Her Relentless Russian (Karev Brothers Book 3)

by Leslie North

  Not that I wouldn't of my own free will, she mused as Dmitry whipped his jacket off the back of the chair and settled it around her bare shoulders. The rain continued to hammer down on the roof and drill against the shop windows outside.

  Something told Harper the storm was only just beginning. The sooner she hurried home, the sooner she'd be back and sheltered once more beneath Dmitry's roof. He unlocked the door, and she hurried out into the downpour. When she had put a block between them, she turned to look behind her and saw him still standing in the doorway, watching her depart.

  Was Dmitry Karev her collaborator—or her warden? Whatever he was, Harper knew she was on the hook. She sank back beneath the safeguard of his jacket, losing herself in the comforting smell of fresh coffee and wizened old books, until the rain faded from her awareness. Less quick to fade was the memory of Dmitry's lean, strong arms pinning her on either side…

  What would she do, if it happened again? And might it not be a question of if—but when?

  3

  Dmitry

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Dmitry was adjusting to his new work situation.

  Harper Allen showed up on his doorstep the moment he opened the store—her punctuality surprised him—with two steaming cups of coffee. Her hair today was a vibrant, amethyst purple, and styled in voluptuous shiny pin curls. Dmitry was speechless as he unlocked the door for her.

  His gobsmacked silence at seeing her new look didn't last long, however. Two, maybe three hours to be exact.

  "You're going to give yourself diabetes with all that sugar," Dmitry lectured, his eyes raking the pile of deflated white packets strewn about her workplace. "And give me back my jacket."

  "No way." Harper hunkered down beneath it protectively, as if she expected him to wrench it from her shoulders. "It's cold in here. We're in the dead of fall, Dmitry. It wouldn't kill you to turn the heat up, you know."

  "Do you pay the bills around here?" he prompted her. "No. That's what I thought. The temperature is perfect the way it is. No touching the thermostat—and no trying to hack into it from afar, either."

  He didn't press the issue though, and she didn't argue with him. He couldn't help secretly enjoying the sight of her wearing his jacket. Then again, her insistence on draping herself in his clothing meant he couldn't really get a good view of what she was wearing underneath it. He knew it was something short and black, the skirt of which terminated well above her knees, but that was all he could gather visually. He decided to preoccupy himself and turned his attention to setting his things up.

  Once his own side of the backroom desk was organized, Dmitry eased down into the spare folding chair he had brought from home. He untucked his glasses from his shirt pocket and slipped them on, glancing Harper's way again as he did so. There was no denying that he looked, and felt, completely out of place in his own domain. The woman had hauled a Rubbermaid tub full of computer parts back with her on the city bus. Spare cords, keyboards, and routers spilled from the bin and onto the floor. Horrifically, he saw many stripped wires among them, their exposed copper innards gleaming in the office light. Surely so many of them bared together constituted a fire hazard of some kind.

  Harper's own workspace was an even bigger mess than the floor. Dmitry had no idea how she had already managed to accumulate five lipstick-stamped Styrofoam coffee cups, but there they were, drained to various levels and arranged haphazardly around their shared vicinity. Dmitry leaned forward to snatch the closest one off a stacked pile of out-of-print dictionaries.

  "My books are not to be used as coasters," he stated as he whisked the offending cup away. "In fact, most of these volumes happen to be very valuable. I would appreciate it if you treated them that way."

  Harper glanced around in wide-eyed confusion. "Then why are they just strewn all over the place like this?"

  "Because you made them this way," Dmitry replied with forced patience. He tossed the cup into the waste bin before it could turn to packing peanuts in his clenched hand. He decided a change of subject was in order… even if everything else wasn't. "So what's the plan?" he asked her as he turned back to his laptop.

  "Weeell," Harper drawled as she leaned back in her chair. "I was thinking about infiltrating Roza today. Security around their properties is as tough as your tightwad personality, but there's a backdoor I've been meaning to exploit."

  Dmitry endured her insults, trying his best not to glance too conspicuously down past the desk when she mentioned backdoor exploitations. Harper shifted her legs, and the hem of the tiny black dress she wore glided up one creamy thigh. No wonder she was freezing beneath his jacket. Had she dressed herself up for him?

