The Dangerous Boxed Set

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Bootleg gas scams, laundering billions, reselling stolen Mercedes—it was all bad stuff, sure, but Nick could live with it. What he couldn’t live with—what he’d dedicated his life to fighting—was people being hurt.

  As far as Nick could tell from the file, Worontzoff had gone into prison camp a writer and had come out a monster. Over the past fifteen years, he’d been personally responsible for death and misery on an unimaginable scale.

  Twelve-year-old Moldavian girls kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, used brutally on an industrial basis and dead by twenty. Mountains of AK-47s put into the hands of Sierra Leonean child soldiers barely big enough to carry them. Cut heroin guaranteed to kill the poor sick fucks shooting up on the streets of a hundred cities.

  Nick was going to take him down. Oh yes. It was what he did. What he lived for. He’d dedicated his life to taking down the bad guys and Vassily Worontzoff was as bad as they come.

  Pity the road leading to the destruction of Worontzoff ran right through this beautiful woman sitting across the table, smiling at him.

  “So.” He put his fork down and leaned forward slightly. He could feel the heat of the candle flame against his face. “What do pretty girls do in Parker’s Ridge? What are the local attractions?”

  Charity shook her head. It was physically impossible, but it felt as if her scent covered him when she moved, as if it were a fine, pearly powder.

  Head. Out. Of. Ass. Now!

  “Parker’s Ridge isn’t Manhattan, Nick,” she said, with a gentle smile. “The pleasures here are more provincial than you are perhaps used to. Still, we do have some attractions. And there’s always Vassily Worontzoff’s musical soirées. He manages to attract world-class musicians to our little corner of the world.”

  Not by a flicker of his eyelashes did Nick betray any emotion. He furrowed his brow, clueless businessman trying to place a name he knew he should know, but didn’t. “Worontzoff,” he said, frowning. “Isn’t he that Russian…Russian what? Musician? Dancer?”

  “Writer.” Charity laughed. “Russian writer. A very great writer, the author of Dry Your Tears in Moscow, one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. Each year he is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. And he would undoubtedly have won if he had continued writing, but he never did. He was one of the last of the dissidents sent to a Soviet prison camp. After he was released, he never wrote another word.”

  Her face and voice had turned serious. She looked down at the tablecloth, tracing a pattern with a pink-tipped fingernail. She looked up at him, gemlike eyes gleaming with emotion.

  “And he won’t talk about it, either. He’s a wonderful man and we’ve become friends since he’s moved here. As a matter of fact, he’s having a musical soirée this Thursday evening.”

  Oh God. Nick felt his heart nearly stop. Friends. What the hell did that mean? Was she fucking him? It was bad enough that she’d spend next Thursday in Scumbag Central, without him having the image of Charity spending time under Worontzoff, those slender legs wrapped around the fuckhead’s hips…

  This was bad shit. He didn’t even want to think about it. This was worse than Consuelo’s chest of toys, way worse.

  Nick looked at her carefully. She met his eyes, her gaze calm and serene. He relaxed. If she’d been Worontzoff’s lover, she’d have shown some sign. A little blush, evading his gaze, a slight smile. Something. But there was nothing.

  So, she wasn’t fucking the bastard. Good.

  Not that he cared.

  Much.

  Jesus. Oh, shit.

  The short hairs on the back of Nick’s neck stood up. He’d just been handed an opening—an honest to God opening wide enough to drive a Humvee through—to insinuate himself into Worontzoff’s house, as Charity’s guest. It was a goddamn huge window of opportunity, it was why he was here and not in the smelly surveillance van and the first thing that flashed through his mind wasn’t How do I wangle an invitation into Worontzoff’s house but Is Charity fucking the guy?

  He’d been completely sidetracked from the mission. Pow! It had been punched right out of his head. Being sidetracked went against every single ounce of training he’d ever had, not to mention it being an excellent way to get killed.

  Undercover work is like proctology. You poke and prod around assholes, looking for something bad, and then you zap the bad things you find. His line of work required utter concentration, day and night.

