by Stacy Gail
“This is rich, a Vitaliev operation hiding behind the shield of the law.” Schott snorted and looked around the room at his people as if to find an outlet of support. I looked around as well, and the unease I read in the eyes of Schott’s team made me want to grin. “But I’m not going to let you rattle my cage. You’re just a high-priced mouthpiece trying to blow smoke up my ass. I don’t have to give you shit.”
“Actually, you do.” Thin and spare and wrapped in disarming tweed, Arnold Papazian had the look of a man who could be blown over by a strong a puff of wind. Then he smiled his killer’s smile, and I understood why he and my father had gotten along so well for so many decades. “I love it when the authorities don’t know the law—a law they think they own. I’m going to make a meal of you, Detective Schott, and all the personnel here whom you’ve now tainted, thanks to your power trip. And I assure you, I’m going to enjoy every. Single. Bite.”
“I feel so silly,” I murmured to Polo, nudging him. “I should have called you right away.”
“Keep that in mind the next time you get into a jam, yeah? Even if I have to move heaven and hell to do it, I’ll find a way to make your world right again.”
Chapter Seven
“Excluding a world-ending meteor striking the earth, this day couldn’t have gone any worse.” More drained than I’d ever felt in my entire adult life, I held the cell phone to my ear as I pushed through my front door, then closed and locked it behind me with a grateful sigh. Home. There had been times today when I’d thought I’d never see it again. “I have a feeling Tiffany Stoddard-Fanning is going to uninvite me to her charity gala event. I’m shattered about that, really and I mean it.”
“Yeah, I can hear how shattered you are.” Sounding equally wrung out, Shona also loosed a long, deflating breath on the other end of the line. “I guess that’s one good thing that came out of this fiasco. Now you don’t have to make an excuse to get out of that stupid ballet fundraiser.”
“Yippee.” I toed out of my heels and nudged them off to the side by the front door, then closed my eyes. The feel of carpet under my stocking-covered, aching feet was an almost-orgasmic experience. “Shona, I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you and your baby were caught up in that search today—”
“Before you go another step down that path, Dasha, I need you to shut the hell up, and I mean that in a loving way.”
I couldn’t help but blink as I dropped my purse on top of my shoes. “Uh... okay.”
“I had a brother once. Well,” Shona interrupted herself with a wry half-laugh, “I still have a brother. But he’s been in the state pen for about six years now, and is going to be in for another nine, at least. I believed hard work on my dancing and schoolwork was the way to get out of the projects. He believed dealing and climbing up within his gang’s ranks was the way. I was right, and he was wrong.”
“Oh.” I blinked, not really seeing my apartment’s lovely twelve-foot high ceilings, large arched doorways, gray-trimmed white walls and pearly gray carpeting along with herringbone cedar flooring. I was in one of the older buildings my father had owned, and usually I adored the older touches of crown molding, large bay windows and thick walls that kept me from hearing my neighbors. But at the moment I was too preoccupied with Shona’s response to give it much thought. “Okay.”
“The thing is, my life got splashed with a lot of his shit, but I had nothing to do with his business. Ever. Even now, I half-expect a call or a knock on my door that’ll bring more of his shit splashing onto me. When you have family that insists on living in the dark, you can’t help but have some of those shadows slide into your otherwise bright world.”
I slumped onto the pink microsuede Chesterfield-style sofa in the living room and fought a wave of stressed-out tears. I loved my space—it was unashamedly girlie, with pinks and grays throughout—but not even it could calm me down. “Thank you for your understanding, Shona, but I still feel awful about it.”
“Well, don’t. What you should feel awful about is not letting me in on your little secret.”
I searched my brain and came up blank. I’d told Shona all about my father right up front when we’d first met. “Secret?”
“Your fine-looking, ponytail-wearing, attorney-toting secret. That’s quite a name he’s got—Marco Polo Scorpeone. Sounds made up.”
“It’s not.”
“I’m just saying I’m glad I got a good look at your boyfriend before I heard his name. Otherwise, I might have thought you were making him up like a sad high school wallflower with no one to take her to Prom.”
“First off, Polo isn’t my boyfriend, he’s my...” In vain, I scrambled around for what exactly he was. Oddly enough, the memory of kissing him kept getting in the way. “He’s my used-to-be bodyguard, and he’s really good at what he does.”
“Guarding your body?”
“Among other things.”
“What other things?”
“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Very funny.”
“That’s me, the comic relief.” No way in the world would I ever tell Shona that my words were closer to the truth than I’d like. “Polo’s actually retired from the security business. He’s now a man of leisure, with one or two side businesses to keep him out of trouble. Until last night, I hadn’t even seen him for at least half a year.”
“You mean when you almost got scooped up in that other raid? Was he there saving you? Again?”
Honestly, Shona had missed her calling as a journalist. She could sniff out the truth faster than a bloodhound sniffed out an escaped convict. “As a matter of fact, Polo did get me out in the nick of time.”
There was a beat of silence. “I thought you said he’s a retired bodyguard.”
“He is.”
“But he’s still watching over you?”
