by Leslie North
He was already getting used to her, period.
There was a time when Maxim had been a regular at Roza, but he hadn't so much as driven down the block in years. Now, as he parked the Hawk and helped Savannah off, he was surprised to find that he still recognized the bouncer standing guard outside the entrance to the club.
He crossed the street, looping his arm through the arm of the woman at his side. The queue to get in wrapped around the building, but he didn't bother heading for the back of the line; instead, he strode to the front, greeting the security guard with a silent nod of acknowledgement. The other's eyebrows lifted in faint surprise; his surprise was a lot less faint once he got a good look at Savannah. He raised the velvet rope without a word. Nobody at the front of the line dared speak up about the preferential treatment; all eyes were on the couple.
"Well, that was easy," Savannah murmured as they passed across the threshold. "I assume Rebecca called ahead. They must have been expecting you."
"I'm willing to bet you have something to do with it," Maxim replied as he steered her inside. Agent Casillero was wearing a slinky black number that just barely qualified as a dress. She had informed Maxim when he drove her home to change that anything colorful would only draw more unwanted attention to them, but he begged to differ on that point. His presence at Roza was already likely to be noticed and talked about by every club-goer they encountered; having a woman like Savannah on his arm would only raise the gossip factor.
Savannah Casillero could have been wearing a burlap sack, and she would still be the most beautiful thing to enter the establishment that night. Her ombre hair was lushly curled and piled along one shoulder, granting anyone looking a clear view of her new tattoo. Maxim had given her his riding jacket to wear to augment the visual that they were together. She deposited it at the coat check, slipping the burner phone out of the pocket at the last instant and passing it to Maxim. After some rigorous negotiation, she had agreed to leave her firearm at home.
"Now what?" she asked. They stared out over the dark room, pulsing with lights, the walls shaking with the pounding rhythm of the bass. Together, they took in the swimming sea of faces. Maxim recognized many of them; he recognized the look of many more. Roza was still mob territory in every sense of the word, and he had a feeling they would not come away disappointed this evening.
There had to be someone here who knew more about his father's death—someone who was placing frequent calls to Gordy. And he intended to find out who.
"I have a booth," Maxim said. "There. In the back."
"It's occupied," Savannah noticed with wry amusement. She was right in her observation: a young man Maxim didn't recognize reclined in the booth with a scantily-clad woman on each arm. The women Maxim did recognize, and potentially not to his credit. He made no remark in response, just moved off into the dark recesses of the club. Savannah followed, threading her arm once more through his.
Maxim may not have recognized the man, but he knew when he was recognized in turn. They approached at a stroll, and he watched the other man's alcohol-flushed face drain of color at the sight of him. He had often been on the receiving end of a visible fear response when he was head of security; now, he had a feeling the widely-exaggerated reports of his involvement in his own father's murder probably had something to do with it.
"Move." He considered it more an offering of advice than an order. The younger man hastened to comply, banging his knees conspicuously on the underside of the table as he got out. The two women lingered longer, as if uncertain whether Maxim's cool dismissal applied to them. One shared look at Savannah, and they slid out after their date, both tossing their hair and casting hopeful glances over their shoulders to see if Maxim would change his mind and invite them back. There was a time, not far removed from the present, when he wouldn't have ignored them the way he did now.
Still, their coquettish departure did provide some inspiration. "There are people who will want to come by and pay their respects to me," he commented as they slid into the newly vacated booth. "Well, they won't necessarily want to pay their respects, so much as ingratiate themselves with a Karev." The idea of brownnosers had always tasted bitter on his tongue. He signaled a passing waitress for two shots, hoping to erase the sensation in his mouth. He knew of another way he could erase it, but the pair of lips he might have lost himself in were too busy currently forming clever retorts.
"Who are you, the godfather? And scoot over," Savannah instructed as she attempted to muscle her way into the seat beside him.
The fact that she still thought she was calling the shots on his home turf amused Maxim. She jabbed with the sharp corner of one elbow, and he caught her arm, fingers wrapping around the toned bicep and yanking everything else attached down onto his knee. Savannah exhaled a startled gasp as she fell into his lap; his hands came up the next instant to hold her hips in place and ensure that she didn't move away and break the illusion.
"My woman wouldn't sit anywhere else," Maxim whispered, lips near enough to almost graze the shell of her ear. Savannah shivered against him. He drew back when the server returned and placed a row of shots in front of them.
