His Kind Of Trouble

by Vivian Leiber

  That’s why she had picked this apartment building—no one would notice a single woman hiding out.

  She stood silent, resisting even the urge to push her blue-black hair back from her face. She listened with all her being, and counted footsteps.

  There were five of them, she realized, feeling a red-hot flush springing to her chest and neck. Her heart fluttered in her throat and she gulped a breath.

  Five of them.

  And they weren’t yuppies in dress shoes or loafers or high heels.

  These visitors wore boots. Heavy boots, but brought down on each step with care. They weren’t meant to be heard.

  There was another sound at the bottom of the stairs—a muttered order and then a single set of brisk footsteps coming up the four flights to her back door.

  If she reached for the phone, she knew she would be dead before the 911 operator even answered her call.

  She quickly calculated how many steps she needed to reach the kitchen counter. On top was her purse, where she kept the gun with a sevenround clip, one in the chamber.

  Eight bullets—but five intruders on the stairs.

  She didn’t like those odds and she started to back away, hoping the front door of her apartment wasn’t as carefully covered as the fire escape.

  A roar of gunfire from inside the mudroom. She heard the fire-escape door kick in and the splintering of the heavy oak.

  Tarini lunged for her black bag, spinning on her heel and tearing for the front door. Toppling the dining-room chairs behind her path. She lost precious seconds as she flipped the two dead bolts— behind her, she heard strong boots kick the door to the kitchen. They were gaining, and they wanted her. Badly. Splattering gunfire like a violent rain across her kitchen walls.

  She flung open the front door. Down the stairs, three at a time, taking four at each landing—jamming her hand in her purse for the gun as she ran. Like the set of keys that always landed at the bottom of the pile of junk, her handgun eluded her fingertips.

  Bullets tagged the wall scant inches from her head. Shell casings clattered at her feet.

  The lobby. If she could just get past the lobby. She could escape to the cover of darkest night— maybe even get that gun out of her purse.

  Enclosed in glass, the tiny lobby had just enough room for a pile of junk mail, a withered fern and a folded up baby carriage. She shoved open the security door to the lobby and tripped over a toy fire engine.

  Straight into strong, muscular arms.

  She screamed.

  She didn’t have a gun in her hand, didn’t have a knife, didn’t even have a set of keys to jab at his face. Still, with her arms pinned from behind by her captor’s embrace, she kicked his kneecaps as hard as she could, tried to whack him with her purse and kept hollering.

  She hoped one of her neighbors had sense enough to call the police.

  She wasn’t fighting for her life so much as the chance not to die anonymously. She knew how the Byleukrainian secret police worked—a person disappeared. Just like Vlad had done. And she had no doubt that it was Karinolov’s men who had come for her.

  “Tarini, damn it, stop! You’re going to break my leg.”

  She jerked her head back and realized who was holding her. “Austin!”

  The glass security door behind them shattered into a thousand little carats that skittered across the floor.

  Shadowy figures rushed the stairwell.

  She didn’t have the luxury of telling Austin Smith to go to hell.

  “Come on!” he shouted, grabbing her hand.

  They ran into the deserted street, past a row of parked cars to his familiar red convertible Porsche.

  He picked her up and dumped her gracelessly into the passenger bucket seat—leaping over her head to the driver’s side.

  With a quick kick to the accelerator, they peeled out onto the road. Her purse landed on the floor at her feet. Datebook, a tube of lipstick, sunglasses and her gun fell out. Tarini had just about decided she’d left it on the nightstand.

  She scooped it up, thanked her lucky stars that she kept it loaded and looked back. Her attackers fanned out onto the road, but scattered at the approaching sound of sirens.

  She didn’t have a clear shot, and besides, she had made it out alive. She never wasted a shot if she wasn’t sure of her target and surer still of her mortal danger.

  Austin took the corner, nearly hitting a car parallel-parked in the left lane. He drove up on the deserted sidewalk and then down an alley toward a brightly lit thoroughfare.

