by Ava Bloom
Alexei
A Billionaire Bad Boy Romance
Ava Bloom
Copyright © 2018 by Ava Bloom
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Contents
1. Alexei
2. Yulia
3. Alexei
4. Yulia
5. Alexei
6. Yulia
7. Alexei
8. Yulia
9. Alexei
10. Yulia
More by Ava Bloom
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Nikolai Preview
Dmitry Preview
Join The Club
1
Alexei
I flagged the bartender over and got him to pour a line of shots. “To Cousin Vanya’s new promotion!” I said, holding up one of the glasses.
“Yeah, yeah, don’t be a dick, Alexei,” Vanya said, rolling his eyes, but I could tell that he was secretly pleased. His father, Evgeni, had been trying to keep him out of the family business for a long time now, and I imagined Vanya was more than glad to finally have completed his first big mission.
“Should we toast to the fact that our not-quite sister-in-law will be joining us in Barcelona soon too?” Dmitry asked, a teasing glint in his eye.
I rolled my eyes. “Yulia and I are not getting involved again,” I told him, even though it went without saying. “She’s just here to keep her father company.”
“Sure,” Nikolai said. “Because her father isn’t some business tycoon who travels the world on his own for more than half the year, is he?”
“She isn’t coming here to see me,” I snapped. “She probably just wanted to get away from the cold in Russia and come here to lay on the beaches for a while.”
There were knowing looks around the table. I took another drink just to shut them all up.
The truth was, I knew it was going to be hard to see Yulia again after all these years. We were serious once—serious enough that I would have thought that by now, we’d be married, all moved into a home together in St. Petersburg, maybe a couple of kids...
But that hadn’t happened. I’d been sent here to Barcelona to help with the family business, and Yulia had stayed in St. Petersburg to finish her studies and start her career. I couldn’t exactly be upset with her over that; it wasn’t like I could expect her to give up everything that she had ever worked towards to come live with me in a foreign country where we didn’t even speak the local language.
I just wished that things could have been different somehow. But there was no use dwelling on that now. That was five years in the past now, and we’d both moved on. Not that I’d dated anyone since Yulia, but I wasn’t anywhere near celibate. In fact, I’d probably take someone home tonight, just to take my mind off of her.
“Uh oh, now you’ve made him gloomy,” Andrei said, raising an eyebrow at me.
I rolled my eyes again. “I was just thinking about what I wanted to drink,” I told him, slipping out of the booth and heading towards the bar. “And who I’m taking home tonight.”
There was a chorus of catcalls from behind me, guys yelling out for me to go get it, and I couldn’t help grinning. I had never really settled into Barcelona like the rest of them had, but I had to admit, there was something nice about being there with family.
I shoved my hands into my pockets as I waited for the bartender to get to me, hoping that none of my cousins had followed me. I knew they were just teasing—that they probably wouldn’t have brought it up, even, if they knew how deep those feelings still went. I guess they probably all thought that I’d fucked enough girls since Yulia that I wouldn’t even remember her. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
Even now, if I closed my eyes, I could see her laughing green eyes and her long, dark hair. She had a great figure but never liked to show it off. While studying to be a teacher, she was more comfortable in jeans and a sweater than in the heavy furs, and long dresses that her mother wanted her to wear. But I always thought she was cute.
Once I’d moved to Barcelona, I’d cut off all contact with her; it had just been too painful for the both of us. Neither of us wanted to have a long-distance relationship, not when we didn’t even know when we’d see one another again. What kind of family would we make, only seeing one another on the holidays?
So I didn’t even know what she’d ended up doing. She must have graduated; she had always been driven. But she could be married by now, or at least have some boyfriend. Probably some wimpy coworker of hers, some scrawny guy who wasn’t suited to her at all. Maybe they’d been close once, but there had always been something missing between the two of them. They had never had the passion that Yulia and I had.
I shook my head, knowing that I needed to quit thinking about her. The bartender materialized in front of me, and I quickly placed my order for just a good old vodka tonic. The bartender nodded at me and automatically went for the top-shelf vodka—the good stuff. There were perks when your family owned the hottest club in the city, and here in Barcelona, the main perk, as far as I was concerned, was the fact that we actually stocked real Russian vodka. Not the watered-down paint-stripper that most of the other places in the city touted as “vodka.”
“Mm, I love a man who loves a simple vodka drink,” a woman to my left purred.
I turned towards her, smiling as I saw the display of cleavage that she was showing off in her low-cut silver dress. She had nice legs, too, I thought absently, tracing the lines of them as they reached towards the rungs on the stool she was perched on. When I looked back up at her face, she was smiling knowingly at me.
“See something you like?” she asked, recrossing her legs in the other direction so that my attention was drawn back to them.
I had to grin, shaking my head. She knew exactly what she was doing, the little minx. She was practically begging for me to take her home.