  If Nicholas Ames made a big mistake, he lost money. Nick Ireland paid for his mistakes in blood.

  Time to get back on track, fast.

  “I haven’t read anything by him, sorry. How long has this guy—what’s his name? Worontzoff?”

  Charity nodded.

  “How long has this guy Worontzoff lived here in Parker’s Ridge? It seems a strange place for a Russian exile to settle down in.”

  “Well, maybe not so strange. I’m told upstate Vermont is much like the area around Moscow, only our beech trees have larger leaves. And Vassily isn’t a Russian exile. He got out of prison camp more or less in the same period the Soviet Union fell. In Moscow, he was greeted like a king when he was released. I remember it still. I’d just read Dry Your Tears in Moscow and I followed what happened to him in the newspapers.”

  Nick did some fast calculating. “Good God, you must have been—”

  “Twelve.” She shrugged, more of that fairy dust coming his way. “A very precocious twelve. And…that summer I had…a lot of time to read.”

  Damn straight. In the summer of 1993, when Worontzoff was released to return like a conquering hero to Moscow, Charity Prewitt had been in the hospital. Her father had thrown her out of a third-story hotel bedroom window in a desperate attempt to save her life during a hotel fire. The two Prewitts, man and wife, perished, and Charity suffered a T12 fracture. She’d had three operations and spent that summer and most of the winter in a full body cast.

  Nick waited for her to tell her story, but she didn’t.

  Interesting.

  In Nick’s experience, people who have been through trauma are almost always eager to talk about it. It was like a badge of honor—look what I went through, look at what I survived.

  Charity’s story was particularly dramatic. Fire started by a disgruntled employee breaking out on the fifth floor of the five-star hotel in Boston where she was staying with her parents. Her father wrapping her in blankets and throwing her off the balcony in a desperate attempt to save her, then rushing back into the room to try to save his wife. It took two days for the room to cool down enough to collect the charred bones for a funeral. Charity never got to attend the funeral. By that time, she’d already had two operations and was sedated.

  Why wasn’t she telling him all about it?

  But she wasn’t, and she wasn’t uncomfortable with silence, either, like most women were. She sipped her wine and watched him calmly.

  Nick finally broke the silence.

  “So he leaves Russia and moves to the States? Why? I mean the Soviet system fell, after all. Why didn’t he just stay? Particularly since apparently he was a big shot there.”

  This was bullshit. Nick knew exactly why Worontzoff was here and he was looking at it right now. Charity Prewitt. A dead ringer for a woman long dead, Worontzoff’s lover, Katya Amartova, who had perished in the labor camp.

  Nick had seen the photos of Amartova, and the resemblance to Charity was uncanny. A normal man wouldn’t ever expect that a woman who merely looked like the woman he’d once loved could be her, but Worontzoff had gone well beyond normal years ago.

  She was silent another moment, then rested her chin on her fist. “I don’t really know why Vassily moved here. He’s never actually talked about it. I just assumed he wanted a clean slate and immigrated here to wipe out the past.”

  Well, to set up a criminal empire here, too. There was that.

  “We don’t really talk about these things,” she continued in her soft voice. “Mainly we talk about books. Vassily has
a great mind. It’s a privilege to spend time in his presence.”

  Fuckhead, Nick thought sourly, then caught himself again, appalled. The secret to undercover work is to stay in character, even inside your own head. Especially inside your own head. He’d been carrying on an internal monologue all this time and if he’d been chatting with someone a little less harmless than Charity Prewitt—with, say, Guillermo Gonzalez, who’d shoot a hole in anyone’s head at the least suspicion that someone was double-crossing him, blow your kneecap out for the hell of it and your elbow off for target practice—then he’d have been a goner.

  This never happened. Ever. Nick was as focused as the laser beam that every morning was aimed at the window of Worontzoff’s study. Always. As a soldier and now as a member of the Unit.

  He had to get his head out of his ass and pretend he was dead from the belt buckle down from now on.

