Page 30 of Masked Seduction
Because if she’d stayed, if she’d unmasked me, if she’d looked me in the eye and said my name...
I would’ve been lost.
Goddamn it.
I shift in my seat, trying to adjust the tight pressure in my slacks. It’s no use. She’s gone, but her fucking ghost is still here—on my hands, on my tongue, in the ache still throbbing at the base of my spine.
I have to see her on Monday, sit across from her at the conference table, pass her reports, and assign her tasks. Act like I didn’t spend an hour with my cock buried in her while she begged for more.
I’m fucked.
The next day…
The morning sun over the Vegas suburbs is clean and gold, the kind of morning that makes the desert look like it’s been freshly painted.
I pull up to the gate of my sister Tatiana and her husband Denis’s house a few minutes before ten, mimosas-in-the-making tucked in a canvas bag on the passenger seat.
The Popov house sits on a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac where the lawns are trimmed within an inch of their lives and the stonefaçades pretend not to belong to Vegas. It’s tasteful, expensive, secure. Bratva money done right.
Tatiana’s always been the classiest of the three of us. She could’ve married into any crime family in the western hemisphere and still made them look like royalty.
Denis is already waiting, swinging the door open with the easy grin he reserves for Saturday mornings and soccer matches. He’s been married to my sister almost ten years, and in that time, I’ve come to trust him like blood.
“Mimosas?” he asks, eyeing the bag.
“As promised,” I say, handing it off. “Where are the gremlins?”
“In the kitchen,” he says. “Tatiana’s letting them destroy her clean floor.”
As soon as I step inside, the smell hits me—warm maple, butter, pancakes. I follow it to the kitchen, pausing in the doorway.
My twin nieces, Sofia and Lilia, Tatiana and Denis’s girls, are parked in matching highchairs, cheeks flushed and hair sticking up in wild brown curls. One of them—I still can’t tell them apart—is gleefully banging a spoon on her tray while the other laughs with food smeared all over her mouth.
My other sister Anya’s son, Charles, four years old and already plotting global domination, sits at the table in a Paw Patrol T-shirt. He’s got a tiny bite of syrup-drenched pancake poised in his fingers. Just as I enter, he leans over and sneaks it into Lilia’s mouth like he’s feeding a pet kitten.
“Uncle Abram!” he calls the second he sees me.
I crouch beside him and ruffle his curls. “You bribing your cousins for loyalty again?”
He shrugs, syrup on his chin. “They like pancakes.”
I reach for a napkin and swipe it off his face. “Smart man.”
The girls both babble nonsense at me, arms waving, and I make a show of inspecting them. “You two behaving?”
They giggle in unison, and I feel the same deep, anchoring warmth I feel every Saturday. These three little people are the lights of my life. Not the businesses. Not the power. This. Sticky fingers and pancakes.
Tatiana’s voice floats in from the hallway, asking Denis if he remembered to put on music. He didn’t. He never does.
I don’t care. The soundtrack of this house is already perfect.
Denis pops the champagne cork with practiced ease, catching my eye with the kind of teasing, older-brother smirk he’s perfected over the years.
“You keep showing up with booze, Abram, but still no babies. When exactly are you planning to catch up to the rest of us?”
I shake my head, leaning back in my chair. “Careful, Denis. I might start bringing cheaper champagne.”
He chuckles, pouring smoothly into the waiting glasses. “I’ll risk it. You really need someone to take care of you.”
