Kissing My Killer (44 page)

Alexei and I looked at each other over her back. I nodded at him, blinking away tears.

Vasiliy walked up. “Next year,” Irina asked, “Can we please holiday in New York instead?”

Vasiliy swore in Russian. “Always with the
New York,
with this one,” he told us. “All she wants to do is go to this Tenthook Academy.”

“
Fenbrook
Academy
,”
said Irina through gritted teeth.

Vasiliy rolled his eyes as he led her away. “What is wrong with the Bolshoi?”

Luka and Arianna were next to stop by. Luka shook Alexei’s hand...then pulled him into a bear hug that set all the medical monitors beeping. “You will always have a place in our family,” he told Alexei. “Here, or in New York.”

That was it. Exactly what he’d been wanting to hear, since this whole thing started. I held my breath.

Alexei nodded. Then he looked at me. “Thank you,” he said. “But no.” And he pulled me close.

When Luka had walked away, Arianna put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry I freaked out,” she said. She looked better, now—still shaken, but her color was back. “I was in a crash, once.”

I pulled her into a hug. “When it comes to freakouts, I got you beat.”

Yuri showed up at that point, a bandage tied around his head. He’d been unconscious the entire time, knocked out by Nikolai, and seemed to take the fact he’d missed everything as a personal affront. He quietly but firmly towed the family away towards a waiting car.

“Oh!” I said suddenly. “I nearly forgot! Lily says hi.”

Luka turned to me, astonished. “You know Lily?!”

Arianna gave him a glare. “
The
Lily?”

Oops.
“She’s a friend,” I said awkwardly.
Surely Lily and Luka couldn’t have...
But Arianna didn’t seem
that
annoyed. It must be something else. “She helped us get here,” I blurted. “We couldn’t have done it without her.”

Arianna’s face softened. Nope, definitely not an affair—no woman would relent that easily. “In that case,” she told me, “you can tell Lily she’s
just about
forgiven for Paris.” And she slipped her arm around Luka’s waist and led him away.

“Paris?” I asked. “What happened in Paris?” But she’d gone.

The paramedics announced that the next ambulance was ours and bundled Alexei and me into it. We sat facing each other, holding hands. “What now?” I asked.

He held his side. “I go to hospital. They patch me up. Then back to New York and we live together.”

I blinked and scrambled for words. “We do? I mean, that sounds…” Actually, it sounded absolutely fantastic. I just hadn’t been expecting him to say it like that. He sounded so
certain.
“And then what?”

“And then…” He smiled and leaned into me, his lips at my ear. “I already told you what happens, when we live together.”

I drew in my breath, feeling the heat blossom inside me and throb straight down to my groin. And I kissed him.

One Month Later

Gabriella

“It doesn’t work.” Alexei’s voice was grumpy...but it had lost the edge it used to have when he got frustrated. He was a lot less angry in general, these days.

I was luxuriating under the shower, but I’d left the bathroom door open because I’d known he might run into problems. “Type it in carefully,” I said. I didn’t have to force myself to sound calm and patient: this shower would make anyone placid. “Double-you, double-you, double-you, dot Netflix dot com.”

One of the things I’d insisted on, when we moved to the new, bigger apartment, was a very serious shower, of the kind we’d experienced at the luxury hotel. Alexei made a show of saying it was ridiculous and decadent, but he only kept up the pretence for a day or two. He now spent more time in it than I did.

From the living area, there came the slow tapping of single-fingered typing. I was going to have to teach him to touch type at some point, but...
baby steps.
I grinned as the spray hit me from both sides and above, washing the strawberry soap from me.

“It still doesn’t work.” Alexei sounded as if he was losing his patience, so I finally cranked off the water—thirty minutes probably
was
enough—and wrapped a towel around me. Damp and half-naked, I padded through the apartment and walked up behind the couch he was sitting on.

“No,” I said gently. “Netflix. With an ‘X.’”

Alexei threw down the keyboard. “What was wrong with renting a movie from a store?”

I leaned over from behind and put my arms around his neck. “When was the last time you
had
a movie night, 1993? And also, that would involve going out.”

“You
can
go out, now.”

