Married By Christmas: His Pregnant Christmas Bride / Carter Bravo's Christmas Bride

But not thinking about Alex only let her mind think of the other man who dominated her every waking and sleeping moment. Ivan.

It was like watching a movie of her life’s transformative moments. For he’d been there in each and every one of them. Their cause or their conclusion.

Every moment replayed in her mind and impacted her senses. When he’d first walked up to her, looking like a supreme being right out of a fantasy. When he’d pulled her into that first kiss, an overwhelming seduction. When he’d loomed above her, invading her body with pleasure, branding her as his, a storm of passion in human form. When he’d snatched her from death’s cold pull, like a lethal archangel. When he’d given her the only reason powerful enough to cling to life, imbuing her with his endless strength, like a guardian angel.

The images played in a loop, but always snagged on a specific one. His face filling with colliding emotions as he’d said goodbye. Watching it over and over as she sat there, she took it apart, looked at it from every angle, until she finally realized something.

How hard it had been for him to say it.

Jerking out of her stupor, she fumbled out her phone, her heart starting to thunder as she searched out the direct number he’d saved on it. She hit Dial as she restarted the car. He answered after only one ring.

“Anastasia?”

To everyone she was Ana. Only he called her by her full name. Every time he said it, he filled the simple utterance with so much, it filled volumes in her being. She’d once thought she’d heard how much he wanted her, and everything else he’d felt in the way he said it. She’d since come to believe she’d been only hearing what she’d wanted to hear.

But there was no mistaking how he’d said her name now. It was the very sound of agitation and solicitude combined. He was worried she needed something, and that it was big enough only he could deal with it, important enough to make her call him.

Before she could reassure him, his urgency silenced her. “I just hit Dial and the phone rang instead.”

Did she get that right? “You were calling me?”

“I went to Alex’s house and your mother told me you went home, but I arrived here and didn’t find you. I was calling you when your call connected first. What happened? Where are you?”

He’d been looking for her? Was at her home now? Why?

“Anastasia.”

His bark was pure anxiety now, clearly imagining another disaster had befallen her.

She rushed to allay his concern. “Nothing happened. I—I just stopped somewhere on the way.” He didn’t need to know that she had only sit there staring at a memory reel starring him. But she needed to know one thing. “Why were you looking for me?”

There was a long beat of silence on the other end, before his deep voice poured into her brain again, and his words snuffed out any light that remained in her world.

“I wanted to see you again before I went back to Russia.”

* * *

Anastasia didn’t even remember the drive back home.

Her brain registered nothing until she saw him sitting in his car outside her family home, like a predator lying in wait. He got out as soon as she neared, looking like a god descended to earth with the setting sun behind him. Even from a distance she felt the tension radiating from him. It swamped her as she drove past him into the garage, as he opened her door and helped her out.

Her throat tightening, her heart hammering, she invited him into the house. Every nerve fired with his nearness, with the intensity blasting from him.

Needing air, she led him all the way out back to her favorite part of her mother’s garden—the gazebo. It was where she’d sat alone countless times with her laptop or a book, where her mind had always ended up dwelling on the man she’d loved and lost. She turned to him now.

He towered over her, his eyes that hypnotic green she’d always drowned in, his expression singeing her blood with its heat. And she just couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t let him say goodbye. Not yet.

Not before she said what she’d called him to say.

“Anastasia—”

“I could have died, Ivan.” Her quavering words cut off what he’d begun to say. “But I didn’t. Because you saved me. Now I need one more thing from you.”

He took a step closer, tight, barely leashed power in the move. Power she felt could move mountains, as he’d done for her and Alex. “Anything, Anastasia. Tell me what you need.”

“I need you to show me that I didn’t just survive, Ivan. I need you to prove to me that I’m still alive.”

His eyes flared with such a blaze of emotions, she almost needed to shield her eyes. “Anastasia...”

This time he said her name as if it hurt, the inflection filled with seething hesitation. And she knew he wouldn’t make a move. Either because he couldn’t credit what she’d asked him for, or because he was taking it upon himself to protect her from any recklessness in her weakened, needy state.

But she couldn’t take no for an answer. This was the one thing she needed. The last thing she’d have of him.

He’d nurtured her back to physical health, but she now needed a salve for her emotions, a reviving dose of passion from the only man she’d ever been intimate with.

Her move ate up the distance between them as a trembling hand rose to his face. The moment she cupped his rugged jaw and felt his strength fill her palm, overflow into her being it was like the years apart evaporated. Nothing remained inside her but longing, and it had taken only this contact to break the dam and have it all come pouring out.

“I need this, Ivan,” she whispered. “I need you.”

His flesh buzzed beneath her hand, electrifying her. “How could you? I left you—”

“It doesn’t matter what you did or why you did it. The past is gone. Alex is gone.” She stifled a sob that threatened to tear through her. “But I’m still here. And it’s terrible, Ivan. Terrible to be alone, to know I’ll always be alone because I’ll never be able to share what happened, what changed me forever, with another person for the rest of my life.”

“Bozhe moi, Anastasia.”

He’d only ever spoken Russian when he’d lost his hold on his rigid control in the throes of passion and pleasure. But now different emotions compromised his control, eliciting his tormented “My God.”

Her hand trembled around his neck, her fingers plunging into his luxurious mane. “But I share it with you, Ivan. It’s only because you know everything, that you’ve lived it with me that I’m able to go on. And I want to share more with you, what might bring me back to life. The past is gone—”

“The past may be gone, but there’s tomorrow—”

A finger on his lips stopped his protest, her tear-soaked voice breaking. “There’s only now. And you said you’d do anything. That’s the only thing I need. The one thing I’ll ever ask of you.”

His chest expanded, as if bracing under an insupportable burden. Not only wasn’t he unfeeling, as she’d once thought, she now realized he probably felt too much, had to close himself off, to protect himself, and maybe the whole world from the power of his emotions. She’d seen him when a measure of these emotions—the violent, vengeful ones—had been let loose. He’d been lethal. She no longer doubted that he’d wreaked far more destruction in his life, that what she’d witnessed had only been the tip of the iceberg. And now she was chipping away at the barrier that restrained his devastating potential, and it was about to crack.

Not that it worried her. She wanted him to demolish her with all the ferocity of his fervor. He’d only ever hurt her when he’d deprived her of it.

“You need this, too, Ivan. You lost him, too.” His flinch was proof that Alex’s loss did hurt him. Her hand twisted in his hair in answering agony. “I need to share his loss with you, the one who knows, the one strong enough to live with it. And I’m the only one you can share it with, the one who understands, who’s been part of it all.”

The torment that blazed on his face solidified her belief.

He mourned Alex, almost as deeply as she did.

“Anastasia, you don’t know what it takes for me to be like this.” Like this? In control? Holding back? “You don’t know what you’re risking.”

“I have nothing more to risk, Ivan.”