Russian Mafia Boss's Heir

by Bella Rose

  She headed back into the master suite and stared at the bed. She’d been sleeping there pretty much alone since that first night. Thinking back to how strangely optimistic she’d felt when she woke up the morning after her wedding night, Tori felt stupid now.

  What had happened to the man who wanted her so much that he ordered her out of her clothes? He had been powerful and sexy that night. She’d felt wanton and attractive and so damn aroused that she’d nearly come at the first press of his fingers against her pussy. Now she would be lucky if he even remembered she had a pussy. It was almost as if the entire night had been an act. It was the thing that all men were supposed to do on their wedding nights, but not something that Mikhail had particularly enjoyed.

  Oh! What if he hadn’t even liked having sex with her? Until that moment Tori hadn’t even considered the possibility. He’d gotten off, right? In her limited experience, that was what men wanted. Mikhail wasn’t a regular sort of guy. He was more. The possibility existed that she had disappointed him and he had become bored before they’d even gotten started.

  That thought made her angry.

  She flounced back out of the suite and took the stairs two at a time on her way to the ground floor. She could hear Mrs. O’Connell vacuuming the living room. The housekeeper was a whole lot better than Mrs. Tobolovsky had ever been, but Tori could tell the poor woman was getting a bit frustrated with Mikhail. It wasn’t like she could tell her employer that he was acting like a crappy husband. That was sort of Tori’s department. Except she was pretty sure it wouldn’t do her a damn bit of good to tell Mikhail.

  She was done hanging around waiting for him to notice her. With one quick text, she made plans to meet her friends for lunch. It was high time she stopped being a bridal doormat.

  ***

  “HOW IS MARRIED life treating you, eh?” Stanislas slapped Mikhail on the shoulder in some bizarre imitation of camaraderie. Bizarre because there was nothing in Stanislas’s behavior in the last few weeks that had resembled any sort of comrade Mikhail would have wanted.

  Mikhail knew he was required to provide an answer. He also knew that Stanislas wasn’t interested in honesty.

  So Mikhail offered a pleasant smile. “I find married life very comfortable.”

  “Good, good!” the old man said absently. “Now. What did you find out about the Orlovs?”

  It was just the two of them in the study at Stanislas’s house. Mikhail was tempted to be honest regarding exactly what he had found out about the Orlovs, but that would have made Stanislas extremely angry, and Mikhail just wasn’t sure if he cared to deal with a tantrum at the moment.

  Mikhail gestured to a sheaf of receipts on the table. “These are the most recent receipts from the casino. It would appear that the Orlovs are spending at least two nights a week inside. There is some gambling, some drinking, and probably more than a few meetings.” Mikhail had his own private opinions about why the Orlovs were frequenting a Vasiliev establishment, but he kept that to himself.

  “Those bastards!” Stanislas snarled. “They are trying to strong arm their way into my business. No?”

  No. But Mikhail couldn’t actually voice that opinion, so he shrugged instead. “I’m not sure of their intentions, but we can certainly keep them under close surveillance.”

  “I want you to find something concrete,” Stanislas demanded. He paced energetically back and forth in front of the table before turning and smashing his hand down on the stack of receipts. “I want something to take to the council. I want to ask permission to take them out. I want their boss, Vasily. I want him dead!”

  “Isn’t Vasily Orlov Tori’s uncle?” Mikhail asked slowly. “Are you certain taking him out is fair to her?”

  “What?” Stanislas snorted, waving his hand in the air in an expansive gesture that managed to convey nothing. “Tori is my child and a Vasiliev. Nothing else would matter to her! I can promise you that. Besides, she is a woman. She will do, say, and think as she is told.”

  Mikhail didn’t give voice to the protest going on inside his brain that told him Tori would be anything but biddable when it came to the notion of her stepfather murdering her mother’s brother. In fact, he had a feeling Tori would be very vocal in opposition to that plan. However, it was equally obvious that her stepfather didn’t care one bit for anything Tori might feel or think.

  “Do you know what happened to Tori’s mother?” Mikhail asked slowly. “Nobody ever talks about it.”

