Forbidden Desires

by Jenna Hartley

  I peeled off my clothes with my mind on Joel and the whirl of thoughts and feelings that accompanied him. He was like a hurricane, a force of nature, and I found myself swept up in him. It was strange, I thought as I tested the water streaming from the shower head, that I would be caught up in someone else. I’d always considered myself the strongest in every relationship I’d been in, requiring some level of submission strictly because of my ability to convince the other that it was necessary. It wasn’t conscious, that drive, but I’d never met a man so wholly like me in that regard. And now that I had, I reveled in riding in the currents of him without having to dominate, in closing my eyes and just letting go.

  Chapter 18

  THE BEAR AND THE FOX

  * * *

  Joel

  * * *

  I SAT AT MY DESK the next afternoon, working on the ledgers as I waited for my next client. The music was on, the shop running as it normally did, before the show at least, before Annika. It was strange, having Stone Temple Pilots playing after days of silence in the shop when we filmed. It was stranger still not having seen Annika all day.

  She’d been working on interviews upstairs in the green room across from her office, and my artists had taken turns heading upstairs to talk to her. And I’d worked down here, tattooing and sketching, working on the ledgers when I could. My decoder lay next to the open ledger, a little crinkled and dirty after being handled so much over the last few days. But she had been right — I was starting to recognize the numbers that looked so much like letters, and what I found was strange.

  I checked my numbers again, comparing them to the key to make sure I had them right. But I did, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  I slipped the paper into the ledger I’d been working on and closed it when my next client arrived, going through the motions of greeting and transferring and needles and ink, though my mind was on Annika all the while.

  The night before had been strangely lonely without her. It took me a long time to fall asleep, and I woke up earlier than usual, anxious to get downstairs to see her, even though I knew we wouldn’t really see each other today. I held onto the thought that I’d see her tonight, that she’d stay the night, that I’d wake up with her in the morning. But it wasn’t enough to make the clock move faster, and the minutes seemed to tick by, mocking me with every jump of the second hand.

  I was the last to be interviewed, and I climbed the stairs to the control room, trying not to feel giddy. But I was. I felt fifteen years younger than I was, before I knew how hard life could be, when I still had hope in the idea that I’d be happy forever. I felt like nothing could hurt me, nothing could touch me, because I had her. Nothing bad could happen if I had her.

  We shared a smile when I walked in, the relief at breathing her air almost tangible between us. She seemed lighter too, smiling more, happier. The ice had melted, and I’d found spring underneath, sprouting green and smelling of gardenia.

  She kept it all business, asking questions that I answered readily, never pressing or pushing for more as I suspected she might. I’d been prepared for it — I’d told her to do her job, and I wanted her to. Within reason. But I was willing to bend, to give her something she could use as long as it wouldn’t hurt me, and I’d redefined the perimeters of what I’d take offense to.

  Once we were finished, the filming crew broke up and dispersed, and I approached her chair as she flipped through the pages of her clipboard.

  I caught a glimpse of a drawing of a dick with a smirk and a beard, and I laughed.

  “Is that supposed to be me?”

  “If the shoe fits.”

  I took the clipboard from her and turned to the paper so I could inspect it, holding it out in front of me as I stroked my chin with my free hand. I shook my head as I handed it back.

  “My beard’s thicker than that.”

  She laughed freely, and I thought back to the time when I couldn’t even make her smile, never mind kick her head back and actually laugh.

  “So, I was working on the books today and found something … well, something I want to talk to you about. When are you finished here?”

  She glanced at her phone to check the time. “In just a bit. It’s an early night tonight — all we really had on the schedule were the interviews, and you were my last one.”

  “Good. I’m finished too. Meet me at my place.”

  Her smile held a spark of mischief. “I’ll be down in a few.”

  I smiled right back, hoping she knew I was thinking about how far down she’d go. Judging by the blush that spread across her cheeks, I figured she did.

  I left the green room, unwillingly catching the eye of Laney in her office. She nodded at me like she knew all my secrets as I passed, and I nodded right back, telegraphing that I didn’t think she knew shit. Then down the stairs I went and into my apartment, heading to the ledgers to look over my notes again.

  Shep had been staying at Ramona’s by my request, and he didn’t seem overly upset about staying gone. In fact, he didn’t seem at all unhappy, but excited at the prospect, taking a suitcase with him like he was moving out. It hit me a little sideways, seeing him leave so willingly, but with Annika filling his place so fully, I wasn’t at all sorry to watch him go.

  I was double checking the numbers on my hand-drawn line graph when she knocked on the door.

  “Come on in,” I called through the door, and she walked in, sucking all the air from the room with her.

  She was smiling, her cheeks rosy and eyes urgent as she closed the door behind her. I didn’t know when I stood, but I found myself moving across the room toward her. She met me half way.

  My hands were in her hair, my lips against hers without needing to command them, and she melted into me. I felt like I hadn’t seen her in a week, like I hadn’t kissed her in a year, like I hadn’t breathed in a lifetime. So I breathed, sipping the sweet smell of her into my nose, tasting her lips, touching her petal-soft skin.