  He could think of a few ways of warming her up, and fetching the woman a redundant cup of coffee was not one of them.

  "… Slick Cycles." Harper continued to rattle off the names of local businesses with mob ties. Dmitry blinked, and realized belatedly that she had been speaking to him this entire time, listing potential marks for Belvedere to hit next. "And I was thinking about snooping around Déjà Brew just for the hell of it. I assume you tip your barista well? Because I have a way of finding out about these things."

  Harper waggled her eyebrows at him. Dmitry lifted himself out of his chair, gripping the edge of their shared desk in frustration. "You have no idea what you're doing, do you?" he demanded in exasperation.

  "I have some idea." Harper shrugged, playing with one amethyst pin curl as she leaned into her work. "All right, looks like we're in."

  "Where?" Dmitry asked in surprise as he maneuvered around to her side of the warzone.

  "Roza. While you were accusing me of not knowing what I was doing, I was running a script to break into their system. I wonder who's proved themselves the most useful in this relationship so far?" Harper asked.

  "Not a relationship," Dmitry corrected automatically as he leaned in behind her, bracing himself on the back of her chair. "A partnership. Born of necessity."

  "And because you think I'm pretty," Harper volunteered as her white fingers flew across the keyboard. "See? I can crack a thesaurus. I'm not just a pretty face, you know."

  Dmitry had a mind to object to some or all of what she said, but he was distracted by the bouquet of her hair. Not only was it the dark, shimmering hue of sugared violets, but it smelled… wonderful. Like perfume that came in a small, expensive bottle, and top-shelf product, and all the feminine conceits that never seemed to find their way past the welcome mat of his store. Beneath this work of artistry, Harper's long, shapely neck bent as she hunched closer to her computer screen. Dmitry felt his stomach clench, muscles flexing to suppress a sudden, primal instinct rearing up inside him—an instinct that told him to lay his hand on the back of that exposed neck in a signal. She was certain to turn her face up to him if she did, and—

  He kept his hands to himself. "What do you expect to find?" he asked her finally. "Roza is a nightclub. I doubt Vasily—"

  "—owner guy—" Harper agreed for the sake of mutual clarity.

  "—Vasily isn't the kind of man to work around the mob's agenda or harbor grudges. I've known him for years. He's a one-dimensional Russian immigrant with very stereotypically American aspirations." Dmitry shook his head and repositioned his glasses up his nose. "He's flamboyant. Showy. Acts younger than his years, but his main focus is the happiness of his daughter, Rebecca, and managing his properties to keep his family provided for."

  "My stories are better," Harper offered. She glanced up the length of his chest, meeting his eyes, even as her fingers continued to flit across the keyboard. "Look, I believe you believe the best of everyone around you, Dmitry, which is why my presence here is so important. If our target winds up being someone close to you, maybe even someone with those same sexy Karev-Ivankov genes and family connection, then odds are you're going to have to rely on an outsider like me to see things more clearly."

  "Is that what you think you are?" he asked her quietly. "An outsider?"

  Harper fell u
ncharacteristically quiet, clicking through to another security screen, typing a few lines of code. "From the way you talk about him, I could have sworn you considered Sergey a sort of father figure. He wasn't a great one, admittedly, but he had his moments."

  Harper stared straight ahead at the computer screen. "Are you saying you want me for a sister?"

  "God no!" Dmitry exclaimed. He saw the smile bloom across her face too late, and realized he may have given too much about his attraction to her away. He decided to go with it. "Although I'll admit with how cramped these quarters are, it's starting to feel very Flowers in the Attic in here."

  "You think I don't know that reference. I know that reference." Harper pushed back from the desk and rose, still wearing the same smile. Was it the backroom light filtering through her outrageous purple hair and casting the blush across her face? "Here, I'll give you some room while I hunt down a coffee pot. You've got to have one hidden around here somewhere."

  "Don't you think you've had enough?" Dmitry mused as he sat down. "Last cupboard on the right over the sink," he instructed. "What am I supposed to do with this?" He gestured to the screen.