  “Why would you bring that up now?” Stanislas whipped around, pegging Mikhail with a hard stare.

  Mikhail recovered immediately. “I was only thinking that if you had proof the Orlovs had been behind her death, you could take that to the council and have your reason to take them out.”

  “Ah,” Stanislas said slowly. “I suppose that would have been one way to go about it, but no. There is nothing about that situation that would help us.”

  Mikhail said nothing more, but he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind that Stanislas knew a lot more about the death of Tori’s mother than he was saying.

  ***

  “WAIT.” JAMIE PAUSED with a teaspoon hanging in midair over her drink. She’d been stirring sweetener into her tea, but seemed to have forgotten what she was doing altogether. “Are you telling me that you and your brand new husband, Mr. Virility Sex God himself, haven’t had sex since your wedding night?”

  “He’s too busy for sex,” Tori said bitterly.

  Mara stayed quiet. She sipped her iced coffee and stared at Jamie and Tori as if she were trying to come up with the perfect answer to this problem.

  The café wasn’t busy. It was too late in the afternoon for that. The tiny bistro table where the friends sat was tucked beneath a tree at the back of the outdoor patio. It was cool and private, a perfect place for Tori to divulge all of her woes.

  “Dimitri says that Mikhail is having a lot of issues with Stanislas,” Mara finally said.

  Her words were enough to make Tori turn so quickly that she was sure she’d broken her neck. “What did you say?”

  Mara took a breath to say it again, but Tori shook her head.

  Then Jamie pointed her spoon at Mara. “You’ve been seeing Dimitri? You didn’t even tell me!”

  “He asked me not to.” Mara sounded contrite, maybe even worried about the omission. “Apparently he’s not really supposed to be seeing anyone.”

  “Enforcers need to be dedicated to their jobs,” Tori agreed. “Especially since Dimitri is Mikhail’s right hand man.”

  “I was afraid if I said something to you, you would tell Mikhail,” Mara explained. “You know, pillow talk and all that.”

  “Pretty sure there’s none of that happening,” Tori grumbled. “Unless he’s pillow talking with someone else. I suppose that’s probably a very real possibility.” Tori mulled that thought over in her head. The idea hurt a lot more than she was comfortable with. “He’s not getting it from me. A guy like that must be getting it from somewhere. Right?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Maybe or maybe not. If what Mara says is true, maybe your stepfather is being a giant cock blocker.”

  “Why would he do that?” The idea was ridiculous. Tori had thought her stepfather wanted them together and would very likely start bitching about the lack of an heir. “Surely my stepfather wants me to get pregnant. It wouldn’t shock me to have him show up at the front door with a pregnancy test in hand demanding that I pee on the stick.”

  “Oh, come on,” Mara said with a laugh. “Now you’re just being silly.”

  “Ask your boyfriend if he thinks I’m being silly or if he agrees that it’s a definite possibility.”

  Mara stopped laughing, glancing from Jamie to Tori. “I think it’s time we come up with a plan to get your husband’s attention back where it belongs.

  ***

  MIKHAIL WALKED INTO the house and went directly to the kitchen. Mrs. O’Connell had left a plate of his favorite sticky buns on the counter. He picked up one and bit int
o the wonderfully soft bread. Closing his eyes, he chewed blissfully and wondered where the hell everyone was.

  “There you are,” Mrs. O’Connell said, stepping into the room. “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to come home at all today.”

  “Where’s Tori?” Mikhail inquired absently. “Upstairs?”

  “No. Tori asked me to tell you that she went out.”

  “Out?” Mikhail put the bun back on the plate. “What do you mean she went out?”

  “I would assume that the young lady got a little tired of waiting around the house for you to pay her any attention,” Mrs. O’Connell said primly. “You know, I told her when she first came here that you were a wonderful man with a good heart.”

  “You did?” He was a little dumbfounded and perhaps a bit miffed that the woman would say such ridiculous things about him to his wife. She made him sound soft. He wasn’t soft. “Am I to understand that you have somehow revised this opinion?”

