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.
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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 w
as 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.
Some instinct made me keep my eyes on him. If I’d looked at the laptop, my fate would have been sealed. But I just stood there, mouth open, as he closed the distance between us.
One huge hand slammed into my chest, the palm right on the valley of my upper breasts. He pushed me back against the door, the hard wood jarring me painfully. He kept coming, stopping when his face was inches from mine. The whole world narrowed down to the throbbing heat of his hand against my skin and those burning, ice-fire eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing in my room?” he demanded.
We stared at each other as I took panic breaths through my nose, my lips a tight line of fear. His hand, pinning me to the door, might as well have been made of warm iron. He had me so firmly that I couldn’t even wriggle to the side. And despite my mounting panic, I was aware of the side of his thumb and the side of his pinky finger as they framed the tops of my breasts. Every breath made the soft flesh push and swell around them and a black, twisting energy shoot straight down to my groin. What the fuck is wrong with me?!
In my earpiece, I could hear panicked whispers as Adam, Roberta and the others tried to figure out what to do. Burst in and rescue me? Wait and see how it played out?
His words were replaying over and over in my head. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak in English. His accent was heavy, softening some syllables and making others granite-hard. His fffuck was like a slow penetration followed by a jerk of the hips.
What the hell is wrong with me?! I wondered again. I had to answer him, had to think of some way out of this, but my mind was stuck on endless loop, replaying his words. Any second now, he was going to snap and just kill me.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I squeezed my eyes shut to try to break the loop and saw that image of him as he’d come out of the bathroom. The shock on his face, flicking momentarily to another look.
Pleasure.
Just for a fraction of a second, the ghost of a smile had touched his lips. Not the fake smile he’d given the women downstairs. A smile that actually reached those cold eyes, thawing them a little. It had been gone in an instant, but it had been there. He’d been pleased to see me.
The implications of it were still detonating like fireworks in my chest when I opened my eyes and said, “I was looking for you.”
He went utterly silent. His eyes flicked over my face, fast and brutally efficient, searching for any trace of a lie.
He didn’t find one because, on some level, I think I was telling the truth.
He inched his head back from me, but he didn’t release me. He was getting a better look at me, I realized. He’d been entirely focused on my face, but now his eyes swept down over my chest, my hips, my legs. Something like a hot shudder went through me and I felt a flush rise in my cheeks. That feeling I’d had downstairs was back, that sense of being locked onto each other like magnets, close enough now that I twisted and turned to mimic his movements.
As he looked at me, I looked at him. He was nearly a head taller even with me in my heels, and his frame blocked out almost all of the light from behind him. With the black suit, he looked like he was made of shadow except for those blazing blue eyes. But it wasn’t his size so much as the solidity of him, the realness. Next to him, I felt like a faded, worn-thin copy of a person.
And the weirdest part was, as I stood there pinned against the door, I could feel the energy of him flowing into me, reawakening me. After years spent frozen and slowly dying, I finally felt alive again.
He took a long, slow breath and leaned in closer to me again. He was wearing some cologne I didn’t recognize, something complex and elegant and somehow old-fashioned. He moved his mouth close to my ear. Then he spoke, and each word was like a savage little kiss. “You shouldn’t come looking for monsters. Men like me will eat you alive.”
And then he drew back to see my reaction.
I didn’t know how I was going to react either. I was operating on a whole different level, now, something deep inside me directing things. I was just along for the ride.
I took a shaky breath and whispered, “I’m not scared of you.”
He stared deep into my eyes, appraising me, and said, “Yes you are.”
And a deep, hot oil slick seemed to sluice through me, more complex than fear, more complex than lust.
His free hand closed on my leg, just beneath the hem of my dress. His palm cupped my flesh through the nylon, his heat throbbing into me. And he stared at me, demanding an answer.
I swallowed and stared back, and the message my eyes sent was…“Continue.”
His hand rose, rasping along the dark nylon, my breathing ratcheting higher and higher with each inch. His fingers slid over my thigh...then my upper thigh. Each square millimeter he touched burned as if it was on fire, the energy crackling inward and up towards my groin. The dress was coming up along with his hand, gathering on his wrist. And then he touched the naked skin above my stocking and I realized I was panting.
He stared straight into my eyes as his fingers reached my panties. His fingertips toyed with the waistband for a second...and then continued. He moved inward, now, hoisting my dress up further with an impatient jerk of his wrist. His hand slid over my stomach and up to my chest and—
He cupped my breast, his hand weighing it in my bra. His palm throbbed warmth through the thin fabric, straight into my soft flesh. Then he squeezed—a long, lingering squeeze, and pleasure erupted in my chest and roared out to every corner of me. I tried to go up on my tiptoes, to twist, to thrash in response, but his other hand still had me pinned. I had to just stay there and take it.
I’d never been more turned on.
And then I heard a noise in my earpiece, a soft intake of breath. They’re listening to this!
And my mouth said, “I have to go,” even as my body demanded that I stay right where I was.
Luka had his eyes half-closed. He just remained there, studying me for another few seconds. He gave my breast one last, unexpected squeeze and I gasped as it sent a ripple of heat through me. Then he released me and my dress fell back into place.
Operating on autopilot, I grabbed my violin case and opened the door. I’d taken two steps out into the hallway before I remembered the bodyguard on the stairs. He turned at the sound of the door opening and his jaw dropped. He reached under his jacket—maybe for a radio, maybe for a gun.
But then I heard Luka emerge behind me, and whatever nod or gesture he made to his bodyguard made the man step back immediately and clear a path for me. I didn’t turn around. I just hurried down the stairs, violin banging against my hip, threw the front door wide and headed straight for the cherry-red SUV. Adam was already inside and waiting and I could see the concern in his eyes. But he faked a fatherly smile and opened the door for me. I quickly climbed inside.
We roared away and the last image I had of the house, in the rear view mirror, was Luka in the doorway, thoughtfully watching me go.
What will happen when Arianna listens to Luka’s next phone call…and hears him talking about the mysterious woman he met in his bedroom?
When she’s asked to go to Moscow to seduce him and spy on him, will she refuse…or risk getting even closer to him? Will she go to bed with him, knowing that he’ll kill her in an instant if he suspects who she is?
<<<<>>>>
Lying and Kissing is available now.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Sixty-Three
Sixty-Four
Sixty-Five
Sixty-Six
Sixty-Seven
Sixty-Eight
Sixty-Nine
Seventy
Seventy-One
Seventy-Two
Seventy-Three
Kissing My Killer Page 27
