Page 75 of Walking Red Flag

“We have to tell mine, too,” she admitted. “Maybe we could just send a mass text message to them all, include Shasha in it, and then go on a beach vacation somewhere that has no signal.”

I snorted. “One, that might work for the time being, but eventually we’d have to come home. I like the beach, but I don’t like the beach enough to live there full time. Two, I have about eighteen jobs lined up right now, two of which are at the Dallas Cowboys stadium to put in lockers in their locker room, and it’s going to pay me a whack. I can’t skip out of town for more than a weekend for now. And three, you’re not a coward. You face stuff head on.”

“I do?” she teased, looking at me.

I walked up to her and smoothed her hair behind her ear, fingers tangling in a small wet knot, before saying, “You’re a Clayborne now. We don’t back down for nothin’.”

She smiled. “According to these documents, I’m still a Semyonov.”

My eyes gleamed. “Legally, on paper, you might still be a Semyonov. But I know where city hall is, and I know how to fill out paperwork.”

She giggled. “If you want me to change it…”

“I do,” I said suddenly.

Fiercely.

Her eyes widened. “Then I’ll change it.”

Mesmerized, I watched her dry her hair.

She struggled with it for a while before I said, “How do you usually dry the ends of your hair?”

“I mostly let them air dry. I can do it, but it’s exhausting.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve thought about cutting it for a long time, but when I was hurt, I’d immediately decided that my hair was getting cut. All of it. Shasha and Dima begged me to leave it, so I did. But I made them promise to dry it for me forever, no exceptions. They could be old men, and they had to dry it for me. Whenever I wanted. They agreed, and when I need it dry, I usually go to Shasha and make him dry it.”

“Not Dima?” I asked.

“Dima is military,” she said. “He’ll do it, if he’s home. He actually did it yesterday. But since he’s not here all that much, the burden falls on Shasha.”

I hopped off the counter and held out my hand for the brush.

She placed it into my hand with a raised brow.

I took the Dyson—excuse the fuck out of me, but didn’t they used to make vacuums?—and turned it on.

After a couple of minutes of learning the best way to make the round brush turn and not get it stuck in her hair, I started to effectively dry her hair.

It was actually fairly soothing, and the bonus was that the fan kept causing the t-shirt to smooth down taut over her backside, revealing her ample ass to me.

When I was done, she arched and stretched, causing the curve of her neck to be exposed.

I wanted nothing more but to wrap my hand around that throat and pull her to me.

Before I could stop myself, I was doing just that, not stopping until her backside was now pressed against my erection.

Her eyes flared wide, and I immediately kicked myself for the move.

“I’m…” I began to apologize, but she turned in my arms and pressed herself against me fully.

“Do you know how fucking hard it is to be a sexual being, for wanting sex, all kinds of different sex, and the men in my life treating me differently because of something that they think I should be traumatized by?” she asked.

I looked down into her indigo eyes and said, “Tell me, exactly, what I’m allowed to do.”

“Everything but hold me down and take me when I’m saying no,” she said.

I blinked, my blood boiling now.

I didn’t know whether to pull her to me and drop my mouth to hers, or to punch a hole in the wall for how that Pennington prick was about to pay.

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