  Tarini started to breathe easier—she was alive!— then realized she had only traded a frying pan for some real fire.

  “You can drop me off at the corner,” she said from between gritted teeth, fighting the urge to grab the steering wheel as Austin sideswiped a garbage can, sending it flipping into the air, littering the alley behind them with paper and cans.

  No way she was dying in a car wreck after surviving those goons at the apartment. If she had to, she’d jump out at the first light.

  She picked up her stuff and shoved everything back into her bag, then glanced at Austin out of the corner of her eye.

  He was cocky, he was arrogant, he was so damn sure of himself, but the horrible truth was, he had every right to be. He was chiseled like a marble god, had the surefooted masculine charm of a star, was wearing a tuxedo as easily as any other man wears jeans and was smarter than any man she had ever known.

  And he had just saved her life.

  “How did you find me?” she demanded, eyes narrowing dangerously.

  “Your sister, Tanya.”

  “I swore her to secrecy.”

  “Yeah, well, you should have told her not to confide in Karinolov, either,” Austin said.

  Tarini gasped. “She’s talked to him!”

  “She believes he’s a hero. I think I saw love in her eyes.”

  Tarini groaned. Tanya and she had always disagreed about what was best for their homeland.

  “I should have told her about what happened that night at the embassy. I didn’t have time. I just wanted to clear out of the apartment as fast as possible,” Tarini muttered. “I only told her about…” She hesitated. She wouldn’t tell him. Maybe Tanya hadn’t told him, either. “Drop me off here,” she said abruptly.

  “No way,” he said.

  “Thanks for getting me out of there, but I’ll just take it from here, if you don’t mind.”

  “Don’t you want to know what they wanted from you?”

  She hadn’t had any time to think—a glance at her watch confirmed that not more than five minutes had elapsed from awakening to the first suspicious sounds, to this bizarre late-night ride down Seventh Avenue.

  “I assume Karinolov’s secret police wanted to kill me because of Vlad,” she said. “But why now?”

  Austin gave a brief description of the confrontation at the Nigerian ambassador’s party. “You’ve got something they want,” he said, pulling to a stop at the light. The light turned green, but he put on his emergency lights and cars pulled around them.

  Tarini knew now would be a good time to bolt, but she was curious.

  “They want my grandma’s secret recipe for klatschkes?” she quipped, affecting nonchalant interest while her knees were wildly shaking.

  “No. They want Vlad’s child.”

  She took it like a slap in the face. It took every ounce of willpower for her not to dissolve under his narrow-eyed gaze. He hated her. He always showed his emotions in his eyes, and where once there had been affection, was contempt. He hated her and he had every right to.

  Now he knew she was pregnant and she also knew it was useless to deny it. In his eyes, she had been two-timing him.

  She could tell him the whole truth, lay everything out between them. Explain it all. But then she remembered why she hadn’t wanted to tell him about the pregnancy in the first place. She didn’t want his obligation and his honor—she’d wanted his love. And the constancy that he wasn’t capable o
f with women. Neither she nor her baby would benefit from Austin coming into their life then exiting again with a whim and a definite idea about how to do things. And he always had the most definite ideas about how he wanted things done.

  “Vlad’s child?” she said hollowly. “But what do they want with an innocent child?”

  “You’re carrying the last of the Romanovs,” Austin answered, his mouth curling in a tight frown. “Whoever’s holding Vlad isn’t satisfied with just him—they want to decimate the whole line. You are pregnant?”

  The question was an abrupt end to his explanation, but expected.

  Tarini flushed. “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Was it Vlad?”

  He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. It didn’t hurt, but she winced because she didn’t want his touch, didn’t want him to interfere with her reasoning. He backed off with a muttered apology, but she got the message. He wanted answers.

  And he was who he was, her memory hadn’t failed her. If he thought the baby was his, he’d stick with Tarini for the rest of his life. Not out of love, but for honor.

