Chapter Five
Cameron
TESS’S SECRET APARTMENT was a tiny studio located in the heart of Okulovka. A factory town located about three-hundred kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg. The apartment was simple and sparce, as one would expect from a safe house, but it felt lived in.
“The Company set you up in this place?” I asked.
Tess laughed. “No, I did. But believe me, I’ll be filing one hell of an expense report when I get back home.”
“What about the place in St. Petersburg I read about in the brief?”
“That one’s a Company flat, but to anyone nosing around, it looks like I’m renting by the month from an out-of-town landlord. Unlike this place, it’s fully furnished, and stylish enough to pass for the kind of place a successful art broker would live.”
“So, why are we here?” I asked.
“Mainly because I wanted time to assess you before you show your face around town, and I know we’re not being watched here. I can’t be sure about the place in St. Petersburg.”
“I thought you said Fedya had no suspicion of you being a spy.”
“He doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t bug my apartment.
He could be surveilling my place in hopes of gathering intel on any pieces I might have been keeping from him.
Sasha is extremely paranoid and competitive about acquiring the latest available items. He’ll do anything to keep the upper hand. In everything.”
“How do you know your St. Petersburg place is clean?”
“Because I sweep and monitor it. I also have a signal jammer installed inside the toaster oven. Keep that in mind before you try and use it. This apartment and my car are the only places where it’s safe for us to talk freely, and even then, every wall in Russia could have an ear pressed against it on the other side.
When we’re outside of these walls, we need to be in character, which brings me to the other reason we’re here. ”
“Which is?”
She sighed. “You, I’m afraid.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“You don’t look like the fiancé of a successful art broker,” she replied.
“I think my get up is pretty solid,” I shot back.
“It is, if you’re trying to blend in with every chuvak on the block, but you’re gonna need a shower, shave, and a change of clothes before you meet Sasha.”
“I look forward to all three of those things in the morning,” I said, scanning the tiny space for where I might crash out tonight.
Tess chuckled. “You’re meeting him tonight, cowboy.”
“Tonight?”
Tess checked her watch. “In five hours, in fact.”
“Five hours?”
“Sasha is throwing a cocktail party for a few of his friends, knew you were arriving today, and insisted I bring you.”
“And he knew I was arriving today because, you told him?”
“That’s right,” she replied. “The closer our lies are to the truth, the less suspicious we are.”
“Espionage and Deception, by Walter F. Charles, chapter two, page twenty-seven,” I replied.
“Are you always a smug prick?”
“Only when I’m right,” I replied. “Now, when exactly were you going to tell me about Sasha’s little soiree tonight?”
“I’m telling you right now,” she replied.
“Cute. Very cute,” I said. “I’m not ready.”
“I know, that’s why we’re here,” Tess replied.
“The shower’s in there. Believe it or not, the water pressure and temperature are better here than at my place back home.
There’s shampoo, soap, fresh towels, and everything you’ll need in there.
When you get out, I’ll give you a shave and will have a clean set of clothes for you to change into. ”
I laughed. “Shave me? I think I can handle that myself, thanks. Besides, I usually rock a bit of stubble.”
“That’s exactly why I’m going to shave you,” Tess replied.
“Unlike the tzars and oligarchs of yesterday, young Russian men of high status prefer a clean shaven, highly manicured look. You look like you’re headed for a football match, and the man you are about to meet has enough money to buy a football team.
Sasha, and the people he surrounds himself with, are all obsessed with appearance, fashion, and grooming trends. ”
“Point taken. I can get into character, don’t worry. I’ll shave in the shower.”
“You ever use a straight razor before?”
“No thanks, I’ve got razors in my bag.”
Tess snickered. “No, you’ve got blue plastic toothbrushes with a couple of metal strips attached to the ends that shave unevenly and remove as much skin tissue as they do facial hair.”
“I use the same kind of razor every man shaves with every day,” I countered.
“Not these men,” Tess said, her tone turning serious. “Trust me. Take your shower and leave the shave to me.”
