Page 39 of Dragon Bodyguard
“I never wanted this life,” she said, tracing her fingers over his brow, down the side of his face. “I wasn’t opposing you having ambition, Misha. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was that bothered me, but I know now. This is it. I was bothering me. My quiet acceptance of what I thought I had to do to be okay in this world. A shiftless is nothing. A Kuznetsova shiftless is at least something. But… it’s bullshit!”
She laughed, making him join her.
“You’re right,” he said. “It is.”
She knew there were words that remained unspoken, she could see them in his eyes, resting in his expression. Soft regret, gentle hesitation. He wasn’t going to simply throw, that much was clear. But how could she expect him to? This was his dream.
“You can do what you do without doing it here,” she said gently. “Think about it?”
“Oh, I’m thinking,” he said. “Trust me.”
She smiled, leaning forward to kiss him. Then she kissed him again, moving her lips to his cheek, his temple. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her down on top of him. She stretched out along his side.
He was hers and she was his.
But she couldn’t stay.
Chapter 13 - Misha
Misha stared at the ceiling. He was in the middle of two conundrums. The first had to do with what she’d just asked of him. It hadn’t been a demand or an ultimatum, it had been stating of fact. He wasn’t surprised that she knew what she wanted, her inner dragon glowing its way through her veins. It was a good thing. He was thrilled for her, if he was honest. But the thought of leaving the house, the grounds, Dmitri’s service, felt like an invasion in his brain. Unwelcome and hostile.
What he’d feared was suddenly right in front of him, but the thought of letting her go again felt too toxic to engage with.
So he left it for now.
As they wrapped themselves in blankets and sunk down on the floor, backs to the sofa, he instead focused on the second conundrum and tried to think of how he was going to tell her what he suspected. He was going to have to broach it very gently. It was going to upset her. It might even devastate her. He had a feeling her inner dragon had arrived just in time. She was going to need all her innate power to handle what he thought her to be the victim of.
He had his arm around her, she was leaning against him, head on his shoulder. They were both hungry, lamenting there was no food in the cottage, but then they traced their fingers against the others, interlocking them, and forgot all about hunger or thirst or even the outside world.
Except he had to talk to her about what he suspected. He had to ask her if she thought it possible.
“Kay,” he said, using her old nickname. She smiled at it. He felt perhaps he shouldn’t talk to her about this now. But if not now, when? They were in the middle of a kidnapping scheme, and she was at the center of it. “I was thinking about what you said earlier. What you asked… Before we…”
“Had sex,” she filled in. “Again.”
He huffed a laugh.
“Yeah. That,” he agreed. “You said… your father broke us up.”
She hummed. It sounded as though she didn’t want to talk about it in the afterglow of their lovemaking, but it made him even more certain that it was now or possibly never. Even though he sincerely doubted they’d be easily discovered at the cottage, Byron had snuck into the guestroom undetected. With everything that was going on, there was no telling what inside intel the attackers had on the house. They might be running short on time with every passing minute.
“And you asked why,” Misha continued his line of thinking. She shifted to look up at him. He hesitated for only another beat before he asked, “What if it’s linked?”
She frowned.
“What if what’s linked?” she asked.
“Breaking us up and you getting taken.”
She sat up, pulling the blanket around her shoulders, frown deepening.
“What are you talking about?”
“Perhaps there’d been a promise made,” he said, speaking each word with great care since he knew this was going to cut her and he didn’t want to have to be the one to make her bleed in any way. “Even as far back as when we got together.”
“A promise?” she asked.
“What if your father saw what we were to each other? What we are…”
