The Russian Seduction (26 page)

I’ll never get used to the way I feel when you touch me.
Incredibly, Alexis found herself worrying about her hygiene. She’d had no shower since yesterday, obviously, and the locally-made toiletries she’d found in that tiny cave of a drugstore had been basic at best. But the gun’s cold weight in her hands seemed less terrifying, with Victor behind her to ensure the thing didn’t go off by mistake.

“Now tell me,” he whispered in her ear, “what are you afraid of?”

She swallowed against her dry throat and reached down deep for the story no one else had ever asked for. Giving herself no leeway to consider and veer away, she launched into the story quickly, skimming over the residue of dread and old grief that filmed her memory.

“It happened when I was twelve years old. I had my first boyfriend, just a crush really, on the boy who lived next door. He was the only child of a prominent politician, smart and cute, a little older than I was. All the standard qualities of a good crush.” She attempted a laugh, but it sounded strained. “One day during summer break, while his parents were away, Chris was hanging out with a friend in his father’s study. Somehow they’d found his father’s hunting rifle, and they were…fooling with it. It went off, of course. Just an accident, but Chris’s friend shot him. I heard the shot next door—so loud—it was so loud, Victor. And I was home alone.”

She drew a shaking breath, and Victor’s arms tightened around her.

“You’re all right, Alexis.” His voice was low and gentle as he nuzzled her neck. “That was a long time ago.”

“Oh, I know. I hardly even think about it anymore. But when I saw that gun in your backpack—” She steadied herself, and went on. “When I heard the shot, I called 911, and then I called Chris. But no one answered next door, and of course I wasn’t about to walk over there. When the police arrived, they found the other boy hiding, and Chris—well, basically, they found his brains all over the study floor. He’d been shot in the head.”

“That must have been traumatic.” Victor’s rough-shaven cheek rubbed against hers, and the familiar dry perfume of tobacco filled her nose. His hands were steady around hers, holding the gun in check, pointed safely away. “Perhaps his father should have paid a bit less attention to politics and a bit more regard to firearms safety. He should have locked his toys up. But that’s not going to happen to you, Alexis, because you’re getting the training your friend never had.”

Nodding her agreement, she filled her lungs with the searing cold and tucked her faded memories away where they belonged. Steeling herself, she told him she was ready to try a few rounds.

When she finally nerved herself to squeeze off a round, the explosion of sound echoed through the trees and made her ears ring. But the wide open space seemed to absorb the noise. Her first few shots went wide of the target, but she began accustoming herself to the feel. When the chamber was empty, he showed her how to reload it. When her next shot bit into the tree’s scaly bark, she surprised herself with a cry of triumph.

Five minutes later, she was firing without Victor’s support behind her. Still leery, but knowing that if she followed his guidance and paid attention, she’d stay in control, and nothing bad would happen. Her last three shots burrowed deep in the tree, two high and one low.

When she’d emptied the chamber and placed the pistol carefully on a nearby stump, exhilaration was singing through her body. Spinning around to face him, she couldn’t suppress a grin of victory as she met his cobalt gaze. “I did it!”

“Yes, you did,” he murmured, reaching to smooth back the tumbled hair from her brow. A look of fleeting tenderness softened his Slavic features as he tugged her warm hood up around her face.

Pulled toward him by that tender look, Alexis took a step forward—and stopped herself barely in time from walking straight into his arms. Damn it, she’d been ready to hug him, to share the exuberance of her achievement and her gratitude with the guy who’d helped her do it.

But she needed to remember that Victor Kostenko wasn’t her boyfriend. He was the man directly responsible for the incriminating photos that had just turned up on her desk in Moscow. The guy who was setting her up for a bruising fall. And she’d better not forget it.

_____________________________________

Several hours later, Alexis wrapped up her phone call with the Consulate at the St. Petersburg hotel where Victor had scored them a suite for the night.

