Page 59 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

27

PIPER

Nikita comes closer, and for once, after everything, there’s nothing chasing either of us.

That’s the thing I notice first, lying in a borrowed bed in a house none of our enemies knows we’re using. There isn’t a name left for either of us to hunt.

Every other time he’s put his hands on me, something waited on the other side of the door, a meeting, a threat, or a name he had to hunt before dawn. Now there’s a locked house, a quiet road, and a whole morning with nothing in it but him, and when he braces above me and looks at my face like he has all the time in the world, it’s because he does.

“You’re supposed to be resting,” he says, but he is already sliding one hand up my side slowly, like he hasn’t already memorized every part of me.

“You heard what Mila said. Gentle is fine, as long as I stop the second anything hurts.” I pull him down by the back of the neck. “She didn’t say lie there like a corpse.”

He laughs against my mouth, and I feel it more than hear it. He kisses me thoroughly and without rushing, and I let myself sink into it because for once I’m not bracing for the moment it gets interrupted.

He kisses his way down my throat and my collarbone to my breast, taking his time at each place until I’m the one getting impatient. I trace the scars across his back, the ones I know by heart now. I don’t flinch from them and he doesn’t tense when I touch them. We’ve done this enough times that there’s no performance left in it. There’s just his weight and his warmth and the low, certain way he says my name when I arch up into him.

“Slow down,” he says when I try to hurry us. “We’re not going anywhere.”

We aren’t leaving. No one is coming, and that relaxes me more than his hands do. The door is locked from the inside because we want it that way, not because something’s trying to get in, and I have never once in my life had that.

He settles between my thighs and rubs the head of his cock through my wet slit before he pushes inside my pussy, slowly and deeply, and I make a sound I don’t try to muffle because there’s no one to hear it and nothing to hide. He fills me completely and holds there, buried to the hilt, his forehead against mine, both of us sharing breaths.

“There you are,” he says, like he found me, like I wasn’t the one who walked into his house two months ago and refused to leave.

Then he moves, and I move with him, and it builds without hurry, each stroke deeper than the last. I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, and he braces on his forearms so he can watch my face, which he does the entire time, holding my gaze.

The heat winds tighter with every stroke, low and insistent, and I chase it against him while he murmurs things into my skin—my name, that he loves me, that I’m safe, and that he isn’t going anywhere.

“I’ve got you,” he says when I start to shake. “I’ve got all four of you.”

That’s what does it, the words more than the friction or the angle. I clench around his cock and come with my face pressed to his shoulder, and he holds me through every wave of it, slowing but not stopping, drawing it out until I’m limp underneath him. Then he lets himself go, buried deep, my name the only word he has left, and he presses his mouth to my temple as he comes inside me and stays there, shaking but holding on.

Neither of us moves for a long time after. He stays inside me. I keep my arms around him as we breathe together in a quiet that isn’t waiting for anything.

“That was different,” I say finally, into his hair.

“It was safe.” He lifts his head and looks at me. “It’s the first time I’ve ever touched you without a war on the other side of the door.”

“I liked it.”

“I’m glad you liked it.” He kisses me, unhurried even now. “You’re going to get a lot of it.”

I wake to the smell of butter and something sweet, and to an empty space beside me still warm from him.

I find him in the small kitchen with his sleeves shoved up, studying the pan with the same concentration he once gave security maps, though the pancakes are defeating him in a way bratva nemeses never did. There’s flour on the counter and on him. A bowl of batter rests beside three ruined pancakes that didn’t survive the learning curve.

“You’re cooking,” I say from the doorway, and I don’t bother to hide how much I’m enjoying this.

“I’m making pancakes.” He doesn’t turn around. “Sit down. You’re supposed to be off your feet.”

“You don’t know how to make pancakes.”

“I’m learning in real time. Sit down anyway.” He points the spatula at a chair without looking at me. “There’s tea. Don’t get up for it, I’ll bring it.”

I sit, because arguing would mean losing the sight of Nikita Rusakov, who ran a criminal empire without letting anyone photograph his face, frowning at a bubbling pancake like it’s a spy. He flips it. It folds in half. He swears in Russian, quietly, and I laugh so hard I have to hold my stomach.

“You could just admit you can’t do this.”