Roma Queen (Roma Royals Duet Book 2) Read online

  “Lazlo never had a tight grip on reality. I can guarantee you that he has some end goal here. He’s probably fixated on that goal, and that goal alone. He’s playing a game. He’s laid out the rules. From this point forward, we have to follow them or pay the price. But he has to follow those rules, too.”

  Pasha knows Lazlo. Spent years of his life living at close quarters with the man. This gives us a distinct advantage, especially if it means Pasha can predict how the bastard will act or behave. He’s confident that this is the right course of action—I can see it in his eyes. But…what if he’s wrong? I push down on my ever-rising panic, slamming a lid on it, but I can feel it violently bubbling away beneath that lid, threatening to boil over. “Maybe I should stay here. If something happens—”

  Pasha’s already shaking his head, though. “Sorry. Not an option. I told you I was going to protect you back in your apartment, and I meant it. I won’t be able to do that if I’m two and a half hours away. If Lazlo is fucking with us, the very last thing I’m gonna do is leave you alone here in the city. You have to come with me.”

  Heat rises up my neck, staining my cheeks red. He did not just shut me down like that. No way. “I’m not your property now. You can’t force me to obey you. You might be about to become their king, but I have no interest in you being mine.”

  A line of red chases across Pasha’s cheeks, too. His eyes flash, the muscles in his jaw popping as he lowers his hand and grips hold of the top of the car door. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to. I’ll rephrase. It would fucking kill me to leave you here, knowing you could be in danger. I really need you to come with me, Zara. I need you where I can see you, so I won’t lose my fucking mind. Can you please trust me? Can you please come with me?” His words are hard. Clipped. Tight. He doesn’t like saying them—it’s clear he’s never really had to ask someone for something before—but he means them. His frustration is openly warring with his need for me to be safe.

  Can you please trust me?

  He made this huge, monumental request not three seconds ago, but his eyes are still asking it. I exhale, hoping that I’m making the right decision; the consequences if I make the wrong decision are dire indeed. “All right. All right. I’ll go with you. But there’s more than one person you need to protect me from, Pasha. Lazlo’s targeting the both of us for some reason, but don’t forget…there’s someone else who’s taken a serious disliking to me, too.”

  Relief smooths out Pasha’s troubled expression. His brows bank together, forming a hard line. “Don’t you worry about my mother, Firefly. If she so much as looks at you sideways, I’ll unleash the kind of hell that’ll have her running for goddamn cover before she can even think your name again.”

  The temperature drops as we drive north. An hour outside of the city, Pasha pulls off into the parking lot of a huge retail outlet—Norm’s Outdoors, Washington’s Premier Fishing and Hunting Warehouse!—and he disappears inside. I wait for a little over fifteen minutes, wondering what the hell he’s doing, before he emerges through the automatic doors, carrying a large bag. He slings it into the trunk and then gets back into the Mustang. He doesn’t say a word. Just leans across the car, places his curled index finger beneath my chin and gently tips my head back.

  When he kisses me, my head swims. His lips ignite a fire inside me the moment they make contact with my own, and the world, if only for a second, seems to quiet. The worry that’s been digging its claws into my back loosens its hold for a moment, and everything is still. This kiss is different to the scorching exchanges we shared back in my apartment. This is slow and deep, and sinks down into my soul, fusing us together.

  I’ve always thought feelings were hard and fast, definite things. I’ve experienced my emotions as if they are primary colors—red for anger; blue for calm; green for excitement. My moral compass has always seen things in very defined terms, too. White for good. Black for wrong. Turns out, the range of human emotion is very much like a rainbow. There are so many different variants and blends of each feeling that sometimes they all bleed together, creating a swirling mess of color, and it’s so damned difficult to pick one shade from any of the others.

