but especially not when he still felt a little too high from fucking her, but he still got up from the bed. In the attached bathroom, he found a pile of folded wash cloths on the counter, dampened one with warm water, and came back into the bedroom. She let him clean her thighs and sex, giving him a sweet smile all the while.
After discarding the damp cloth to the laundry basket in the bathroom, Pav came back into the room to find Viktoria resting against the headboard. She didn’t attempt to hide her nakedness from him, leaving the soft beige sheet to pool around her waist while she toyed with an item in her hand.
One of his knives.
“What are you doing?” he asked, slightly amused.
She spun the tip of the blade against the pad of her finger. He might have warned her that it was a terribly sharp blade, and took very little pressure to actually slice through the skin, but she looked fine. She seemed like she knew what she was doing. Who was he to tell her to do anything?
“Thinking,” she murmured.
“I’ll get dressed, and you think, yes?”
She gave him a look from the side, but Pav only shrugged. Being naked was only good for him if he was going to be doing something about it. He made quick work of pulling on his jeans and shirt from the night before.
“You wear a lot of black, huh?”
Pav’s head tipped up and he caught that sinfully beautiful woman in his line of vision. She grinned when he cocked his eyebrow at her. She was still playing with that damn knife, and for once, didn’t have that glare of fire or fear in her eyes.
All good things.
“I do, yes,” Pav replied.
“Why?”
“Easier to blend into the shadows, hmm? Blood is less noticeable. Many reasons.”
Viktoria nodded and put her attention back on his knife. He wasn’t even sure when she had gone to get one of the three blades that she’d taken from him the night before. Maybe when he was sleeping, who was he to say? Usually, a simple noise would wake him up out of a dead sleep, but he had slept hard last night.
“I thought for sure I was going to have nightmares last night,” Viktoria said, more to herself than him. Still, Pav looked her way as he slipped on his socks and shoes, waiting for her to say more if she wanted to. “I was so sure of it that I was going to drink myself to sleep to prevent it from happening. And then you showed up.”
He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been scared that having him here, or rather, letting him have her, would bring on those nightmares, too. The thing was … this woman didn’t give herself nearly enough credit about her own strength. She clearly lived within a war of someone else’s making—they put the battle in her head, and she had to fight it every single day. The fact she woke up each and every morning proved her triumph.
Did she even realize that?
Probably not.
“Are we sharing secrets?” Pav asked.
Viktoria smiled a little. “I don’t know, are we? Do you have something you want to share with the rest of the class?”
She was so sarcastic that he wanted to laugh. It was amusing. She was usually so cutting, but even now, softened and sweet, there was still a hint of that fire and bite in her. It wasn’t that her persona or the front she put forth was entirely a mask, he realized. She’d just sharpened and honed it enough to use it as a weapon against those who became too close to her.
Viktoria was naturally quick-witted. She was always going to be a sharp-tongued woman with a bark far worse than her bite. It was all in how she chose to use that against someone else that determined whether or not her barbed-wire-covered heart was going to cut when a person came too close.
Well, if they were sharing secrets …
“This is the longest I’ve been away from the Compound in a while,” he admitted. “A couple of years, anyway. The last time, I was taken out for the weekend. But it’s been a while since I was away for this long.”
Viktoria glanced up. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
Did she really want to know?
“Are we making pillow talk?” he asked.
Viktoria’s brow lifted into a perfect arch. “Not used to that, or …?”
“Usually, women I spent the night with were paid for their time,