Not just any suite,
she amended, glancing at her surroundings. The spacious expanse of hardwood floors gleamed with the silken sheen of Persian carpets. Royal blue walls were lined with enough Russian Impressionist paintings to make any collector drool. An oversized vase of creamy roses perfumed the air above the dark luster of a baby grand piano.

She’d watched Victor glide through the front door of the best hotel in the city and grab one of the top suites without a reservation. Even though the desk was telling everyone else this was high season, and the place was sold out through Christmas.

She’d watched Victor slap down a platinum credit card from Russia’s biggest bank to cover the tab. Then snuck a look at the monitor and eyeballed a four-figure price at the current exchange rate—just for a one-night stay.

“I can’t do this!” she’d hissed on the elevator, as the deferential butler escorted them to their suite. “There are strict regulations limiting the value of gifts a U.S. government employee can accept.”

“This does not surprise me.” The maverick sub captain was utterly indifferent to regulations, of course.

Alexis closed her eyes and prayed for patience. “Victor, the limit I’m allowed to accept is twenty-five dollars.”

“What do you want to do, Alexis?” His tawny brows lifted. “Do you wish to wait on the sidewalk until midnight for Mr. Chase to arrive, with his Chechens? Recall, if you will, that it’s December in St. Petersburg.”

By which he meant that it was forty below out there, with a nasty wind knifing in from the Gulf of Finland. And Geoff still wasn’t picking up her calls.

So she’d assuaged her guilt by scheduling a full day of meetings for tomorrow to work through the complicated logistics for the President’s visit. She’d figure out when she returned to Moscow how to report this unauthorized largesse.

And she needed a serious talk with Victor about where all this money he splashed around was coming from.

When she checked her office voice mail, she found another message from her financial planner in New York, sounding a trifle tense as he asked her to return his call. As soon as she got back to Moscow, she’d dig out her latest monthly statement and ring him. She’d noticed her mutual funds hadn’t been performing so well in recent months, but she’d never paid much attention to Wayne Castle’s financial legacy. Willfully ignored it, in fact. Her father had been an investment wizard, and the account balance he’d left behind was more than she’d ever need, even after Geoff’s settlement.

Anyway, she didn’t have the stomach to deal with Dad’s money right now. And she didn’t want to dilute her focus on her upcoming meetings.

Resolute, she tightened the sash on her oversized hotel bathrobe. Four o’clock in the afternoon and it was already pitch black out, this close to the Arctic Circle. But the Ambassador had cleared her to sit in on Victor’s dinner with the dean of the naval academy, Admiral Pavel Germanovich Grachev, in the hotel restaurant at seven.

Fortunately, this left just enough time to complete some emergency shopping. The clothes she’d been wearing since yesterday were getting pretty gamey.

She hesitated outside the bathroom door, behind which the shower hissed over the thunderous strains of Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet
. And struggled to keep the thought of Victor Kostenko, his sculpted physique naked and dripping wet, from kicking her libido into overdrive.

Nervously she cleared her throat. “Excuse me, captain?”

Determined to prove to herself she
wasn’t
in love with the guy, she’d worked hard all day to restore some semblance of professional distance. She’d kept him strictly at arms’ length except when he was teaching her to fire the damn pistol. Which, between her fear of the gun and the sexual tension that hummed between them, had almost sent her into cardiac arrest.

She’d been stiffly calling him
captain
all afternoon, and he’d reverted to calling her
counselor
, in a tone so frigid it could crack steel.

And now he didn’t seem to be responding to formal address at all.

“Ah, Victor?” she called softly. “I need to collect the hair dryer.”

No luck. She pondered the most genteel approach to resolve her little housekeeping dilemma. Best of all, really, if he never even knew she’d been in there, wasn’t it? Holding her breath, she eased the door open.

A wall of steam billowed over her, almost obscuring the expanse of Italian marble and fogged-up mirrors.