  The emotions that have attached themselves to Pasha in my mind are so fucking confusing, all spilling over into one another, complicating what ought to be so easy to sift through. This is more than a simple attraction. This is more than a desire to satisfy a hunger inside my body. He is a physical need that flows in my blood. He is a burning ache that thrums in my chest. He is a warning, and a plea, and a gunshot in the dark, and I have only one way of responding to him: desperately, fiercely, and with every part of my soul.

  He’s breathing quickly as he pulls away from me, framing my face in his hands. “Fuck, Zara. You turn everything upside down,” he whispers.

  I close my eyes. “At least you still know which way is up. I don’t have a clue anymore.”

  His huff of laughter barely makes a sound, but it makes me smile. When I open my eyes again, he’s leaned back and he’s studying my face with a burning intensity. My first thought is to turn away from him, to make a joke, to end the moment where it feels like he’s rifling through a box of my deepest, darkest secrets. I hold myself in place, though, forcing myself to remain still as he continues his assessment.

  “You looked at me like this when you came out of Shelta’s tent,” I say softly. “It scared the shit out of me.”

  “Does it scare you now?”

  I see the curiosity in his eyes. There’s something so unusual about him. Sometimes, it’s as though today is his first day on the planet, and he’s seeing everything and everyone for the very first time. His eyes don’t skim over objects and people in the same way other people’s eyes do. When he looks at something, it’s as if he’s really seeing it, cataloguing its shape and appearance, trying to understand its form and existence. And when he looks at me…it’s as though the tide of some great ocean has inexplicably paused, and I am staring back into this vast, unknowable, awesome force of nature, and it’s about to sweep me away any second.

  “Yes,” I whisper. “It terrifies me.”

  His thumb rubs a small circle against my cheek, and a flurry of goose bumps break out across my shoulder blades. “I get caught,” he murmurs. “You’re just like Medusa. Beautiful. Dangerous. You turn me to stone.”

  I dismiss the urge to make a joke out of his comparison. It’d be easy enough to come up with some self-deprecating quip about my hair bearing some resemblance to a nest of snakes, but that’s not what he meant and I know it.

  “I’m sorry, Firefly. I was a fucking asshole earlier. I’d love to say I’m not the kind of guy to make demands on people, but sometimes I am. Shelta taught me to command everyone around me. I’ve done my best to shake that trait over the past three years, but it’s tough with you. You’re…you’re fucking important. Precious. Makes it much harder to rein in my need to control everything when it seems like you might get hurt if I don’t.”

  An apology. An apology from a man like Pasha is no small thing. In college, I dated guys who did far worse than tell me what to do, and they weren’t able to swallow their own pride for five seconds to tell me they regretted their actions, let alone say they were sorry. Pasha’s far more arrogant than any of those guys. Far prouder. But he’s far stronger, too. I don’t mean physically stronger (even though he is by far). I mean his strength of character.

  It takes an incredibly strong man to see a fault within himself, and to voluntarily step forward and take responsibility for it. It takes an even stronger woman to do the same.

  I lean my forehead against his. This close, his pupils look like bottomless black wells, and I’m fully prepared and willing to fall into them. “I’m never going to give you shit for wanting to make sure I’m safe,” I tell him. “I probably…urgh, I definitely reacted a little…sharply.”

  His mouth quirks up into the faintest suggestion of a smile. “You straight up eviscerated me, Zara Llewellyn.”

 
He’s exaggerating, really. I could have left his entrails in a bloody pile on the sidewalk for telling me what do like that, but I didn’t. “The General. That’s what people call my father. When he gives an order, he expects it to be followed immediately and without question. Took me years before I finally stood up to him and told him where to shove his commands. I decided I wasn’t going to let anyone ever order me around again. And when you told me what I was going to do and how, without leaving room for even a sliver of my own free will…well, I guess I might have responded a little harshly. So, I’m sorry, too. I won’t do that again.”

  Pasha brushes my lips with his own one last time and then sinks back into his seat, starting up the engine. “Feel free to call me on my shit whenever you like, Firefly. It was hot as fuck. My dick’s still raging hard from the telling off you gave me.”

