by Bella Rose
“Well, if I did have more than a passing interest, that’s over. So can we just finish this task and get our next assignment from Orlov? I’m sick and tired of sitting on my ass doing nothing.”
“Clean now, shoot later,” quoted Jacob.
Yes. That was fine with Kirill as long as there was the promise of shooting to come in the near future.
“YOU WERE RIGHT,” Oksana said eagerly. “Having lunch instead of dinner was a very good idea.”
Susan didn’t comment. She wasn’t about to tell her friend that she just really wanted to get this first meeting over with. The men they had come to the bistro to meet were headed their direction. Both were Russian. Both were in some sort of business that did not include mafia ties. Or at least that was the story Oksana was trying to sell to Susan.
“Hello, Susan,” her date said smoothly. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time now. My name is Vlad.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Vlad.” She did not mention that he shared a name with Dracula and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Perhaps that was a topic for another time.
“Oksana tells me you’re in finance.”
“I’m a mortgage processor,” Susan admitted. “I’m not sure I would call that finance. I have an accounting degree, but I hardly use it in the job I’m in now.”
“I’m an accountant myself,” Vlad explained. “It’s nice to meet a woman who isn’t intimidated by the thought of one.”
“Intimidated as in she thinks you’re going to quiz her about her taxes? Or intimidated as in she’s afraid of math?” Susan asked congenially. “Because I’ve met men who seem to fit both of those.”
Vlad laughed, and Susan joined in. Before long, Oksana glanced over from her side of the table where she had been getting very cozy with a man she called Gregory. She smiled at Susan and seemed quite satisfied with the way things were turning out.
“Do you date much?” Vlad asked casually after the waiter had brought their drinks.
“Not really.” She wondered what had brought that question on. “How about you?”
“Not at all actually.” Vlad glanced over at Oksana. “When she first told me she thought she had the perfect woman for me, I told her I would rather not meet you.”
“I said the same thing,” Susan told him with a wry smile. “She’s just so damn pushy!”
“That she is.”
“How do you know Oksana?” It hadn’t occurred to Susan to wonder this before, and now she really wanted to know. What if they had dated?
“Oksana and I work together. The export firm we work for does a lot of business in Russia, Ukraine, Croatia, and the Czech Republic, so they hire native speakers to make life easier for everyone. It’s so nice to be around other people who speak the language that you naturally make friends.”
“I would imagine,” Susan murmured. “Did you ever date?”
“Oh God no!” He actually looked horrified. “She’s not my type at all. Far too flashy and high maintenance.”
“Yes, she certainly has those things going on for her.” High maintenance? So did that mean he wanted low maintenance? And what exactly did that mean?
Susan was just about to ask a few more probing questions when she saw Kirill come through the front door of the bistro. He turned, spotted their table, and sauntered over.
KIRILL COULD NOT believe his sister thought Vlad would make a good match for Susan. Did Oksana even know Susan? Or did she just think she did? The guy was so lukewarm that he barely had a personality. If the two of them ever wound up in bed together, Susan was going to scorch his dick.
“Kirill!” Oksana jumped up from the table. “What are you doing here?”
“I just saw you were here and decided to stop in and say hello.” He let his gaze wander over Susan and saw a pretty blush stain her cheeks.
“Excuse me,” Oksana said to the group at the table. “My brother and I will be just a moment.”
Oksana grabbed his arm and dragged him out the door to the street. He let her because he was enjoying the look of confusion on the faces of the two men at the table. He knew them. They knew him. More importantly, they knew what he did for a living.
“What are you doing here?” Oksana hissed as soon as she was certain they were outside and out of earshot.
“I told you. I saw you sitting in there and decided to stop in and say hello.” He kept his face neutral. “I’m doing some legwork for a job.”
“Ugh! I don’t want to hear about your pretend jobs for Orlov.” She rolled her eyes. “The man has you running errands all over the city like a dog.”
“Really.” He was still trying to decide if she was willfully blind to his job, or if she really didn’t know what he did. “That’s honestly what you think I do for Orlov?”
“Everyone knows that.”
“Do they?” He hadn’t listened to the rumors in years, but he was fairly certain most of them began and ended with Oksana. “And do these rumors ever come from anywhere but your mouth?”
“I refuse to let people think my loser brother is something special.” She tossed her blonde hair like a beauty queen.
“I think you’re afraid they’ll find me more impressive than they do you,” he teased.
Her look of outrage was almost comical. “As if that would ever happen!”
“You are such a drama queen.” He didn’t even try to keep the derision out of his voice. “You have set Susan up with a man that will bore her to death and make her boring in the bargain. And you can sit there in your arrogance and judge me without ever looking in a damn mirror and taking a good hard look at the woman staring back at you.” He put his finger right in her face. “You are self-centered, arrogant, and completely absorbed in what works best for you.”
It was the longest speech he had ever made to his sister, but he could tell it still didn’t make a dent. She merely turned on her heel and flounced right back into the bistro as though she’d given him a piece of her mind. Kirill watched through the window as Oksana returned to the table. But he truly only had eyes for Susan.
