15. Alexei
Alexei
Christ, she’s beautiful.
No movie director could have created a scene more perfect than the one coming into focus as the tender races toward the shore.
Late-afternoon sunlight gleams off the turquoise water, casting a buttery glow over the small beach.
Lola and the two female security guards are fanned around the edges of the small space, flanked by several of my own men.
Others stand guard on the rocky clifftop above, where they’ve been waiting for Ofelia’s arrival.
I barely notice any of them.
Right at the water’s edge, barefoot and wearing a white dress over some kind of halter-neck swimsuit, is Ofelia.
The breeze molds her dress to long, slender limbs gleaming gold in the soft light.
Large sunglasses are perched on her head, pushing her hair back from her face.
As I near the shore, the breeze picks up the blonde strands and fans them into the air, where the sun makes them a halo around her head.
She laughs, the sound reaching me as I cut the engine, trickling into my soul like the most joyous music I’ve ever heard.
I leap out of the boat into the shallows, grounding it in the sand as I come to a halt a few paces from her.
“Hey,” she says tentatively, clutching a small carry-on protectively in front of her.
“Hey yourself.” I reach for the carry-on. “Is this all you brought with you?”
“I wasn’t sure—” Uncertainty and confusion chase across her face. “That is, I didn’t know—”
“It’s fine.” I touch her hand, savoring the satin smoothness of it under my own. She trembles slightly, then goes very still, staring at my hand on hers. “There are clothes on board if you need them.”
Except given the way that dress clings to every delicious line of her body, I’m far more concerned with getting her out of her clothes.
Fucking stop, asshole.
“Hey, Petrovsky.”
I look up, startled, to find one of the dragons giving me a death stare.
“Are you referring to me?” I ask politely, stifling my amusement at the incredulous expressions of my own men.
“Mak has been fully briefed.” The dragon’s eyes bore into me like lasers. “We’ll be calling in twice daily with a full report, including location.”
“Teresa.” Ofelia has gone a delicious shade of pink beneath her tan. “We discussed this already—”
“It’s okay.” I squeeze her hand, unwilling to let it go, then draw her gently to my side so we’re facing the dragons together.
“You can tell Mak what Ofelia has for breakfast,” I say in the same even tone, “so long as you do it via the closed line in my secure room. Unfortunately, you’ll have to leave your own phones behind.
Don’t worry.” I nod at two of my men, who step forward and take the reluctantly produced phones.
“I have replacements for you that are more secure than your own. Obviously, they’re only to be used to communicate with each other, or the crew.
Any personal calls are to be made from the secure room. My men will brief you on the rest.”
Privately amused at the open mutiny on their faces, I ease Ofelia toward the water, trying not to let my arm linger at her waist. “Shall we?”
“Yes.” She shoots me a sideways look from under her lashes that makes me want to rip the dress off her right here on the beach. “Please,” she whispers, and I inhale sharply.
As we approach the tender, a swell rolls in, lapping up Ofelia’s thighs and drenching the bottom of her dress. She squeals, then laughs, and my arms slide around her from behind. I put my lips close to her ear. “Ready, Ofelia?”
The way she shivers when I say her name has my cock almost busting a hole through my deck shorts.
She turns her head so her lips touch my jaw. “Uh-huh,” she breathes.
Fuck.
“Hold on, then.” Lifting her above the tide, I inhale her almond-and-rose sweetness like an aphrodisiac and deposit her into the boat, wondering how the fuck I’m going to keep my shit together long enough to offer her a drink.
“We’re traveling with you,” Teresa snaps from behind us.
I roll my eye at Ofelia, who giggles. “Of course you are,” I say without turning around.
They both clamber aboard without waiting for permission.
My men on the beach are biting their lips in an effort not to laugh. I give them a look dark enough to shut them up, temporarily at least, but they’re still grinning as I start the engine.
Motherfuckers.
“Hold on, ladies,” I say, smiling evilly at the dragons. The contemptuous scowls I get in response make my smile even wider.
Oh, this is going to be fun.
I settle on the seat behind Ofelia, one arm curving around her waist with my hand resting on her damp thigh, and suddenly the word fun seems entirely inadequate.
As I start the tender and head for open water, she glances over her shoulder at me. Unable to stop myself, I drop my lips to her shoulder, allowing them to linger there for a moment, my eye behind my sunglasses not leaving hers.