  She hummed and broke away, looking up at me with smoldering eyes, smiling with her lips together and hands on my chest as she leaned into me.

  “I missed you too,” she said, her voice raspy and rough, and I laughed, brushing her cheek with my knuckles.

  “As much as I can’t wait to get you out of these clothes, I want to show you this first. Then I want to undress you slowly and get reacquainted.”

  She laughed. “You act like I didn’t see you yesterday.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t see you.”

  “But you saw me three times the day before that.”

  I brushed my lips against hers. “I want to see all of you, all the time.”

  Another laugh, and I smiled, pulling away before I saw her right then.

  “Come here,” I said, taking her hand to pull her toward the table. I picked up the graph and handed it to her, looking at it with her over her shoulder.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “So, this shows the cash sales of the dry cleaners by month, over the course of the last five years. Look at this.” I pointed to the peaks of the curve, happening every three months before dropping off like a heartbeat. “Every three months like clockwork, the cash flow skyrockets, then tapers off. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Annika didn’t respond — her eyes were locked on the paper, and she was still and quiet as stone. So I kept talking.

  “I was thinking that maybe they had a company they worked with, like uniform cleaning or something like that. Something that had them cleaning every three months. But it doesn’t make sense. Places like that already exist just for laundering, and those kinds of companies wouldn’t use cash, they’d use credit. There would be receipts or a trail, but this … this has nothing. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  She still didn’t respond, so I just kept talking to fill the silence, figuring she just didn’t understand quite what I meant.

  “Do you have any ideas? Because this goes back all the way to when they opened the sto
re. At some point in the late nineties, the cash would have dropped way off when people started using debit cards, but it doesn’t. It’s almost the exact same amount of money, every three months on the nose, like someone is dumping dirty money into the dry cleaners.” I chuckled at the thought.

  Her eyes were still on the paper as she stepped toward the table and pulled out a chair, sinking into it slowly.

  My brows dropped. “Annika? What’s the matter?”

  She swallowed. “I think I know what’s going on.” She set the page on the table and looked up at me, and the worry and anger in her eyes alarmed me. My jaw clenched.

  “Tell me.” I sat next to her, resting my elbows on my thighs as I leaned toward her.

  She nodded and took a breath. “They’re laundering money.”

  I blinked. “Are you serious? I was just kidding. Why the hell would that be your first guess?”

  “Because my uncle is in the Bratva.”

  More blinking as my mind raced to keep up. “As in the Russian mafia, Bratva?”

  Another nod. I ran a hand over my mouth, whispering a swear.

  “They can’t sell their business, Annika. When they have the business and books appraised, it’s going to be obvious that something’s going on. These numbers aren’t real.”

  She mumbled something angry in Russian, something that sounded like a curse.

  I rubbed my face again, trying to figure out what I could do to help, but before I could come up with anything, she stood and turned for the door, grabbing her bag.

  “I’ve got to go talk to them.”

  I stood and made to follow her. “I’ll go with you.”

  She shook her head and turned, laying her hand on my chest when I reached her. “No. I don’t want to drag you into this.”

  I gave her a look. “Nice try, princess. I’m coming with you.”

  “Why would they want to talk about money laundering with a stranger? There’s nothing you can do, Joel.” Her angry eyes bounced around my face, though I knew she wasn’t angry with me, just angry in general. Her hopes had been dashed, and she’d been duped.

  The absolute last thing I wanted was for her to leave me like that, to face it all alone. She could have handled it, I had no doubt. But I didn’t want her to be alone. I wanted to be there for her. So, I tossed the strongest excuses I could at her.

  I rested my hand over hers against my chest and clasped her fingers. “Sure, I can. First of all, I already know what’s going on — I’m the one who figured it out. And secondly, maybe someone was cooking the books for them and they didn’t know, in which case I can help explain it to them. I can answer their questions and help you come up with a plan for them.”

  She didn’t seem convinced.

  “Then I can take you home and fuck your brains out.”

  She laughed at that, the tension unraveling just enough to let me in.

  “Let me come with you. Let me be there with you.” The words were soft with my real reason for wanting to go, and I touched her face.

  She leaned in and looked up at me as her smile fell and the weight of the situation rested on her again. “All right.”

  I kissed her forehead. “Thanks.”

  “No, thank you. I’m sorry to have wasted your time with all this.”

  “It wasn’t a waste of time. Think of all that work we got done.”

  She chuckled, and we headed out as she texted her driver to pick us up from Habits down the street, opting to duck into the bar for a shot of fortitude.

  Within an hour, we pulled up to a row of red brick houses, each entry framed with a porch, with cheery yards and flower boxes on the rails. We thanked the driver and climbed out, and Annika fumed as we walked up the path to the door, walking in without knocking.

  I hung back on the porch for a second, not as comfortable barging into her parents’ house as she had been. She stopped a few steps in and turned when she realized I didn’t follow, motioning me in.

  I took a reluctant step across the threshold as she stormed toward the back of the house.

