Red Heat

by Nina Bruhns

  She felt a blush rip up her throat. God, he’s right. After their passionate encounter last night in the hotel stairwell, any kissing between them had just been in her own vivid imagination. “You kissed me back,” she defended herself, fighting the acute embarrassment.

  “And I’d do a lot more if given the chance,” he conceded. “But it would change nothing. I would still have to arrest you. I have my career to think of. Letting a spy go free . . . well, let’s just say I would not be popular with my superiors.”

  Okay, then. At least she knew where she stood.

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m not a spy,” she said and turned away to concentrate hard on the horizon, a focal point for her chaotic thoughts . . . and feelings.

  What was going on with her? She didn’t understand why she was so drawn to this man. It was totally unnerving. And nearly as terrifying as the sensation of drowning. In a way it was like drowning. She was floundering in a sea of unfamiliar emotions and desires. Wanting to know him, wanting him. No, it wasn’t like she’d never fallen for a man before . . . but never one so screamingly wrong for her. And never so hopelessly.

  Under a brooding bank of storm clouds, the late-afternoon light saturated the sea, turning it a deep, rich pewter, painting the crests of the choppy waves in liquid silver. It had a deadly, ominous power. No wonder it lured men to abandon hearth and home to taste the mysteries of its depths.

  Sort of like a certain Russian sea captain.

  But she would be a fool even to think of pursuing this any further. He’d said it himself—it would never work between them. Ever.

  For God’s sake, he’d just told her he’d have no qualms about arresting her for espionage!

  “Milaya moya—,” he began, apparently sensing the direction of her thoughts.

  “Don’t,” she said, cutting him off, feeling foolishly, stupidly hurt by the brutal candor he’d just displayed. “Don’t call me your sweetheart thirty seconds after you threaten to have me executed.”

  His fingers gripped her arm and swung her around. His expression was as stormy as the sea. “I would never do that!”

  “Don’t be naïve. What do you think happens to spies who are arrested?” she shot back. “You think they’re sent to a country club on the Black Sea, perhaps?”

  He blanched, his head snapping backward as though she’d slapped him.

  She should have slapped him. “Well, I know exactly what happens to them,” she spit out. “They killed my father, you know. Shot down on a street in Moscow in broad daylight. Your people. Your Russian FSB murderers. How fitting if the same should happen to me!”

  He looked stricken.

  She jerked her arm from his grip, fury pouring through her like salt on a fresh wound. She couldn’t get past him to escape down the ladder, so she spun away, grabbing the cold metal edge of the cockpit with white-knuckled fingers, facing into the bitter wind.

  He swore in Russian, then said, “I’m sorry,” his voice oddly gritty. “I’m so sorry, Julie. I didn’t know.” She felt his hands alight almost convulsively on her shoulders.

  She stiffened. “Don’t touch me! Please.”

  The feel of his hands melted away, leaving a stinging hurt where they’d been. Her cheeks hurt, too, from the icy wind. And her eyes—they swam and stung like someone had ripped them out. Along with her heart.

  Why? Why did she give a damn?

  “Julie,” he said in that dark voice, and his body whispered gently against her back. “I would never let them hurt you. I swear.”

  Too late. Almost twenty years too late.

  She felt the press of his face against the fur hat his mother had made for her grieving boy, a loving gesture that had become a constant reminder of a father’s cruelty . . . and of an even greater grief. A parent gone forever.

  She couldn’t stop her tears.

  For herself. For him.

  Maybe even for them. They were so attracted to each other. But they were doomed from the start.

  Blindly she turned and tried to push her way past him, to get to the ladder.

  “Julie, wait. Talk to me. I need to—”

  “No! Let me go,” she said between soft sobs. “We can’t be friends and we damn well shouldn’t be lovers. Please, Nikolai. Let’s just leave it alone. While we still can.”

  She tore his hat from her head and thrust it into his hands. She stumbled to the access trunk ladder and, almost against her will, glanced back at him.

