Fortune by Annabel Joseph (ebook reader for comics TXT) 📕

wonder, and he came too in waves of deep, explosive pleasure. All of it—tasting her, spanking her, getting to see her walls fall down—it all coalesced into one shimmering peak of ecstasy.

He fell over her, feeling emptied and replete. He lay over her a long time, just nestled inside her, until his cock softened and he had to slip the condom off and pull away. Still she didn’t move. He put his ear down on her back and listened to her faint, steady heartbeat. He basked in her lovely scent, the scent he already recognized. He tried to memorize the feel of her skin against his. He breathed her name in her ear, felt her long, soft exhalation.

“Ryan,” she whispered.

“Yes, doll?”

“I have to go.”

Chapter Six

Kat stayed in her room almost all of Sunday. She didn’t want to face her mother. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She needed to be alone. Ryan called and she didn’t answer. At dinner she watched the chatter of her large family like a spectator. She felt numb, confused. Detached. Her foray into submission at Ryan’s home had sent her world lurching sideways. Pleasure and fear warred with some other new emotion she felt. Love.

But that was ridiculous. It all came down to the deep intimacies he demanded and the bodily responses she’d felt. The idea of love was ludicrous and she hated herself for mooning over him. Basically he was just really, really good in bed. She tried to convince herself that’s all it was and then tried to forget him altogether. Without success.

After dinner she wandered into her father’s small TV room. He was watching a cowboy movie, his favorite. In Westerns the good guys and bad guys were always blatantly obvious. In life, Kat thought…not so much.

“Little princess,” he said in Russian as she pulled up a chair beside him. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

He grunted. “Something is wrong. You are troubled tonight.”

After a moment she sighed. “I just don’t know, Papa. I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what, zaika?”

“I don’t know how to change. I don’t know how to stop doing things that…that make me…unhappy…” Her throat closed on the last word, making a pathetic strangling sound that very much expressed how she felt. Her papa reached for her hand, clasped it tightly.

“You must not be unhappy. This is not good.”

“I know.”

They both fell silent, sat together in comfortable stillness. Her papa always soothed her when no one else could, because he would just hold her hand and make no other demands on her. She looked down at his hand in hers, parchment white, with more liver spots than she remembered. Her papa was getting old. She was getting old. Life was rolling along, rolling past her with a velocity she didn’t know how to halt.

“How did you know, when you met Mama?” she asked. “How did you know she was the one for you? Did you love her right away?”

He blinked, looking past her, considering. “Ah, Katyusha,” he murmured. “I don’t remember.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But you know what?” he said a moment later. “It does not matter how or when you know. It matters that you love, not how you know or how you find it. If you love, you love.” He looked back at his cowboy movie, waved his other hand in a light gesture. “Katya, you think too much. You have too much intelligence. This is my fault, I fear.”

Kat laughed softly. “Yes. It’s all your fault.”

He squeezed her hand, warm gentle pressure. “Are you… Are you in love?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“Don’t know? Poufft.” He tore his gaze from the flickering Western to look over at her hard and took her chin in his hand. “It is very important to know. And yet not important at all. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Nope. Not at all.”

“Ah well. You know…love…it begins in the heart, not up here,” he said, tapping her temple. “It is not thinking and knowing, zaika. It is feeling. How do you feel? Mama tells me it is the doctor you are seeing. This is true?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“And how do you feel about him?”

“I don’t know. That’s just it. I don’t know how I feel about him.”

“Knowing is nothing. How do you feel? Here?” He laid a hand on her heart. She looked at him, considering.

“I feel scared,” she finally said. “I feel anxious.”

“Oh.” Her father’s brows drew together and he turned back to his show. “In that case…”

She waited a moment. “In that case, what, Papa?”

He stared back at her, a million miles away. She kissed him on his cheek and squeezed his hand. She watched the rest of the Western with him in silence until his grip loosened on her hand and he drifted to sleep. When Kat left to go up to her room and get ready to go out, her mama watched her closely but, for once, held her tongue.

* * * * *

The gay club was the place to be Sunday night. For years she’d come here to soak in the fun. The place was cavernous, dark, smoky, a thousand times cooler than Masquerade. The music was louder and more current, and the man flesh was definitely hotter, albeit not interested in her. Still, it was a great place to lose herself. At least it used to be.

Kat felt more and more like an outsider at the clubs. Since she’d taken a few weeks off, since her tumble down the stairs, since him…the clubs didn’t feel the same. She felt trapped between her past life and her future—a future she didn’t know yet. She felt alone, stranded. No one talked to her. She realized there was only one person who wanted to talk to her and that was the person whose calls she’d ignored all day. She left her phone at home, thinking to escape him, thinking to come out to the clubs and have a blast the way she always had. Thinking to prove to