So Over You (Chicago Rebels #2)(22)

“What does it mean to leave a woman hanging?”

The D-men stopped talking, shared a glance, and then looked at Ford.

“Callaghan?” Cade asked casually.

“Context?” Ford replied, equally casually.

“It’s what Shay said,” Vadim said. “That I left Isobel ‘hanging.’ Then something about women toasted on vodka in Siberia.”

Ford nodded slowly, as if he didn’t quite understand but time might help him get there.

“Burnett, that sounds like a southernism,” he said. “Care to explain?”

Cade nodded. Then nodded again, this time rubbing his chin. “Don’t know about a southernism. But by my understanding, it’s when a woman doesn’t quite . . .”

Vadim wasn’t mistaken in thinking everyone leaned in slightly. In fact, the entire bar appeared to have quieted, all waiting for the answer to this vital question.

“Um . . . complete the act.”

Vadim frowned. “Complete the act?”

“The sex act,” Cade said with the assurance of a medical professional.

Vadim arced his gaze over the table. No one could quite meet his eyes.

He remembered his time with Isobel, if not with blistering clarity, with a certain nostalgia, despite what came afterward. She had been soft and warm and . . . wet? Yes, wet. Of course she was. Passion dictated their hurry, but that was to be expected. Their foreplay was daily, on the ice, with Isobel flirting and laughing.

Just like she had with Kelly earlier.

He recalled her soft moans, her begging words. Please, Vadim. I need you, Vadim. Then the sharp cry she tried to hide. Not pleasure, but pain. So brave, his Bella. Surprise had halted his thrusts, but she clung tighter, urging him to continue because she was a tough girl. A fighter, a future champion. And while he’d been annoyed that she didn’t share with him the crucial fact of her virginity, he was already too far gone.

Beyond knowing.

Fuck.

“Are you saying that Isobel didn’t come?”

Ford grabbed his shoulder. “Keep it down, man. Who’s to say what happened exactly?”

Except the people who were there. Some women were quiet. Vadim had screwed partners who lay there like dead frogs, expecting him to do all the work. Assuming that sheer nakedness and beautifully sculpted curves were a substitute for sexual chemistry.

They were not.

But Isobel was a willing participant, arching her body into him, rubbing her breasts against his chest, moaning her encouragement. True, she did not tell him to do specific things to ensure her pleasure, but it was her first time and she was young, just eighteen, and he wouldn’t have expected it. That was his job.

His. Job.

“If that’s what she said to her sister, perhaps it’s something that happens to her always . . .” He trailed off, not wanting to voice his worst fear.

“Yeah maybe,” Ford offered, not unkindly.

“More likely, you failed in your manly duty,” Erik said.

Cade elbowed the Swede, who raised his palms to the air. “Well, that’s what it sounds like.”

That was what it sounded like. He had failed to bring Isobel to orgasm. During her first sexual experience with a man, he had not satisfied her.

Ford patted his arm, and Vadim decided he didn’t like him so much after all. “I wouldn’t pay attention to anything Shay says. He probably made that up.”

Perhaps, but it was a rather specific detail.

Vadim searched the faces of the men before him. “Do you think he made that up?”

An unmistakable delay was followed by nods and murmurs of acquiescence.

Shay must have made it up. The alternative was not possible.

Not with the Czar of Pleasure.





SIX




With more pep to his step than the destination deserved or his night could attest to, Vadim walked into the trainers’ room an hour earlier than usual for his remedial lessons with Isobel. The Rebels’ captain, Bren St. James, lay on the table, getting his shoulder examined by one of the team doctors and Kelly.

Vadim had not slept well. He would say he had slept terribly, and not even Alexei’s warm milk concoction was enough to send him back to sleep. (Alexei believed warm milk and brandy solved everything.) All night, Vadim had replayed that one night with Isobel, but eight years had morphed it beyond recognition.

The sex was amazing.

The sex was adequate.

She had screamed his name over and over.

Because she was in pain.

In her eyes, he had seen desire and trust and honesty.

The mind could play the cruelest tricks.

Again he sent that mind back to the day he had finally slipped inside Isobel’s body after weeks of burning for her: a late afternoon in July, the air thick and sultry, the trees lining the driveway to Clifford Chase’s house green and bright.

I curl in on myself, hunching my shoulders lower while waiting to be admitted. Another furtive glance over my shoulder tells the same story as the first five furtive glances: no one is watching me.

The big oak door opens. My chest opens right up with it.

Bella.

Her dark chestnut hair is down and curled over her shoulders, and she wears makeup—smoky gray lines around her green eyes and slashes of pink on her cheeks and lips. I’ve never seen her in makeup before. It makes her look older than her eighteen years, and I suppose I should be grateful, because as mature as she is on the ice, she appears young off it.