Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 113324 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 567(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113324 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 567(@200wpm)___ 453(@250wpm)___ 378(@300wpm)
Sevastyan swallowed. “And what about the other . . . ?”
“I’m just grateful you survived. I’m grateful you told me.”
He looked like he seethed with emotion. “You can’t expect me to believe that you’re willingly here with me after I confessed what I did—and what was done to me. Much less because I confessed it!”
“You have to believe it, because it’s true. What I know of you only binds me to you more.”
He fell silent for what seemed like an eternity.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Sevastyan. What you’re feeling.”
“Feeling?” He made a caustic sound. “You’ve just felled me. No, you’ve slain me. I’ll never want another, yet you were ready to give up on me.” He dropped my hands, his ire mounting. “You can’t think that all this is random! Paxán found me all those years ago. Across the world, you somehow found him, and then he sent me to you. At any point, you could have been lost to me.”
Sevastyan had told me in the banya that we were inevitable. Now I realized why he believed that.
Now I did too.
He reached out to grip my upper arms. “I went through my entire life, never knowing that I was starving for this beautiful, brilliant redhead. Then I saw her. I watched her. All the while, she had no idea that she went about her days and tormented me every one of them.”
I gasped. “Sevastyan . . .”
“The first time I saw you, you nearly put me to my knees. I wanted to invade your thoughts as totally as you had mine. When I did manage to sleep, I’d dream of you and wake up fucking the sheets.” His grip grew harsher, as if someone were trying to take me away from him. “I’d will you to look at me. And then, in that bar, you did. You showed interest in me, and amazingly Paxán approved the match. All he asked was that I give you time.” He released my shoulders to pace. “Time—while goddamned Filip moved in on my woman!”
“I didn’t choose Filip.”
“You didn’t choose me either! Not until you were alone and confused, reeling from Paxán’s death. I took advantage of you that night, and every night after.”
“No,” I said firmly, “I wanted you.”
“Because you didn’t know the real me. Can you understand now why I didn’t want to give in to my perversions with you, to give you pain? I feared becoming like my father. I fought so hard, but the thought of you going to another . . . it sent me over the edge.”
Was I hurting him by putting on pressure? To engage in sex he wasn’t comfortable with? Considering all the abuse I knew about—and the abuse I could only imagine—I had to wonder.
He might enjoy what we did together, then be appalled at himself.
He was talking to me now; I needed to dig deeper with him. “Will you tell me when you first realized your particular interests?”
His voice was so grave when he asked, “I’m to reveal even more?”
“Yes, Sevastyan,” I answered. “There’s no word limit here.”
His brows drew together. “It didn’t start out as a sexual thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
He exhaled. “I’d always had my brothers in my life, but in St. Petersburg, I suddenly had no one. Though there were other children, I couldn’t connect with them. Not with my background. Yet I hated being alone. Even at that age, I decided that I needed a wife—who would belong to me.”
I tried to picture Sevastyan as a boy, mulling marriage of all things. Yet decades later, he’d never wed. He wants to marry you, Nat. . . .
“I was young enough to make ridiculous plans, but old enough to realize I was homeless and penniless. I knew I had nothing to offer anyone. Until a year later . . .” He trailed off.
“Tell me.”
With reluctance, he said, “There was a back-alley prostitute that all the boys used to watch. I could tell she was feigning passion with her clients, faking screams—desperate just to be done for the night.”
I cringed to think of all the things he’d seen when living on the streets.
“Then one night, a man came to her, touching her in ways I’d never seen before—exacting, even cruel ways. He made her put her hands against the wall as he whipped her. I couldn’t believe he was striking her. I was ready to kill him for hitting someone so much smaller. I started for the man, but then I looked at her face—really looked. Her eyes were glassy, and she couldn’t catch her breath.” Sevastyan’s gaze flicked to me—to see if I was still with him?—then away. “She was . . . she was in heaven.”
“Go on.”
“Once the man finally fucked her, this jaded woman melted for him. In those moments, she would’ve done anything for more. She belonged to him absolutely.” Sevastyan faced me, holding my gaze, as if he needed me to fully understand him. “He had something to offer her—something that other men didn’t. I realized if I could learn how to do the things he’d done, I could master a woman like that. I could make her melt. I didn’t crave the acts as much as I did the result.”
I’d suspected that kink for this man had more to do with a woman’s pleasure than his own. Now I was learning that he’d imprinted the day he’d seen a woman taken to heights he’d never before witnessed. “And then later?”
“As I told you, it always felt like practice. After I met you, I understood why. But then when my needs grew fiercer with you, I feared I was interested in pain for the wrong reasons. Maybe because I’d received so much of it. Maybe because I wanted to control it like alcohol, meting doses of it. I was terrified that I would scare you away—or lose control and harm you.”
And all I’d done was push him. Regret weighed on me. “Then I’ve pressured you into things you’re not comfortable with.”