Still, I decided to flirt with her first—half the fun was in the chase. I didn’t want to seem too easy.
So I shrugged and took a sip of my drink. “I’m hardly the only person you’ll meet drinking vodka in here.”
“Yeah, I heard that this place is owned by Russians or something,” the woman said, cocking her head to the side. “Your family?”
I shrugged. “Yeah,” I admitted. “We do a lot of business in this city.”
The woman laughed. “Do I want to know what kind of business?” she asked, reaching out a hand to trace the tattoos swirling up my forearm. “You look like you must be the type of guy who’s up to no good.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Is that something you’d like?” I asked her. “Maybe you’re just a naughty girl yourself who’s come to the bar all alone looking for trouble. Just hoping someone to take you home and fuck you silly tonight.”
Even surrounded by the noise of the club, I could practically hear her sharp intake of breath. I could definitely see the way her eyes darkened with lust. Yeah, she needed this, I thought smugly.
“Is that what you want to do with me?” she asked, reaching for my glass as though she had every right in the world to take a sip of my drink. Normally, I would snap at a stranger who did something so overly familiar. But instead, I watched in surprise as she savored the sip like she really appreciated the taste of good vodka.
Which was so rare in a woman, even back home.
“You know, if I didn’t know better, I’
d think that you must be Russian as well,” I said jokingly.
The woman raised an eyebrow at me. “How do you know I’m not?” she asked.
I stared at her for a long moment. I supposed she did look almost Russian, with that dark hair and those chiseled features. I hadn’t noticed it at first because I’d been so focused on her sex appeal, but she actually looked something like Yulia might have looked, if she’d dressed up sexily and put on makeup. But I shook my head. “You don’t have the accent,” I pointed out.
“I’ve spent years working on getting rid of it. It helps that I work at a bilingual school, where we have plenty of native English-speaking teachers.” The woman smiled sharply at me. “You know, Alexei, I’d think that after all these years, you might still recognize me.”
I felt as though the floor had dropped out from beneath me. “Yulia?” I asked incredulously.
From her stool, Yulia gave me a mocking bow. “Guess I’m just another in the string of women whose hearts you plan to break in this city?” she asked bitterly.
I wanted to remind her that I had already broken her heart. But somehow, that didn’t seem appropriate. Instead, I shook my head, taking a step back. I still couldn’t believe it was her. Gone was the mousy girl-next-door that I had always known. She had grown into her curves, and she had dressed like…
I swallowed hard. She had dressed to look sexy.
Not only that, but her presence here in Ritmo couldn’t be a coincidence. It might be a coincidence that I had happened to run into her at the bar, that I had tried to chat her up, but she must have known exactly what she was doing, coming in here, looking like that. I glanced over towards my cousins, wondering who had told her that we were going to be there that night. But they were all studiously avoiding looking over.
Guilty, all of them, I thought. Not that there was anything I could do about it.
I looked back at Yulia, wondering what to do now. I wondered if she really did want me to take her home that night, if that had been another part of her act or if that was really true. But my feelings were too mixed up for me to risk taking her home. She might be here in Barcelona for the next couple weeks, but I had no doubt that she would be returning to Russia after that. I better stick to those meaningless one-night stands.
With that in mind, I spun away from Yulia, heading towards the door. Suddenly, Ritmo seemed claustrophobic, and I knew that it was time to get myself home. I’d down another few drinks and pass out on the couch. No shame in that, in the privacy of my own home.
But even three strong drinks later, I couldn’t stop thinking of Yulia’s long legs. I wanted them wrapped around me, or I wanted her bent over at the end of the couch as I took her from behind. There was so much pent-up need between us, so much history, that the lines blurred and I didn’t even know what I wanted.
Her. I just wanted her.
I shook my head and flopped back on the couch. I couldn’t have her, and I knew that. Or rather, I could have her, but only for a couple weeks. Not nearly enough to satisfy either of us. Just long enough to make everything hurt all the worse in the end.
One thing was for sure: I was going to have to avoid her while she was here. It shouldn’t be too difficult to do: she might be here to accompany her father, but that didn’t mean that Yulia herself had anything to do with Volkov family business. I might bump into her around headquarters once or maybe twice, but that was it. As long as I steered clear of Ritmo and other places that she might be, it would be fine.
With that resolve in mind, I drifted into an uneasy sleep.
2
Yulia
I kicked my feet as I waited on a bench out in the hallway in the Volkov family headquarters. I hated the place; with its clinical feel, it gave me the creeps. But maybe that was just because I knew the kinds of things that the Volkov family got up to, and didn’t want anything to do with them.
Actually, I hated that my father had anything to do with this stuff, even though I knew these arms deals were his way of doing Mother Russia proud. It wasn’t like he was really doing anything wrong, either. But it made my skin crawl, nonetheless.
