Dangerous Vows

Chapter One
Marika

I sit alone at my vanity, wondering when I’ll hear the knock at my door.

We don’t have all that much time. I have a dinner tonight—family dinner, once a week now that I live alone at the mansion I once shared with my father and brother. Now, my brother, Nikolai Vasilev, lives with his wife on their estate—I still live here. 

To be honest, I like the solitude. It’s a little strange—this house felt too big even when it was only the three of us—but it fits my mood these days. I can wander around most of it without so much as even running into a staff member or security, who do their best to stay out of my way. 

No one knows how to handle it when the Bratva princess comes back battered and broken. 

No one except Adrik.

There have been so many days in the last few months since Narokov’s threat was neutralized and my brother disappeared into married bliss with Lilliana, where I’ve wondered how I would ever piece back together who I was—who I am now. It feels, honestly, as if it’s been longer than months.

Maybe that’s why I feel the way I do about him. I’d never been alone in my life, and then suddenly, I was, more often than not. Once a week or so, I see my brother and his wife—usually together, sometimes apart—when they’re not enjoying the new estate they purchased after their honeymoon, eager to fill it with the family they’ve already started creating. And in the days in between, there’s Adrik.

He’s the reason I haven’t finished getting ready yet. No point in putting on makeup when I know he’s going to kiss it right off.

Even though I expect it, the knock at the door makes me jump a little. That’s something that’s stuck after the events at the compound where Ivan Narokov made his stand. I jump at things now. Shadows, knocks, strange noises. I knew Adrik was coming, and it still startled me.

I tug my silk robe a little closer around me, and get up to answer the door.

Adrik is standing just outside of it, tall and handsome and blond, a man who was once just another of my family’s security and now has become so much more to me. An anchor, I think, sometimes, during days when I felt like I might float away. He saved me when I couldn’t have done much to save myself.

“Marika.” His deep, accented voice ripples over my skin. “May I come in?”

I nod wordlessly, stepping to one side to let him in. He steps into my bedroom, closing the door behind him, and it still surprises me a little to see him here. It still feels forbidden, taboo. It is.

Bodyguards do not sleep with Bratva heiresses. They don’t take their virginity and become their lovers. But that’s exactly what’s happened with Adrik and I.

“Are you alright?” He steps forward, touching my face, his fingers skimming over my cheek. His thumb grazes over my cheekbone, and where I was chilly a moment ago, I feel my skin warm beneath his touch. “I know today was difficult for you.”

I went to visit my father’s grave today. I woke up alone this morning, dressing in all black and asking for a car. Adrik insisted on accompanying me. It’s been rainy and wet for a week now, the end of winter turning into the first damp chills of spring. I stood out in the wet cold for a long time, under my umbrella, staring down at the gray stone numbly until Adrik finally came out and urged me back to the car, solicitously convincing me to go back home. 

I told him he could come up and see me later. I haven’t left my room since.

I nod, still trying to find my voice, glancing over at the rumpled sheets of my bed. I’ve never had a secret like Adrik before. For a little over a month, I’ve kept it. And I don’t know what I’m meant to do.

“Do you want me to go?” His fingers are still gently touching my face. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Marika.”

“No,” I say softly. “I don’t want you to go.”

He smiles faintly. “That’s what you said to me downstairs, remember? When I came and sat with you, and we—”

I swallow hard. “I remember.” 

“I will always be thrilled I asked to stay on your security detail,” he says, that faint smile still on his lips. “Otherwise, this—” he brushes his thumb downwards, over my lower lip, “this would never have happened.”

Of course, it wouldn’t have. Adrik and I are something that shouldn’t have happened. I should have told him no. I should tell him no every time he comes to my bed. But I can’t.

I want him too much.

“Sometimes I think it only happened because you were lonely,” he says softly, drawing me into his arms. I turn my head, laying my cheek against his chest, breathing in the faint, warm scent of male skin and a hint of cologne, the laundry detergent used to wash his uniform. His arms are broad and strong, and I feel safe in them. I have felt safe in them ever since he picked me up off of the concrete floor in that compound, beaten half to death, and carried me to safety.

“I was lonely,” I whisper. “But that’s not the only reason why.”

Nikolai left strict instructions for me not to leave the mansion unless I was heavily guarded, while he went on his belated honeymoon with Lilliana. I didn’t begrudge them that—they needed their space to heal and reconnect, too. I had been left with my security—one of which was Adrik—at the mansion.

At some point, as I came out of the fugue I’d been in, I remembered that he had saved me. I wanted to thank him. So I had offered him a drink.

“It should have been in a proper bed,” he says, a slight laugh behind his words as he kisses the top of my head, turning me slowly towards the rumpled sheets still left from my afternoon nap. “I’ve tried to make up for that, since.”

“You’ve done a good job.” I turn in his arms, looking up at him. “I think I like how it was, the first time.”

“You’re a Bratva princess.” His hands smooth downwards, over my back, down to my waist. His fingers are rough against the silk, catching on it a little. “You shouldn’t have lost your virginity on a vintage sofa.”

The memory comes back, as sharp and piercing as the moment of pain when he’d first slipped inside of me, and with the same burst of heart-racing desire at the reminder of just how it had all happened. 

Adrik telling me that he was on duty, that he shouldn’t have a drink. Me insisting, telling him that he saved my life, and I only wanted to thank him. Flirting, maybe, in the way of someone who doesn’t really know how to flirt. 

It would be hard not to flirt with Adrik. He’s gorgeous—six foot three inches of muscled, tattooed perfection, always dressed in fatigues meant to be loose but pulled taut over muscled thighs and an immaculate ass, and a tight black t-shirt. Even without meaning to, he’s made to be flirted with.

