The Dangerous Boxed Set

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Finally, Drake’s muscles relaxed, felt like water as he lay half over her, one hand cupping her mound, one hand cupping her head. She released his cock finally.

  Their breathing slowed, evened out.

  “Well, that worked,” she finally whispered.

  Drake could barely lift his head.

  He rarely felt wiped out after sex. If anything, it energized him. But right now, lifting his head to give her a quick kiss seemed to be the most he could hope for. God help him when they could finally make love. It would probably kill him.

  Ah, well. You had to go some time.

  They lay like that, not asleep, not awake, as the room slowly filled with late-morning light. It was the first time Drake could ever remember when he hadn’t started the day early, with specific business plans. His big plan right now was to keep Grace in bed with him, making sure she got used to being naked with him, until her skin smelled of his.

  He’d try again to fuck her, just as soon as he could move.

  See if she loosened up a little, so he wouldn’t panic at the thought of hurting her when he entered her. It would happen, he just didn’t know when.

  His head had come to rest against hers on the pillow, his lips close to the skin of her neck. Much too beautiful to resist. He moved forward the inch necessary to kiss her, breathing in deeply. He could smell her skin and his. The scent of their sex was unlike any other he’d smelled.

  Grace’s hand dropped from his shoulder, making a faint plop sound as it fell to the mattress. “Drake, I think real sex is going to be too much for me. I’m not too sure I can handle it.”

  He breathed in and out, slowly. Every single muscle felt lax, like water. His mind was completely empty, no thoughts at all. Only sensations, all connected with her. the feel of her silky skin under his fingertips. The scent of her skin, the sound of her breathing.

  He’d traveled the world, racking up more air miles than any pilot possibly could. He’d lived in eight countries, was intimately familiar with fifteen more.

  This was an entirely new country for him, a new, completely unfamiliar landscape.

  He didn’t know if he could handle sex with her, either, but he was willing to try. His cock, ten minutes after an explosive orgasm, twitched at the thought. His fingers knew how she felt inside and now his cock was jealous.

  You’ll get your turn, Drake wanted to tell it—and then thought that he was going crazy, talking to his own penis.

  He wanted to lift his head, reassure her, but he didn’t have the energy. It was the oddest lassitude. Not the frightening weakness of being wounded. He’d been weak from blood loss only a few times and it was terrifying. When he was weak, he was instant prey.

  No, this was different. His muscles weren’t weak, they were…relaxed.

  How odd a feeling.

  Grace’s stomach growled, loudly. Drake laughed into her neck. “I guess I know what you want. And right now, it appears that sex isn’t it.”

  He could feel the slight shift in the air as she smiled. “To tell you the truth, breakfast sounds good right about now.”

  He’d already ordered it. Trays would be waiting on a trolley outside the bedroom door.

  Drake lifted his head. “Something tells me it’s ready. Stay right where you are.”

  The weakness disappeared instantly. Grace needed food. Just the thought of her being uncomfortable—God, hungry—in his home, was enough to energize him. He rolled out of bed naked, making for the door, then heard a soft noise behind him.

  Drake turned. She was up on one elbow, staring, mouth slightly open. Her hair was tousled, falling in soft locks over her shoulders. One lock, delightfully, had fallen to encircle one nipple, now not cherry red and diamond hard but soft and pale.

  An enchantress that had been tumbled and would be tumbled again.

  Her eyes widened and he didn’t have to look down to see what was shocking her. He could feel it. His cock rising, lengthening, thickening. Color rose in her cheeks and her nipples turned a deeper pink. His cock rose higher on a thick pulse of blood at the sight. A vein pounded in her neck, bringing the blood that now flushed brightly down to her breasts. Breasts he’d touched, kissed. At the memory, his balls tightened, drew up while his cock burned.

  They were seducing each other across ten feet of space.

  Her stomach growled again. “Food,” she said weakly.

  “Food,” he agreed, turning back around.

