The God (Bratva Blood #3)- S.R. Jones Page 0,20
I put my hand on his chest, push, and shake my head. He does not get to see me change.
“Let me check it out, at least,” he says.
I nod once and stand back. He saunters in, curiosity evident in his gaze. He’s a contradiction. His gaze is hungry, but his stance is laid back.
Bohdan is here. My Bohdan. This is surreal.
I watch as he prowls my space, eyes taking everything in. He reaches out and trails one finger over a dress hanging on the rack of clothes. The way his hand caresses the fabric makes me shiver.
I remember the second time he came into my life. We weren’t children any longer and though, at first, I’d been glad to see my old friend, I soon wanted more from him. I was full of hormones then. Desperate for things I couldn’t even articulate.
Young women now live in a different world. They face pressures, of course. Of the kind we didn’t so much back in the noughties. They need to look good on social media. They grow up to find they’re expected to list all the sexual things they’re willing to do on their hook-up profiles, where people choose one another by a swipe. As if they’re picking something off the shelf to buy.
Back then we didn’t have those pressures, but also we young women, certainly in Russia, didn’t have access to much education about sex. Boys like Bohdan, they knew what they wanted. They had access to plenty of things that told them what their bodies were craving. I didn’t. All I knew was my insane love for Justin Timberlake took the brunt of these new feelings and desires.
Until we moved back to St. Petersburg and Bohdan entered my life once more.
This time around, he hadn’t sprinkled me with magical pixie dust; instead, he’d touched me and made me shiver. He’d looked at me in a way to make me melt. He soon replaced Justin in my affections, and I fell hard into first love.
Then he broke my heart.
“Don’t touch my things,” I snap.
He looks at me, raises one brow, but drops the fabric. A small smirk twitches at one side of his mouth, but he tamps it down.
Walking to my desk where I do my make-up and prepare myself before a show, he looks at the photographs. There’s one of me with Jasper, and a couple of me and Mom on holidays, but mostly they are of my animals.
He’s digging into my life, and I don’t like it. He has no right to do this.
“Please, will you go and wait outside?” I ask. “I need to get changed.”
I make my request polite, even meek. It’s not the way it should be. He works for me. I’m the one holding the purse strings that pay him, or rather Jasper is. But Bohdan? He’s always had this air about him that somehow elevates him above most of the people around him.
I don’t mean that he’s superior or pompous, only that he somehow seems not of this world. Not only because of his looks but his demeanor too.
“Okay,” he says easily, and then adds in damn good French. “I will do as you ask, Dasha.” Where did he learn to speak French?
“I’ll be right outside the door,” he tells me.
I wait until he’s closed it behind him, and then I collapse on the sofa by the back wall.
God help me, but having him as my bodyguard simply isn’t going to work for me. I need to tell Jasper to find someone else. Bohdan says there’s a threat against me, but he doesn’t have to be the one to protect me from it.
I feel untethered. Lost somehow. Emotions are stirring in me, and I don’t like emotions. I mostly refuse to feel them anymore unless I’m dancing. I think it’s why I’m so good at it. I feel every single movement soul deep. I know the stories behind each performance back to front, and when I dance lead swan, which is the role I’m currently preparing for, I channel her emotions into my dance.
It’s the way I deal with the shit life has thrown at me. All the anger, rage, sorrow, and yes, hate, I feel I put into my swan. The white swan with her heavy arms and her more fluid movements, and then the black swan with more rigid, sharp movements. It’s all in the arms when it comes to displaying their differences.
Realizing I’m lolling around when I need to get going,