  But he didn’t try to stop her.

  Pain razored through her heart as his mute expression turned to one of shuttered acceptance.

  Well, what the hell had she expected? A goddamn declaration of love?

  10

  It nearly killed Nikolai to let Julie go.

  It was like someone was tearing him in two.

  It made no sense. In one short day she had managed to get to him, to burrow under his skin—and into his soul—more thoroughly than any other human being on earth had done since the death of his mother. He was at a complete loss as to why. What had started out as an explosive sexual attraction had quickly burned into something far deeper.

  How? They’d barely spoken. Barely kissed. And yet, every time they touched it felt like a depth charge had gone off in his chest and laid his heart bare. He felt raw. Exposed. And almost desperate. He wanted her so badly.

  Чёрт возьми! How the devil had this happened? How had she managed, as guarded and unwilling as he was, to awaken every male instinct he had—sexual, possessive, protective?

  He wanted nothing more than to stash her in his stateroom and keep her there until he could spirit her away to his dacha and keep her there, safe, forever. Except, she wouldn’t be safe there. She’d never be safe with him.

  How had he let himself become so . . . ensnared by her? She seemed so damned innocent, so defenseless, so . . . unlike the sort of hard, heartless woman the word “shpion” invoked. Was she for real? Or was it all just an act? Was she so skilled at her craft that she was able to convince him so thoroughly of her goodness that he’d fallen for it—and her—hook, line, and sinker?

  Hell, he didn’t think anyone could be so accomplished an actress. Those tears, the anguish in her eyes as she’d torn herself away from him, were genuine. He’d stake his life on it.

  Which, he feared, he was already doing.

  Stefan Mikhailovich had the right of it. Nikolai must force himself to steer clear of her on a personal level. Keep it professional. Trap her, turn her in, then forget her.

  The question was, how? How to ignore the overwhelming need . . . and the guilt . . . gnawing at his gut, and feed her to the politchik wolves?

  He looked down at the fur hat in his hands and shuddered out a long, agonized breath.

  A flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a boom of thunder that shook the deck beneath him. Seconds later rain began to pelt his face.

  A rating popped up from below holding a hooded slicker. “Foul-weather gear, Kapitan?”

  Nikolai waved it off. “Nyet, I’ll be down in a moment.”

  But forty-five minutes later he was still standing there on the bridge, soaked to the bone and nearly frozen solid. He hadn’t noticed the discomfort, nor had he moved an inch. He’d been lost in an unwilling tumult of thoughts . . . and memories . . . stirred by the pretty American. He’d been thinking about his mother.

  One memory in particular. Of a photo he’d also found among his mother’s belongings after she died.

  A single photograph, old and yellowed with age, it had been carefully concealed under a false bottom in a small cedar jewelry box. It showed a smiling young couple with a child of about six or seven, posing in front of a huge waterfall. The little girl, despite the small size of the photograph, had features uncannily like his mother’s.

  Which was impossible, he’d always told himself. What he’d suspected at the time was wrong. Dead wrong. Even though the paper the photo was printed on had a troubling word repeated in faded print di
agonally across the back: Kodak. And regardless that the waterfall in the background looked an awful lot like Niagara Falls, which he’d visited that year he’d spent at an American high school.

  Impossible. Utterly and definitively impossible.

  Nikolai had replaced the photo that day and never taken it out again. But the image had been burned into his memory. Down through the years he had steadfastly ignored the niggling feeling that Cherenkov’s blackmail may have something to do with that single, damning photograph.

  He’d ignored it, because his mother was not American. She’d spoken flawless Russian. She’d had a whole documented family history, proving her pure Russian heritage. She was sweet and uninterested in anything much beyond her summer garden, her winter embroidery, and her only child. His father had been—and still was—an important provincial party official. Rostislav Ivanovich Romanov was handsome and charming on the outside, though viciously, ruthlessly ambitious under that thin veneer of charisma. He’d been especially fanatical in the old Soviet days because of the taint of aristocracy in his family blood. Rostislav Romanov would never, ever, have married a foreigner, risking his ever-tenuous position in the party.

