“Sure you don’t want to come back with me to Palermo?” He studied her. “Tonio, your cousins, your aunties—they’d all be glad to see you. In fact, your Aunt Isabella will have my head if I don’t insist.”
“I can’t,” she said firmly. She might be already planning her exit strategy from her brief stint in diplomacy, but there was no conceivable future that included resuming a warm and cozy relationship with her Mafiosi family.
More flashlights were playing over the rocky path, descending from the hotel toward the beach. She gestured, and her uncle turned slightly.
“Looks like it’s time for a graceful exit,” she murmured. “There’s a dead man on the jetty behind me whose presence I’m guessing you won’t want to explain.”
One corner of Marco Rossi’s mouth turned up. He slipped a flat PDA from his tailored jacket and briefly spoke into it. A few moments later, the purr of an approaching vessel filled the night. Judging from the sound of that high-end engine, the elder Rossi would be leaving the scene in style.
As a sleek white cigarette boat pulled smoothly alongside, her uncle strolled toward her.
“You know where to find me if you change your mind.” The fragrance of brandy and cologne perfumed the night air as he dropped a European double kiss on her cheeks. “Ciao, bella.”
Gracefully her uncle climbed into the cigarette boat to join a handful of dark forms clustered watchfully in the cockpit. The vessel pulled smoothly from the jetty, circled in a wide arc and purred away, leaving a trail of white foam on the night-black sea.
Shaking her head, Skylar stared after him, grateful to realize she felt absolutely no regret. She’d turned her back on that lifestyle and the family legacy long ago. The fact that she’d endowed the bulk of her inheritance to a respected non-profit institution dedicated to fighting the spread of chemical weapons was the primary reason she slept at night.
The thud of purposeful feet on the jetty brought her spinning around. The police had indeed arrived, and there was a dead man behind her whose demise she couldn’t bring herself to regret.
But the heat must be the last thing Nikolai wanted. Automatically her gaze swept the length of the jetty to find him.
He was gone.
“Nikolai?”
Her soft call met no response. But then she’d already known it wouldn’t.
On the weathered boards where he’d been standing, a small flat object proved to be the recording device he’d been carrying, now loaded with its treasure trove of digital data.
The first pang of understanding flared in her heart. He’d kept her safe, just as he’d promised. In fact, he’d delivered in spades on all his promises.
He’d saved her cannoli, helped her bring down the smuggling ring and close the chemical weapons pipeline that flowed from Khimgorod through the Mafia to Pyongyang.
Then Nikolai Markov had disappeared, as if he’d never existed.
Slowly Skylar’s legs folded beneath her. She knelt on the jetty and gathered the device he’d left behind, still faintly warm from his body. A sharper pain knifed through her, the dawning recognition that she’d been abandoned.
She’d been expecting it, really. She’d told him she loved him, and once or twice she’d been fool enough to hope he felt the same.
But he’d never said it back.
When the sun came up, she would book passage on a boat to the mainland. Then she’d climb onto the first flight from Salerno to the Netherlands. She’d turn over what she knew to the responsible officials, and the United Nations could decide what to do.
Once she’d locked herself into the privacy and security of a hotel room, closed the curtains and unplugged the phone, she could let herself cry. Because she knew once she started, she’d cry herself into an exhausted sleep. When she awoke, she’d probably cry again.
Until then, she’d manage somehow to hold it together.
For now, it was time to do what she did best, aside from science. Time to do what ICSI had hired her for in the first place. Time to talk herself out of a tight spot into the place she needed to be.
Behind her, the island police had discovered the dead man. Seeing her huddled and bedraggled form, someone called out in a torrent of Italian concern and hurried toward her.
Skylar straightened her shoulders and turned. Then she stepped forward to begin the next phase of her life. A life she would live alone, just the way she’d always lived.
A life without Nikolai.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Endgame: The final stage of the game after most pieces have been removed from the board.
