Page 53 of The Bratva's Nanny

I held her tighter and whispered into her ear, “I’m going to rewrite everything that fucking bastard did to you, and by the time I’m done, you will only remember me.”

Then, I kissed her sweetly—tugged at her upper lip and tasted the heat on her tongue. It started slowly…until I kissed ferociously.

I whispered in her ear how much I wanted her, needed her. How crazy I felt when I didn’t have her beside me. How murderous I got at the thought of letting her go.

But I said all of those in Russian and enjoyed the ascending sound of her loud moans ricocheting off the walls in my office.

She looked dazed, her cheeks flushed and her eyes hazy. She began to shake. Quivering, she arched against me, tipping her head back on a helpless moan. Her hips rocked in time with the thrust of mine, and her thighs shook.

I wanted her to come. I wanted her to scream my name. I wanted it so much that I grunted with the effort to stop myself from saying it.

She whispered, eyes closed, “You feel so good, Roman. You’re so hard, and I love it. I love—"

She gasped, trailing off. And I lost myself.

I bucked into her so hard that she clenched around me with every thrust. Her body flexed; then, she arched and came, jerking and shuddering.

I tried to catch my breath. Her sounds drove me to the brink, and I wanted to jump off the edge. Sweat rolled down my arm and stuck to the fabric of my shirt. Her upper lips glistened, and her eyes rolled into her head.

The first time we had sex was purely physical, driven by lust, desire, and adrenaline. This second time…it felt different. More intimate, like we’d connected in ways neither of us could explain. My chest felt like it would burst.

In split seconds, my desire for this woman grew and blossomed into something more consuming—a force so powerful that my knees buckled.

I grabbed her ass, dug my nails in, and fucked her as hard as she asked me to.

Then, I exploded with a sudden, violent jerk: an explosion that cracked a door open, a door I’d kept shut for a long time.

I groaned, pulled out of her, and spilled myself onto her thighs. Our breathing slowed, and our heart rates returned to normal. I felt lighter and more exposed than I’d felt in six years.

Cupping her cheeks, I kissed her softly and heard myself murmur. “Solinishko. It means ‘Little Sun’.”

Chapter Fourteen – Maria

The day I turned fifteen, I had my first boyfriend: Noah Jepton.

That was his name, and he made sure I didn’t forget it.

He was an athlete at our local high school, one of those stereotypical jocks that all the girls in the cheerleading squad drooled over, shook their booties for during practice, and giggled their heads off for, even when his jokes were as dry as twigs in the Sahara.

We were neighbors. We rode to school together, talked, laughed, and ate pizza with his friends at Joe’s Pizza Hut. I watched his games, he bought me Starbucks, and I wore his jersey to sleep every night.

Handsome, smart, a bit arrogant, and charismatic. I like him, then, a whole lot. I was living a fantasy. I was living the dream. But I was fifteen: young, naïve, and in love. I couldn’t have possibly known that he would crush my heart to pieces three months after his dumb proposal at the school cafeteria, with a bowl of pistachio ice cream and a stupid note scribbled in the poorest of handwriting, asking me to be his girlfriend.

But it didn’t matter. The most popular boy in school liked me. All of me, he claimed: my weirdness, my silence, my obsession with learning self-defense, and my strange tendency to mix blueberry muffins and plums together.

So, I said yes.

Yes, to my fifteen-year-old idea of love.

Yes, to finally being a girlfriend to my high school crush.

Yes, to getting the worst heartbreak of my life. The type that left a girl hiding in the basement one week after the entire school knew that she’d lost her virginity to East High’s heartthrob because the douche himself showed his friends a video of our very first time.

I’d been hurt, broken to pieces, wrung out, and left scarred for life.

But I didn’t forget to return the favor. A month later, I learned some roundhouse kicks from a video online and used him as target practice on the field after one of his stupid games.

But the point was, six years later, I wasn’t that fifteen-year-old naïve girl who gaped out of the window like a love-struck puppy, waiting for her charming N.J. to slide through the old windowpanes and kiss her goodnight.