  “Revised it?” Mrs. O’Connell’s voice grew shrill. She was actually wagging a finger at him. “You’ve ignored that poor woman since the day you married her! If there’s a reason for it, that’s fine. But you should at least tell her! It’s killing me to watch her walk around here looking so forlorn and rejected.”

  “So you encouraged her to go out?”

  “No sir, I did not. She came to me and said she was lonely and wanted to visit with her friends. Since neither one of us had any reason to expect you home within the week, she didn’t tell me when she would be back, and I didn’t ask.”

  Mikhail was staring at the woman as though she’d grown a second head. When had she ever been so rebellious? Honestly, he couldn’t recall her ever being cross with him or even raising her voice. And the woman had been working for him for more than ten years now.

  “I’m sorry for disappointing you,” Mikhail said stiffly. “It was not my intention. Unfortunately, Stanislas has been unusually demanding with my time lately.”

  “Why would that man make demands of a newly wed man?” Mrs. O’Connell wondered out loud. “Especially since he knows the woman being stiffed on your time is his own daughter!”

  “I couldn’t say.” Mikhail grimace. He did have his suspicions though. And most of them revolved around the Orlovs and Stanislas’s unfathomable obsession with killing Vasily. At some point, Stanislas was going to order Mikhail to do something that his conscience would not allow.

  Chapter Ten

  “I don’t think we should be here,” Mara whispered in Tori’s ear. “Look at all of the guards. Dimitri is going to kill me.”

  “Oh hush.” Jamie frowned at their friend. “Sometimes you are an insufferable goody two shoes. You know that?”

  “I am not!” Mara actually sounded outraged. Her high pitched voice even garnered some attention of the male variety as more than a few men turned to stare at them.

  Tori couldn’t help but laugh. “Mara, you have to admit that Jamie is sort of right. I used to equate the two of you to the angel and devil sitting on my shoulder.” Tori nudged Jamie. “No guessing, I’m sure, as to who was the angel.”

  “I really don’t appreciate that,” Mara grumbled.

  Tori led the way through the Vasiliev casino. She’d only been there once before, and that was with Stanislas for some official party or meeting. So all of this was new to her too. She was just trying to pretend that it wasn’t.

  “Shall we gamble?” Jamie asked, sounding eager. “I’ve always wanted to play roulette. It seems so exciting and sexy, you know?”

  Mara cleared her throat. “Roulette is practically the only fair game in the house. The odds are always fifty percent for both the player and the house.”

  “Then let’s play that one!” Jamie grabbed Tori’s arm and began dragging her toward the roulette tables.

  It didn’t take a whole lot of persuasion.

  At the nearest roulette table, the girls bought in at a hundred dollars a piece. Tori wasn’t sure if she should be relieved or insulted that nobody seemed to recognize her. Had she been utterly unnoticed in her stepfather’s home? Surely some of these men had been enforcers or guards that had been by the house once or twice. Or wouldn’t they just know because it was part of their job as Vasilievs?

  Tori shoved that thought out of her head. She had married Mikhail in front of a church full of her father’s men. If that hadn’t brought her to their attention, nothing ever would. She focused instead on the spinning wheel and the little tiny ball as it bounced its way to red or black.

  “I won!” Mara screamed excitedly. “I won, I won!”

  Jamie and Tori were laughing, hanging onto each other and pointing at their straight laced friend who apparently could be completely won over by success at the roulette wheel. All of the stress and worry was forgotten, at least for the moment. Life was good.

  “Ms. Ivanov?”

  It actually took Tori a moment to realize that she was Mrs. Ivanov. She turned and found herself staring into the face of a man perhaps ten years her senior. His face had what some people might call character. His nose had obviously been broken a few times, and his hair was long and a little ragged. But his blue eyes were sharp, and something of his face actually looked a bit familiar, though she could not imagine why.

  “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  “I am Antonin Orlov,” he said quietly. “You are my cousin.”

  Crap. So his face was familiar because he looked like her. Or she looked like him, or something to that effect.