The distant voice of a trumpet playing New Orleans jazz drifted over the rooftops to the wisteria-laced balcony of the antebellum French Quarter inn. As Skylar loitered over her café au lait and a bag of powdery fresh beignets from the Café du Monde, the wavering pain of that distant trumpet brought a poignant smile to her lips.
She was checking out of the inn in two hours, and she really should get going. The moving truck, loaded with her furniture and chemistry texts crated for the journey, was due to arrive at the crumbling, overdue-for-renovation Garden District house she’d bought last month for a steal. She’d already gotten started on the renovations, installed her ballet barre and mirrors in the attic, converted the airy space into a private dance studio for her workouts.
And her new job as senior research chemist at a major pharmaceutical company overlooking Lake Ponchartrain started next week.
All of which should be more than adequate incentive to get her up and moving. Yet she couldn’t seem to shake the lingering sense of lassitude and aimlessness that had gripped her since she’d unloaded her evidence against Vladimir Krasnov and the Chemical Munitions Agency to the competent authorities and resigned from her post at ICSI.
Mannaggia, Skylar, that was two months ago. When are you going to return to the land of the living? Are you going to sleepwalk through the rest of your life?
God knew, she wasn’t the first woman to fall in love with a man who didn’t love her back. It had been two months since Nikolai Markov vanished from the jetty in Capri and from her life. During the long weeks that followed, while she cooled her heels on a beach in Maui, she’d done some casual sleuthing. But not even Victor and Alexis Kostenko, with their impressive connections, had been able to find him.
Nikolai Markov had simply disappeared.
Ceased to exist.
No doubt he’d changed his name, nationality and passport and gone under the knife of some elite, off-grid plastic surgeon weeks ago. She could pass him on the street and never know him.
But it didn’t matter what face he wore. She would recognize him anywhere.
Madonna mia, she was losing her mind! And she was getting worse instead of better. A dozen times over the past few days, as she roamed restlessly through the shops and galleries of the Quarter, acquiring an eclectic assortment of discarded treasures for her new home and trying to forget, she’d felt the butterfly flutter of intense awareness she always associated with Nikolai. She’d felt the warmth rising in her cheeks and pooling between her thighs, a heightened sexual awareness she associated exclusively with him. She’d turn quickly, heartbeat quickening, pulse speeding through her veins.
But there was never anyone there.
This very moment, for cripes’ sake, she smelled the subtle perfume of a French cigarette curling through the verdant spring air, mingling with the acrid chicory of her coffee. The combination reminded her of the way his mouth tasted when he kissed her…
“Merda!”
Impatient with her own heartsick longing, she tossed back a last swallow of cooling coffee and pushed back from the garden table. The wrought iron chair scraped roughly against the flagstones as she turned her back on the enclosed garden courtyard and walked into her room.
There, seated before the slender antebellum writing desk, one leg crossed gracefully over his knee and a cigarette poised over the ashtray, sat Nikolai.
Skylar’s first fleeting thou
ght was that her mind had snapped. She had to be hallucinating, because the man calmly seated before her no longer physically existed. The plastic surgeon would have seen to that.
But there were differences between this man and the one she’d known. The silky dark hair that now teased his shoulders was streaked with copper. His skin was tanned the rich golden brown that came from prolonged exposure to a tropical sun. He was more casually dressed than she’d ever seen him, in high-end cargo pants and a light shirt opened halfway down his chest. A string of tiny wooden beads with a miniature tiki mask nestled against the taut skin of his chest. Another string of tiny beads circled one sinewy wrist.
In short, he was Nikolai Markov as she’d never seen him.
More than anything else, those differences convinced her she hadn’t taken leave of her senses.
“Hello, Skylar,” he said softly. The same butter-smooth tenor, faintly tinged with the rolling consonants of the slight Russian accent she knew he could erase at will.
He was really and truly here.
The knowledge struck her like a blow to the heart. Because why the hell would he do this to her—come back, stir up all her thinly buried angst and confusion and heartache—after she’d given up all hope of finding him?
