Page 31 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

He’s beautiful and violent in equal measure.

He catches me giving him the thirsty up-and-down look and arches a brow. But he says nothing.

I swallow and hurriedly turn away to pretend I’m fussing with something on Lukas’s seatbelt.

“Here. Take this.” I turn back to see he’s handing me another piece of clothing.

It’s the sweatshirt he stole from my closet. I also can’t help but notice that he is now shirtless.

His body is somehow even more jaw-dropping than I would’ve expected. Broad, muscular shoulders swoop down to abs like hardened boulders.

His skin is tanned, smooth, and rippling with inky tattoos. I see symbols and shapes I don’t understand, along with Russian characters I can’t decipher.

Beautiful and violent, indeed.

There’s a tense silence in the car as he shrugs into the t-shirt he bought for himself.

Although the tension dissipates like a whoopy cushion fart as soon as I see the shirt. I burst out laughing as I read it out loud.

“‘I Heart NY’?”

Dima growls, “… Shut the fuck up.”

I keep chuckling as he puts the car into drive and pulls us out. At least we both look a little ridiculous. And at least I have my sweatshirt back. It smells like him, though—the cedarwood and gunsmoke smell I remember from that night almost a year ago.

And once again, that tense silence descends on the car. I feel like my skin is tightening on my face. Everything about him reminds me of how I begged him to make me come the night we met.

Those fingers—graceful, tapered, brutally effective—resting lightly on the steering wheel.

The swell of his thighs beneath his jeans.

The tendril of tattoo peeking out from beneath the collar of his shirt.

I shudder and busy myself with looking through the bag at the other items he purchased. We’re now equipped with diapers, wipes, baby powder, a pack of water, two boxes of granola bars, and a gas can to cut down on how often we have to stop for fuel.

“That’s it?” I ask in alarm.

“What’s it?”

“I can’t eat a granola bar for dinner. I need real food.”

“We don’t have time for real food,” he snaps. He’s sitting in the front seat with his eyes facing fiercely forward. He also tilted the rearview mirror up so he doesn’t see me nursing in the backseat.

What a gentleman. As if he hadn’t seen enough of me already.

“My body is making milk for another human. It cannot do that with a hundred and fifty calories of oats and chocolate. If you want your son to eat, you have to feed me.”

I don’t mean to sound whiny. I’m just tired and sore and, in case he’s forgotten, recently shoved a human being out from between my legs.

Not that I care what he thinks.

“Who says I care about what either of you eat?” he asks as he drives across the convenience store lot to park in front of a rundown diner next door. “You act like you’re solving world hunger back there.”

I roll my eyes. “When your nipples start dispensing milk, let me know.”

* * *

A Diner Outside Of New York City

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