Page 19 of The Bratva's Innocent Sold Bride
He was toying with me all along. Every second I thought I was free was a cruel joke. At any moment before this, his guard could have dragged me back, but he thought it would be funny to let me breathe the air of false hope a little bit longer.
I wanted to punch him.
“Well, let’s go, then,” I said, my anger giving me courage I probably shouldn’t have had.
Shrugging out of his grip, I started walking the way I had come, and Mat fell into step beside me. He must have been rubbing off on me because as we walked in silence, I mentally catalogued all the ways I could kill him.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” he asked with so much sincerity, I cracked up.
I was losing it. Turning into a cold-blooded killer while taking a moonlit walk with one. He scowled at me and waved his hand at the hills and the trees.
“Is it that different from Moscow?” I asked.
“Very different. Even the air is different.”
“Better?”
“Not better. But I like it. I’m growing to like it quite a bit.”
I glanced up at him to see him looking at me with that intensity that turned my insides to jelly, and not necessarily in a bad way.
“I guess you want to stay, then,” I said, kicking a stone.
He chuckled. “Oh, very much.”
After a few minutes of nothing but the sound of our feet and the whisper of the wind, he turned to me, grinning broadly. “What made you try something so dangerous?”
“Pfft, there’s nothing dangerous out here. And it wasn’t like I had anything better to do.”
“Oh, so you miss your chore schedule?”
I sputtered at his infuriatingly smug tone. “Don’t worry. I got the message that I’m supposed to decorate the house.”
“Supposed to?” he asked. “I thought you’d enjoy it. If you don’t want to, I’ll hire someone, as simple as that.”
Oh. Well. I only grumbled, turning that information over in my mind. He kept grinning.
“Maybe it was me you missed,” he said. “Although you were going in the wrong direction to find me.”
There was no way to fight his teasing except with stony silence. We came to an electric off-road vehicle that was practically silent when he started it up. The thing was surprisingly fast, and I grabbed onto his middle as we zoomed back toward my beautiful prison. With the wind whipping at me, I tucked my face against his strong back, absorbing the warmth of his skin through his shirt.
He’d taken his jacket off, but he still had on a dress shirt out here in the middle of nowhere. Where had he been this late at night? Who had he been with? It hit me that he might notconsider our marriage real, and if he wasn’t spending his nights with me, his wife, he might be spending them with another woman.
But who cared if he was? It had to be something else that made my stomach turn over. Probably the ATV is bumping over the rough trail. I loosened my grip on Mat and shivered in the cold instead of resting against his back.
We ended up back around the front of the house, and Mat left the ATV in the driveway. As soon as we were in the house, he snapped on the lights so I could see just how displeased he was by my escapade.
His blue eyes were dark, his cheeks ruddy from the wind. His hair was a tangle of dark waves that he raked his fingers through before taking me by the arm again.
“This was fun,” he said in an ice-cold voice. “But let me remind you that your father’s life was spared because he gave you to me. I don’t yet consider his debt repaid.”
My breath froze in my chest. He was once again threatening Dad’s life. It wasn’t enough that he’d utterly broken the man; he would have gone so far as making me go to his funeral, the fault of his death squarely on my shoulders.
Still, I raised my chin, narrowing my gaze on him. “I won’t be anyone’s prisoner,” I spat.
His eyes lightened, and the quirk of a smile lifted a corner of his lips. “You’re not my prisoner, CJ. You’re my wife. And you’ll start acting like one.”
His arms tightened around me faster than any striking snake. My body was crushed to the heat of his hard chest, and his mouth was on mine in a flash. The firm pressure made me gasp, and at the slight opening of my lips, his tongue darted past them.