  Unless he hadn’t known who she was.

  Or what she was.

  Nikolai’s turbulent mind did not want to think about Julie’s father’s murder.

  Shot down on a street in Moscow, she’d said.

  Ruthlessly. Cold-bloodedly. For being a spy. . .

  Was that a lie, too? Just part of her strategy to worm her way into his sympathy? Worse, was she trying to convince him to trust her by feeding on his own darkest fears about his mother?

  But how could Julie know about the photograph? How could anyone know? And how in hell could she ever know his own mother had also been shot down on the streets of Moscow . . . ?

  She couldn’t, he told himself, shoving back at the sickening sense of foreboding rising in his heart.

  Because his mother was not American. Not a spy. There was nothing more to say on the subject.

  He resurrected himself from his disturbing thoughts and shook the cold rivulets of water from his hair. He looked up and saw that it had stopped raining. And realized the rest of his body was shaking like a dog.

  Чертов ад. Fucking, fucking hell.

  He stabbed his fingers through his icy, wet hair, snapped himself out of it, and climbed down the trunk ladder to the central post, where he stripped off his drenched greatcoat and tossed it and his mother’s wolfskin hat to a rating.

  “Captain on d—,” Starshina Borovsky began to announce, but he halted as Nikolai swung around and headed in the opposite direction.

  “Carry on,” Nikolai called over his shoulder as he ducked into the radio room. He dug the SD card he’d taken from Julie’s satellite phone and handed it to the surprised radio operator, Lyeĭtenant Danya Petrov. Petrov had a reputation for being a computer wiz. The kid also knew how to keep his mouth shut. “I want to know what’s on this. Everything. My eyes only. Understood?”

  “Da, Kapitan.”

  Nikolai closed the door again and called to Borovsky, “I’ll be in engineering if anything comes up.”

  He needed a major distraction, and this was the best one he could think of.

  The engineering problem Nikolai had gone aft to investigate earlier in the day had actually turned out to be a malfunction in the atmosphere production equipment. Which, according to the chief engineer, Praporshchik Yasha Selnikov, was slowly strangling the boat’s supply of oxygen. If Yasha hadn’t caught it when he did, their breathable air would have slowly degraded. It could have been very bad news indeed if they’d submerged for any length of time.

  Hypercapnia, or carbon dioxide poisoning, was an insidious thing; it started with headaches and fatigue, slithered quietly through hyperventilation and impaired judgment, and ended with painful convulsions and death. Chances were good that they would have noticed and surfaced in time—especially with all the scientists on board—but perhaps not before a tragedy had occurred, either medically or from a mistake resulting from the crew’s mental erosion.

  The chief engineer had been working to correct the problem all day. Nikolai wanted to make sure the cause was found and fixed, without fail. This was not something to be trifled with.

  Before exiting the central post a second time, he turned back to call another order to Borovsky. “See that a drill is scheduled for tonight on the use of the IDAs. Everyone on board who’s not on critical duty is to participate. Officers to supervise.”

  The IDA-59 was a personal breathing apparatus designed to provide ten to thirty minutes of good air in an emergency. Every Russian submariner was issued one and was required to have it on his person at all times. He’d planned to do the drill tomorrow, but in light of this development, the sooner the better.

  “Scientists, too?” Borovsky asked, mildly surprised.

  “Everyone,” Nikolai repeated. “And see that they also carry them from now on.” It was probably just spies on the brain, but the whole oxygen malfunction thing was bothering him. Better safe than sorry.

  Nikolai ducked through the watertight door and headed aft. He really should go to the stateroom and change out of his soaked clothes first. But Julie might be there, and he wanted to keep his distance from her until he regained a more even mental keel. And if she was still upset, he didn’t want to intrude on her.