  “Papa? Mama?”

  Her father’s voice boomed from the kitchen, whatever he said beyond my comprehension as it was in Russian, a cheery sound, even when tinged with confusion.

  Annika responded as I caught up, her words biting and angry, faster than I could keep up with, not that I had any idea what she was saying.

  Her parents looked mildly confused, their confusion deepening when they saw me step into the room behind her. Her father asked a question, and Annika glanced over her shoulder at me, her anger softening by a degree.

  “Papa, this is Joel, a friend of mine,” she said in English.

  I extended a hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” I offered, not sure what else I could say, given the circumstance.

  He smiled, the big, jovial man with a slate gray beard and a newsboy cap on his head. The point of the visit seemed to be forgotten, though her mother wrung her apron between her fists, her lip between her teeth.

  “Ah, hello, my friend. I am Maxim, but my friends call me Max. And this is my wife, Dina.”

  She nodded, stepping forward to offer her hand. “Hello, Joel.”

  I took her hand and shook it. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  Max took a deep breath before opening his hands to us. “Now, come. Sit.”

  He shepherded us into their dining room where we sat at the long table, though Annika was ramrod straight as she took her seat, her lips a thin line. Max assessed her coolly from the head of the table and touched his wife’s hand where it rested on the surface.

  “Dina, I think maybe vodachka may be in order.”

  I must have looked confused because he smiled at me and winked.

  “Vodka.” The word was heavily accented, the sound of it so right for the drink, and I felt like a fraud for pronouncing it so crassly for the entirety of my life. “Vodka helps us solve all our most pressing problems. Yes, Annika?”

  “Yes, Papa,” she answered, but the word was perfunctory — she slung it at him as Dina entered the dining room with four small glasses and a bottle of Stolichynaya.

  Annika didn’t offer more, seeming to wait for her father to lead. But he didn’t say anything, not until we all had a glass in front of us.

  Max picked his up. “This is about our books, yes?” He took a sip.

  “You know very well this is about the books, Papa.”

  “And why did you bring your friend? I am happy to meet him, zvezda moya, but this is not something I wish to discuss with strangers.”

  “He’s not a stranger — he was helping me dig through your books, and I wouldn’t have accepted his help if we couldn’t trust him. And he’s the one who figured out you’ve been putting Andei’s cash through the store.”

  Dina and Max were very still.

  Her face hardened at their reaction. “So you did know. Did you think I wasn’t going to find out?” The flush climbed her neck, her cheeks, her eyes icy. “You can’t sell the business because it’s been involved in illegal activity since you started it. So, why? Why did you waste my time? And Joel’s? Why did you let me run a fool’s errand when you knew it was pointless to even consider selling?”

  Max didn’t answer right away, just drained his glass. No one else had touched theirs. When he set the glass down, he pressed his palms on the table, his eyes on his hands as he spoke.

  “I did not consider that we could not sell. Andrei had given us instructions, and I believed that we had done right to sift the money in.”

  “Done right? Papa, this is illegal. Don’t you understand? You could go to jail. They could have taken everything from us, and for what? Tell me, what did he give you to convince you to do this for him? To take such a risk?”

  His eyes were sad when he looked up at her, the same cold blue as hers, though his were tinged with wisdom and pain that hers couldn’t know. The depths of his were unfathomable, giving me a glimpse of his past that left me humbled.

&nb
sp; “Annika,” he said her name as a plea, soft and accented in the way it was meant to be spoken, “you must understand. Andrei saved me. He saved your mother and her sister. If not for him, we may never have had you. We may not have lived, trapped in Russia. You would not have the life we wanted for you, the life you have had. So, yes. When my brother came to my shop, the shop he helped me to build, with a bag of crisp money and instructions on how to help him, I did it without question. Because he gave me everything, and he is my brother. He loves us, and you, and I owe him all of our lives.”

  Annika didn’t respond as I sat there next to her, feeling like I didn’t belong, like I should have listened to her and stayed home. But I knew I’d made the right choice when I looked over and realized she didn’t speak because she couldn’t, not with the tears in her eyes and jaw clenched tighter than a steel trap. Whether they were angry or sentimental, I couldn’t know, but she picked up her glass and lifted it, tilting her chin as she poured the clear liquid down the hatch until it was gone.

  She took a breath. She let it out. And then, she spoke.

  “I don’t know how to help you, Papa. I don’t know if you can stop working, maybe not for years. There’s not enough in your retirement. There’s just not enough …” she trailed off, her voice smaller as she shook her head at her empty glass.

  “Then we will work,” Max said, and Dina picked up her glass with a sigh, tilting it to me almost imperceptibly, inviting me to do the same. I did, gratefully, feeling like an intrusion.

  “I don’t think you have a choice, Papa.”

  “I did not ask for a choice. That choice was your doing, zvezda moya.”

  She nodded, and I reached for the bottle of Stoli to refill her glass. A grateful smile was my thanks, and she took a sip, leaning back in her seat, looking defeated when she spoke.