She sucks in her breath, the late sun turning her eyes to blue fire, and her hand slides over mine, her fingers twining through my own. We stay like that, hands joined, our bodies barely inches apart, taut with tension, for the entire journey out to the yacht.
“Drink?” I covertly watch Ofelia from the bar.
She’s hovering uncertainly by the railing, one long leg twined about the other, her hands gripping the metal like it’s holding her upright.
The white dress is still damp enough to cling to her legs.
Her hair is tousled by the journey out, her face kissed by the luminous rays of the dying sun.
I wonder if it’s only my imagination that senses something darker behind the almost celestial vision.
And maybe that’s just your dick talking, asshole. I suppress the urge to knock back a large shot of Graf, not without difficulty. Don’t try to justify what you’re about to do by coloring her in the same mud you drowned in.
The thought acts like the ice shower I need, so that when she tentatively asks for a gin, I’m able to mix the drink and turn back to her with at least the appearance of my customary composure.
“Here.” Painfully aware that touching her has a catastrophic effect on my self-control, I’m careful not to let our fingers touch as I hand her the drink.
“The Quantum Drift.” She smiles shyly, her eyes ducking away from mine. “Was that one of Lars’s jokes?”
Her affectionate reference to my oldest friend pisses me off far more than it should. “Actually, the name was my idea.” I touch my glass to hers to take the sting out of my words. “Za zdorov’ye, Ofelia.”
Her eyes fly up to mine, widening in a way that makes me instantly regret making the traditional Russian toast.
Russian is home.
Family.
All the things we’re both pretending don’t exist.
But instead of looking away, her eyes deepen, sparkling with that inner fire that makes my every fucking nerve sing.
“Za zdorov’ye, Alexei.” Her Russian is rich and soft, a reminder that we share more than just a native tongue.
Ofelia’s grandfather was raised in the same gulag as my own father, two best friends who carried one another across the vast steppes.
That one simple phrase reminds me that we are joined by more than her scars, my knife, and the sadistic bastards who forced us into that concrete hell.
“Does your father ever talk to you about it?” she asks, as if I’d spoken my thoughts aloud. “About Russia, I mean?”
“Not a lot.” I lean against the railing beside her, resisting the urge to stroke the bronze arm lying barely inches from my own.
“When I was a kid, back before the Orlovs came, sometimes he would tell Darya and me lighthearted anecdotes. If he ever told us more serious stories, they always had a purpose.”
“Like what?” Ofelia shifts slightly, turning side-on so her eyes search my face with that still, focused intensity that always seems to cut through my emotional defenses with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. “Tell me.”
“Once, when I was very young, Papa was teaching me to swim.” I turn my vodka in my hands, staring at the golden sunlight streaming across the water below.
“I couldn’t have been more than four. I’d been going into our family pool since I was a baby, but I still had those yellow inflatable things on my arms. I remember I was absolutely terrified of taking them off. ”
The memory is like a distant echo: laughter and the acrid scent of chlorine, the clear blue water of that long-ago pool seeming to my four-year-old self as vast as the sea in front of me now.
“My father kept trying to take the inflatables off my arms. He was telling me I’d be fine, that the only way I’d learn to swim was by trusting myself. But I was convinced that I’d sink, and so I kicked and screamed, until eventually I accidentally kicked him in the eye.”
“Oh!” Ofelia’s hand covers her mouth in shock, but when I glance up, her eyes are brimming with laughter. “I’m sorry,” she gasps. “But just the thought of Deda Sergei getting kicked in the eye . . .” She shakes her head. “He’s so . . .”
“Stern. I know.” I smile wryly. “If you think he’s that way now, you should have seen him when I was a kid.
He was already over sixty back then, an old man by most people’s terms. But he was so tall and tough.
He was what the gulag raised him to be, I guess, and it showed.
Even so, he was always slow to anger, so when I kicked him, he just laughed.
But I could still tell, by the way he plucked me out of the pool, that there was no way I was leaving that day until I swam.
“He carried me over the tiles, far away from my mother and Darya, and sat me down in front of him. Then he asked if he’d ever told me about the time he and his friend Ruki crossed a frozen river.”
Ofelia’s eyes widen.
“Now, of course, I know it must have happened during that long trek he made with Roman’s father, from Russia to Switzerland. But back then, Ruki was little more than a storybook character to me, and in Miami in summer, it was hard to even imagine something being frozen.