by Rose, Emery
Her mouth opened and closed. “You said my job was safe if I…” She changed tactics, running her tongue over her dark purple lips and fluttering her eyelashes in a way that was pathetic rather than sexy. Angel made me want to fucking cry and I wanted her gone but not before I tried to help her. “Look at you, Kosta. You are a woman’s dream. Take me with you. I’ll do whatever you ask.”
I shook my head. “You’re not coming with me. You’re spending the weekend with your daughter.”
“But Dmitri said I am with you. I don’t understand.”
“Do you like your job?” That made a difference. If she loved it, then that’s what she should be doing, but I got the feeling that she didn’t. She needed to snort coke and drink champagne to get through the night. It was no fucking way to live.
She shrugged her shoulder. “I don’t have to like it. That’s not so important.”
“You just need the money,” I stated flatly.
“Yes. And it’s not so easy to find a job that pays the bills, you know. I want my daughter to have the good things in life.”
Yeah, I’d heard this before. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. Aw, shit. She pulled a pack of tissues from her purse and wiped her eyes. I waited for her to pull herself together, not making a move to comfort her.
“What did you want to be before you had your daughter?”
“A nurse,” she said with no hesitation.
Nurse Angel. “Are you good with kids?”
She smiled. “I think so, yes. They love me.”
“I might be able to help you find a different job. Would you like that?”
“Why are you doing this for me?” she asked, and I got the feeling that nobody had ever done something nice for her.
Because nobody did it for my mother. “I want you to go home and spend time with your daughter. I’ll take care of Dmitri. You have nothing to worry about.”
She leaned over and kissed my cheek. Her perfume was flowery and overpowering and I’d have to drive with all the windows down to rid my car of her scent. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And Angel…this is just between us,” I added.
She nodded gravely. “I will never breathe a word,” she said as if I’d just entrusted her with a State secret and she would rather die than divulge it.
She hopped out of the SUV and I watched her walk away, wondering what the hell had possessed me to play good Samaritan. But I knew the answer. I called my sister Abby, the queen of lost causes, and put her on speaker as I pulled away from the curb, Hamptons bound.
After apologizing to Abby for the radio silence and listening to her rant, I told her about Angel. She sighed loudly. “I’m not the Unemployment Office.” I heard her fingers tapping on the keyboard. Abby was a lawyer and she had a lot of good contacts, specifically wealthy friends and clients who were always looking for a nanny.
“Okay, good,” I said as if she’d just agreed to find Angel a job. “I’ll leave it in your capable hands.”
“You owe me.”
“Add it to the list. One of these days, I’ll make good on it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Mom’s worried about you. She says you haven’t called in months.”
“Tell her I’m alive and well.”
“Keep it that way.”
“Listen, Abs, this has to be confidential. And when you find a suitable position for Angel, maybe give her a few wardrobe tips.” I winced, envisioning Angel’s tight dresses and sky-high heels.
“Jesus H Christ, Deacon. I’m not a miracle worker.”
“Yes, you are. I have faith in you.”
With that, I cut the call and texted Angel’s contact details to Abby, my good deed done for the day, albeit through my sister. Like me, Abby had been a foster kid before she was adopted at four. Unlike me, she had excelled at school, gotten straight A’s, and was pretty much the model child with a clear plan for her future. She was an Ivy League graduate, worked for a prestigious law firm, and lived in a doorman building on the Upper East Side but the money and designer clothes hadn’t turned her into a snob. Abby never forgot where she came from.
* * *
I’d need a new liver when this assignment ended. Everyone was still sleeping off last night’s vodka and debauchery as I swam laps in the Olympic-sized pool behind the colossal Bridgehampton McMansion. It was day three of this boondoggle and I felt like I was living in a reality TV show. The Russian version of Big Brother. Which was as crazy as you would imagine.
I heard my name being called as my head came out of the water. I swam to the end of my lane and gripped the edge of the pool, watching Dmitri as he crossed the lawn. A beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, sporting his morning wood in a Speedo. Jesus Christ. I was too intimately acquainted with this man’s junk. Who the fuck wore Speedos? Flashy Russian drug and arms dealers, that’s who.
