Chapter 25
LUKE
“Zinaida hurt her ankle boarding the plane,” I tell Charlie the following morning, “so I took her straight home when we landed.”
It’s not a lie. Not exactly.
I stand in the middle of my kitchen, staring out the window at the early-morning mist rising over the river.
There’s a long pause on the other end of the line.
I know Charlie is dying to ask why I canceled her pickup at the airport in favor of calling an Uber, not to mention ask what happened between us on the plane, since I’m absolutely certain that by now the security who traveled with us have set the rumor mill alight.
I glance toward the closed door of my bedroom.
What happened is I finally hit the limits of my self-control.
I hustled Zinaida straight off the plane, into an Uber, and back to my apartment because I’m done playing games.
And right now, she’s naked in my bed, and I’m thinking about how fast I can get off the phone and back inside her.
“And you’re going to pick Zin up this morning, too,” Charlie says. “Huh.”
I don’t miss the not-so-subtle unspoken question.
“Yep. Take the morning off, Charlie. It’s all good here.” I hang up before she can ask anything else.
Good, Luke?
Good is the most egregious understatement of my life.
Good comes absolutely nowhere near describing a night that still has every nerve ending in my body tingling.
I flick on the kettle and pull out the French press and coffee, unable to think of much past caffeine and Zin’s naked body.
The roar of the kettle disguises the sound of her bare footsteps on the floorboards.
“Hey.”
I turn to find her standing uncertainly in the middle of the room, naked but for one of my sheets. Her hair is a tangled, disheveled mess, her face entirely scrubbed clean of its normal impeccable makeup.
She looks so fucking gorgeous I just want to throw her back down on my bed.
And I can read her well enough to know that despite having spent the past six hours gasping under my hands and mouth, she’s now ready to bolt at the first wrong move.
“Hey yourself.” I pour water into the press and lean against the counter as it steeps. “Coffee?”
She glances toward the window, pulling the sheet closer around herself. “I should probably get going.”
“I just spoke to Anatoly and Charlie.” I ignore her last comment as I pull kiwifruit and pomegranates out of the fridge. “Busy night, apparently.” I turn back, grinning. “Half of the rooms are still full, including the Blue Room, where Mak spent the night.”
“Mak?” She frowns. “Weren’t you just with him in Spain?”
“I was. He flew back for a meeting at the Quartier last night, with an ambassador from some North African hellhole. It must have gone well, given that he’s still entertaining four women, at last count.”
“Typical Mak.” Zinaida’s eyes shift everywhere in the room except to me. “That man is a walking red flag.”
I start cutting up the kiwifruit, not looking directly at her. “Charlie says he’s caused so many missed shifts that we should put him in the induction training manual under workplace hazards.”
That at least gets a small huff of something like laughter.
She edges slowly toward the counter. I keep my head down, which is dangerous, since it puts the breasts I so recently had my mouth around directly at eye level, albeit covered by a sheet.
I turn back to press the plunger on the coffee, fighting the urge to throw Zin down and plunge into her instead.
I don’t want to give her an excuse to run. She’s still standing, shifting from one foot to the other.
“The problem is,” I say, keeping my back turned and tone casual, “that Mak’s so fucking charming he gets away with it. The only people who can’t stand him are the husbands of the wives he’s seduced.”
Zin gives a burble of actual laughter this time. “Roman always says that with two daughters, he’s extremely grateful that Mak chooses to spend most of his leisure time in London instead of Spain. And after seeing how stunning his eldest daughter is, I’d say he has a point.”
“Ofelia’s a special kid. Masha too.” My body temporarily, at least, under control, I turn back and push a steaming-hot cup of Australia’s best across the counter, then keep chopping fruit.
“That’s right,” she says, eyeing the coffee on the counter and the stool right in front of her. “Darya was telling me about how you were involved in that whole Miami shitstorm with Roman’s kids.”
“Yup.” From the corner of my eye I watch her inch toward what I happen to know is her kryptonite.
“I got to know them all pretty well. You’re right about Ofelia being stunning, but I don’t like anyone’s chances of getting within a red-hot mile of her, not unless they fancy facing down Spain’s most powerful pakhan and his entire army of vor. ”
“Pakhan, huh?” The kryptonite finally wins, and Zin sits down on the stool, pulling the coffee toward her. “And vor. Someone has had a decent education in Russian bratva organizations.”
