"I want your fist in my hair."
His fingers flex against my hip. The heart monitor picks up speed, and somewhere a nurse is probably wondering why his vitals just spiked.
"I want your cock all the way down my throat while you call me good girl."
The sound he makes—low, rough, somewhere between a groan and a growl—sends heat dripping through my center. My hand slides down the sheet and finds him already hard. The warm, silky skin pulses between my fingers as I wrap around him, and he twitches in my grip—thick and insistent and very, very awake.
“And I don’t want to fucking wait.”
"Then don’t," he says. "If you don’t want to wait, then be a good girl, Ms. Farnassi, and open your pretty little mouth."
I give him a look, and then start kissing my way down his body.
My lips move along his jaw, past the column of his throat, and down the hard muscles of his chest. My tongue carefully laves each ridge of muscle on his torso, careful to avoid the bandages, and memorizes the familiar topography of scars and muscle and warm inked skin.
His stomach tenses under my mouth. I pull the sheet lower and lower.
Then, his cock slides past my lips, heavy and thick with the taste of masculine salt. His heady musk fills my lungs with each breath, and my mouth opens further to take him down, down, down until my eyes water and roll back into my head.
His hand finds my hair. Not a fist—not yet, that's for tonight—but his fingers thread through the dark strands and hold, andthe sound that comes out of him is the sweetest thing I've ever heard from him.
I take my time taking him apart with my mouth the way he's taken me apart with his—systematically, thoroughly, with the focused devotion of someone who has spent months learning exactly what makes him tick and unravel.
"Good girl." His voice strains until it breaks into something raw and desperate with each slow drag of my tongue, my lips, and the hollowing pressure of my cheeks. "Fuck—good girl."
He comes with my name on his lips and his hand in my hair and his entire body shuddering like something breaking free. I suck out every last drop from him as his balls empty, and swallow every last drop—hot and thick and so uniquely him—until there is nothing left.
I lick my lips clean, and then I lean up to press a final kiss against his mouth and let him taste himself on my lips, whispering. “Whose good girl am I?”
"Mine." His voice is raw, sated, and spent. “Always fucking mine.”
“Good.”
My fingers trace the edge of his bandage, checking that we haven't reopened anything. His hands move through my hair, and I lean into the touch.
"One more thing," Slava whispers against my hair. "We’ll need to update your paperwork."
I look up at him. "My paperwork?"
"Bella Creminelli doesn't exist." He cups my face, tilting it up toward his. "Not anymore."
My heart is already climbing toward my throat.
"What do you mean?" I can feel it coming, the way you feel a wave building before it arrives.
His thumb traces along my jaw, and his winter-gray eyes shimmer.
"Because when we leave," he says. "I want to make you Bella Romanov."
There’s no ring, and he can’t get down on one knee. He's not asking for my hand. He's stating his intention to give me his name. Because that’s who he is and what he does. Because both he and I have known that this was the inevitable conclusion the first time he ever called me by the fake name of Ms. Creminelli.
That name has served its purpose, and now like the hate I once held for him, it starts to dissolve around us.
And in its place is Romanov. He’ll give me his name, he’ll give me his world, and I know he’ll give me his life.
"Yes."
It’s the simplest word I can say, and yet it carries the full weight of everything in the world.
