Lainey bit her lip.
She didn’t know why she turned down his offer to make her cum. Heaven knows sheneededit.Wantedit.
Maybe before the night was over, she might want to fool around with him a little bit. It was a date, after all.
Handjob in a hovercraft, anyone?she thought, unable to help the amused smirk that crossed her lips.
Besides, she couldn’t deny that she was curious. She was curious about what sex with him would be like.
Not like I’m going to have sex with him, she amended silently.
At least not tonight, the little devil on her shoulder whispered in her ear.
Lainey exhaled a shaky breath.
“Vrax, luxiva,” he said, his voice going husky, inhaling deeply, his breath whistling in her ears.
“Sorry,” she whispered, though the word was whipped away by the wind, wondering whatluxivameant in his language. Lainey wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know.
She couldn’t help but smile when his hand clenched on her waist, a warning to behave. But even Kirov should know by then that she didn’t like being told what to do.
“Will you tell me where we’re going now?” she asked, to distract herself, to distracthim. She had a feeling if he propositioned her again, if he growled at her in that sexy, dark voice, if he slid his handslightlylower…she wouldn’t be able to resist him a second time.
Behind them, the Golden City looked like a speck, although they hadn’t been traveling for more than ten minutes.
Kirov relented and pointed in the distance to a mountain range.
“At the base is a stream,” he said. “I go there often. It calms my mind when I need it. I wish to show it to you.”
Her heart skipped, liking that he wanted to take her to a place that was special to him entirely too much.
It was sweet. And Lainey wasn’t used to sweet.
If she was being honest, she’d never met a male like Kirov. All her ex-boyfriends, if they could even be called that, were...not good. But Lainey hadn’t been allowed boyfriends during high school—her mother claimed she needed to focus on her music more than flirting—and the moment Lainey had moved out at 18 and quit piano, she’d gone through a rebellious phase.
After her early-twenties, she’d sworn off men altogether after an incident with her then-boyfriend, when he’d gotten drunk and dislocated her shoulder when he shoved her into a wall.
Like she said, her taste in men had been bad.
Lainey liked to think she’d grown up since then. It was perhaps why she hadn’t had sex in two years, why she turned down dates from men she knew wouldn’t be good for her. Why she’d closed herself off and kept her heart encased behind a steel wall.
Then Nadine had died. And the world got darker.
Lainey shook herself and blew out a breath, not wanting to think about it, not right then at least.
“Thank you, by the way,” she said, tucking a rebellious strand of hair behind her ear. She turned a little, tilting her head up to look at Kirov. “For my hat. I never thanked you this afternoon.”
Kirov’s eyes warmed with pleasure and Lainey could feel herselfmelta little at that look.
This is bad, bad, bad, she thought.
“I was pleased to see it functioned properly,” he told her. “I hadn’t had much time to test it properly before I had to be at the command center this morning.”
She frowned. “Test it?”
“Tev. The idea came to me when I left you last night.”
Her lips parted. “Don’t tell me you actuallymadethat thing last night.”
