Page 93 of Defiled Innocence

She laughs. She always does when I ask her this.

“The baby is fine.” She covers my hand with hers. “We’re both fine.”

I kiss her again. “I’m going to ask the doctor to be certain. Maybe you should be on your hands and knees from now on. That way there’s no pressure on the baby.”

She laughs harder. “You’re going to ask the doctor if fucking me doggy style is safer for the baby?”

She likes to tease me, no matter how often I threaten to spank her for it.

It’s a useless threat. I won’t do anything that might harm the baby sleeping in her womb.

But once she’s given birth.

Her ass is mine.

“Keep it up and you’re going to have a hell of a time sitting after you give birth.” I kiss her cheek then roll off the bed to get a warm washcloth to clean her.

By the time I get back from the washroom, she’s ready for me, her legs opened and her hand resting on the small baby bump.

“It was really nice of your mother to come all the way from St. Petersburg. Maybe we should have asked her to stay longer,” she says after I’ve finished cleaning her and helped her back into her nightgown.

“My mother prefers Russia to all things. She’ll be back when our son arrives,” I assure her.

The only reason my mother traveled this time was to attend our wedding.

Our real wedding. With a priest in a church and our entire family in attendance. Charlotte and Anya took Amelia shopping for a wedding gown and stood up as bridesmaids for her.

The party is finished, and all of the guests have gone home. My mother was on the first flight out of New York this morning.

Four months of planning and it’s all over with now. No more planning and shopping and stress over Amelia working too much and too hard in addition to the wedding planning.

Just peace.

I climb back into our bed and lean against the headboard, pulling my wife to my chest.

“It’s too bad Kost couldn’t make it, though. I’d really like to meet him,” she says, tapping her fingertips against my chest.

“He said he’d visit soon. He’s been working.” My cousins were right to question the validity of the excuse the Kozlovs gave for the holdup of my shipments.

They tried to claim a man who had fallen in love with one of their women had inserted himself. Payback for the retaliation against her for what she’d done to Roman’s wife.

A complete lie.

Once the Zhukovs were given the incentive to stop backing the Kozlovs’ attack on my family, the Kozlovs lost the ability to keep my shipment hostage. The weak lie the Kozlovs gave was more to divert revenge.

Weak men sit at the head of that family.

But Kost didn’t stop at merely getting the Zhukovs to back off. He’s tracked down every asshole who had anything to do with the delay. And every one of them has paid the consequence.

Thanks to his diligence, there won’t be any more problems at the port. And we’ll be even richer with the fees we’ll be collecting for other shipments going through there.

He may hate the business end of our world, but he’s fucking amazing at it.

Amelia yawns and snuggles further into my chest, wrapping one arm around me to anchor herself.

“Dmitri?” She says my name softly, and I know exactly what she’s doing.

She’s about to say something that’s going to make me angry.

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