33. Viktor

[ 33 ]

VIKTOR

To me, Ranger had always been the perfect blend of sweet aggression. As if he had always known I could only take his caution if it came with a promise of something more.

He was inside me, and it hurt in a way that sent snaps of arousal to every nerve in my body, pleasure fighting memories I had spent years shoving down.

Except I didn’t need to shove them down anymore. Because Ranger had come along with his tatty boots and stamped them to smithereens. And the burn where we were joined . . . it was nothing compared to the searing lines his fingers branded into my hips as he held me still, his cock pulsing inside me, muscles contracting, eyes flaring with raw desire and love.

He smoothed his hand up my spine, grasping the nape of my neck. “I’ve thought about this . . . a lot, but I was okay with it never happening. I still am.”

“You don’t need to be.”

“Fucking do. That’s how this works.”

I flexed. “I know how this works.”

Ranger groaned, all pleasure, no pain, and my blood cranked to a swelter. Already breathless, I let my body do what it wanted—what it needed, easing into a slow grind that pressed Ranger deeper into the back of the couch.

A Russian curse fell from my lips.

Ranger inhaled it, skimming his palms all over me but keeping his hips still, down, leaving it to me to carve out a mind-numbing rhythm. “Fuck, Vik. You feel so good.”

I did not have words for how he felt. To describe the sound that tore from my chest as the fire between us caught another spark. Faster. Harder. It became an untameable beast, and I did not even try to contain it.

Ranger savaged my mouth, leaving my lips stinging from the force of his kiss. Then he pushed at my chest, easing me back, his dark gaze fixated on my cock, rigid and weeping between us. “I love your dick.”

A wild laugh was my only answer. I had never felt so free, even thousands of feet in the air, the pilot of my own destiny. Because I had never been free. Not until this moment. Not until him.

I braced my hands behind me, slowing down, pushing against the tide of the climax bearing down on me. “I did not think I could come with someone inside me. I was wrong.”

“That’s the trouble with thinking.” Ranger teased my cock, blistering my nerves with the light touch. “Too much of it makes you stupid.”

He was not wrong, but as my pulse heavied with amassed emotion, I did not care if he thought me stupid. I cared that he had trusted me with his body. With his heart. I cared that he loved me and that I loved him. As release barrelled closer, I could not think of much more.

“Vik.”

Ranger’s throaty whisper recentred my focus.

I found his gaze and leaned closer, drawn to him, squeezing him, the movement teasing a guttural noise from him, rolling his eyes. “What?”

“Your hip’s had enough. I wanna take the weight off it. That okay?”

I had not noticed the trembling protest in my weaker leg—I did not truly know what he meant, but I nodded anyway and found myself on my back.

Ranger eased inside me again, his forearms either side of my head. For the longest moment, he did not move, and I realised that he was waiting for me. That he needed something from me I had not thought I could ever give.

“Asher.”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to fuck me.”

Ranger bit his lip, fisting my hair, lost in my touch as I tugged him down to bite my favourite spot on his neck. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

I lay back, relaxing, handing the ship to him. Because I trusted him. Because I loved him. And I could not live with it being any other way.

Ranger stole a kiss. Then he began to move, working deeper inside me with every steady stroke of his cock, as I grit down on my teeth, arousal knotting my chest, nailing my senses.

He stared at me as deeply as he fucked me, wielding the connection we’d built like a love-struck weapon. Atomic and eviscerating, purging breath from my lungs and sweat from my skin.

Pent-up emotion built, threatening to burst free, and I let it happen. There were things I could never tell Ranger. Things he could never tell me. But this . . . all of it, I showed it to him, and he answered with a low cry, burying his face in my neck.

I wrapped my arms around him, arching my back, falling faster into a vortex I did not want to escape, taking him with me.

Ranger fucked me a little harder, the caution he’d begun with slipping away. He rooted a palm to the sofa, gazing down at me through hair that had grown long enough to hang in his face.

Beautiful. Inside and out. And I realised in that moment that dreaming of this, of him, even if I had not tangibly understood what it was, had been my solace in every hollow day and lonely night I had survived to be here with him.

I had dreamed of Ranger my whole life.

Love and pleasure unfurled inside me. “Asher.”

He felt it and rocked harder into me, cursing up a storm that would later make me smile. Flattening his body to mine, trapping my cock as it chased the friction of his ridged abdomen.

It was my undoing. My body vibrated, muscles seizing. I came and dragged Ranger over the cliff with me.

“Fuck.” He buried himself deep and stayed there. “Fuuuck.”

Indeed. Ranger collapsed on top of me. I held him, dazed, but mindful of the fact that it had not been a day since he had struggled to walk to the bathroom without help. “You are okay?”

Ranger raised his head, eyes heavy, a sex haze I’d seen in him before thick in his gaze. “I’m dead.”

“Good dead?”

“The best.”

He fell slack again, breathing hard. I kissed every part of him I could reach until he came back to me.

Ranger pulled out and staggered to the bathroom to clean up.

He came back with a towel and a viscous headache written all over his face. “We need to wash this if we want to keep our balls.”

“I will do it in the morning. Come, Asher.”

Ranger lay down with me again. The TV was on and he stared at it for a long moment, gaze vacant, excavating his brain again.

I touched his face. “Are you still worried I will not stay with you?”

“Hmm?” He came back to earth with a slow blink. “Nah. I was wondering something else about you.”

“And what is that?”

“How old are you?”

Of all the things I thought he might ask, it was, perhaps, the most benign. “I am twenty-seven.”

“What?”

“Twenty-seven,” I repeated. “Did you think I was forty-five?”

Ranger opened his mouth.

Shut it again. “I don’t know what I thought. But it wasn’t that. How . . . ?” He frowned as he thought too hard. “I don’t get it.”

“Which part?”

“You’ve done so much. How the fuck did you fit it all in?”

“I started early.” The sofa had blankets and pillows, as if someone had known that Ranger would tire of the bed the moment we were left without an audience. “When your name is not your name, the rules don’t apply.”

“Your name isn’t Viktor?”

“It is. The Petrenko part . . . not so much. My employer chose it to be unremarkable, like Jake, like Alexei’s name, though I believe his is as real as such things allow.”

Without the weight of a head injury slowing his thoughts, perhaps Ranger would’ve asked me more. But he lay down instead, wrapping his long, lean body around me, his cheek to my chest. “I feel like we have a future, and it scares me.”

“Why?”

“I never thought I’d have one.”

I kissed his temple, burying my face in his silky hair, letting my eyes grow damp, tears blurring my vision. “Neither did I.”