Chapter Eight
Susan could not get Kirill out of her mind.
She was making a valiant attempt to be normal. Today was grocery shopping day, and she’d come to the corner market with the notion that if she did what she always did, she would eventually feel as she always had.
Absently shoving her cart down the aisle, she found herself in the feminine hygiene product aisle. It occurred to her that she should have had those items on her list. She was way overdue for her period, and yet it had never started.
The thought made her stop short in the middle of the aisle. A slight turn of her head to the right, and she was staring at the pregnancy tests. She snatched one off the shelf and flipped it over in order to read the back.
“Tests are accurate within one to seven days of a missed period, blah, blah, blah,” she muttered. “How accurate?”
The rest of her groceries now seemed completely unnecessary. Why should she even bother with them? At this point, the only thing that mattered was whether or not she was going to have to change her entire life in nine months—or actually eight months.
Feeling almost shell shocked, she left her cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle and took the test to the check out stand.
Was it her imagination, or did the clerk look at her funny after the woman rang up the purchase? Susan decided she was becoming paranoid. Thousands of women probably purchased these things every week. It wasn’t a condemnation of her character to be in here buying a pregnancy test, right?
“Susan, hello!”
She almost fainted dead away at the sound of a vaguely familiar male voice.
The clerk’s eyes widened, and she quickly shoved the test into a paper sack. Susan mouthed the words thank you and then turned to smile at Vlad.
“Hi there!” She realized belatedly that her voice sounded freakishly bri
ght, as though she were trying way too hard. Clearing her throat, she tried again. “I’m sorry, you startled me. I think I was completely zoned out. How are you?”
“Good,” he said with a smile. “Actually, I’m great! I had such a wonderful time with you yesterday at lunch. I was wondering if you might be available to have dinner with me tonight.”
Was she? That stupid little pee stick test was going to be the deciding factor, wasn’t it? Susan paused, presumably to think about her schedule. “I would love to have dinner tonight. What time were you thinking?”
“How about eight o’clock?” He glanced at the small paper sack the clerk handed to her. “Since it doesn’t look like you bought much in the way of groceries, it’ll be my pleasure to share a real meal with you.”
“Oh, I just stopped in for a few things I forgot earlier,” she lied. When had she become such a consummate liar anyway?
“Can I get your address so I can pick you up at home?” Vlad took a step closer and gently touched her hand.
The feel of Vlad was so at odds with Kirill’s powerful presence that it actually threw Susan off balance for a moment.
Finally she managed a nod. “That would fine.”
She quickly borrowed a pen from the check out stand and wrote her address on a tiny corner of the paper sack. Then she had to carefully rip the piece off without exposing the contents.
“See you at eight.” He gave a little wave and left the store with his own grocery bags in hand.
“I feel like I should ask if you’re all right,” the clerk murmured. “But I have a feeling you don’t actually have an answer yet.”
“Good call,” Susan told the younger woman. “I suppose I’m off to find out.”
Susan practically jogged back to her little house from the corner store. The key stuck in the lock, and she almost left it there until she remembered that Vlad would be coming to pick her up in a few hours. Jerking it free of the door, she hurried inside and into the kitchen.
Ripping open the package, she skimmed the directions. One line she wasn’t pregnant, two lines she was. That was easy enough, right?
Susan ran into the bathroom to pee on the stick and get it over with.
The testing portion of the process took relatively no time at all. The ten minutes of waiting for the results, however, was the longest stretch of time that Susan had ever experienced in her life. She paced up and down her hallway, going by the bathroom door about a thousand times. She purposefully left the test on the sink until the timer went off. She didn’t figure carrying it around was going to make things better at this point.
Then she saw the test results.
“Oh. My. God!” she wailed. “How could I be so stupid? It isn’t like we used protection or anything. And I’m not exactly regular about taking my pill. I suppose I have nobody but myself to blame.”
It occurred to her that the worst was really yet to come. At some point, she was going to have to tell Oksana. That was going to suck. Her friend was not going to be happy. And what if Susan told her all of it? What if she just flat out admitted that she was carrying Kirill’s child? Oksana would flip!
“Okay.” Susan put her hands on her hips and glared down at the pregnancy test sitting on her bathroom counter. “First things first. I have a date in two hours. I need a shower and an outfit. After I go out with Vlad, I can fall apart. Until then, I have to keep it together.”
“YOU ARE AWARE that the gentleman you’re tailing all over town isn’t a target, correct?” Jacob asked in Russian as he squatted beside Kirill on the rooftop of a three story building.
Kirill didn’t respond. It was a silly question and required no answer. Instead, he kept his eyes glued to Vlad. The man was completely oblivious to the fact that he was being watched. In fact, he seemed happily ignorant of pretty much everything around him. How could Oksana truly believe this moron belonged with Susan?
“Who is he?” Jacob finally asked.
This question could be answered carefully without giving away too much. “A man my sister thinks would be perfect for one of her friends.”