Why come back now, when she was working so hard to forget him?
Blindly she groped for something to hold her up. One hand found the smooth cherry wood surface of the armoire and gripped hard. She answered him in Italian—a tongue he spoke with perfect fluency, along with a half-a-dozen others.
“You’re an inconceivable bastard, Nikolai Markov. Or whatever name of the week you happen to go by now.”
“Obviously.”
He removed the smoky glasses riding on his slender nose and unveiled the full force of his night-dark eyes. They, at least, were the same. “You knew that, presumably, when you fell in love with me.”
This cool reminder of her utter folly—first falling in love with him, then actually telling him about it—infuriated her. An antique silver-backed hairbrush lay on the armoire, inches from her white-knuckled fingers. She grabbed it and threw it at him.
“Bastardo!”
He caught it easily and laughed. “You’re angry with me, obviously, for abandoning you on the jetty in Capri. And possibly for eluding the rather clever efforts of one Captain Kostenko to locate me in the South Pacific—at your request, one presumes.”
“If I am angry, do you blame me?” The antique comb lay nearby. She hurled it at him.
He shifted slightly to avoid it.
“But I’m not angry,” she went on. “I despise you!”
He raised a chiding finger. “Tsk tsk. You’re not being very diplomatic, Dr. Rossi.”
“Screw diplomacy!”
She knew she was behaving illogically—ridiculously, in fact. But irrational anger was her lifeline at the moment. It fueled her with the strength that kept her on her feet. If not for her anger, she was afraid she’d start crying. God knew she’d done enough of that in the lifetime since his disappearance.
“For all I knew, you were dead, you bastard.” She looked for something else to throw, but she’d already hurled everything on the armoire except the antebellum lamp—and hurling that seemed a bit extreme.
“I’m a hard man to kill, Skylar,” he said mildly.
“When I turned in the evidence we collected, all hell broke loose!” she fired back. “The prime minister himself had to make a public statement, affirming Russia’s commitment to the Chemical Weapons Convention and cutting Krasnov loose. Then when he lost his job, the general skipped town. It took Interpol a bloody month to find him holed up in Belgrade and arrest him, along with a cache of stolen artillery shells filled with mustard gas.
“While he was missing, I barely slept.” Her voice cracked, which made her even angrier. “For all I knew, he was trying to hunt you down and kill you.”
“You of all women should know I’m exceedingly difficult to find,” he murmured. “Although I must confess Captain Kostenko gave me an interesting few weeks of it. Eventually, I had to slip off to Munich.”
Briefly diverted, she stared at him.
“Why Munich?”
“Because,” he said deliberately, pressing out his cigarette in the ashtray, “Alain Devereux’s wife lives in Munich.”
“Alain’s wife?” For a moment, she was deprived of speech.
She’d quickly shrugged off her humiliation at Alain’s betrayal. He’d pursued her relentlessly, undeterred by the fact that she’d largely rejected him—except for that one regrettable and quite forgettable night in Paris. But the alacrity with which he’d sprung to take the helm of ICSI after her resignation confirmed her sneaking suspicion that it was the position she occupied, rather than Skylar herself, which Alain Devereux had always coveted.
Yet the European Union had done nothing to advance Alain’s nomination as her replacement. Recently, she’d heard, the Japanese had put forward their own candidate. Perhaps seeing his ambitions thwarted yet again was sufficient payback for betraying her whereabouts on Capri to the Russians—a suspicion she’d never be able to prove.
But Alain and his fate had become trivial concerns. Her entire emotional bandwidth was already engaged, consumed by the turbulent pitch of her response to the man before her.
While these thoughts jostled through her brain, Nikolai watched her closely—a perusal that did nothing to calm her agitated nerves. She felt naked in the casual sundress of filmy jade that left her arms and shoulders bare, perfect for the balmy May heat in New Orleans. In place of the sculpted bob she’d worn in Russia, her hair now grazed her shoulders.