Maybe I should talk about the killing thing, after all. “Yep.”
“And you say he’s not your boyfriend?”
“Right again.”
“But you kissed him. I saw you kiss him.”
“Uh...”
“You see why I’m confused, right?”
Maybe I was the one who was confused. “Kinda.”
“See, you kissed a man who seems to live and breathe for the sole purpose of keeping you out of trouble, and he’s doing that difficult task for free. No one’s paying him to guard you this time around. Yet here you are, claiming you’re not together. Either I don’t know what together is, or you don’t.”
Okay, she had me on that one. I flailed around for some kind of rational response to explain what exactly my relationship with Polo was, only to discover I wasn’t very clear on that myself. He’d been a huge part of my world for so long, and I’d gotten used to the role he’d played in my life. Then he’d vanished on me, and I’d missed him more than I ever thought possible. It was almost like missing a part of myself; I’d think he was there, turn around to share a thought or a joke that I knew he’d appreciate, only to find a blank spot where he’d once been.
It had been awful, adjusting to life without Polo. Worse than awful. It had been crippling. I had grieved for the passing of my father, yes, but I had known for a long time that he was dying. I’d been able to say my goodbyes, and I’d made peace with the reality that his suffering had finally come to an end.
With Polo, it had been completely different.
I never knew I could miss a person so much.
As I sat there, remembering the crazed joy I’d felt at seeing him again, and the almost painful awareness of him whenever we were in the same room together, it finally dawned on me why Polo’s leaving had hit me so damned hard.
I wasn’t just attracted to him.
No.
The man made me hot. Seriously, undeniably, insanely hot. To the point of obsession.
I had no idea what that meant, but I did know that it wasn’t going away. If anything, this strange obsession was only getting worse.
“Dasha?”<
br />
“Sorry, I was...” I was saved from coming up with some kind of lame response when the security buzzer by the door went off. “Oh, I’ve got to go, someone’s at the door. Talk to you later?”
“Can’t wait. Maybe by then you’ll have an answer for me.” She was still laughing when I hung up.
My aching feet protested as I hobbled to the front door and hit the button, eyeing the view screen framing a shot of the downstairs security guard. “Yes?”
“Good evening, Ms. Vitaliev, this is Abraham at the front desk. A Mr. Polo Scorpeone is here to visit you. Shall I send him up?” The camera angle swiveled to show Polo waiting at the desk.
Without warning, my heart tried to race off without me.
“I...yes, please send him up.”
Right. Send up the man I had kissed after sharing a not-kissing relationship with him for thirteen-plus years. After all, this day hadn’t been stressful enough.
But I could do this. All I had to do was hold my shit together during this visit while I sorted myself out. Totally doable, I decided, opening the front door to look out into the spacious, well-lit hallway. All I had to do was play it cool while I figured out whether or not jumping his bones was something I was ready to do. It was always such a risk taking things out of the friend zone...
The elevator dinged and suddenly there he was.
Just as suddenly, there my brain wasn’t.
Oh, crap.
I stared at him while I forgot every word I’d ever known, and all I could do was hope he wouldn’t notice the rather obvious fact that I’d just succumbed to hysterical muteness.
“Rule number one,” Polo said without greeting me, and his forward momentum pushed me back into my place as he crossed the threshold and shut the door behind him, “never open the door until you have your expected visitor in sight of the peephole. Someone ringing from downstairs could just be a tool to get you to open that door for someone who’s already found a way to sneak into the building undetected. I’ve used that very method a time or two in the past—getting some flowers delivered or whatever, and already being in the hallway when someone opened their door before their expected visitor arrived. By the time that visitor showed up at the door, I was already inside taking care of business. Understand?”
“Yep.” I knew what taking care of business was, knew that he’d done whatever needed to get done on my father’s orders, so I didn’t bother to ask him to expand on the subject. “Lesson learned. Won’t do it again.”
“Good. Why are you limping?”
Technically speaking, I wasn’t limping anymore. He’d backed me up all the way to the back of my lovely pink sofa and was now no more than a handful of inches away. Instantly my temperature began going haywire. “You’d limp too if you were in heels all day.”
“You’re usually in heels all day. It doesn’t leave you limping.”
I sighed. “I was walked off my feet following the police around, filming as much as I could. Call me paranoid, but I had the feeling Schott wanted to plant something to make the harassment look legit, so I did my best to make sure everything stayed on the up and up.”
His expression rippled with ominous darkness. “So you were on your feet the entire time they were there?”
“When I wasn’t trying to soothe that socialite chick.” I couldn’t remember when looking into his eyes made my heart pound like I’d just run a marathon. God, I had to get a hold of myself. “Deep down, though, I know there’s no soothing her, or smoothing this fiasco over, so today marks just the beginning of my suffering.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m pretty sure Chicago’s Future was dealt a mortal blow today. Tiffany Stoddard-Fanning is the center of the charity community in Chicago, and to say she was upset by being held hostage by a power-mad cop is putting it mildly. All she has to do is tell a few contributors that I’m a shady, drug-dealing Russian mobster like my father, and suddenly I’ve got zero donations coming in.” And it hurt. It was bad enough, thinking that this might be the end of my dream of making some kind of difference in the world, but saying it out loud crushed me.