Trust me? As if I had a choice. From the moment I arrived in Russia, Officer Teresa St. Marks had been two steps ahead of me.
Hell, she was five months and ten thousand steps ahead of me.
Every new bit of information she gave me informed me of just how little information I’d been provided about this mission.
The truth was, without Tess, I’d be standing at the train station in St. Petersburg with my thumb up my ass, headed for certain doom.
What the fuck had I gotten myself into? More importantly, what the fuck had Leslie signed me up for?
* * *
Tess
Either Officer Wallace was the coolest cucumber in the patch, or he was too stupid to know exactly how far in over his head he was.
He had moxy, as my Pap used to say, and he was certainly the best-looking officer I’d ever seen.
But I shuddered to think of him walking into the lion’s den armed with only his underwear model smile and his Quantico orientation handbook tucked under his arm.
Sasha would have him chopped up and fed to the dogs by morning.
“You okay in there?” I asked through the bathroom door.
“You weren’t kidding about the water pressure,” Officer Wallace replied.
“The nearest water tower is only a block away from this building. It’s one of the reasons I chose this place.”
I heard him turn the water off and slide the shower curtain open and I fought back the urge to take a peek at him through the door’s turn of the century keyhole.
After a minute, a shirtless and glistening Cameron Wallace stepped out of the steam-filled bathroom with only a towel around his waist. I prayed to God that my poker face was on point, because I’d never wanted to sexually attack someone before in my life, but I did right now.
Lord, help me.
I seriously did right now.
“You fi—you find everything okay in there?” I asked, my voice cracking, slightly.
“Not much to it. Water, soap. Wash, rinse, repeat. That sort of thing,” he replied.
“You repeat, huh?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “Never felt like I had the hair to warrant it. My oldest brother, on the other hand, has a head of hair most women envy.”
“Maybe next time it’ll be him in my barber’s chair,” I said, pointing to the stool sitting in the center of my tiny kitchen.”
Officer Wallace shook his head. “All the training in the world wouldn’t help you in a fight against his woman, should you cut a single hair on my brother’s head.”
“She’s the jealous type, huh?”
“No, just protective of his hair,” he replied. “I honestly think she might love his fuckin’ hair more than she loves him.”
“Speaking of hair, let’s get you shaved.”
“This is weird,” Officer Wallace said with a groan. “I’ve never let anyone shave me before and we just met.”
“Have you ever shaved with a straight razor before?” I asked, trying not to stare at his perfectly sculpted abs.
“Nope,” he replied.
“Then it’s probably a bad idea to start now, unless you want to meet Sasha Fedya looking like you just lost a knife fight.”
Wallace took a seat on the stool, and I could have sworn I heard his cock slip out from underneath his towel, hitting the kitchen floor with a thud.
Then again it may have been an auditory hallucination brought on by the presence of a hot half-naked man in the kitchen of an involuntarily celibate woman.
“You ready?” I asked, to which he nodded. “Trust me,” I said. “I’m really good at this.”
On the counter was a basin of hot water, a towel, a foaming brush, cup and lather bar.
In my hand was an ivory-handled straight razor.
Freshly sharpened with a leather strop. Straight razor shaving was a skill I’d acquired as a child, thanks to my father, and had kept up as an adult.
It was during puberty when I discovered that shaving my legs and underarms with a straight razor caused less skin irritation and ingrown hairs and provided a much closer shave.
Since Wallace had just showered and we were on a bit of a time crunch I decided to forgo the usual hot towel facial, moving straight to lathering up some foam and generously applying to his face and neck.
He smelled amazing, and the scent of the fresh shaving foam against his skin was driving me half insane.
For a moment I was scared that my hand would shake from nerves and that I’d nick him, but fortunately the wave of school-girl horny hysteria passed long enough for me to shave his neck without incident.
I then moved on to his face. Studying every line and curve as I carefully followed them with my blade, Officer Wallace sitting steady as a rock as I did my work.
Steady, until he wasn’t, that is.
* * *
Cameron