Page 26 of Knocked-up Bratva Bride
“You heard me.” He shrugged casually. “It won’t be the first time a woman’s done it.”
I wanted to smack the poker expression off his face with the back of my hand. “Well, I don’t know what women you’ve been around, but I am very big on self-respect. I don’t go around stalking men.”
“Well, you keep showing up like this,” he murmured, stepping in close enough that I could smell the faint trace of cedar and something darker I couldn’t place. “I might just have to snatch you up for myself.”
My breath caught, traitorously, and my heart thudded hard, once.
I didn’t want to assume anything, certainly not with someone who boldly and arrogantly declared he was not the right one for me.
Someone I don’t really know!
He could be an assassin or an unemployed fraud pretending to be in the corporate sector, and I wouldn’t know.
I mean, for Christ’s sake, all we did was suck faces and exchange saliva in heated passion. I should gag in disgust and be ashamed of myself for being so warped in a risky fantasy with a stranger.
But the invisible pull between us was not something I could ignore.
The awareness of our connection and how unreasonably I craved him started like a spark, a flicker, and spread like a wave of heat around my body, licking up every sensitive inch. And I knew I had to be careful. Because whatever this was, whatever it still could be, it was already starting to burn ferociously.
Damien leaned closer until his warm breath, a blend of red wine, tickled my earlobe. My chest fluttered, and, for a few seconds, I struggled to breathe normally. But I held my ground, refusing to let him see how much his nearness affected me.
“Stay away from me, Elena,” he whispered and pulled back, his blue eyes holding mine captive. “I mean it. It’s for your own good.”
The sooner I got away from the man, the better for my sanity. I summoned the courage and started to walk away from him. “With pleasure.”
Chapter 9 – Damien
The first time I saw Irina, I was twenty-one, half-drunk on whiskey and arrogance, my suit jacket slung across the velvet booth like I owned the place.
Hell, I nearly did.
It was the kind of night where the air smelled like cigar smoke and sweat, and the bass from the DJ booth made the floor pulse like a heartbeat.
Girls were dancing half-naked, some fully-naked, painted in gold, draped in glitter and sexual anticipation. In my mind, some of them blurred together, just noise and movement, like static on a television screen.
I watched, yet my mind was somewhere between business and boredom. And then she walked in, carrying a silver tray of overpriced vodka bottles, weaving through the crowd of sycophants and thugs like us, like she’d done it a thousand times.
She had that aura that stopped the world. She wasn’t the prettiest woman in the room, but she was the realest.
Eyes sharp, mouth tilted in a smirk like she already knew all our secrets. When she leaned in to pour my drink, I caught a whiff of something warm and clean—vanilla, maybe. No heavy perfume, no fake giggle.
She looked me in the eye. Most women didn’t, not like that.
“You look bored,” she said.
I arched a brow. “Is that how you get tips?”
“No,” she replied. “That’s how I get fired. But it was worth it.”
I laughed. Like, really laughed—not the cold, polite chuckle I reserved for clients and bastard enemies.
After that, I told her to sit down, and we talked. For hours, maybe. Between the clinking of glasses and the shuffle of bodies, she sat beside me, never quite touching, always just close enough. We talked about stupid things. Favorite food. Dreams we didn’t believe in. Some actor she loved that I mocked relentlessly just to see her glare.
Then a drunk Matvey suggested we play truth or dare. I rolled my eyes, but Irina? She grinned like a devil in disguise.
It started as a joke.
“Truth or dare,” Matvey slurred, tossing back another shot as the table roared with laughter. “Come on, lighten up, Damie. Even Bratva royalty needs to play sometimes.”