Jacob watched Vlad enter a flower shop. Less than five minutes later, the man emerged with a bouquet of roses. Obviously he had a date.
Jacob cocked his head to one side. “He seems to be a predictable sort, doesn’t he? You don’t think this man is good enough for your sister’s friend?”
“He’s a pansy.” Kirill gestured to Vlad who had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and was fumbling with the flowers in his hand while trying to reach for his phone. “He’s blocking foot traffic while making himself a prime target for anyone who might want to steal his wallet. It’s like begging to be mugged.”
“Not everyone lives in a world where mugging is an imminent possibility, Kirill. Our world is not necessarily the real world.” Jacob gestured to Vlad. “The only reason this man has had danger introduced to his existence is that he managed to catch your attention. Otherwise he would be waltzing through life without a single care, going to work, going out with a woman he likes, and maybe marrying her and starting a family.” He clapped Kirill on the shoulder. “That life is not for us. That does not mean it isn’t for someone else. Come. We have actual work to do.”
Kirill was feeling sour. He followed Jacob’s lead down the fire escape to the alley below. They turned north and continued. As they walked, Kirill continued to chafe at the idea of lukewarm Vlad somehow inserting himself on a more permanent basis into Susan’s life.
For the first time, Kirill was unsatisfied with his own life.
“Remember, the death of this particular target needs to seem like a suicide,” Jacob murmured as they rounded the corner.
Kirill threw his head back and gazed up at the building where their target kept rooms. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”
“What?” Jacob frowned and then turned his head to follow Kirill’s gaze. “Is that the target?”
“Yep.” Kirill watched in morbid fascination as a shadowy figure pushed their target out onto the balcony of his small apartment.
Jacob cursed in Russian and then grabbed Kirill’s arm. “This makes no sense.”
The shadowy figure pushed the target off the balcony. As Kirill and Jacob watched, the man plummeted to his death in the street barely a hundred yards away.
Kirill glanced at Jacob. “Either we have competition, or someone is trying to screw us over.”
“IT WAS SO nice of you to come and pick me up for dinner.” Susan took the roses from Vlad and tried to look pleased. “I’ll just put these in water. Feel free to come inside and wait while I do.”
“Thank you,” Vlad murmured.
He was the perfect gentleman. He had even brought her flowers.
The idea of Kirill showing up at the front door was laughable, much less the notion of him bringing flowers.
Susan grabbed a vase and filled it with water. The roses looked nice on her kitchen table. It was really too bad that Kirill wouldn’t be swinging by to see them. They would have driven him nuts.
Ugh! Stop thinking about Kirill!
“Ready?” Vlad poked his head into her kitchen.
Susan pasted her warmest smile into place. “Of course!”
She let Vlad take her arm, and they headed out the front door. She locked the door and placed the key in its spot before turning to look at the curb. There was a very nice luxury sedan parked and waiting.
“Wow, nice car.” She smiled up at Vlad. “Where do you find places to park that thing? I would love to own a car, but it’s just not practical.”
“I’m fortunate enough that my building has underground parking.” He opened her door and helped her into the low slung vehicle.
Susan settled herself in the passenger seat and tried to remember that this was all good. It wasn’t like she was under some sort of obligation to disclose to Vlad that she might be pregnant with some other man’s baby. Right? It was just dinner.<
br />
“Are you all right?” he asked once he had put his seatbelt on. “Forgive me for being forward, but you seem to have something weighing on your mind.”
“It’s just some problems at work. I’ve had some issues in the past with a coworker. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was affecting me that much.”
Vlad gazed at her with warmth and compassion. “We can do this some other time if you would like. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“No. Tonight is great.” Susan had no way to express just how badly she did not want to be by herself tonight. “It will be a welcome distraction.”
“Oh!” He perked up. “You’ll appreciate this anecdote.”
She nodded. She was just glad he was willing to carry the conversation.
“So I was dealing with this neophyte today who could not even navigate a basic actuary table…” Vlad was off and running on some story that starred himself as the most amazing employee/accountant in the universe and everyone else on the planet as infinite morons. Susan felt as though her eyes might actually have glazed over. Not that Vlad noticed. He was speaking at warp speed with no sign of stopping, nor any indication that he realized she had absolutely no interest in his story.
Susan had a feeling she had just discovered the downside of being with a guy like Vlad. The problem was, she should want to be with Vlad. Kirill was bad news. She just needed to keep remembering that.
Chapter Nine
Kirill watched Susan follow Oksana into the club. The pounding techno music throbbed against the walls as though it were trying to tear them down brick by brick. Kirill wondered where Vlad the Wonderful was. Oksana appeared to be alone as well.
“Hey.” A sultry feminine voice snagged his attention. “Aren’t you Kirill?”
“And if I am?” He set his jaw.
The scrap of femininity in a too tight mini dress that let half her ass hang out batted her enormous dark eyes at him. “You’re an Orlov.” She trailed her finger along his arm. “Everyone knows that.”
