His Everlasting Love: 50 Loving States, Virginia (22 page)

He wanted badly to join her in front of the fan, but he still had to get in his daily workout and another shower after that before his security guard shift at the School of Social Work began.

However, she made it hard for him to stay focused on his plans for the day when she looked up at him with a sexy grin and asked, “Are all you Russians trained to move like panthers?”

That gave him a moment of pause. Having grown up the scion of the Rustanov crime family, there were indeed talents he had that many other Russians did not. He could shoot several different kinds of guns, from the simple-to-shoot but easy-to-hide Walther PPK to the much more complicated Uzi. Thanks to the tutelage of his father and uncle, he could also sell those same guns to any interested party with a mixture of charm, marketing, and not-so-subtle aggression.

The reason he moved so quietly was because his father had made him start accompanying his uncle, Sergei, their family’s main enforcer, on retaliation killings at the age of twelve.

“The secret is to value the quiet above all things,” his uncle had told him outside the apartment of a man who had sold valuable information about their organization’s inner-workings to another crime family. “Become the quiet. People cannot prevent what they cannot hear coming.”

Five minutes later, he’d watched from a dark corner as his uncle snuck up behind the target in his own kitchen and slit his throat with only a whisper of sound. He’d then pulled out a GSh-18 with a silencer attached to it and shot the man, who was grasping at his bleeding throat, twice in the chest and then once in each knee cap, an intentional style of killing that had been in the Rustanov family since the early 1960s.

Alexei had barely made it to the street below the apartment before losing his dinner on the sidewalk. But his uncle had given him a few hearty slaps on the back, congratulating him on throwing up outside of the apartment, and therefore leaving no DNA behind for the Russian police. As with most of their killings, Sergei wanted everyone to know they’d done it, but they didn’t want any evidence left behind to officially attach the Rustanovs to the crime. Later, Alexei’s father told him he had also thrown up after witnessing his first killing.

“I will tell you as your grandfather told your uncle and me, if you are to order an execution, you must understand what you are doing. I will not have you be one of those spoiled princes who tell their men to murder like they are putting in an order for lunch.”

Six years later his father had been killed by one of those spoiled princes, a young man, Igor Stavnof, whose own departed father had been considered a friend to the Rustanovs. Igor and Alexei had attended the same private secondary school, and had even shared a bodyguard for a few hours once, when Igor’s fell sick during a snowstorm and a new one couldn’t immediately be sent out. But the Rustanov-Stavnof alliance came to an abrupt end when Igor had Alexei’s father gunned down outside a restaurant where they were supposed meet. Igor had meant this as a display of power, a warning to any enemy who thought his young age might make him any less of a force to be reckoned with than Stavnof senior. However, the move only served to seal Igor’s fate as someone who would die young.

After putting his father in the ground, Alexei had quietly hunted down the new crime lord, slit his throat, shot him twice in the chest and once in each knee cap.

His uncle had been very proud of him, but in order to avoid a full-out war with their former allies, he’d taken over as their family’s interim head and arranged for Alexei to come to the states for college. Sergei found the day-to-day business affairs of running a mostly criminal organization distasteful, so the plan had been for Alexei to come back and take his place in four years. Staying on for grad school had been Alexei’s idea, and his uncle had not approved. He’d withdrawn all financial support, telling Alexei he could either come home and take his rightful place in their family’s organization or starve in America.

Alexei had enrolled in UT Dallas’s MBA program anyway, vowing to get the education necessary to make his family’s business legitimate and stop the killings that had claimed the lives of both his parents, and many of the people who worked within the Rustanov organization. But then he met Eva and a whole new path opened up for him, one in which he left the family behind forever, forging ahead as a businessman in America, someone who had nothing to do with the Rustanov crime family, someone who could live a simple life right here in Texas with the woman he loved most in the world.

“Lexie?”

He came back to the present day with a jerk. Only his Eva called him by this nickname. No one else would dare. His size and general demeanor didn’t invite joking or teasing of any kind from most people. But from the moment they’d met, Eva had displayed a talent for crossing him on certain things, and somehow getting away with it.