  Charity turned her head to the big picture windows. Snow had started gently falling, dusting the big spotlit evergreens in the sloping lawn outside the restaurant, a scene straight out of a Christmas card. She sighed and pushed away her half-eaten tiramisú. She dabbed her mouth with the big linen napkin and placed it on the table.

  She needn’t have bothered wiping her mouth. Nick couldn’t even imagine her being sloppy with her food. Her moves were all so graceful, just watching her was a pleasure.

  Head. Out. Of. Ass. If he kept repeating it enough to himself often enough, it might just happen.

  “Nick.”

  His head snapped up. She’d pushed back from the table, body language clear. Oh God, he hadn’t pumped her at all for enough intel on Worontzoff. Again, at the word pump, his cock leaped in his pants.

  Jesus.

  He let his left hand drop to his lap, wondering whether he should surreptitiously pinch himself. Maybe if he hurt himself enough, it’d go down.

  “Yeah?”

  She smiled at him. “It’s starting to snow. I don’t have snow tires, so I should get to my car before the streets become too slick.”

  A drop of sweat ran down his back. He didn’t want this evening to end. Of course, he hadn’t gotten as much info as he wanted, but he also…didn’t want the evening to end. This was the nicest evening he’d spent in…shit. Since before the Gonzalez job, which had lasted a year. And before that had been Afghanistan. We were talking years, here.

  He relaxed his face. “I’ll drive you home, don’t worry. And I have snow tires and they’re brand-new. We can still have coffee. Or would you like a brandy?”

  Her eyes were so clear, it was like looking into limpid pools of water. That pale pink mouth tilted up. “That’s very nice of you to offer, but I’ll need my car tomorrow. So if you’ll just drive me back to the library, that’ll be fine.”

  With bad tires? Nick balked. No way.

  But that pretty, pointed little chin looked just a little stubborn so he couldn’t just say, Hell no, I’m not letting you drive home in lousy weather with the wrong tires. Much as he’d like to.

  He glanced out the window himself. The snow was falling more thickly now. He turned back to her.

  “Tell you what. I really like my java after a meal. Offer me a cup of coffee at your house and I’ll not only drive you home, but I’ll stop by in the morning, pick you up, and drive you back to the library.”

  She blinked. A moment of uncertainty.

  Nick was really good at finding even small chinks to make people do what he wanted. It was a gift and he’d had it forever. He leaned forward.

  “Please,” he said softly. “I really can’t stand the thought of you driving home alone in the dark in bad weather with the wrong tires. My mom drummed that sort of thing into my head and she’d turn over in her grave if I let you do it. And I’d just drive right behind you to make sure you got home safely, anyway, so you’d be doing me a big favor if you’d let me drive you home.”

  Charity gave a half laugh. “Well, if you put it that way….”

  “I do. And you just tell me when you want me to pick you up and drive you to the library to get your car tomorrow, and I’ll be there.”

  She shook her head, the soft dark-blond bell of her hair swinging and sending some shampoo scent full of pheromones his way. “Don’t you have things to do tomorrow?”

  He looked her straight in the eyes. “Not important things,” he said softly. “Not as important as this.”

  It was his first overt move. His meaning couldn’t have been clearer if he’d written it in Day-Glo letters on the wall. I’m putting the move on you.

  To her credit, Charity didn’t simper or blush or look away. She watched his eyes for a long moment, then finally spoke in a soft voice.

  “Okay.”

  Fucking A!

  Five

  I’m going to sleep with this man, Charity thought in bemusement. This New York businessman, this Nicholas Ames, whom she’d met for the first time today—she was going to go to bed with him.

  And not just in some vague moment in the future, after thinking about it endlessly, turning various scenarios over in her mind, they way she usually did, but tonight. Maybe. Probably.

  Not only had she never done anything like this in her life, she’d never even thought herself capable of it. Her roommate in college said she was incredibly picky, and she was. It sometimes took her weeks to decide whether she wanted to go to bed with someone, and if the man lost interest beforehand, too bad.