  "Don't touch anything," Harper stressed as she pulled the dusty coffee pot down along with a crumpled bag of beans Dmitry had forgotten he had. "Just… shout over to me if anything weird happens."

  "Something weird is happening," Dmitry said uncertainly as he watched the screen. "I mean, the green bar stopped filling, and now there's a red bar. Now the red bar is flashing."

  "Wait, what?" Harper hurried back over to look. One glance at the screen and she dropped the bag of beans she was holding right into the Rubbermaid tub along with all her tech pieces. "Oh, shit!" she exclaimed. "That is not good."

  Before Dmitry could slide out of the way, Harper had dropped into his lap and resumed the driver's seat. He lifted his hands, holding them aloft awkwardly, but he couldn't quite bring himself to settle them on her curves and push her off again. He gritted his teeth in silent acceptance, trying not to think about the warm press of her body and how good it felt against his sure-to-stir groin.

  He felt sure the male brain wasn't built to handle all this stress.

  "What is it? What's happening?" He wished the question didn't sound so strangled leaving his lips, but he had to make sure he didn't let slip a groan in the process.

  "A new security system," she stated. "One I've never seen before."

  "From Roza?"

  She jerked her head in a nod, hair bouncing and buffeting him in the face. He could imagine all too vividly what it would be like to position himself behind her, to…

  "This is bad. Really bad." Her fingers flew across the keyboard. "It's an automated counterstrike. Rather than defend against my invasion, they're using the same pathway I drilled into their inner system to attack me back. Clever."

  "I take it being… drilled… is a bad thing," Dmitry said. He was only barely following her, but he knew they were in bigger trouble than just the situation localized to his pants. "So you have a plan for this sort of thing, right?"

  "Er… plan. Right." Harper's fingers continued to clack the keys. Unfortunately, the woman wasn't as skilled at inspiring his confidence as she was his erection.

  "If it's automated, then that means it's your brain against the computer!" Dmitry snapped. "Are you telling me there isn't a maneuver for this sort of thing?"

  "As much as I appreciate your compliment about my mental prowess, this isn't Internet chess. There's a lot more at stake here than just a victory for the computer." Harper turned, and their faces nearly collided. She blinked her thick lashes in surprise as Dmitry quickly craned himself backward. It was as if she hadn't realized she was sitting on his lap this entire time. "The counter-security measure is set to delete everything it has access to in the next… less-than-five minutes. That doesn't just mean we lose what we're looking for—it also means everything I've ever programmed is forfeit. It's fried. This security system amounts to a big fuck-you, and it's going to self-destruct if I don't act fast."

  "Why don't you slow down and think?" Dmitry demanded angrily. He seized hold of her waist to keep her in place as she leaned to the side, grabbing for one of her spiral notebooks. Cold coffee sloshed out of an overturned cup, but he couldn't reach far enough past her to salvage the book it stained. "Why don't you plan?"

  "There's no time for a plan!" Harper snatched the notebook and flipped to a page in the far back. Her penmanship was completely illegible to him—it looked as if it ran backward and forward and inverted in on itself, like one of Leonardo Da Vinci's famously coded diaries, although it was definitely in English. It didn't surprise him that none of her equations adhered to the built-in lines of the paper.

  "Here! Read this off to me!" She passed the notebook back to him. Dmitry pushed his glasses up his nose and studied her hieroglyphs, proceeding to rattle off words, numbers, commands, never entirely understanding what he said and certain he must be rereading every other line, but Harper seemed to instinctively know what he intended. The next time he glanced up, the flashing red bar had disappeared; a second later, the green load bar zoomed to completion.

  "Got it." They shared a sigh of relief as Harper settled back against his chest. She felt so overwhelmingly good nestled against him, with his chin barely grazing the crown of her head, that Dmitry almost said so. He almost wrapped his arms around her waist to secure her against him. It would be so easy from this angle to aid in her skirt's ascent, to run his hands up her thigh in a tentative first exploration…

  "Good." He rocked them both forward and dumped her off him. "Whatever that was, don't let it happen again. I can't afford to have any of what we're doing here traced back to my store."