I don’t even entirely remember how we ended up the way we did. I remember that he asked me how I was doing, if I was healing well. I had said yes, that my injuries were getting better. It was all very formal. I turned my head, reaching for my glass, and suddenly felt his hand on my face. There had still been a bruise there, healing, on my jaw.

“Do you think it would have happened,” I whisper, “if you hadn’t touched me like that?”

He knows what I’m talking about. I see it from the wry twist of his mouth. “I shouldn’t have,” he says quietly. “It was out of line. But—” he hesitates, brushing his fingers over my lips again. “I can’t say I regret that I did.”

“You could kiss me like that again,” I whisper, tilting my chin up, and I see the smile on his mouth as he bends to kiss me. I feel it against my lips as his press against mine.

He was my first kiss. My very first, sitting on a chintz sofa in the informal living room, the taste of vodka lingering on both of our mouths. His fingers that had grazed below the bruise on my jaw found a place to rest on my waist, his other hand coming up to touch the unhurt side of my face, and I had discovered what it was like to be kissed by someone I chose, and kissed in return.

It was unexpected and better than I could have ever imagined, having spent my whole life believing that the only intimacy I would ever experience would be within a marriage arranged and brokered without my input. 

I had known I shouldn’t allow it. I still had value to my family. My innocence still had value. Even a kiss was too much.

But as Adrik said, I had been so lonely. I had experienced so much pain—ached for a gentle touch. To feel pleasure instead of hurt. Adrik’s mouth was full and soft and warm, the kiss eager and careful all at once. I could feel that the desire in it had been there for a long time, maybe even before my kidnapping, before my rescue. I thought of him watching me over months and years, wanting me, pining for me from afar. It was all so romantic that I let myself be swept up in it without even really knowing if it was all true.

Nikolai had been somewhere far away, and no one would find out. I was still a virgin—my kidnappers hadn’t taken that from me—but they had hurt me, shamed me, and stripped so much else away. Adrik’s hands, I had felt, could piece that back together. He could give me something that no one else could. 

And he still was.

His mouth moves over mine, strong and sure, without hesitation. I sometimes wonder, afterward, how he seems to have no fear with me. What he’s doing could cost him his life. I can’t imagine that a night with me, a week, or the month that we’ve spent doing this, is worth what would happen to him if Nikolai found out. And yet—

He doesn’t seem to care.

“Marika—” He breathes my name against my lips, his hands finding the silk tie of my robe. I’m nude underneath, and when the silk falls away, I hear his groan of pleasure, his hands touching bare skin. They’re broad and rough, gripping my delicate waist. I love how he makes me feel—fragile and protected all at once, as he lifts me onto the bed, him still fully clothed, and me bare as the silk flutters to the floor.

“You liked it when I did this to you.” He slips one hand between my thighs, parting my folds for a thick finger, sliding over my already aching clit. “When I touched you like this—”

“Yes—” I’m already breathless. My gaze flicks downwards, seeing the thick ridge of his cock, pressing against the fly of his fatigues. I can feel the slick shape of the buttons beneath my fingers before I even touch him. How it feels to try to quickly get them open, slipping my hand inside to find the hot, hard shape of his cock. I know the sound he’ll make when my palm brushes against him for the first time since he came into the room.

There are a dozen or more small intimacies that I know about him now that I shouldn’t—and the same for him with me.

He bends down, turning me so that my ass is at the edge of the bed, kneeling down so that his mouth is level with the apex of my thighs. “I did this to you, remember? Kneeling in front of the couch to eat your sweet pussy for the first time—”

I suck in a breath as his lips graze over my inner thigh, sliding higher. “I wouldn’t have been able to take you if you hadn’t,” I whisper, the words breaking in between each one, my voice cracking with desire as his mouth moves closer to where I need it the most. “You were too big. And I—”

“I was the first.” There’s a raw desire in his voice when he says it, his lips brushing directly between my thighs. “The first to taste you. The first to fuck you. The first to do this—”

His tongue presses between my folds, sliding hotly over my clit, and my head falls back against the blankets. There’s no more talking, no more teasing. There’s only his mouth pressed between my thighs, the hot, wet, sweet pleasure of it, his tongue sliding and rolling over my clit as he holds my legs apart and I press into his hands, wanting more. It feels so good—I could never have imagined that anything would feel so good.

I feel his fingers slide against my entrance, teasing me. I arch into his touch, impatient, and I feel the vibration of his laugh against my skin.

“You want it,” he murmurs. “I gave you one taste, and you’re insatiable.”

“Adrik—” I moan, hips bucking against his mouth as I reach down, running my hands over the short crop of his blond hair. “Stop teasing me.”

“Oh, this isn’t teasing, princess.”

He pulls his mouth away from me as he says it, and suddenly he’s leaning over me, his fingers nimbly undoing the buttons at the front of his pants as he frees his cock. He’s hard and thick, filling his own palm as he strokes his hand over the throbbing length, and suddenly I feel the hot, swollen head pushed against my clit.

“This is teasing,” he murmurs, and leans down to kiss me again.

I gasp as he rubs himself against me, the slick mixture of his pre-cum and my arousal mingling together to create a delicious, hot friction between the head of his cock and my clit, and I know I’m going to come. Every time I start to twitch and shudder, he pulls away, dragging the head of his cock lower to circle my entrance before sliding up again, until I can feel how swollen and sensitive my clit is, aching to come. I buck helplessly under him, glaring up at his satisfied expression.

“Please,” I whisper, and he laughs, low and lustful, kissing me again.

“The Bratva princess, begging her bodyguard to make her come.”