  Her last affair had been in college, after two months of dating, and it hadn’t been anything memorable. In fact, she couldn’t remember his face or even his name. Mickey. Mickey…something.

  It had been just before she was supposed to leave for Paris. A few days later, a distraught Uncle Franklin had called to say that Aunt Vera was ill, Charity’d rushed back to Parker’s Ridge, and that had been that. The new boyfriend—Mickey Whosit—had vanished into the ether, along with her trip to Paris.

  Her job, her aunt and uncle…since then, there hadn’t been time or energy for much more than that. Certainly not for love affairs.

  Slowly, so slowly she hadn’t noticed it happening, the world had closed in on her. The dull, gray world.

  It wasn’t dull and gray now. She felt as if she’d been shocked by a jolt of electricity that had awakened all her senses. Her skin was so sensitized that she could feel the movements in the air when Nick moved his hands, when the waiter walked by. She was aware of every item of clothing she had on. She was aware of her lace panties biting slightly into her hips, the feel of her thigh-highs, her bra rubbing against her sensitized nipples.

  When he looked at her, it was as if he touched her with his hands. Those big, rough, well-manicured hands so at odds with his profession.

  The world was saturated with color. The flames from the huge fire in the dining room painted the left side of Nick’s face a dusky rose. His black hair gleamed a shiny ebony, his eyes were such a searing blue. He had the most beautiful male mouth she’d ever seen. Firm, mobile, a rich red. Redder, after he started flirting with her. It had been fascinating, watching him watching her.

  There was no doubt that she turned him on. The blue fire in his eyes as he looked at her was like a punch to the stomach.

  What had been amazing was that she felt the desire right back. It was then that Charity realized that she’d been living in a little glass bell of sadness, in a world leached of color and desire.

  They were at the door. Somehow, between getting her coat for her and helping her into it, he must have paid the check, because they just walked right out of Da Emilio’s.

  Nick stopped just under the eaves and looked down at her, frowning. “They wouldn’t let me pay for dinner,” he said, in an annoyed tone.

  She sighed. “I thought that might happen. They never let me pay, either. And so of course I try not to come too often. Pity, because the food is so very good.”

  He reached out a big hand and stroked her cheek with the back of his forefinger. “I think you bewitched them,” he said, that deep roug
h voice suddenly soft. “I understand completely.”

  “No.” Charity fought against the urge to rub her cheek against his hand, much as Aunt Vera’s cat Folly did when someone scratched her head. “I think it’s more a question of adoption than enchantment.”

  An errant snowflake fell on her cheek and she looked up. Big fat lazy flakes were drifting out of the inky night sky, seeming to come from nowhere. She lifted her face into the night and breathed deeply, completely content.

  Nick seemed to shake himself. He looked up at the sky and back at her and tugged his scarf off. “Here.” Before she could protest, he’d wrapped it around her neck twice. “It’s turning chilly. And as pretty as that coat is, it doesn’t look quite warm enough.”

  The scarf was a deep midnight blue, very soft. Cashmere, triple ply. It still carried his body heat and the scent of him–a primal scent, male musk and pine, with a faint overlay of citrus.

  “There.” He knotted it tightly, patted it, and stepped back, pleased. “That’s better.”

  Actually, it was. She’d felt the chill and hadn’t been dressed warmly enough. “Thank you, but now you’re going to be cold,” she protested.

  He just looked at her. But it was a look that spoke volumes. It was the kind of look men didn’t give women anymore. She recognized it as the look her father had given her mother when she tried to lift something heavy and he rushed to take it out of her hands.

  It was the look only a certain kind of man could give to a woman and she hadn’t seen it in a long, long time. A totally politically incorrect look, sexy as hell.

  Nick had almost ridiculously old-fashioned manners. He walked her to the passenger door, handed her in as if she were indeed the queen of Parker’s Ridge—maybe she should just buy herself a tiara and be done with it—buckled her belt for her, then got in himself.