  "And I can't afford to build any of my programs from scratch," Harper stated. Was it his imagination, or did she sound slightly sulky, maybe even slightly disappointed? When Dmitry removed his glasses and narrowed his gaze for a better look, she had already turned away from him to rummage through her rubber container of wires. "This is my life's work we're talking about. All right, so we got the info, but it looks like it's been encrypted. I can run a few programs to deal with it, but it's probably going to take all night to crack."

  "Fine." Dmitry moved back to his side of the desk, trying to discreetly adjust the front of his pants. "You think what you got looks promising?"

  Her smile bloomed, and she gave him a thumbs-up. "Oh yeah. We're doing good, boss."

  Boss, he thought in amusement. If only you knew all the ways I'd like to bend you over this desk and—

  "And it looks like your buddy Vasily is probably in the clear on this one," Harper continued, oblivious to the crude scene he was enacting out in his mind's eye. "This info was embedded pretty deep. I doubt anyone but the person who stored it knows it's there. Hell, even the developer would have likely completely overlooked this little underground cache buried in the systems. I can't say confidently until we open it, but let's just say this modus operandi is very familiar. I'll bet we get into these documents and find the information we've gathered picking up exactly where it left off."

  Dmitry shook his head in wonder. "This… person… whoever he—or she—is," he quickly corrected when Harper shot him a withering look, "they've got their fingers in every Mafia pie this side of the pond."

  "Yeah. But whoever it is has fallen back to being more cautious now," she pointed out. "They must know we're onto them. Either we need to lay a lot lower, or you need to have a talk with your brother—the one who's dating that FBI chick."

  Dmitry sat down in his folding chair and drummed his fingers in contemplation. "I was just thinking that myself."

  Maxim was looking well—better than he ever had, if Dmitry was being honest with himself. He had lost the lean, hungry appearance, the so-cool-they-looked-almost-dead eyes, the grim set of the mouth and the fresh stitches and bruises that had once established him as an entrenched Mafioso to anyone who knew the look. To his knowledge, Vlad had yet to outgrow the symptoms of his
hard life on the inside of the Bratva, but Dmitry suspected a softer demeanor would come with fatherhood.

  "He's not drinking. In solidarity with Madison." Maxim snorted as he poured his brother a shot of vodka. "Can you believe it?"

  They were convening in Dmitry's living room. Dmitry had provided the phone call and the meeting space, and as always, Maxim had provided the booze. And the beard, apparently. The thick, chestnut-colored growth shaped his brother's jaw in a well-maintained swoop, making him look more mountain man than Mafioso. Dmitry tried not to look too obviously jealous as they clinked their glasses together. Maxim was the literal black sheep in the family, more Ivankov than Karev, and he had the dark unruly hair to show for it. At least Dmitry still had his own nose for male fashion.

  "It seems as unbelievable to me as the fact that you remembered his girlfriend's name," he replied, smiling ironically as he brought the glass to his lips. "Cheers," he added.

  Maxim snorted. "Everyone still thinks I'm a slut. I haven't been that way since before I was with Rebecca, but I guess the brotherhood never forgets."

  "And now you're with Agent Casillero," Dmitry said.

  "I hear you have a lady friend yourself."

  Dmitry sat back into the cushion of his sofa, surprised. "Word travels fast when you're assisting the FBI," he said finally, propping his arm up on the back of the couch to soften some of his outward alarm. "They give you your own badge yet? Hell, they give you your own gun?"

  "Yeah." Maxim's expression gave the game away, and Dmitry rolled his eyes as his brother carried on with the job. "But it's a trick one, like Dad's. Doesn't fire shit most of the time."

  "Jesus, it's been forever since I thought about that," Dmitry muttered. "Just how many games of Russian roulette away from offing himself was he, do you think?"

  "Zero," Maxim replied. "You ever get a good look at that thing? You'd have to be some sort of idiot wizard to succeed in blowing a man's brains out with a toy like that. He always knew how to stack the odds in his favor, that's for sure. Guess he hadn't accounted for an ice pick, but…" Maxim shrugged. "Who would?"