Two girls from Dmitri’s harem, a redhead and a bleached blonde, trailed after him—in string bikinis, full makeup, fake tans, and heels. They were paid by the hour, in cash and coke, and were carrying platters of fruit and croissants and a carafe of coffee like they were making an offering to the gods.
Fasten your seatbelts for another day in Paradise.
“You could get used to this life. No, Kosta?”
Fuck no. I grinned and fed him a lie, just like I’d been doing for months now. I was a smooth liar. Too smooth sometimes. “Beats working for a living.”
He laughed, his head thrown back like I’d just told the mother of all jokes. Then he ordered the redhead to drop her swimsuit bottoms and bend over. She did as he asked. Without batting an eye, she touched her toes, her ass in the air and her murky brown eyes on me. Dmitri smacked her ass cheek with the palm of his hand, the sound shattering the peace and quiet I’d sought out. Once. Twice. Three times for good measure. She wrapped her hands around her ankles to stop herself from toppling over as he continued his assault.
“I’m going to fuck your ass so hard you won’t be able to walk for weeks,” he snarled, fisting his cock.
“Do it,” she moaned, sounding like a B-grade porn star as she fingered her pussy and simulated the sounds of someone in the throes of passion. It was as fake as her tits.
I dove under the water to muffle the sounds of poolside anal, her screams and his grunts that polluted the rarified air of a summer’s day in one of America’s most expensive playgrounds. I swam underwater to the opposite end of the pool, putting as much distance between myself and the porn show as possible. If breathing wasn’t essential, I’d stay underwater until this weekend getaway was over. When my head surfaced, the bleached blonde was waiting for me, topless and holding out a towel, her plastic tits in my face as I levered myself out of the pool and walked right past her.
She trotted after me, tits bouncing and her spiky heels making divots in the manicured lawn. Dmitri’s roar bounced off the glass panes of the French doors as I slipped inside, shutting out the sound and the blonde as I dripped water across the tiled floors of the chef’s kitchen. The air conditioning was set to Arctic temperatures, a nod to Dmitri’s Siberian roots and his glacial heart.
I needed to go for a run and wash my eyes out with bleach. I wanted warmth and sunlight and fresh sea air. Silky-smooth, honeyed skin and whiskey-colored eyes. Pouty pink lips that weren’t collagen-injected. I wanted Keira. With her, I could be Deacon, not Kosta.
11
Keira
Maybe this was what people referred to as the honeymoon phase. Those glorious, golden days when you begin to discover all the little things that make a person who they are. The more you learn, the harder you fall until you start to wonder how you ever got through life without seeing their smile, hearing their voice, and breathing the same air.
Feeling this way about Deacon was not altogether welcome. I didn’t want to fall in love with him. I didn’t want to be like my mother, a bird with clipped wings confined to a gilded cage. Maybe with Deacon it would be different, but I had too many daddy issues to trust my he
art to make a good decision.
Anyway, we were just getting to know each other so it wasn’t love. Maybe it was the prelude to love, when you’re falling, and the feeling is so delicious and delirious you don’t try to stop yourself from falling.
Sasha and I had skipped this courting ritual. I’d never experienced that fluttery feeling in my stomach or those feel-good endorphins that flooded my body when Deacon was near me. Sasha was too cold and too cruel, and I was too selfish and too rebellious. We guarded our hearts fiercely and had mastered the art of self-preservation. Back then, we fucked like the teenagers we were, with wild abandon, without intimacy or sweet words or foreplay. Maybe we thought we were too cool for all that or maybe we were not as fearless as we pretended to be. Just two beautiful people with ugly truths and fucked-up lives who were drawn to each other for reasons we never bothered to identify.
