Katerina is warm against me, still half-asleep, her hair spread across my chest, her soft thigh thrown over my hip as if she has been sleeping in my bed for years instead of hours. Her hand rests over my ribs. Her breathing is slow. Her body trusts mine in a way it has no reason to.
That’s what wakes me.
Not danger, but trust.
For a moment, I do nothing. I lie there with the gray Moscow morning pressing against the windows and watch her sleep.
Last night should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Sometime before dawn, she woke when I moved away from her. She blinked at me in the dark, sleepy and offended, as if my absence was a personal insult. Then she reached for me.
She had rolled on top of me, hair falling around both our faces, and said, “If you ask again, I’m going back to my room.”
She did not go back to her room.
Now she’s asleep beside me, naked under the sheets, with my marks on her throat and my come still leaking slowly from between her thighs.
The sight should satisfy something primitive in me.
It does, but it also unsettles me.
She had told me she was on the pill before I pushed inside her the second time last night. Calmly, directly, with flushed cheeks but steady eyes. I believed her.
Still, the memory of being bare inside her is a dangerous one. It’s too easy to want again. Too easy to mistake pleasure for claim.
Her eyelashes flutter.
I brush a strand of hair off her cheek.
She wakes slowly, then looks at me with the soft, dazed expression of a woman who remembers exactly why her body aches.
“Good morning,” she murmurs.
“It’s almost afternoon.”
Her eyes widen. “What?”
“You slept in.”
“Because someone tried to kill me with sex.”
I almost smile. “You survived.”
“Barely.” She shifts, then freezes. A blush climbs her throat.
I know the moment she feels it. The wetness between her legs. The slow slide of my come out of her, warm against her inner thigh. She glances down beneath the sheet, then back at me with a look caught between embarrassment and accusation.
“You’re looking very pleased with yourself,” she says.
“I’m pleased with you.”
She tries to turn away, but I catch her waist and pull her back. Her body slides easily over the sheets, soft and warm, and the moment her breast presses to my chest, I forget half the reasons I’m supposed to get out of this bed.
Her hand lands on my shoulder. “Roman.”
“Yes?”