I wasn’t really sure why he had asked me to come along to Barcelona with him. I wasn’t usually part of these things. I knew that some measure of it was for moral support. He and the Volkovs didn’t always see eye-to-eye. I hadn’t realized it back then, but I was pretty sure Evgeni had specifically forced Alexei to come to Barcelona all those years ago because he didn’t want his nephew marrying someone like me.
Our name wasn’t particularly well thought of in Russia.
I sighed and closed my eyes, beyond bored with just hanging around the headquarters. I’d expected this to just be a quick stop. All I knew was that Dad needed to hand a list of contacts over to Evgeni. They were people he knew through work who were interested in buying some large arms shipment. The weapons would ship from Barcelona and the Volkovs rather than the mob syndicate back home in St. Petersburg so that it was less likely to be traced back to Russia if things went south on the deal.
Or something like that. I didn’t know all the specifics.
The thing I really didn’t understand was why Dad had to be the one to come all the way to Barcelona to get this deal figured out. He usually didn’t have anything to do with these kind of deals. Or if he did, he didn’t tell me about them.
I had to wonder whether I was there as some sort of cover for him. Maybe an arms deal was just the start of things.
But I didn’t want to think about any of that. All those possibilities, all the things that our family might be tied up in—and once upon a time, all the things that Alexei might be tied up in—I did my best to ignore. The less I knew, the safer I was. And the safer they were because there was no information for me to hand over to police, members of other gangs, or whoever else might have a reason to use that sort of information.
I shuddered just thinking about it.
Just then, Dad came out into the hallway, closely followed by Evgeni. He looked surprised to see me sitting there, and I could tell that the two of them had been drinking. I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Russians… Enemies or friends, it seemed like they were always drinking together, especially where business matters were concerned.
“Yulia!” Dad said, his voice too loud and overly-enthusiastic. “What are you still doing here? I thought you’d be gone by now.”
I raised an eyebrow at him, giving him a cool stare. Maybe that’s what I was doing here: fishing him away from these wolves before they tore him limb from limb. But I was careful to keep my tone sweet and my expression neutral. “Dad, I thought we were going to go to lunch together,” I reminded him.
Dad looked shocked, but he quickly recovered himself, laughing as he clapped me on the shoulder. “We’ll go to dinner instead,” he promised me. “Zhenechka was just telling me about this wonderful place on the waterfront that we have to try while we’re here.”
I stared at him for a long moment, not sure which I was more baffled by, the fact that Dad was blowing me off, or the fact that he and Evgeni were apparently close enough now that he used Evgeni’s pet name when talking about him. Zhenechka, I never thought I’d hear Dad call him that, I thought, shaking my head.
The deal either had gone really well already, or else there was something more going on that I didn’t understand. But again, I didn’t want to know what it was.
Instead, I back slowly away from the two of them, edging carefully away. “All right, well, call me when you’re ready to go to dinner,” I told him, even though I had a feeling that if he was this drunk already, there was no way we’d be going to dinner that night. He’d be lucky to make it back to the hotel before passing out.
As I headed through the maze of hallways, trying to remember which way the exit was, I suddenly bumped into someone. I stumbled backward, caught totally off guard, and the guy reached out to steady me. His hands were strong on my forearms, and for a moment, I leaned towards him, comforted by the familiar scent of
…
“Alexei?” I asked in surprise, blushing crimson as I shook his hands off my arms.
Alexei stared down at me, looking like he didn’t know what to say. I smirked, remembering how flat-footed I’d caught him the previous night.
Alexei’s eyes narrowed, and he folded his arms across his chest. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Just keeping Dad company for a while,” I told him.
Alexei looked around. “And where is your father, then?” he asked.
“With Evgeni,” I said, my mouth twisting. I paused. “Seems I have a free afternoon.”
“Well, you’d better not go poking around Volkov headquarters,” Alexei said. “You know better than that.”
I raised an eyebrow at him, putting a hand on his arm. “Why Alexei, I didn’t know you still cared about me,” I purred. There was something cute about watching him squirm.
The truth was, my feelings were still tangled up over Alexei, even all these years later. I’d dated a few guys, but there hadn’t been anyone serious. I kept catching myself comparing them to Alexei, even though I knew that wasn’t fair. But every one of those guys had fallen short of my standards in some way.
I hated that I was still thinking about him. He certainly hadn’t waited for me; Dmitry said he was at Ritmo to pick up a new girl nearly every other night. I mean, I hadn’t expected him to wait for me, to pine for me. I would never have liked him in the first place if he had been that kind of guy. But all the same…
And the cherry on top of it all had been his attempts to get me to go home with him the previous night. I knew that I didn’t look half as studious as I used to. We’d both changed. I’d matured a lot. But the fact that he didn’t recognize me at all, that he didn’t even think I was Russian… Something about that just hurt. It made me feel like I’d just been some forgettable chapter in his life.