  “Okay,” Tori said slowly. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

  “Your mother,” Antonin said tersely. “Or rather, I want to talk about what happened to her.”

  “She died.” Tori said it simply, hoping the guy would just take the hint. She didn’t want to dig into her mother’s past. Did she?

  ***

  MIKHAIL STRODE THROUGH the casino, looking for both Tori and any Orlov stragglers and praying to whatever deity might be listening that the two had not found each other. When he saw Antonin Orlov talking to Tori right next to the roulette table, Mikhail cursed his luck. It wasn’t going to matter what happened now. He would wind up pissing someone off.

  “Dimitri!” Mikhail raised his hand, ushering his friend over. “Could you please escort Mara and Jamie out of the casino?”

  “Mara,” Dimitri murmured. “What in the hell is Mara doing here?” He cursed in Russian. “She knows I would never allow such a thing!”

  Mikhail raised his brows. “And why would you have any affect on what Mara would or would not do?”

  Dimitri’s mouth snapped closed. Obviously he hadn’t been prepared to answer that question when he had reacted reflexively.

  Finally, he cleared his throat. “Mara and I have been seeing each other. It’s not serious.”

  “That’s too bad,” Mikhail said mildly. “She’s a nice woman.”

  “Stanislas would not allow it.”

  Mikhail gave a disgusted grunt. “I’m beginning to realize that Stanislas has some very unusual ideas about more than one topic. The dating choices of his men is apparently something I need to add to the list.”

  “Why are they here?”

  “I have no idea, but I can almost certainly assume that Tori is somehow wishing to rub my nose in her activities.” Mikhail glowered at his wife.

  “What are you going to do about her little chat with Antonin Orlov?” Dimitri pursed his lips. “The two look as though they have plenty to discuss.”

  “I’m not quite certain yet.” Mikhail mulled this problem over in his head. “I do know that I need to hurry before Orlov tells her something that can’t be taken back.”

  “You think Stanislas had her mother killed, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question. Dimitri was stating fact.

  “I’m not sure what to think, and the old man won’t divulge anything. Antonin or his father might be the only ones who know the truth,” Mikhail said bitterly.

  “If you can assume that they would
tell the truth,” Dimitri pointed out.

  “Exactly.”

  “So how about we go break up the party and send everyone home?” Dimitri suggested.

  Mikhail began walking. He was glad his friend was right behind him. “I was just going to suggest that.”

  ***

  TORI KNEW SHE was in trouble when she spotted Mikhail moving toward the roulette table. What was he doing here anyway? The one day he wasn’t at work and he had to come here? Or maybe the casino was work. That was certainly a possibility.

  “Hello, Antonin.” Mikhail’s voice was pleasant, but it sounded a bit forced.

  Tori put her hands on her hips. “What are you doing here?”

  “This casino is a Vasiliev enterprise.” Mikhail raised his eyebrows. “I should ask what you are doing here. This is no place for a lady.”

  Antonin snorted. “You cannot keep your woman locked up in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, Mikhail.” Antonin switched to Russian. “This is not the old country.”

  “I’ll be home when I’m ready,” Tori told Mikhail. “I’m not done speaking with my cousin.”

  She could see Mikhail grinding his teeth. No doubt he didn’t appreciate the reminder that she was related to the Orlovs. Well, he could go to hell for all she cared. It wasn’t as if her husband wanted to talk to her, or spend time with her. There was no reason why she couldn’t enjoy the company of someone who did.

  “Mara,” Dimitri said quietly. “Please take Jamie and go home.”

  Jamie might have protested, but Mara grabbed her arm and dragged her off anyway.

  The imperious command made Tori so angry she could hardly contain herself.

  She put her hands on her hips and stomped her foot so hard she nearly snapped off the heel of her shoe. “That was bullshit! Do you hear me, Dimitri? Bullshit!” She pointed right at him and poked the middle of his chest. “It’s not fair for you to pull that on my friend. She’s not even your real girlfriend because you don’t have the balls to tell my stepfather you’re dating her! How rude is that, I ask you?”