  Luckily, having the diesel motors running nonstop guaranteed that the aft compartments would be stiflingly hot. His clothes would dry quickly, and he’d soon stop shivering. On the outside, anyway.

  When he got to engineering, a concerned Praporshchik Selnikov glanced up from amid the guts of the atmospheric equipment, some of which was in parts on the deck. He did not look happy.

  “What’s the word, Yasha?” Nikolai yelled over the ever-present mechanical noise of the engines.

  He had served with the older man several times previously, and for his money Praporshchik Selnikov was the best engineer, mechanic, and all-around fix-it man in the Russian navy. On this patrol, Yasha was also chief of the boat, or COB, a sort of intermediary between enlisted men and officers. There wasn’t a man on the crew whose judgment Nikolai trusted more.

  Yasha glanced around and waved the other crew members off, to give them privacy.

  Damn. Any discussion that required secrecy never delivered good news. Nikolai squatted down on his heels so they didn’t have to shout.

  “It’s not good, Comrade Kapitan.”

  “Tell me the worst. Can’t you fix it?”

  The praporshchik gave him a withering look. “Of course I can fix it.”

  “Then what?”

  “It is a very unusual break. One that happens very rarely.”

  Nikolai returned the older man’s steady gaze, reading between the lines. За ебис. “Are you saying it may have had a little help breaking?” he asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

  Yasha swiped his oily hands on a rag. “There’s no way to tell for sure. But yes, there’s a fifty-fifty chance this malfunction did not happen on its own.”

  Sabotage?

  Nikolai’s first thought was of Julie. He scowled. “What level of expertise are we talking?”

  “High. If this was deliberate, the person who did it either knows exactly what he is doing or has been given explicit directions and knows enough to follow them.”

  Nikolai digested that with trepidation. Julie didn’t strike him as having an advanced engineering degree. True, looks could be deceiving. He’d ask her what she had studied. But if it wasn’t her . . .

  Чёрт возьми. Nikolai didn’t want to think about the possibilities.

  “Again, it may not have been deliberate,” Yasha said and pursed his lips. “There were no overt signs of tampering. And with the general run-down state of this vessel . . .” He let Nikolai draw his own conclusions.

  “If there was no outward indication, how did you find the break?” Nikolai asked.


  Despite the serious subject, Yasha gave him a boyish grin, taking years off his weathered face. “I was testing a new piece of equipment. A kind of chemical sniffer I saw on an American TV show about crime scene investigators. Thought it would be fun to try to build one myself.”

  Nikolai gave him an incredulous look.

  The COB winked. “Hulu. Gotta love the Internet.”

  “Shit,” Nikolai said after a chuckle, then went back to the problem at hand. This was just what he needed. A spy, and now this? “What the hell do we do if there’s a saboteur on board?”

  Yasha pushed out a breath, the both of them once again going somber. “Pray we catch the bastard before he kills us all.”

  It wasn’t easy to hide on a submarine. Every inch of space was filled, either with hardware, equipment, supplies, or people.

  But tucked way in the rear of the sub, behind the aft hatch ladder where she’d originally climbed in, Julie had managed to find a small corner to be alone. Well, relatively speaking.

  After leaving the confrontation with Nikolai on the freezing bridge, she’d taken a short but blessedly hot shower. There was no way she was putting that skirt back on, and the socks were too wet to wear, so she’d had to put the damp coverall back on, along with her red heels. Now she sat huddled there knees-to-chin on the floor behind the ladder.

  Some of the crew knew she was sitting there. But they’d all taken one look at her puffy red eyes and tear-tracked cheeks, and let her be. Apparently men were the same the world over. None of them wanted to deal with a crying woman. Even now, two hours later, she was still sniffling and they were still avoiding her.

  She hated that she couldn’t stop crying.

  She’d thought she’d cried herself out over her father’s death long ago. But being in the country that had murdered him, and seeing the pain-mingled sympathy in Nikolai’s gaze at her revelation . . . it had brought all the emotions boiling to the surface that she had managed to hold at bay for so many years.