“What were you thinking about?” she asked.

He pushed thoughts of the life he’d lived before coming to Texas to the back of his mind. “I am thinking you deserve more than this shit apartment,” he said.

“Stop it,” she answered with a roll of her eyes. “A few of my clients would consider this place a palace. At least you have heat in the winter.”

That was Eva’s answer to everything meager in their lives, to joke that at least they had it better than the people she worked with in the field as a grad student, finishing her Masters in Social Work. But he knew better. She had grown up the pampered youngest daughter of the mayor of Drummond, a small oil town about three hours away. Before her father had cut her off for dating Alexei, she had lived in a two-bedroom apartment with air conditioning and hardwood floors, in a building with an onsite gym and several other amenities she no longer had access to thanks to falling in love with him.

“I will pay to landlord visit before I go to gym.”

“Why? He said the repairman can’t get to us until the end of the week. It’s a heat wave, so it’s got to be hard to get them out to fix one lil’ old window unit.”

“I will talk to landlord and he will fix window unit today. I do not like to see you suffer.”

“I’m not suffering, baby. The only reason I’m still sitting here is because I don’t have anything clean to wear, except for a miniskirt and a couple of tank tops. I have no idea what I’m going to do for underwear.”

His dick pulsed at the image of her in a miniskirt with nothing on underneath.

And as if sensing his desire, she crawled over to where he stood at the edge of the mattress and unwrapped the towel from around his waist. “Maybe instead of talking to the landlord, you could be my honey bee and do a couple of loads of laundry for me before you leave for work?”

She brought her face just close enough to his penis that he could feel the heat of her breath as she spoke.

Few people hated doing laundry as much as his Eva did, and after three months of living with her, he had learned to recognize the beginning of a negotiation to get him to take care of her dirty clothes yet again.

“Now you don’t want me prancing around the School of Social Work in a miniskirt with no underwear, do you?” she asked, her Texas accent become even sweeter as her words got dirtier. “What if I forgot I wasn’t wearing any and accidentally bent over in front of one of them horny security guards there?”

He shook his head in disbelief. “You are using sex to ask me to do laundry again?”

She shook her head, grazing his dick with her cheek as she did so. “No, darlin’, I’ll have sex with you even if you don’t agree to be a prince and do my laundry instead of threatening your landlord.” She stuck out her tongue and ran it across the sensitive ridge of his large penis, taking its bulbous head in her mouth for just a second before saying, “But if you agree to wash just two loads of my clothes, I can guarantee the sex will be even hotter.”

He wasn’t a laughing man by nature, but he’d be damned if Eva didn’t make him smile. “In my country, the girlfriends not only do their own laundry, but also that of their boyfriends.”

“Mmm-hmm…” This time she took his dick in her hand and closed her mouth around it, giving it three languorous sucks before letting it go again. “You probably wish you had one of them Russian girlfriends right now, don’t you? I’m sure they always have clean underwear to wear under their miniskirts.”

“You are vixen. You should wash own clothes every week as I do. And not wait until last minute.”

She took him in her mouth, and this time she suckled him for long minutes until he forgot all about the gym and instead took her by the back of the head, holding it steady as he pumped himself into her mouth, while an urgent need built up inside his groin.

But all of a sudden, she stopped and forcibly withdrew her mouth from his penis. She then dodged his seeking hand when he tried to pull her back down to finish what she had started.

“I think I should demonstrate what might happen if you send me off to school with no panties today,” she said before dancing away to open a dresser drawer, from which she pulled out a miniskirt. She turned her back to him and hooked her thumbs into the sides of her bikini bottoms, pushing them down over her hourglass hips and deliciously round derriere, before stepping out of them and pulling on her miniskirt.

“Cuz maybe I’m just being silly. I might not have anything to worry about, right?” She knocked a pen off the dresser and gasped with a faux innocent look. “Oops! I dropped this pen. I better pick it up.”

