Total pages in book: 36
Estimated words: 33695 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 135(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 33695 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 168(@200wpm)___ 135(@250wpm)___ 112(@300wpm)
He sighed. “You’re going to have to learn to shoot.”
“Why can’t we go back to the whole self-defense stuff? I was getting good at that.”
“You’re just happy hitting my balls. Grab a gun.”
Galina wanted to argue a lot more with him, but saw that it was pointless. He wasn’t going to listen to reason, so she stepped up to the table and picked up the first gun, the smaller of the two. It appeared less threatening. Whenever she held a gun in the past, it didn’t go well.
She spun around and held it up. “I picked one. There, are you happy?”
“It would be better if you didn’t just point it anywhere. Keep it down at the ground.”
“Why? It’s not loaded, so it’s not like I could—” She pressed her finger to the trigger and froze. It was very much loaded.
Mikhail let out a grunt and then sunk to the ground. Still holding the gun, she rushed to his side.
“Crap, see, this is why I don’t handle guns. Not because I’m not good, but bad things happen when I hold guns. You should ask my dad.”
She placed the gun on the floor and then ran her hands all over his body, trying to locate where he could possibly be hurting. There was no place on him that showed any kind of injury.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Galina, it’s my thigh.”
She gasped as she looked down and sure enough, his pants were ripped and blood seeped out of the wound. “We have to get you to the hospital.”
He sat up. “No, no hospital. Help me up.”
“I don’t think you should be moving. Look what I did!” She wanted to scream at him to sit down and rest. Look what she did to his thigh. This is what happened on the multiple occasions her father tried to train her. The guards ended up injured, and after she’d accidentally shot five of them the last time, she’d gotten her father. She was a klutz. Her finger pulled the trigger, and banging happened, and it all became a nightmare. She didn’t even know what the hell happened. No one died and their injuries weren’t life-threatening—a graze here and there, that was all.
Galina helped Mikhail to his feet, and they walked back toward his main house.
“Your father is going to kill me,” she said.
“I’m not going to die, Galina. It’s a graze, nothing more.”
“A graze? You’re bleeding. That’s more than a graze.” She was trying not to panic.
Great. The Bratva boss’s son was attempting to teach her self-defense, and what does she do? She nearly kills him. This was not intentional. No matter how much of a bully he’d been to her in the past, she didn’t want to kill him.
They arrived at the kitchen, and she moved him into position in the chair, and he flopped down. “The first aid kit is under the kitchen sink.”
This was something she was good at. “You’re going to need to drop your pants.”
He chuckled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She didn’t stop looking for the first aid kit. “This is not a time for you to be making this all sexual.”
“Baby, you make it hard for a guy not to make it sexual.”
She found the kit, and sure enough, it was fully stocked. Spinning around, she found Mikhail sitting on the kitchen counter, pants off, leaning back just a little.
On the backs of his calves, spreading up to his thighs, he had some ink. It looked like a dragon’s body, curling around his leg, ending at his thigh, like the dragon was clawing its way down his body.
With his pants off, she was able to see it wasn’t too bad. The bullet might have just grazed his thigh.
“I can still call the doctor,” she said.
“No, no need to call the doctor. You can take care of me. It’ll give you good practice for when we’re married.”
“You presume a little too much.” She gave a tut, but then smiled as she got to work, cleaning and dressing his wound.
****
“Mikhail,” Vik Kuzlov said.
“Vik.”
They were at one of the final parties before he was due to marry Galina. She was with the women and he’d been pretending to be interested in whatever the men were saying, but the truth was, he watched Galina.
The women around her were nothing but vultures. They all wanted to know how she felt, but his woman knew how to play the game. She had to keep the fake happy face. He knew she still wasn’t happy about their upcoming marriage.
Even though for the past two months, he had forced her to spend as much time with him as possible. There had been a lot of deal-making with Peter, and there had been sometimes when her brother had to come and stay with him.
Peter didn’t mind that he forced Galina to sleep in his bed, or that he was forcing her to get accustomed to him being with her. Her brother understood what he was doing.