“That’s because ‘someone’ had to dispose of several dozen members of them during the fight for Roman’s kids, and the battles that came afterward.
I’m sure you heard about Alexei Petrovsky taking back his compound from the Orlovs?
” I push a bowl of kiwi over to her with a fork and pull up a stool on the other side of the table.
She picks at the fruit, her eyes still downcast. She’s tucked the sheet in as best she can, but it still keeps slipping.
I want to tear the fucking thing off.
“Everyone from Miami to Moscow heard about that,” Zin says dryly. “Worst-kept secret in the criminal world.” She looks at me directly for the first time, her eyes curious. “So you were really in the thick of all that, with the Orlovs.”
I grin at her and lift a shoulder. “I had nowhere better to be at the time.”
That gets a reluctant smile from her. She spears a piece of kiwifruit and sips her coffee.
Houston, we have the all clear.
I cut the pomegranate in half on the board beside me. It falls open, the seeds inside red and luscious.
It looks exactly like Zin did last night, when I spread her wide open on this counter.
My eyes fall to Zin’s shirt, still lying in a pool on the floor after I tore it off when I got her home.
I realize that she has stopped eating.
I raise my eyes to find her staring first at the shirt, then at me, the color mounting slowly in her cheeks. I reach across the counter. Cupping her chin in my hand, I rub my thumb slowly across her swollen mouth. Her lips part in a way that makes me want to thrust my cock between them.
“You know,” I say, stroking my hand up into the tangled mess of her hair, “I think we might need to wash this to get the knots out.”
Zin swallows. “Oh?” Her eyes roam over my chest. Her nipples stiffen beneath the sheet.
“Yes.” I stand up, and her eyes flare as they drop to the rock-hard bulge in my sweats. “I think a shower is in order, Zinaida. Don’t you?”
Her eyes darken, start to glaze over in the way that makes me fucking insane.
I’m about to tear the sheet off her and carry her into the bathroom when my phone rings on the countertop.
Leave it, Luke. Just fucking leave it.
But I can’t help glancing at the screen any more than Zin can. It’s the head of day shift security at the Quartier.
Fuck, fuck, fuckety fuck.
I snatch up the phone and put it on speaker. “What?” I snarl.
“Hey, Luke.” The man sounds slightly taken aback. “Sorry for the call, man. I would have checked in online, but we’ve hit an issue with the security cameras that I can’t fix.”
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
Zin’s glazed expression has turned to a laser-sharp frown of concentration, and I want to howl to all the gods when I see her unconsciously rewind the sheet, tucking it in firmly. Ask him if Mak is still there, she mouths.
“Mak left like five minutes ago, or I would have asked him,” the guy says before I ask.
“Explain,” I say shortly.
Zin slides off the stool and disappears into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
I want to kick the cabinets when I hear the shower start to go.
By the time I wind the call up, she’s showered and dressed in one of my shirts with a belt around the waist to make it look like a dress, with her damp hair pulled back into its customary neat twist.
I want to tear it all out again.
I’m not stupid enough to try it.
“It’s nothing too major, but I’ll have to go in to deal with it.” I move past her to the shower. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll drive you home.”
“I can just call an Uber—”
“You’re not calling an Uber.” I fix her with a hard eye. “Don’t even fucking think about it, Zin. I mean it.”
We stare at each other. For a moment I think she might actually argue with me. Then her eyes shift back to the shirt on the floor, and two high points of color light her cheeks. She lowers her eyes and gives a brief nod.
At least Avonmouth seems to have got that much clear.
“Five minutes,” I say again, moving past her into the bathroom.
My thirty-second shower bears absolutely no resemblance to the marathon of sybaritic pleasure I’d been lazily anticipating.
And while we may have established that Zinaida isn’t going to argue with me about security measures, I’d say that’s about the only thing that’s clear between us at all.
Apart from the fact that the sex is off the fucking charts.
But then, I knew that long before I ever even touched her.
The question was never about whether the sex would be amazing, although I admit it knocked even my wildest expectations right out of the fucking park.
The question is how the fuck we’re going to make this work—and if Zin actually wants to make it work at all.
“Have you seen this?” Later that day, I push a tablet across the glass table of Zinaida’s Mayfair office, open to that morning’s headline from the Daily Truth. “I’m surprised the home secretary hasn’t beaten your door down already.”