  Ten

  Fifty thousand dollars. So much, for so little. Andrew Peters, born Andrei Petrov, continued peeling potatoes while thinking it through.

  Peeling potatoes as the kitchen commis was not where he wanted to be, in his tenth year out of cooking school. By rights, he should have been the chef, or at least the sous-chef, in a decent restaurant, socking money aside for his own place.

  And he knew exactly what he wanted. He’d had his eye on the place for a while. A small place, a thousand square feet, in Chelsea. It would be decorated like the dining room in Tolstoy’s town mansion, serving pre-Revolutionary Franco-Russian haute cuisine, what the czars and barons ate before the Soviet monsters came and ransacked Mother Russia.

  The Petrovs had been aristocracy in St. Petersburg, the family fortune and nearly all the family members wiped out by Stalin.

  But books and photographs had somehow survived the monsters, ah yes, and had come down to the last Petrov. Andrei had an entrée into the lives of his forebears. Though he read the books and pored over the photographs in a small room with plyboard walls which hid nothing his drunken neighbors said or did, though he lived in a small, cramped fourth-floor walk-up in Brighton Beach, that wasn’t his life. His life was in another place and another time. In his imagination, Andrei was Prince Petrov, a grandee in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg.

  He lived on Nevsky Prospekt in a palatial Italianate mansion, which had been his great-great-grandfather’s town house. As a young boy, before his parents emigrated, he used to stand in the street, small hands clutching the bars of the elaborate wrought-iron fence guarding the building, and imagine that the building now housing the state archives was still his. The mansion of Prince Petrov.

  He knew every detail of his great-great-grandfather’s life. The number of servants, the coaches and the horses, each horse with its own groom. The social calendar filled with balls and concerts and parties. The elaborate meals with fifty guests eating off the one-thousand-piece gold-trimmed set of Limoges china.

  And the food! He’d come across a set of menus for meals during the Christmas season of 1904 and his boy’s mind swam with the grandeur of it all. Borscht and kvass, kholodets, pelmeny, twenty different types of pirozhki, kebabs from woodland game hunted on Petrov land, sudak fished from the well-stocked ponds of the country dascha. Fruits and berries collected by the serfs, an enormous Sharlotka carried in on a two-foot-long silver serving tray borne by four servants. Washed down by the finest imported French champagne. Fifty guests, one hundred servants.

  Andrei’s young heart thrilled at the images. Russia’s finest, at the Petrov table by candlelight, a quartet playing Mozart on the balcony overlooking the immense mirrored dining hall, an army of servants in livery, quietly serving the ton.

  His parents applied to emigrate to Amerika when he was eleven, and he thought yes, perhaps Amerika would be the place where he would make his money and return in triumph to Russia, where the Petrovs would take their rightful place amongst the rich and mighty.

  It didn’t turn out that way. Andrei’s father, an engineer, could only find work as a cab driver, working fourteen hours a day for a company that paid him a pittance. Andrei’s mother developed breast cancer and the two Petrov men watched helplessly as she died a fast, painful death.

  When they buried her, his father died, too, except his body. He could barely work with his grief. So it was all on him—on Andrei, now Andrew. His shoulders had to bear the burden of the Petrovs.

  He’d had such huge dreams of returning to the motherland, dre
ams with the solid feel of destiny to them. A Petrov picking up after seventy years of the barbarity of the Soviets. Yet with each passing year, as he grew taller, the plans grew smaller, shrinking steadily, until he was reduced to applying for aid to enroll in a second-rate cooking school.

  It might have been his way out. A quick rise through the ranks, a few years at the top. Celebrity chefs could pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary and millions in sponsorships. But not him.

  He’d been interviewing for the lowly job of garde manger, the fucking pantry supervisor, in a third-rate restaurant in Rockaway, when he’d heard of a job opening for a Russian speaker. In Manhattan, the heart of fine cuisine. And it paid three times the going salary.

