Vlad turned his head slowly. The streetlight outside cast his own expression into a black tableau, until she couldn’t see past any of the shadows pooling in his rigid face. She saw his eyes, though. They glowed with quiet fury, until the cool blue of them looked as if it could scorch her to a cinder on the spot. His pupils dilated all at once, and Madison’s primal instinct kicked in. She turned to run.
It didn’t occur to her until it was too late that there was nowhere to go.
Her hand was on the doorknob when he grabbed her waist, and Madison found herself lifted clear off the ground and hauled back into the room. “Let go of me!” she shrieked. He was a trained killer. Anything could happen.
So of course the unexpected happened.
Vlad turned her into him forcefully, and Madison struggled against him until the end, throwing shoulders and futile punches that he deflected at every turn. His hands clenched over her shoulders and pressed them down against her sides. If he was going to use them to restrain her rather than kill her then and there, then what…?
He kissed her punishingly. The heat of his mouth against hers, the aggressive pressure, forced her to bend her head back beneath him to take him all at once. His tongue pushed its way past the seam of her lips, its strength as controlled and honed as any other muscle in his tense, powerful body. She opened her mouth against him with the idea to protest, but of course her hubris only enabled his invasion to succeed. His tongue plunged past her teeth to war with her own; there was no home court advantage here. He had her on the defensive, parrying and thrusting to keep up, engaging when she knew she should be pushing him out to enable a retreat.
She had never been kissed so aggressively, so thoroughly, in all her life. If this was the male response to being disrespected, Madison thought she could personally afford to throw a few more expensive dinner jackets out the window. When the kiss was as good as the best sex she had ever had, what did that say about the sex that might follow?
Vlad’s hand plunged up her shirt, bypassing the underwire of her bra until she felt the rough touch of his fingertips directly applied to the swell of her breast. He clenched his fingers over the swollen flesh, taking a firm, possessive hold of her. She moaned headily; they broke apart only long enough to share a glance down the length of their joined bodies and take in the sight. Vlad tightened his hold beneath her shirt once more, almost experimentally, and she couldn’t help but moan again. She wondered if he counted his experiment a success.
“No… bed…” she panted. She was surprised Vlad gave her any room to get the words out.
“Don’t need one,” Vlad growled.
She half-expected him to halt the proceedings long enough to invite her over, but apparently even a quick relocation would take more time than they had available to them. This was it, and this was happening now; any hitch in the choreography, and they might never find themselves in a similar situation again.
They were still adversaries, after all, but they were adversaries with an agenda that just happened to immediately align.
“Ow!” Madison’s back hit the jut of the sink, and her protest was swallowed by another desperate, greedy make-out session to follow the first. Wait, when had they found the time to go into the kitchen? It was like being taken against her will by a tornado: straight out of Kansas and dropped into a new world of complete sensory overload.
Madison disengaged from Vlad’s fervent mouth with a wild gasp, her hand groping behind her blindly to seek purchase. She had to grab hold of something, anything, to keep her supported beneath this force of nature. Her fingers managed to wrap around the crank of the faucet before Vlad dropped his head down between her breasts; she released a flood of water in a gush, the splashdown wetting her back as Vlad’s ravening kisses took her from the front. He hiked her shirt up over the swell of her cleavage and made a low noise of approval in his throat when he noticed her brazier was the kind that unhooked in the front. Vlad released it with a snag of his teeth and an artful flick of his tongue.
Her breasts sprang free. Madison knew she had a nice pair: they were as ivory-colored as the rest of her, round and heavy, and her pink nipples pulled taut from the sudden cold. Vlad raised his mouth from the valley of her cleavage to draw one nipple into his mouth. Madison moaned, her spine arching back toward the water as her body pushed against him for more. The wet, suckling heat of his mouth, in combination with the sweep and flick of his tongue as he teased her into rigid arousal… it felt borderline unbearable, yet she self-destructively craved more. Her very existence threatened to unravel beneath Vlad’s questing touches, until all that would remain for the Russian to contend with was a spent shell of one incredibly, sexually-exhausted woman. Was that his motive this time around? Did she care? There were few things in life Madison O’Connor wanted for herself. Vlad Ivankov Karev was currently ranked number one.
She made a keening, close-lipped noise of pleasure as Vlad drew the tight pearl of one nipple between his teeth. A slight pressure, and she gasped and strained, putting her free hand on his shoulder to hold him off. Her head spun, an intense thrill of pleasure shooting through her, but she had seen just how powerful those teeth of his really were.
“Trust me,” he murmured into her glistening skin. Madison might have laughed, considering how little honesty there was between them, but all she could do was gasp again as he moved to address her neglected left breast. By the time he was finished with her, her chest was heaving with each drawn-out breath as if she had run a marathon. The junction between her legs burned with the memory of how his touch had felt. She needed it now more than ever; Vlad had just ensured himself a repeat invitation.
The Russian smiled crookedly in the darkness, as if he could read her thoughts. Certainly her body gave enough away that it wasn’t a lucky guess what she wanted. He lifted a finger to his lips, signaling her to hush, before lowering his hand to glide it beneath her waistband. The front button of her jeans burst free beneath the invasion, and the masculine thickness of the wrist that followed. His hand vanished completely down her front, and Madison moaned in anticipation. He was picking up exactly where they had left off the other night, granting her body’s unvoiced wish that he fulfill the promise his touch had made her.
Vlad’s fingers parted her inner folds and stroked her clit in a come-hither motion. Then he pressed down hard, as if engaging a button whose outcome he knew with a hundred percent certainty. A burst of pleasure rolled through her, from where he pressed; all the way up into the core of her belly.
“Oh.” She heard her own response as if from a distance, like she was watching another woman be pleasured by a man she herself had no right to be with. Encouraged by the noises she was making, Vlad continued to stroke her, deepening the touch of his fingers with each gesture until every nerve within his reach sang out for more. Soon his fingers slid against her with each stroke, slick with her body’s natural lubrication.
“There it is,” Vlad murmured as he pressed his lips beneath her ear to whisper, “You want more?”
Madison’s head was spinning. It took her a while to realize that the pounding of her pulse was in-time to a pounding at the door. “Miss O’Connor? You in there?” one of the male movers called. “We’re locked out.”
“Good,” she growled as she reached up to divest Vlad of his T-shirt. The Russian chuckled, his mouth sliding along her neck.
It was dark in the apartment, but not dark enough to conceal the rippling musculature of the torso now bared beneath her hands. Vlad wasn’t just strong; he was the definition of ‘cut.’ Every muscle was as sharply defined and convex as if he had been crafted by a master sculptor. Madison ran her fingers along his bunched abdominals, moaning as the man’s own fingers continued to work her beneath her waistline. Despite the wan light in the apartment, she couldn’t always make out the difference between Vlad’s tattoos and the shadows that pooled in the crevices of his unbelievable body.