"This is kind of surreal to see," Savannah murmured as the waitress retreated hastily. She shifted in his lap as she reached for a drink, and Maxim stifled a groan in his throat. "Everyone we've encountered so far is either terrified of you, or trying to get in your pants—and usually it feels like a little bit of both. Clearly they know something I don't."
"You know enough," Maxim said as Savannah plucked up another shot and ferried it his way. It felt like more than half the eyes in the club were currently trained on them, even though he had always favored this particular booth due to its darkness and privacy. "You know what I was in a past life."
"Who you were," she corrected him. "And I know who you are now, Max. I can't imagine the man who made all these people afraid of him is any different than the one I've come to know."
Maxim shifted her closer, until she was sitting sidesaddle across his legs. He could feel the swell of her hip and breast pressing in against him. He tried to burn the moment, the sensation, into his mind, knowing he might never get her this close again. "Thanks for the vote of confidence," he murmured.
Was it his imagination, or did Savannah seem suddenly nervous to find herself in his arms? He watched the shallow rise and fall of her cleavage and had trouble pulling himself away from his consideration of her breasts.
"What I mean is, I get why you did what you did for so long," she said hastily. "You were protecting your family. Protecting your own. It might surprise you to hear it, but I can understand that sort of motivation. I can respect it. I can even admire…" Her breath caught when she noticed the direction of his gaze, and Maxim watched as Savannah pulled her lower lip in between her teeth. "I can admire a man like you," she finished. "Things aren't black and white anymore. I wish they were. I—"
"Take a shot with me," Maxim said. His voice was rough, his mouth ghosting across the downy-soft hair of her temple. "Before we say and do things we both regret."
He didn't want her talking to him like that—didn't want it, because he had no idea what was truth and what was fiction anymore. If Savannah struggled to color code good and evil, then Maxim struggled to know where to draw the line between fact and fabrication. If having every off-limits inch of her pressed this close to him wasn't helping his clarity, then maybe an attempt to chase his feelings with vodka would.
They linked arms, tipped their heads, and threw back the shots in the same instant. Two empty shot glasses rang hollowly on the table as the couple slammed them down with a thunk in the same instant. Maxim relished the burn in his throat, the warmth of the alcohol a welcome distraction from the heat of having her in his lap. He could feel himself starting to rise to the occasion, his erection stirring and stiffening beneath her.
Savannah made a small noise of acknowledgement and tried to shift aside, but Maxim held her fast against him, burying his fingers in
the silk-slick material of her dress and pressing hard into the skin beneath. He trained his own dark eyes on hers, and she didn't disappoint him by looking away. He wanted her to feel what she did to him. He wanted her to think twice before putting that wall up a third time.
He thought the drink would make things easier, but he was wrong. Her mouth was wet and glistening, and the pulsing lights from the dance floor played in her dilated pupils. Was she aroused? He trailed his fingers up her thigh and slipped them beneath the hem of her dress. He was on his way to finding out.
"Maxim!" a gregarious male voice interrupted them then, cutting his exploration short. Maxim let a low growl of frustration escape through his teeth as he retracted his hand; Savannah's own quickly came up to pull the edge of her dress back down over her thigh.
"Excuse me, gentlemen, I have to… powder my nose," Savannah said hastily as she slid from Maxim's lap and moved off from the booth. Maxim watched her slender body sway with hawk-like intensity, until the man who had interrupted them came into focus and eclipsed his view.
It was Rebecca's father, Vasily, the proprietor of the night club. Maxim saw that the older man was carrying another tray of shots, likely on the house; he turned to follow Savannah's quick exit as well, bushy eyebrows drawing together in puzzlement.
"What, no introduction?" Vasily boomed in his thick Russian accent. "Rebecca has told me much about her! I can see that rumors of her are not widely exaggerated. She is very beautiful."
"She is. That's why I have to keep an eye on her." Maxim was already hauling himself out of the booth after her, before he realized the dismissal might come off as rude, if not a little suspicious. He grabbed two of Vasily's offered shots and winked. "We both know what happened to the last woman I let out of my sight."
"Da! She found a better man than you!" Vasily laughed uproariously as he waved one gnarled, ring-laden hand. "Go! Go get her! I want to meet this woman for myself!"