  It was a good job, in a superbly well-equipped kitchen, but his talents went unnoticed. Well, what could he expect? He was cooking for Russian thugs. Men who knew the best gun to use in a firefight, but who had no clue how to judge the fineness of crepes or the smooth consistency of a good béchamel. Or even appreciate the fine porcelain they ate on or the heavy crystal of the glasses they drank out of.

  Andrei wouldn’t have cared one way or the other, except that they spoke the language he worshipped. The language of his forefathers. The language of Pushkin and Tolstoy and Yevteshenko.

  Only this wasn’t the Russian he’d been taught by his parents. The language the thugs spoke was rough, ungrammatical, provincial, the Russian of illiterate goons. Gutter Russian, fit only for guttersnipes.

  Yet the money was so good, he was forced to stay, even though every day was an assault on his senses, another day amongst the barbarians. He considered it a form of indentured servitude, the exorbitant salary he could never hope to duplicate elsewhere, like a noose around his neck, slowly choking him.

  He studied his surroundings, seeking a way out. He was a prince among swine. It went without saying that he could outwit them all.

  The kitchen fed forty-five men twice daily, like a small restaurant. It was also open whenever necessary, as men came and went at all hours of the day and the night. The food was copious, fresh and good, without any attempt at sophistication. After a week in the kitchen, Andrei realized that any decent housewife could do what he did. Only it had to be in Russian, since almost the entire staff was Russian or Ukrainian.

  He worked for a mystery man everyone called Drake. Andrei knew very little about him and no one talked, ever. The closest Andrei could come to information on Drake was a friendship with the butler, a Russian-Ukrainian called Shota. Shota was fanatically faithful to Drake, though Andrei couldn’t understand why. The mystery man kept to himself on the top story of the building, rarely interacting with the staff except through intercom messages.

  It wasn’t until Andrei had spent a couple of months working for Drake that he understood that he was working for an international criminal, one of the most powerful men in the world. A frisson had run up his spine. Surely there would be a way to use this information. An enemy to sell information to.

  It wasn’t easy, because this Drake was mysterious as hell. It was an impregnable fortress up above, the domain of a powerful, untouchable ruler. Very few people knew Drake’s comings and goings. The man was like smoke—impossible to grasp, impossible to pin down.

  And then Andrei had two strokes of good luck. Fabulous luck, actually. Shota developed a crush on him, and a Russian came to Drake as a friend and left as an enemy.

  Shota was easy to lead on. He was a romantic, and was deliriously happy with soulful looks and stolen kisses in the pantry. Andrei had no interest whatsoever in fucking Shota, but he did want to string him along as much as possible. It was through Shota that he learned that Drake disappeared two Tuesday afternoons a month. It was through Shota that he learned that Drake was buying the entire production of an artist called Grace Larsen. Finding the gallery that sold Grace Larsen had been a snap. He waited in a coffee shop across the street on the right Tuesday afternoons and—voilà!—the mysterious Drake, slinking in an alley.

  Hard info on a billionaire running a crime empire was worth money, big money, but you had to find a buyer for it. Then he overheard that a Russian was offering fifty thousand dollars for information on Drake. None of Drake’s men was willing to cross their dangerous boss for half a year’s salary. But then none of Drake’s men had any ambitions, other than to be a thug for hire.

  Andrei did.

  There was a Hotmail account. It had all been so easy.

  If you want information on Drake, transfer $50,000 to this bank account.

  The response, and the fifty-thousand-dollar payment, had come fast. Someone wanted the information badly. Andrei had sent the information and the money went into his savings account.

  For a sweaty couple of hours after the attempt on Drake’s life, Andrei expected a tap on the shoulder and—well, fuck, Drake was a mobster, after all—two bullets through the back of the head, Soviet style. But as the hours ticked by, Andrei’s hands steadied and the sweat along his spine dried. His exquisitely sensitive antenna told him that no one suspected him. He was a sous-chef, a kitchen servant, off everyone’s radar.