  The sidelong look he shoots my way has my stomach doing backflips. God, this is so ridiculous. I can’t spend too much time thinking about any of this, because if I do, my brain is going to melt out of my ears. The dreams I had for so long felt real to me in a way that I couldn’t reconcile, and now the star of those dreams is sitting less than a foot away from me, and he just fucking kissed me and told me I made his dick hard. In the briefest time, he’s addled my brain, turned me inside out and upside down; I can’t even begin to imagine what he’s going to do next.

  Pasha guns the Mustang’s engine, and we peel out of the parking lot. His smile turns into a full-on shit-eating grin.

  “Why do you look so pleased with yourself?” I ask, fighting back a smile of my own.

  His eyes remain on the road. “Because you’re blushing. You like me, don’t you. Just a little.”

  “You’re not even looking at me. You can’t tell that I’m blushing.”

  “Firefly, I could make s’mores over your face. I can feel the heat coming off your cheeks from here.”

  I thump him in the arm, the crimson coloring my cheeks worsening by the second. “You are so full of shit.”

  “You do. You like me. More importantly, you like my dick.”

  If there were some way I could stop him from saying ‘dick,’ I’d do it. My heart needs a break. The palpitations that send my pulse skittering all over the place every time he utters that word are going to end me any second now.

  I clap my hands over my cheeks. “Just drive, you idiot.”

  “Admit it. Tell me the truth. You liked having my cock inside you, didn’t you? You want me inside you again.”

  I can’t very well tell him I didn’t like it. That would be a flagrant, barefaced lie. He made me come enough times to know just how much I liked not just his cock, but his fingers and dirty fucking mouth, too. And I do want him inside me again. More than anything. I straighten up in my seat, removing my hands from my face, and pinning them underneath my legs, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing me squirm. “If you must know, I did like it,” I say. “It felt…it felt incredible. Amazing. That was easily the best sex of my life. I’ve never lost my shit like that before. Having you inside me made perfect fucking sense. Everything else is so messed up right now, but while we were naked together on that couch…” Oh god. This is taking an unplanned turn for the worse. I wasn’t planning on being so damn honest, but now the words are half out, suspended in mid-air, and Pasha’s hands are gripping the steering wheel so fucking tight that I know I can’t stop now. What the hell is wrong with me? Fuck.

  I clear my throat, looking out of the window to my right. “While we were naked on that couch together, I felt like at least one good thing was happening to me. I felt safe. I felt like everything was going to be okay. I felt like, so long as you stayed with me, there was nothing to worry about, and all I had to do was keep holding onto you, and…” I run out of steam. Jesus. Of all the dumb things to say to the man you only just hooked up with for the first time a few short hours ago. I can’t keep staring out of the window. If I do, I’m only going to make it worse. I plaster a slightly mad smile onto my face and turn back to Pasha. “There. Happy now? Your dick must be really fucking magical if it’s capable of making me feel all of that.”

  I laugh. Mercifully, the sound is light and carefree, filling the Mustang from floor to roof. Pasha’s not smiling, though. His amusement has vanished, replaced by a seriousness that makes my head pound and my palms break out into an instantaneous sweat. Shit, he looks like he wants to pull over and boot my crazy ass out of the car. I’m cringing internally when he opens his mouth and says, “My dick had nothing to do with that, Firefly. That was my heart.” Slowly, he turns back to the road, his sharp jade eyes, so pale in the early morning light, fixed straight ahead.

  He is the most beautiful, savage creature I have ever seen.

  Three

  PASHA

  Most people remember losing their virginity.

  Not me.

  I was fifteen-years-old and my father had just died. The old man was bound and buried, lowered into the ground, and I’d stared at Shelta’s blank, emotionless face throughout the whole process, and it had fucking destroyed me. The wake was loud and boisterous, full of drunk men and women shouting over the top of one another, crying, and laughing, and arguing, and telling stories, and I couldn’t bear it for one more fucking second. I stole a forty of Jack from my uncle’s vardo, and I slipped off into the night with it, dead set on drinking every last drop inside the bottle.

