“Your father wanted you safe, and he chose me to be your protector.”
I gesture toward the men dismantling my apartment. “Viktor and Alexei will keep me safe, as they always have.”
Even though we’re speaking English, Maxim takes a step closer and drops his voice. “Think about it, caxapok. If your father thought you were safe with them, he wouldn’t have arranged to have you shipped off to America. He wouldn’t have brought me in.”
I want to scoff. My mom and I practically own Viktor and Alexei.
After I got Maxim banished, I realized how much power I could wield with my sexuality. And since it’s the only power I wielded in my life, I used it. I played games with my father’s men. Baiting them, getting on my knees for them. Sucking their cocks. Then threatening to tell my father to get whatever I needed from them—usually my freedom.
But a whisper of foreboding runs through me at Maxim’s words. He’s right. With my father dead, everything’s changed. I don’t hold any power anymore.
“Go and pack your personal things. Our flight is in a couple of hours.”
I shake my head mulishly. “I’m not going.”
Maxim goes still and warning bells go off in my head. There’s a dangerous air to him. “Pack now or you travel with what I bring for you.”
“Just leave me here,” I try again. “You can have the money—that’s why I’d be in danger, right? So you keep it. Just give me enough to live on, and I’ll stay out of your hair. Just leave me here.”
“Do you think I married you for the fucking money?” he snarls. Maxim’s upper lip curls. He shouldn’t look so beautiful when he looks down his nose scornfully at me. “Believe me, caxapok, I don’t want it. It—and you—are definitely more trouble than you’re worth.”
I spread my hands. “Then go. I’m letting you off the hook. Vladimir will protect me here.”
“I made a promise to your father, Sasha. I won’t dishonor him by forsaking it.”
I roll my eyes.
He looks at his watch. “We’re running out of time, sugar. Looks like you’re traveling with what’s already packed. Go and get in the car that’s waiting outside.”
I don’t know why I have to push. Stubbornness has always been my downfall. I fold my arms across my chest, lift my chin and dare to say, “Fuck you.”
He cocks his head. I half expect a slap, like my father sometimes issued, but he appears completely unruffled. “If I have to make you, there will be consequences, Sasha.”
“Go ahead—make me,” I challenge.
Maxim isn’t amused. He loses the relaxed posture and launches into motion, like the sleeping lion that suddenly springs into a pounce. In one swift movement, he tosses me over his shoulder and carries me to the door, barking an order at one of the men to get my suitcases and bring them down to the car.
His hand claps down on my ass when we’re out in the hall. “There are consequences for your disobedience, caxapok.”
Surprisingly, he doesn’t sound angry. His voice is relaxed and even, despite the exertion of carrying me. I wriggle on his shoulder, which sends my microskirt bunching up around my waist. He slaps my ass again, kicking open the door to the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. “Stop squirming, or we’ll both break our necks,” he advises as he starts swiftly down the steps.
I find the back of his belt and hang onto it. His muscular ass fills his slacks, flexing as he takes each stair. Heat swirls in my low belly as my old attraction to this man flares to life. I remember what he looked like on the deck of my father’s yacht. His shirt off, skin bronzed in the sun. He was an Adonis, sculpted muscle and perfect lines, in the prime of his youth.
He’s no less appealing now, at thirty.
He exits the building, and I reach back to tug my hemline down, fuming that he’s giving a show to his driver and the men outside. He tips me down to my feet, and when the driver opens the back door of the waiting car, hustles me inside the roomy Towncar.
Maxim says something to the driver before he climbs in beside me and shuts the door, then snaps the window between the front seat and back closed. The way he looks at me makes everything inside me squirm. There’s a dark promise in his gaze. Like he’s going to enjoy punishing me.
There will be consequences.
I try to control my blush—one of the downsides of being a redhead. “So what? You’re going to punish me, as my father suggested?” I’m a fool to keep pushing. But it’s Maxim, and I never recovered from him spurning me as a teen.
I swear I see the corners of his lips twitch right before he tugs me down across his knees.
I’m simultaneously thrilled and horrified. My body’s already a live wire from being ignominiously manhandled by him out of the building. Now, with the promise of punishment, electricity zings everywhere.
He gives me several hard spanks—five, to be exact—then he squeezes my ass roughly. My minidress rides up my hips, exposing the lower portion of my ass. I’m wearing a thong since the dress shows everything, so Maxim now has a full view of my cheeks.
I don’t make a sound. I’m breathing hard, but it’s more from shock than pain although a tingle and burn start to set in as he continues to knead and massage my ass.
It feels good. Humiliating, but hot. And when his fingers stroke between my legs, over the thong, I realize just how much Maxim is still my ideal man.
I fell in love—or maybe it was just lust—with him on that yacht in Croatia, and even though things went terribly wrong, it seems the attraction never died. Heat pulses between my legs. Maxim rubs along the seam of my panties, tracing the string up between my ass cheeks and back down again. I soak the little triangle of fabric, impossibly excited.
The moment he slides a finger under my panties, though, my internal alarms come back online. I buck on his lap.
The truth is, I’ve never let a man touch me there. I flaunted and bluffed my sexual experience to rebel against my father, but in the end, I actually was that good little girl he wanted me to be.
And Maxim may think he can do whatever he wants with me, that he has rights to my body because we stood in front of a clerk and he gave me my father’s ring, but it’s not going to happen.
I lurch my legs toward the floor of the car, and he lets me go. I land on my knees at his feet. “I’m not having sex with you,” I declare, my mussed hair falling across my face.
Maxim gives me an unfathomable look. He was always hard to read. “I hope you’re good at satisfying yourself, then, because no other man will be getting between those legs.”
I flush with indignation—probably to a darker red than my hair, but before I can think of a response, Maxim’s door opens, and one of the men hands in my purse. “I’ll put the suitcases in the trunk,” he tells Maxim then steals a glance at me kneeling at my husband’s feet and smirks.
“Don’t look at her,” Maxim orders, slamming the door in the guy’s face. He grips my elbow and helps me back onto the seat beside him. “I’m sorry for that,” he surprises me by saying. “He should have knocked first.”
“I guess you think you own me,” I seethe, still hung up on the claim he’s made on my body.