  The BlackBerry in his chef’s pants vibrated. Andrei took a bathroom break and checked the screen.

  $100,000 for further information.

  Andrei’s breathing speeded up, his heart raced. One hundred thousand dollars—100K per pop. Oh yes, this was it, his moment. In a day, maybe two, he could accumulate more money than in a lifetime of working hard in shit jobs in other people’s kitchens.

  He was smart. He could feed the information in tiny incremental bits, string this Rutskoi along. In a couple of days, Andrei could have five hundred thousand dollars. Maybe more.

  Five hundred thousand dollars would allow his father to retire, would allow Andrei to open up Troika with enough style to guarantee its success. This was opportunity knocking at the door, what everyone said would happen in Amerika. All he had to do was answer.

  OK, he typed into the tiny keyboard. He combed his long blond hair, dabbed some Hugo Boss cologne on his pulse points and went off looking for Shota.

  Though Grace was starving and though her stomach was making embarrassing noises, it was hard to keep her mind on food with Drake walking naked across a room.

  The man was simply magnificent. There were no words to describe him. Luckily, Grace didn’t need words. Her artist’s eye told her everything she needed to know.

  She’d studied human anatomy all her life. During art school, she’d drawn literally thousands of human backs, but had never seen anything like the musculature of Drake’s back. It was immensely broad, rippling with muscle, tapering to a lean waist. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. It almost looked as though he didn’t have any skin, either, the muscles underlying it were so prominent. Clothed, he was impressive. Naked, he looked lethal. The pristine white bandage over the enormous ball of his left shoulder looked almost like a decoration. It was impossible to think that he’d taken a bullet only the day before. He looked completely fit and moved with utter ease, like a huge panther.

  It was hard to imagine what kind of exercises he put himself through to maintain a body like that. Bodybuilding exercises pumped muscles up, made them rise. These weren’t built muscles: they looked…forged. Out of iron and steel.

  He didn’t move like a bodybuilder, either, with that muscle-bound waddle they developed. No, he moved like water, smoothly flowing across the floor, like a force of nature.

  She remembered the feel of him in her arms. Amazing. Like holding a warm, perfectly proportioned rock. No, that wasn’t the right analogy. Though he’d been hard as stone, what had come through her fingertips had been life. As if the man had a greater proportion of life force in him than others. She’d felt her fingers sizzle with electricity when she touched him, a connection to something almost superhuman.

  Everything about him was outsize. His physique, his fighting ability, his…wow. Yeah, that was outsize, too. Grace didn’t have that much experience with male me
mbers, but even so, she understood that she’d just held a champ in her hand.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like sex, it was just that sex involved men, and a goodly portion of them turned out to be unlikeable jerks. She’d tried, she really had. Done her best to relax, go with the flow, all the other clichés, but she never quite managed it.

  With Drake relaxation hadn’t been a problem. Her muscles had turned to mush. All he had to do was touch her, and her entire body softened for him.

  Drake opened the door and walked back to her, pushing an enormous trolley carrying covered plates, cups, cutlery, a Thermos. She could smell the rich aroma of coffee, buttery croissants and juicy meat from across the room.

  Grace sat up against the headboard cross-legged, pulling the sheet up under her arms, covering her chest. Drake parked the trolley next to the bed and poured two cups of steaming coffee from the Thermos.

  He held a cup out to her, while the other hand tugged down the sheet. “Don’t cover yourself up,” he said softly. “You’re much too beautiful.”

  She could have put up a fight, but of course it would have been ridiculous, thinking she could win a tussle against Drake. She was naturally modest. Even in the locker room, the few times she made it to the gym, she preferred dressing in the toilet cubicles. Not out of prudery, but out of shyness.

  Which, clearly, had taken a hike, because she let him tug down the sheet without a murmur. It might have been the molten heat in his eyes that convinced her to just let go of the sheet instead of clutching it to her. No one had ever looked at her like that, like he wanted to eat her up and was restraining himself with difficulty.