Over the past few weeks, I’d been thinking about Sasha a lot, trying to figure out what we had meant to each other and why were drawn to each other. He wasn’t always cold, and he wasn’t always cruel. He had charisma and charm that he turned on and off to suit his needs or on a whim. He was smart, too, with a razor-sharp wit and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. When he wasn’t plotting world domination, Sasha could also be funny and fun to hang out with. Sasha was easily bored and we both had the kind of restless energy that made us feel pent-up, in need of an outlet or escape. We intrigued each other, maybe, but I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me and that had made it all so much easier.
Losing Sasha crushed my soul. Loving him would have destroyed me.
Which brings me to Deacon.
Three weeks ago, he returned from his weekend getaway with sun-kissed skin that made his green eyes more vivid and his smile whiter. When he knocked on my door that Sunday night, he brought the scent of the sea and his disheveled sun-bleached hair and boyish charm into my apartment and took up residence in my heart like he belonged there. He had come bearing gifts—tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in a plastic grocery bag (our favorite flavors and a dark horse; chocolate and fudge with a marshmallow center) and a fancy shopping bag filled with sea glass nestled in tissue paper. They were all different shades of blue, from dusky to midnight, the same hue of that weird, lonely time before sunrise. I poured the tumbled gems into a glass bowl and set them on the coffee table. We ate our ice cream on my balcony, and he thought it was funny that I liked my grapes frozen but my ice cream soupy. We talked for hours about nothing and everything. He was fun and witty and charming and if I hadn’t known it before, I knew it then. I liked him. A lot. And being with him made me happy.
He told me that he had missed me and when I asked him what he missed about me he said, “Your twenty-three pillows.”
Turned out he did use hyperboles. There were only eight pillows on my bed. So we were both liars.
Two weeks ago, he left a bunch of bananas on my kitchen counter as a joke. I left them there, uneaten, until the skin turned brown and my whole kitchen smelled like bananas before I tossed them in the trash.
Last week, we watched the final innings of a baseball game on TV. I was bored out of my skull. Don’t even ask me which teams were playing. I fed him watermelon sprinkled with salt and chili with a squeeze of lime, introducing him to a whole new flavor sensation. He gave me two orgasms. The baseball game wasn’t so bad, after all.
Now he was standing in my kitchen in faded jeans and a plain white T, looking more gorgeous than any man had a right to. His tan hadn’t faded, and it made me wonder what exactly he did all day. The silver blade of the chef’s knife I never used flashed in a blur as he chopped vegetables for the salad. While he was busy cooking our late-night dinner—lemon garlic chicken and couscous, his specialty—I was busy trying to protect my heart. I imagined his hands reaching inside my chest and massaging the beating organ until he changed the rhythm of my heartbeat.
I told myself that my heart was safe. I wasn’t in love. Maybe a little bit infatuated. And this was not a relationship. But I couldn’t deny that I missed him on the nights he didn’t come over and I wondered what he did and who he was with when he wasn’t with me.
I took a sip of my chilled white wine and stared at the flex of his muscles and the delicious veins in his forearm as he wielded the knife. He caught me watching and grinned like he knew what I was thinking.
So I stared at his face in profile instead and the view was just as glorious.
Jesus. This was bad. So, so bad. And we hadn’t even had sex yet.
Why haven’t we had sex yet?
“Where did you learn to cook?” I was aiming for a diversion and, also, I was curious. I’d never learned how to cook, nor had I ever had the interest. In Miami, we had a chef, Raoul, and a housekeeper, Rosa. When I was little, Rosa was also my nanny. My mother didn’t work. She didn’t cook, clean, or take care of me either. Her sole purpose in life had been to keep my father happy. Apparently, that had been a full-time job.
“My mom,” Deacon said. I knew now that he called Faye Ramsey ‘Mom,’ but sometimes I had to remind myself that he wasn’t talking about the woman who had given birth to him. “She never actually taught us. She gave us free rein to experiment in the kitchen. Growing up, my sister Abby and I cooked dinner once a week. Abby always set out to create a culinary masterpiece. My meals were hit or miss. I was more interested in working on my knife skills.” To demonstrate, he beheaded a red pepper and diced it in two seconds flat.