That darkness in his eyes deepened. “Tell me how to fix it, and I’ll do it.”
“You can’t un-ring a bell, Polo.”
“So?”
“So, you can’t un-traumatize a snooty socialite, whose idea of hardship before today was having dinner without an onsite sommelier.”
“I could always ask her, politely of course, to keep her fucking yap shut.”
Politely. Uh-huh. I could imagine. “You’ve already saved me enough times in the past twenty-four hours.”
“There’s no cap on how many times I can save you.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. When will I ever get a chance to save you?”
“You saved me from tangling assholes with that sonofabitch Schott today, didn’t you? I’m not in jail now, and he’s not dead with his goddamn tongue ripped out of his lying mouth. All because,” he leaned deeper into my space, a move that somehow gobbled up every ounce of air in the room, “you kissed me.”
I could only pray the sudden heat in my face didn’t glow like a neon sign. “Hm.”
“The thing is,” he went on when I couldn’t come up with anything better than monosyllabic grunts, “by saving me, you landed yourself in hot water all over again.”
“I did?”
“Hell, yeah, you did. Boiling hot.”
“Funny, you’d think I would have noticed something like boiling hot water.” I swallowed, trying valiantly to ignore the fact that boiling hot was a fantastic description for what was going on in my panties at the moment. “Just how dangerous is this boiling hot water?”
“Normally I’d advise you to avoid it at all costs, for your own safety.”
“That sounds like good advice.”
“Yeah, but it’s like you said—you can’t un-ring a bell.”
My lips parted hungrily when his breath feathered across them. “So...what kind of advice do you have for me now?”
“Get used to the burn.”
This time it was his mouth that came to mine. At that first touch my knees nearly buckled, because I somehow wasn’t prepared for this. Our earlier kiss had been a rushed, hit-and-run kind of thing. A stolen kiss, really.
But this kiss...
This was another thing entirely.
His lips fused to mine with a heat that was staggering. I barely had time to marvel at how perfectly we fit together before the sweep of his tongue against the inside of my lower lip and the increasing pressure against my lips opened my mouth to him.
The floor dropped from under my feet as his tongue invaded, and I instinctively wrapped my arms around his shoulders so I wouldn’t fall. That was how powerful his kiss was. It was the kind that knocked a woman off her feet. The kind that was better than any fantasy. The kind that changed lives, worlds, universes.
The kind that nearly stopped my heart.
His tongue dueled and danced with mine, wet, deep and bold. That was when I absolutely knew that for the rest of my life, I would never have a kiss more perfect than Polo’s.
“Dasha.” My name was caught by my mouth, no louder than a breath. I even thought I had imagined it as he adjusted the angle of his lips over mine before he dived deeper, his hand coming to once again cradle the back of my head. For a second I feared he was going to rip me away like he did before, but then he whispered my name once more into my mouth, while still kissing me, and it was so sexy my thighs began to shake.
If this was how I reacted to his kiss, complete with a hot surge of wetness in the cleft between my legs and seriously trembling thighs, I’d probably dissolve into a puddle if he ever took me to bed.
The thought of Polo and sex was too much to take all at once. I’d just realized that I had the hots for him when he suddenly appeared, and now with the taste of him on my tongue—a taste I’d never stop craving now that I’d sampled it—my mind was in chaos. My everything was in chaos. I
needed to apply the brakes until I was ready to deal with this new reality.
Before I could find the strength to pull away he suddenly did it for me, his mouth lifting from mine while the rock-solid bands of his arms still held me clamped against him. It was absolutely insane, but I loved that I could feel the wild hammering of his heart against mine as I opened my eyes and looked up into the turbulent intensity of his.
“Look at you,” he murmured, and the roughened texture of his voice made everything feminine in me squeal. That was the voice of an aroused man, and like the heart still pounding against me, it told me more than words just how hot his engine was running. “Getting all uptight and thinking you can’t handle the hot water. That’s not like you. The Dash I know loves a challenge more than her next breath.”
“There’s hot, and then there’s thermonuclear.” Really, in my defense the difference between the two had to be pointed out. “Nobody could handle that right off the bat.”
“So, you’re saying you need some practice. I get that.” He nodded once, as if he’d settled something in his mind. “Okay. We can do it your way.”
“My way? I have a way?”
“We all have a way.” The hand he still had at the back of my head softened in my hair. It was joined by his other hand, which tilted my jaw up a fraction to make sure I looked right into his eyes. “For instance, there’s my way. My way is to turn up the heat even more to see if we can melt each other right out of our clothes, and fuck until neither one of us can walk.”
My eyes widened. This time I could feel my heart knock against his.
His low, delighted huff of laughter told me he felt it too. Then, to my surprise, he lowered his head until his brow settled against mine, his hands still holding me in place. The gesture was so unexpected and sweet it tightened the muscles in my throat.