All of it put her at a distinct disadvantage in dealing with the man before her.
Too, she was keenly aware she hadn’t bothered to put on a bra that morning. Beneath the jade chiffon, her breasts were bare. When his dark gaze slid slowly over her, undressing her an inch at a time, her nipples tightened and rose against the thin fabric.
Feeling breathless, she folded her arms and hugged herself. Somehow she dragged her mind back to business.
“Why were you looking for Alain’s wife?”
One shoulder lifted in a shrug.
“I thought she’d be interested in knowing about her husband’s infidelity—as, indeed, she was.”
Skylar stared at him. An inappropriate urge to smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, but she fought it back.
“Why would you do that? Why would you even care?”
“Because he deserved it.” He met her gaze squarely. “Alain Devereux needed to learn a lesson. Thanks to him, you would have been killed on Capri if not for my intervention.”
Her stomach fluttered.
“Still protecting me, Mr. Markov?” she said softly.
“I seem to have acquired the habit,” he murmured. “Perhaps it will gratify you to learn Madame Devereux has initiated divorce proceedings against her philandering husband. As it happens, the Devereux wealth is mostly hers. Our philandering monsieur will soon be singing for his supper.”
She supposed she was gratified, but in truth she hardly cared what happened to her former deputy. She was far more interested in the confluence of decisions that had made Nikolai turn up on her doorstep.
Struggling for composure, she turned toward the mirror and sleeked her hair into a knot at her nape.
“Don’t,” he said softly. Reflected in the polished glass, his elegant features were intent. “Wearing it long suits you.”
He didn’t have the right to offer opinions about her fashion choices, but she didn’t tell him so. Besides, she’d have to find a hair clip, and his keen eyes would surely discern that her hands were shaking.
Flushing, she let her hands fall and moved restlessly to stand before the balcony doors. The gentle breeze fluttered her sundress around her body. She stared blindly at the screen of lavender wisteria, heavy with fragrant blooms that twined around the trellis.
For some reason, he was still protecting her.
Slowly the realization seeped through her, blunting the jagged edges of her razor-sharp anger. Without that protective armor, she felt fragile as the delicate blossoms before her, trembling at the slightest touch.
If he tried to touch her, she was lost.
She scrambled to fill the pregnant silence, to dispel the growing awareness that throbbed between them.
“How is your sister Irina?”
“Happily, her experimental treatment was a complete success. That neurosurgeon we hired was worth every kopeck.” His satisfaction and relief at these developments infused his voice. “She’s rented a summer cottage on the Delaware shore. My nephew Misha is with her. He’ll be attending school in the States from now on.”
So much for his nephew’s Swiss boarding school.
Now that Nikolai had given up his dangerous career, no doubt life would be easier for all of them—these people he loved. His satisfaction with that development, too, hummed between them.
Skylar realized she no longer found him impenetrable, the enigmatic cipher he’d once seemed. To the casual observer, he appeared cool and reserved, just as she herself often did. But she’d learned to read his tells, the coded language of tone and inflection and subtle shift in expression that communicated the powerful emotions surging beneath his clinical detachment.
By saving his sister and saving Skylar herself, he’d made a start at redeeming the choices of his past. Still, she reminded herself firmly, he was what he was—a man with no past he could ever reveal and a blank slate for a future.
She’d do well to remember that.
“Was it all worth it, Nikolai? The choices you made over the years that kept her and Misha alive, that cared for your mother, that kept you alive yourself?”
“Are you asking, now that I’ve retired from my distinguished career, if I can live with myself?” Behind her, the antique chair creaked as he rose. “I won’t lie to you, Skylar. I have a lifetime of memories I wish I could forget. And I’ll always sleep with a gun under my pillow.”
“Are you warning me away?” she said with forced lightness. “Because it’s entirely unnecessary, I assure you. I’ve learned my lesson—”
The Russian Temptation (Book Two) (Foreign Affairs 2) Page 29
