Free Her Russian Brute: 50 Loving States, Idaho by Theodora Taylor

the moment she’d had the temerity to yell at him about his treatment of the old man, he’d wanted her in a way he hadn’t wanted anyone or anything but revenge in a very long time. And six days later, he still couldn’t stop thinking about her. Her compact curves, the way her eyes had blazed at him, despite her bruised face. Her skin, so warm and tawny. He knew she’d be soft to the touch, soft beneath his hard body…
    This couldn’t go on . Swimming and running, then swimming and running some more. His body, strong as it was, couldn’t handle it. Neither could his mind.
    He hit the slick tile wall of the pool and pushed off again, making the water churn around him.
    But what could he do? She clearly hated him. The old Ivan would have taken that as a challenge. Pursued her with lavish gifts, and expensive dates—unrelenting in his chase, all the way up until the morning after he bedded her. Then he’d leave and she’d never hear from him again.
    But he was no longer the old Ivan.
    And more importantly, he didn’t have the old Ivan’s face. Negotiating her up against a wall and sweet-talking her onto his dick wouldn’t work the way it used to.
    Also, this woman was…different. He had to wonder if even the old Ivan would have been able to claim her. She was less than impressed with the manor house and all its perks. And she showed more interest in the town’s strange full-moon curfew than anything else he’d told her.
    As it was, she’d barely come out of her room all week, even going so far as to take all her meals there. Hannah mentioned she’d been spending a lot of time in the solarium, but otherwise, Sola really only left her room to go down the hill to The Thirsty Wolf for an hour or so every night.
    Ivan had taken to watching her leave the house from his diamond-paned study window. Though he kept swearing he wouldn’t wait up for her, each night after she left, he’d somehow end up in the set of armchairs in the small alcove beneath the front entryway’s main staircase, drinking the vodka he’d ordered at great cost from his homeland. Wondering if a woman, fresh and fiery as her, would find one of the town’s resident males to walk her home.
    But so far, every night Sola returned—alone—to Wolfson Manor around ten every night, bundled in the Lands’ End jacket, gloves, winter beanie and snow boots Hannah had procured for her at the local supply store. Looking cuter and sexier than any short little brown girl in tortoiseshell glasses ought to in such an ensemble.
    “Hey,” she’d say when she spotted him in the front foyer with his vodka.
    “Hello,” he’d answer, as if he’d just happened to pick this particular place to drink his vodka and hadn’t, in fact, been waiting up for her.
    And that would be the end of their exchange. She’d walk toward the stairs. Sometimes he’d catch the faint whiff of tequila—a smell he recognized easily, since Cuervo had been one of his official sponsors when he’d been in the EFC. Then she’d climb the stairs back up to her room.
    She’d only once stopped to talk to him on her very first night out.
    “Since you’re being so generous with the terms of my stay, could I move into one of the downstairs guestrooms?” she’d asked.
    Downstairs. Away from him.
    The “No” had fallen out of his mouth with all the subtlety of a brick before he’d even had a moment to wonder why she’d made the request in the first place.
    She’d looked stricken, dropping her eyes and tugging at one of her ear-length curls. Which made him angry. At her, for wanting to move further from him. At himself, for caring whether she did or not.
    And then he became even angrier when she tried again with, “It’s just that it might make things a little easier for me. You see I—”
    “How old are you?”
    She blinked. “What?”
    “How old are you, Sola?”
    “Twenty-four,” she answered carefully.
    “Do you have an illness, like your teacher’s spouse?”
    “No,