Page 53 of Seduction (Wicked Vows)

He kisses my cheek.

I giggle at the memory of what I just did. “I called you Daddy.” I smack his shoulder. “You made me.”

“I did,” he says with a satisfied chuckle. “And you liked it. I knew you would.”

Of course I did. It was all kinds of taboo and hot.

“I never called my own father Daddy. I barely called him anything. Why did that not feel wrong?”

He grins. “Because you’re kinky as fuck, sweetheart. And you like what I give to you—protection. Nurturing. A safe place.”

Mmm. Yes. All of that.

“My mind is trained to find the why behind things and I—I need to stop that sometimes.”

He smiles. “You do. Sometimes, we don’t need to know the reasons behind why we do what we do. Why we love what we love. Why we love who we love.”

Love.

He went there. He totally fucking went there, but we’re still obviously talking on hypothetical terms. Still. . .

We’re lying in bed. It’s inky dark outside, and the window is cracked just enough to let us hear the tell-tale sign of late-night crickets. It’s a marvel to me that in a place where humans can’t understand differences in language, the late night sounds of crickets are a universal language.

“That’s amazing,” I whisper. I feel split wide open. Exposed but in the best possible way. Bared. And the effect is making me quite contemplative.

“What is?”

“I don’t understand a word of Russian, and there are people here who don’t speak English. But the language of the crickets has no barriers. They all speak the same. What if humans never had such limitations?”

“We’d kill each other,” he quips. “Sometimes a language barrier is the only thing keeping people from fighting.”

“True,” I say with a smirk. “When I was little, my sister and I invented this language to speak to each other. It was fun.”

“Cute. My brothers and I did something similar. We had hand signals, and we thought we were something else.”

He buries his face in my hair and inhales.

“You like that?”

“I do. You smell so damn good. I feel like I’m in the middle of a field in spring, surrounded by violets.”

“I guess that expensive shit’s worth it, then.”

He inhales again, deeper. “Indeed. When my brothers and I did our hand signals, my father thought we were mocking him, so he put a swift end to that.”

“Dammit. Those strict Russian fathers. How many brothers do you have?”

He doesn’t answer at first. It’s a simple enough question. Why the hesitation?

“I have five brothers and one sister,” he says. “And you?”

“Wow. One older sister. So that’s a lot of brothers.”

“Mmm hmm,” he says. “But I don’t want to talk about my brothers in bed.” He leans over and nips my ear lobe. I squeal.

“I’m not that tired, though. I like these late-night convos.” I stick my toes out from under the blanket because I’m overheating. He helps me by tugging the rest of the blanket off when my toe gets stuck.

“I didn’t say we had to go to sleep. We can keep talking.”

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