  If he thought it was Vlad’s…

  “I’m waiting, Tarini,” he said impatiently. “I’ve long since stopped caring about you dumping me or even about two-timing me, but I want to know if that’s a Romanov baby you’re carrying.”

  “And if it is?”

  “If that’s Vlad’s baby you’re carrying, you’re attracting the wrong sort of crowd.”

  “They won’t stop with tonight?”

  “Lady, they’re going to stop at nothing to get you,” Austin answered, shaking his head. “Tonight was just the beginning.”

  “Do they want me dead?” Tarini tried her best to keep her voice neutral though inside she was shaking with horror.

  “They’ll take you dead, but I think they want you alive,” Austin said. “At least, so they can publicly execute you—so there won’t be any Royalists thinking there’s a secret Romanov still alive. Remember—the mystery of whether they really killed Anastasia kept the Russian Royalists going for years.”

  “So I’ll have a chance of being led back to Vlad,” she said, her mind leaping quickly ahead. “They’d want me and him together—for a final reunion—if you want to call it that.”

  “Correction,” Austin said, in that damnable we’re-doing-it-my-way voice. “I’ll have a chance of getting back to Vlad. And I’m going to keep you away from them…for the baby’s sake.”

  “You mean, little Vlad?”

  He stared at her, a quick play of emotions flickering across his face. None of them good. She hadn’t actually lied, hadn’t actually said the words, “This baby is Vlad’s,” but she’d done enough. “Little Vlad” was all the confirmation Austin needed.

  He glanced into traffic, muttered an oath as he abruptly swung the Porsche onto a side street.

  “They’re still on our tail,” he muttered.

  She shoved her hand beneath her seat, found the velvet box with Vlad’s ring and slipped the diamond onto her left ring finger.

  It felt heavy. She hadn’t worn it since the kidnapping. But she hadn’t planned on having to see Austin, to carry through the lie.

  “You twisted me up so much,” he said grimly, banging his head against the headrest.

  “Thought you were over it,” she said with a chilly quality she didn’t feel.

  He closed his eyes briefly, painfully, and Tarini gulped. She could tell him the truth now, this one last opportunity to clear up the confusion.

  But she was bait. She knew it. She was the bait that Karinolov wanted. But only if she carried a Romanov.

  So who did she lie for? The love of her life or the leader of her homeland?

  “Austin, maybe I better explain—”

  He jerked his head in disgust.

  “Don’t bother,” he said dismissively. “I don’t have time for explanations. You might be important to others because of some ancient monarchy crap, but you’re important to me only because you’re carrying the child of my best friend. No other reason, understand?”

  “Austin, I—”

  “Understand?” he interrupted coldly. And she glimpsed the unyielding will of iron which had made her bolt in the first place.

  “Sure, I understand,” she said, scrambling to recover her pride and her balance. “And that makes you nothing more than my fiancé’s…employee.”

  She held out her hand to display the Romanov diamond as if for her enjoyment, sending a very pointed message to Austin.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, but she knew that he had seen the ring—the sparkling five-carat gem was hard to miss.

  “Good, we lost them,” he said.

  She pulled out the sunglasses and put them on though it was past midnight and the street glowed with the half light of the city.

  Then she leaned against the headrest, tilting her chin up with just a shade of spoilt pique. “Just drive, Austin,” she said with wobbly imperiousness.

  Chapter Three

  Tarini jerked awake and pulled off her glasses.

  “What are we doing here?”

  They were parked in the reserved spot in the garage beneath the San Remo, Austin’s building overlooking Central Park. For a moment, she felt transported in time, to the late-night hours of their December affair.

  Memories flooded her mind, memories of so many kisses.

  Sometimes their kisses had been so passionate they couldn’t break away long enough to go up to his apartment. Kisses that lasted all night in a gray concrete lovers’ hideaway amongst the parked cars, kisses so fulfilling they were their own reward.

  But it wasn’t their December affair.

  April was deceptively cold, some men with guns wanted her dead and there weren’t any kisses left between them. And Austin wasn’t sticking around. Or, at least, Tarini hoped she could ditch him again.