She bent over at the waist, giving him a tantalizing peek of her glistening wet pussy. “You can’t see anything can you? Nothing that would attract any unwanted attention from a School of Social Work security guard, right?”

Before he could even try to reason himself out of her sexy trap, he was behind her, sinking his dick—still wet from her mouth—into her soaking pussy. “I will do your laundry,
kotenok
, but only if you promise to be waiting for me in this exact same position when I get home.”

She braced herself against the dresser as he pistoned into her. “Oh, baby, I will let you do whatever you want to me tonight. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she said, in such a way that Alexei couldn’t be sure if she was talking about the laundry he’d just agreed to do, or the sex they were currently having.

He pulled her skirt-covered hips into his, riding her and loving the way she let her chin drop to her chest in delicious abandonment, as if his sex was some kind of heroin-like drug that made her feel loose all over. The wet sounds of their bodies slapping together filled the apartment until she came with a loud cry and he released into her with a stream of Russian words.

She laughed as she came down. “I have no idea what that means, but I for sure agree.”

He pulled out of her but kept a hand cupped over her pussy, which was now leaking with his seed. “When we do this again tonight, one hand will be here…” He brushed his right thumb against her still-swollen clit and took a hold of her left breast in the other. “And one hand will be here on this breast. And I will not let you come until you are screaming my name. My full name, not pet one you insist on using.”

She laughed again and rubbed her ass against him. “In that case, I can’t wait until you get home.”

He nuzzled his face against the back of her neck, savoring the way she smelled, like sex and sandalwood soap, and her Russian boyfriend. “I love you very much. You know this, yes?”

She turned in his arms, pulling her miniskirt down before stringing her arms around his neck. “I know this. And I love you right back, baby.”

He kissed her, “Good. I will make you prove tonight.”

But when Alexei arrived home that night, he did not find Eva waiting for him as she had promised. In fact, the apartment was dark when he came in, filling him with worry. She had also not stopped by the school’s security desk, where he usually sat with one of his thick Economics textbooks, to visit with him. He also hadn’t seen her while making his rounds, which he was required to perform every hour on the hour.

Halfway through the day, he peeked into the window of her Non-Violent Conflict Resolution classroom, which was the seminar he thought she took on Friday afternoons, but no Eva. And when he called the apartment’s landline to tell her he was on his way home, she hadn’t answered.

As he walked home from campus, he vowed to haul Eva down to the nearest electronics store to get her a cell phone the next morning. Her father had shut hers off when she insisted on staying with Alexei. And whenever Alexei talked about adding her to his plan, she pointed out that they couldn’t afford it. Eva hadn’t taken out any student loans, because her father had been covering all of her expenses. And when he cut her off, it was too late to apply for any work-study jobs.

She had wanted to get a part-time job, but Alexei had talked her out of it. With her summer credits, she’d only one more semester to go versus the remaining full year of B-school he had left. Also, she had enough to deal with, having to get field-work hours in on top of a full class load. He’d just have to figure out a way to afford adding another person to his plan. Maybe he could take on a second work-study job.

He tried to keep his thoughts on her lack of a phone as opposed to letting them stray to other territories. Territories that included the kind of foul play that had gotten his mother killed when he was four and his father shot down when he was eighteen.

So when he arrived home and found their apartment empty, rather than panic, he chose instead to focus on finding her. As he flipped on the lights, he forced himself to think about the simple gold band, which had been sitting in his sock drawer for almost a month now. Its price tag was the reason he’d only had forty-two dollars left in his bank up until today. He’d wanted to take her to a nice dinner after he proposed, so he’d had to wait until he got paid. It troubled him that he had to wait just to be able to afford to take her out to a decent meal, and even more so that he wouldn’t be able to truly provide for her until he was finished with his program.

But he hoped Eva wouldn’t care about the current miserable state of his finances. He imagined her only condition to marrying him might be his promising to do her laundry at least once a month, a condition he would gladly meet if it meant he’d get to spend the rest of his life with her.