I laughed. “Show-off. Are you sure you don’t need help?”
I was just sitting on a stool like a lump, being of no help whatsoever, too busy being infatuated to do anything useful.
“I could use some help but not with the cooking.”
My eyes lowered to the zipper of his jeans. He chuckled. “Dirty girl. I need some plates. And you can set the table.”
“Huh.” I got him two plates from the cupboard and collected utensils, napkins and placemats for the table. I had recently acquired a glass table and four upholstered chairs from Connor and Ava’s apartment. I’d insisted that I wouldn’t use a dining table and chairs and they’d be better off putting it on eBay, but Ava had ignored me so now I was making good use of it.
By the time I set the table, our late-night dinner was ready, and we carried our plates of food and the wooden salad bowl into the dining area and sat across from each other at the table.
“This is amazing,” I said, shoveling another forkful of chicken and couscous into my mouth. “So much better than my Ramen and ready meals.”
“You set the bar high. Not sure how I topped that.”
I laughed and took a sip of wine while The Smiths sang about a double-decker bus crashing into us and the rain pelted the metal table and chairs outside my open glass doors. It smelled like summer rain and possibility. And sex. I had sex on the brain. Idly, I thought that I wouldn’t mind dying by his side. That was how far gone I was.
It felt like we were cocooned in our own little world, cut off from everything and everyone but reality was right outside our door.
“Do all undercover cops live like this? Cut off from family and friends?” I asked as he rinsed, and I loaded the dishwasher.
“Depends on the assignment.”
“Would you get in trouble if they found out you were hanging out with me?” I loaded the last of our dinner dishes and leaned my hip against the door to close it. He grabbed my ass and pulled me flush against his body.
“It’s not me I worry about. I always make sure I’m not being followed. To your place,” he clarified, his lips moving to my neck. “A couple times I didn’t come over. Thought better of it.”
“Do you ever get scared?”
He shrugged. “There’s always the fear that I’ll get made. That some guy I busted before is going to recognize me and rat me out. So far, I’ve been lucky. My worlds haven’t collided.”
So far.
Hanging out with an undercover cop wasn’t a lot different from being with a criminal. I wondered
what it meant that of all the guys I could have gone for, I had chosen him. One of the good guys, doing a dangerous job. Maybe that was the appeal. The hint of danger.
He skimmed his hands over my stomach, dragging the material of my T-shirt up and over my head. He tossed it on the floor and unhooked my bra with one hand. Sliding the straps down my arms, he cupped my breast and squeezed the nipple between his thumb and forefinger. My body heated and my eyes fluttered shut, a gasp escaping my mouth.
“Since this is a fling…” I said. “I think we should get this out of our system.”
“A fling, huh?”
“Mmhmm.”
He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my cotton shorts and tugged them down with my underwear. They pooled at my ankles and he lifted me up, my legs cinching around his waist as he carried me, our lips locked in a kiss. I was naked and he was fully clothed and that seemed unfair.
Deacon tossed me onto the bed and my back hit the mattress. He reached for the back of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head, and I pushed myself up on my elbows to watch him undress in the dim shadows of my room.
“You think sex will help us get each other out of our system?” he asked.
“Yes,” I lied, taking in the view of his naked body. Golden skin stretched over bone and muscle. I’d never given much thought to penises before and had never considered them beautiful but his was. Straight and long and thick, the skin smooth and velvety. I’d never wanted to go down on anyone before but with him, I had wanted to do it.
He knelt over me, his hands pressing my legs apart as his mouth lowered to my center.
“Do you want this?”
Oh God. Yes. I wanted everything he had to give me.
I lifted my hips, trying to reach him, but Deacon’s hands clamped over my thighs and held me down.
My hands found their way to his blond head, and it took all my self-control not to shove his face between my legs. A plea left my lips and he began to devour me. He licked and tugged and sucked at my clit until I was arching up and writhing against him. And when one finger slid inside me, I knew I couldn’t wait anymore. I needed him to fill me up inside, to give me something he’d been denying me for weeks.