  “Stay right here,” he warned and jumped out of the Porsche. “I’ll check out the apartment, see if it’s safe. I’m not sure how close they are, but it’s possible they’ll try to get to you here. If it’s safe, we’ll stay here for the time being. If it’s not, we’ll know soon enough.”

  Tarini started to protest and then said nothing. She didn’t have the energy to say she didn’t ever want to see his apartment again, and she knew that any words would draw them into another argument. She let him go, unbuckled her seat belt and stretched her arms.

  She was disoriented from a nap that couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes. Her neck hurt from being contorted on the backrest. Her mind was numb with combined shock, terror and exhaustion. And her feet tingled from the pounding they had taken in the escape from her apartment.

  As the security door snapped shut behind Austin, she felt the unwanted whip of fear uncoil up her spine. She had felt safe in his presence—funny to feel that way when half-a-dozen men had just broken into her apartment with automatic weapons trained on her back, she thought humorlessly.

  But she knew that Austin would do everything possible to save her—even if he despised her. And she knew that he was skilled, very skilled. If there were any set of hands she should place her life in, it was his.

  But she didn’t want to feel that way, couldn’t trust herself to depend on him. Even now. Especially now.

  She slipped out of the car, stretching her legs.

  Then she tried to apply logic to the situation in which she found herself.

  Vlad was alive. Vlad was someplace, held by somebody—somebody with the new Byleukrainian military government.

  That somebody thought she was carrying Vlad’s child and they wanted her, too. Whatever else Vlad was, he wasn’t, by himself, the glittering prize of total annihilation of the Romanovs.

  She was. They had to kill the unborn Romanov child, too. She and her baby were in danger because some people wanted to destroy Vlad’s legacy. But she was also the tool that could be used to gain Vlad’s safety.

  And what would Austin do? Put her somewhere safe and l
ook for Vlad on his own. He was a loner, and since he was good—very good—he didn’t think he needed anyone else.

  She didn’t doubt he’d go after Vlad with the same determination that he’d applied to every other job—more, since he felt for Vlad as for a brother.

  But he would do it without using his most important bait—Tarini Schaskylavitch.

  He was doomed to failure if he put her in hiding, but he would shield her from danger, anyway.

  But she wasn’t a stay-at-home-and-wait-for-the-men-to-fight-it-out kind of woman. Her pregnancy wouldn’t take her out of commission, as Austin no doubt thought. She wouldn’t be surprised the next time someone pulled a gun on her. What had happened at the apartment was a fluke. From now on, she’d be prepared.

  She squared her jaw and put her purse over her shoulder. She walked briskly toward the heavy steel fire-escape door, picking up her pace as her resolve deepened.

  She’d find Vlad, whatever it took. She’d play it safe, sure, but she wouldn’t cower any longer. Her people depended on her. If she had to walk to the U.N. mission and face down Karinolov himself, she would.

  Down the fire-escape stairs—not at a run, but she nonetheless kept up a quick pace. She didn’t want to tire herself out, but still wanted to keep far ahead of Austin.

  At the alley, she rued the fact that she hadn’t a coat. Goose bumps covered her arms, and she shivered—fear or cold, it didn’t matter.

  She walked on the curb, craning her neck frequently, hoping for a cab. She used the solitude to formulate a plan. Couldn’t go back to the apartment, probably should try to place a call to the mission, give them a little tease about her whereabouts. See how well she could draw them out. And she had to make contact with Tanya, had to set her little sister straight on what a monster Karinolov really was.

  She patted the bottom of her purse, feeling the reassuring outline of the loaded gun.

  Suddenly her heart went thaddump!

  The red Porsche sidled up to her, slowing to match her pace. He looked cocky. She wished she wasn’t shivering. There’d be heat in the car. She even saw a yellow down jacket flung over the passenger-side headrest He had changed into soft jeans and a chambray button-down shirt.