“Doesn’t mean I always want to. This isn’t fear—it’s good, healthy laziness.”

Water dripped from my hair onto his chest, which made him finally turn around and realize I was only wearing a towel. His eyes got
that
look and he twisted around, grabbed me and hauled me over the back of the sofa. I yelped, delighted, and landed in his lap. The towel came off.

“I am going to do
very bad things
to you,” Alexei told me gravely.

And he did.

***

We wound up never getting to the movie, though we did stop for pizza sometime around midnight. We woke up with the dawn, because both of us had been too distracted to close the curtains.

“Did you think any more about what I asked you?” I said. I was lying on my stomach, watching the sunrise, my arm around his shoulders as he lay next to me. “Lily and Yolanda agree—we need someone to provide security for us, in case things ever get physical again.”

He looked at me. “I would protect you anyway.”

“But this way you could be on the payroll, so to speak. We could cut you in.”

“With the money you steal.”

I sat up and crossed my arms. “
Really? You’re
going to give me a moral lecture?”

“No,” he said at last, conceding the point.

“Besides, we only keep one percent of the money when we empty these bastards’ bank accounts. The rest goes to charities that help trafficked women.” Our hacks were getting more and more effective, too. Arianna had helped—she’d made some calls to the CIA, who in turn had made some calls to the FBI, and we now had a dedicated contact we could feed evidence to, when we uncovered it. There were always more trafficking rings popping up, though, and the mysterious Carl was still out there somewhere.  

“It’s a good idea,” Alexei muttered after a while. “But we will have to change the name.”

I blinked at him, unsure if he was serious. “Really?”

He shook his head firmly. “I am not being a
Sister of Invidia.”
He playfully spanked my ass. “You should try to sleep for a little while. You have college.”

With the Dread held at bay—seemingly for good, although I wasn’t taking anything for granted—I’d been able to enroll in college. Only part time, for now, but it was a step towards a normal life. And at some point, I was going to meet up with Lily—maybe Yolanda, too.

“There’s not enough time,” I said, looking at the clock. “I have to be up in an hour.” I bit my lip as if thinking. “What could we
do,
to pass an hour?”

He grinned and started to whisper in my ear.

“No,” I said, squirming. “Say it in Russian.”

<<<>>>

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed
Kissing My Killer,
please consider
leaving a review
.

Want more? All my “Kissing” books are standalones so you can read them in any order.

The story of Luka and Arianna is told in
Lying and Kissing
(turn the page for an extract!) :)

The story of Bull and Lily is told in
Texas Kissing
.

Or try
Punching and Kissing,
the story of a woman forced to fight to save her brother, and the Irish boxer who trains her…and falls for her.

I launch my books at 99 cents for my newsletter subscribers - they get an email on launch day so they can snap them up cheap. When you
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I’ll also send you
Losing My Balance,
a steamy novella in my
Fenbrook Academy
series about Clarissa, the ballet student, and Neil, the badass, BDSM-loving biker who falls for her. It’s exclusive to my subscribers.

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An Extract From

Arianna is a CIA languages expert who spends her days eavesdropping on the phone calls of Luka Malakov, a notorious Russian arms dealer, and her nights dreaming about what he might look like in person. Lonely and shy, haunted by the car crash that killed her parents, she feels as if she’s frozen inside.

Everything changes when she’s sent on her first ever field assignment. After infiltrating a party at Luka’s New York house as part of a string quartet, she risks everything to slip upstairs and plant a bug on his laptop.

Then Luka walks in…

There are some moments you know you’re going to remember for the rest of your life. I know this, because one in particular has burrowed so deep into my soul that it’s never coming out. I remember the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach as the car fell. It was my life, dropping out from under me. The feeling that nothing is ever going to be alright again.

This was the same and yet different. That was an ending; this was something beginning.

I’d stepped away from the bed and towards the door. That single step probably saved my life. If I’d still had my hand on the laptop, he’d have known for sure I was a spy and I would have been carried out of that room in a bloody, plastic-wrapped bundle.

I saw shock on his face and then, just for a split second, another look, one I couldn’t even process, right then—I filed it away for later. Then anger, and a quick glance at the laptop.