Jesus, what am I doing? Unless I want to wind up on the front page of the Washington Post as the divorcee whose sex drive derailed a presidential visit, I can’t go anywhere near this guy.
Although, really, the Ambassador had encouraged her to cultivate him….

Anyway, it was forty below. She needed to dry her hair before she went out in the arctic winter, didn’t she? Besides, she had her priorities all straightened out.

Cautiously she edged inside, cataloging the list of hotel toiletries she needed to grab. But, inevitably, her eyes snuck to the shower’s glassed-in expanse. Roomy as a subway carriage, double-headed and definitely designed for two.

Whoa.
Through the steamy glass she caught a rear view of the captain…wearing nothing but his diving watch…that sucked every particle of oxygen from her lungs. Tendrils of soapy water streamed over his burnished hair and sun-bronzed skin. Caressed the bulging shoulders and back that had pulled him up the vertical face of K2 without portable oxygen. Slid over the tight bulge of the ass she’d been gripping last night for dear life—

No doubt about it. Coming in here had not been her smartest notion. She was burning up like a patient with a terminal fever, smothering under forty pounds of terrycloth bathrobe. Better grab who she’d come for—
what
she’d come for—and get the hell out.

She tiptoed to the sink and heroically turned her back on the shower. Eased open the vanity drawer and groped for the hair dryer. Yet, unavoidably, her gaze crept up the oversized mirror before her. In its steamy reflection, the shower door swung open.

Front view of the captain this time. All six-and-a-half feet tall, soaking wet, with those ice-blue eyes fixed on her like a heat-seeking missile.

“Are you coming in or not, Ms. Castle?” he growled, in that low sexy voice that sent chills down her spine.

“Actually, I’m not.” She pivoted to face him. But it would have taken a saint not to look….

“That wasn’t a question.” A purposeful hand wrapped around her sash, pulling until the knot unraveled and the whole damn thing fell open.

His eyes lidded as they slid over her, and beads of sweat spring out against her skin. Uncovered by the robe, her nipples tightened and ached like he was already tonguing them.

He caught her lapels in both hands and tugged her into the cascade of steaming water. Somewhere along the way, she lost her bathrobe.

“Oh God, Victor, we can’t keep doing this…”

But even as her mouth said
no
, her entire body was saying
yes
. Her disobedient hands weren’t waiting for clearance from her head, but took their own initiative and slid over his slick muscled chest. Her nipples grazed his skin; his rigid erection nudged her belly. And her sex melted and ran like hot caramel over ice cream.

“We can’t do this,” she repeated. Water trickled over her lips into her parched mouth.

“Why can’t we, precisely?” he murmured, strong hands sliding down her back to wrap around her derriere. “Remind me again of the reasons.”

“I’m in this for my government,” she breathed, lips moving against his chest. Water dripped in her eyes, blinding her, as she dragged her tongue across his nipple.

“How patriotic of you, Counselor,” he rumbled.

But he was smart enough not to stop her when she sank to her knees, nuzzled her way down the taut column of his six-pack abs.

“I don’t want to have any misunderstanding.” Her hands curled around his ass, nails scraping his skin. Rubbed her face against his rigid length until his breath went ragged. “You know you can’t trust me.”

And I know I can’t trust you.

“What if I said I’m willing to take the chance?” He groaned. “Christ, Alexis, you’re killing me.”

Then she did what she’d wanted to do since she saw him standing there, hard and ready as though he’d been waiting just for her. The stiff ridge of his cock tasted of salt and musk, still smelled of her own arousal. And that turned her on like hell. She stroked…tasted… teased…suckled. Shivered when he clenched her sodden hair, and arched against her like he couldn’t get enough.

He was dangerous to her in so many ways. He was an SVR agent who’d been lying to her from Day One. Splashed around enough money to float the economy of a mid-sized country, and was extremely vague about how he’d earned it. He was going to ruin her career and her reputation, possibly derail a presidential visit,
and
torpedo her father’s dying wish for her to make Ambassador by age forty. And he was going to break her heart.