The shirt falls open, andholy shit.
Dimitri Volkov is built like a weapon. That’s the only way I can describe it.
Where Alexei had been lean and graceful (swimmer’s build with smooth skin that rarely saw the sun) Dimitri is brutal power and violence written in flesh.
His chest is broad and heavily muscled, the kind of muscle that comes from years of physical training and violence, not from a gym.
His shoulders are massive, each one corded with strength.
His abdomen is a landscape of hard muscle, defined and ridged, narrowing down to lean hips.
And the scars.
Holy hell, thescars.
They’reeverywhere. A long, vicious one across his ribs that looks like it came from a knife.
Bullet wound scars—small, puckered circles—on his left shoulder and one super close to his heart.
There’s smaller marks on his hands and arms. His body is a roadmap of violence and a life lived on the edge of death.
Alexei’s body had been beautiful and perfect. Unmarked except for the occasional bruise from soccer or a childhood scar from falling off his bike.
He’d been soft in all the right places, gentle, safe.
Dimitri is none of those things.
He’s dangerous. Hard. Every line of him screams predator, survivor, killer.
And I can’t stop staring.
Shame floods through me, hot and sick. What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I comparing them? Why am I looking at this man—this man who hates me, who married me for revenge—and feeling heat pool low in my belly?
Alexei’s been dead less than two weeks. Less than two weeks, and I’m lying in another man’s bed, pregnant with Alexei’s baby, and I’m?—
I’m a terrible person.
Dimitri shrugs off the shirt completely, letting it fall to the floor, and when he moves toward the bed, I can see the way his muscles shift and flex under his skin.
The way he moves with that predatory grace despite his size, like a big cat or something built to hunt.
When Alexei moved, it was with easy elegance. Fluid. Almost dance-like.
Dimitri moves like violence barely contained.
Stop comparing them, my mind screams.Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
But I can’t.
The bed dips under his weight, and suddenly he’s right there, all that muscle and barely restrained power looming over me.
Up close, I can see more details—the way his chest rises and falls with each breath, the dark hair scattered across his pectorals, the way his skin is darker than Alexei’s, more olive-toned rather than Alexei’s pale Russian complexion.
Stop it, I tell myself desperately.Stop thinking about Alexei. Stop comparing. Just—stop.
But guilt is eating me alive even as unwanted desire coils tighter in my stomach.
Dimitri’s hand touches my skin, and I flinch.
