splintering glass. He kneaded her firm, silken tits. She had lost most of the baby weight by now, her breasts the first to shed their plumpness. A persistent soft pouch made more obstinate by her convalescence remained below her belly button. It didn’t matter to him, not five or ten extra pounds, not the scar on her back or the deeper ones in her soul. She did not recognize her own power to heal.

She prodded a finger past his lips. He sucked at it, swirled his tongue around it, until she withdrew and began flipping it over her clit. He slinked his hands over her hips and onto her ass, and thrust in time with her strokes. Catlike, she arched her spine and rocked back, hips swinging back and forth as she fingered herself and he fucked her—finally, mercifully. A flush diffused over her chest and up her neck. Her muscles convulsed around him before the release of fluid splashing his cock. She stopped bouncing and cried out—shrieked, if he was being honest, and he was no likelier to be shy about coming—her orgasm jolting through him as though he clung to an electrified fence.

“The way you feel inside me…” she was saying as she swayed on top of him. His turn to gasp for air.

“How do I feel inside you?”

“Like you were made for me.”

He smiled, sighed, and closed his eyes.
I was. I know I was.

“Open your eyes, Alex.”

He did. Motionless, a pond the moment before a stone dropped into its center. Breathless as the first swell crashed through him. He was a thousand galaxies colliding. He was a million supernovas, his light too bright to be observed directly. She shared her breath with him, her precious air, when he could not catch his own. She tightened around him; he shot a hot, copious stream into her and let out a wild sound of release and rapture, and with tingling limbs possibly lost consciousness for a second or two.

Stephanie folded onto him. She’d once told him that she kept him inside her after he came so she could feel him softening and then slipping out on his own. He buried his face in her apple-scented hair and trailed his fingers up and down her spine.

“I want to stay like this,” she murmured. “This perfect moment. You and me.”

“We’re going away for a little while.”

She lifted her head, crossed her arms over his chest, and rested her chin on them.

“Just the two of us. I think we need this.
You
need this.”

“Where?”

“Not Russia.” He chuckled. “I don’t know. What about Italy?”

“Very romantic. But we should wait until she drops the allegation.”

“What if she doesn’t? She’s done enough damage, and I want to get you away from all this.” He fingered a lock of her golden hair. “I want you to remember why you fell in love with me.”

“I never forgot.” Stephanie captured his mouth with her lovely lips in a slow, intense kiss that healed all wounds and cured any illness. “I never will.” She charted a course down his chin, his throat, his chest. Down his belly, which tautened beneath her kisses. Downward still, and with the magic only she controlled coaxed him into a second performance he was all too willing to give.