  It was Christmas break and school was out; I’d only been home three days when my father keeled over, dead as dead could be. We were renting temporary space on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, and the ground was so frozen it took three grown men wielding pickaxes to dig the damned grave.

  As I’d started drinking, the liquor searing my throat, I’d hoped that the alcohol would take the pain away, and eventually it did. It took everything else first, though. My hope. My ability to think straight. Stubbornly, the pain was the last to go.

  At some point, the girl found me in the backfield and came to sit with me. She was blonde, hair the color of the bales of straw that were piled up to the rafters inside the farm’s many barns. Her father owned the farm. Had told her to steer clear of us, and warned her of the consequences she would suffer if she was even caught talking to us.

  She hadn’t cared.

  She was two years older than me. Had already developed a skill for drinking Jack that outstripped mine by a long shot.

  She kissed me first. Wrestled me out of my blazer and my shirt, even though it was below freezing. She’d pulled her own sweater over her head, discarded her boots, tugged her jeans off, and then laid herself down amongst the frost covered leaves, white and crisp with the cold, and…

  …and who the fuck knows what had happened next.

  I woke up the next morning in one of the barns, lying in a pile of puke, still clutching hold of the bottle of Jack. It was empty, though I couldn’t recall if I’d drunk most of it or if the girl had. I threw up again, head thumping angrily, and when I’d sat up, trying to clean myself off, that’s when I’d seen the blood all over my dick.

  My first instinct: panic.

  Upon very close inspection, I’d realized the blood wasn’t mine, which was a relief until I’d started wondering how the blood had fucking gotten there. I’d ether seriously hurt someone with my junk, or I’d screwed a virgin, and neither was a comforting thought, given that I couldn’t remember a single fucking thing that had happened after the girl had gotten naked.

  I’d managed to find my clothes, still outside, made stiff and brittle by a layer of frost that had cracked and shattered like glass when I’d shaken out my shirt and pants. Archie had come across me, lurching between the tents and the trailers, still reeling drunk. He took me back to his vardo, brought me coffee and something warm to put in my empty stomach, and then he’d made me drink a shot of Jack, promising it would make me feel better. Surprisingly, it had.

  Three hours later, I saw the girl pull up in her rusting Jeep Cherokee, her hair flying lik
e a silver-gold banner in the wind, and the secretive, knowing smile she sent my way told me that I hadn’t hurt her. It had just been the sex. Her virginity, and mine.

  We left the farm three days later, and I never saw her again. I never even knew her name, and, as far as I can remember, she never knew mine either.

  I’ve forgotten plenty of other sexual encounters since then. Plenty of other women, too. None of those experiences were important. None of those women meant anything. But fucking Zara on that couch in her apartment that smelled so deliciously of her, filled with all the art and the books she’s collected, the light on her answer machine flashing red in the hallway, the messy, jam-packed calendar hanging on the fridge, the Pink Lady apples in the fruit bowl, and the beads of condensation on the windows in the living room? I am going to remember every single, minuscule detail of that encounter for the rest of my goddamn life.

  It’s burned into me. Branded, as if she’s taken a glowing red poker to the synapses in my mind and forged every tiny element of those few, blissful hours into the wiring of my brain. If she leaves me now, she will haunt me for the rest of fucking time. No other woman will ever compare to her. No one will ever be able to ignite the same roaring need in my veins the way she has. Her fiery hair, threaded through with copper, cinnamon and spun gold; the delicate, barely visible freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose; the ever-changing hue of her eyes, as unpredictable and inscrutable as the sea: every part of her is a fractured shard of a dream that has miraculously come true, and now the pieces of her have all blended together into the astonishing creature sitting next to me, and I’m too scared to fucking believe it.