Maxim nodded and moved off onto the pulsating, pounding dance floor of the club, adjusting himself discreetly as he went. He passed through grinding, gyrating bodies, breaking apart couples with a single look. Soon enough he had gained the hallway; he saw Savannah slip inside the women's restroom and disappear.
He downed one shot, then the next, planting them face-down on an empty table in quick succession.
Then he started down the hallway.
6
Savannah
Not good. This was definitely not good.
"Pull it together, Casillero," Savannah hissed under her breath as she pushed her way into the bathroom. A gaggle of female club-goers clustered around the sinks, passing around a tube of lipstick and laughing at something one of them said in Russian; one look at Savannah and they packed up the party, striding past her to make a quick and collaborative exit.
Or so she thought.
They were right to run. She was a storm of sexual frustration with no thunder or lightning for an outlet. She made her way over to the still-running tap and cupped her hands beneath the streaming faucet, collecting and splashing cold water on her face. It wasn't enough to make her mascara run, but maybe it would be enough to shock her back into reality.
Maxim Karev is at best a Russian thug, and at worst, a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation. You're an FBI agent who sure as hell hasn't busted her ass for years at the academy only to be derailed now.
What she needed was a glass of wine and a cold shower to get her mind off the dark-haired, dark-eyed Karev. What she needed was a tangible lead, and fast, to assure her that the case was moving forward, and that she wasn't just burning time and federal dollars enjoying the proximity of a man who had no choice but to act close to her.
As she turned away from her reflection, she was forced to acknowledge for the first time that maybe—just maybe—it wasn't her entrance that had inspired the other women to leave.
Maxim filled the doorway to the women's washroom, his towering height and broad shoulders ensuring none would dare attempt to slide past him—and that went as much for entering as exiting. Savannah twisted the tap off and straightened, folding her arms beneath the ridiculous pronouncement her push-up bra made of her breasts. Breasts that Maxim couldn't bring himself to look away from earlier, she reminded herself. If it hadn't been for the appearance of the other man, she didn't know what might have happened between them, had they been left alone for a second longer in that booth—
"Did you get lost?" she asked, but thought the irony in her question lacked some of its usual bite. She hated the way her voice trembled as he strode toward her. "Maxim? What's the matter? Is everything—?"
He reached for her before she could think to move. His strong, proprietary fingers grasped her around her wrist; in the next moment, she was nearly yanked off her toothpick-thin heels as Maxim pulled her against him and crushed his mouth to hers.
He tasted as sharp and heady and immediate as the top-shelf vodka they had been served already. Savannah wrapped her arms around his shoulders to stabilize herself, sampling as much as she could as he backed her against the wall. Her shoulders struck the tile, but the force of the blow hardly registered to her on a conscious level; she felt as if she was being devoured whole by the man she had secretly longed for, day and night, the man she couldn't allow herself to have yet was having her anyway.
She tried to muster up his name to speak it, to wake them both up like a splash of cold water delivered from the sink, but his lips were relentless. He kissed her as if he knew what she was about to say and do and needed to silence her, and she found her willpower to refuse his advance suddenly vanishing beneath the onslaught. She gripped the muscles that bulged in his back, desperate to know them as she had earlier that day. Clothing had to be the worst invention of the human race, she decided. She tugged at the collar of Maxim's shirt and managed to get it halfway up over his head before he pulled her away from the wall and herded her back into one of the bathroom stalls. She heard the door bang closed behind them, heard the latch shoot into place, but she was having trouble distinguishing how he did it when he had his hands full of her.
She yanked his shirt over his head, freeing his dark curls and everything else that followed. The shirt dropped, and her stomach twisted with a desire so deep-seated it felt almost painful as his angular face came up to taste her again. They clashed in a tangle of lips and tongues and teeth, and Savannah brought her hands up between them, desperate to explore every newly-bared inch of him. Maxim's body was as smooth and hard as marble beneath her questing touches; she could hardly believe the man was real.
There was scarcely enough room to accommodate them both inside the stall, and Savannah soon found herself shoved back against the wall again out of necessity. She could not find it in her to care about the time or place this was finally happening—all she cared about was that Maxim had finally given his hands free rein to explore every inch of her. She lost herself in the sensation of calloused fingers working their way beneath her dress, dragging the ink-black fabric upward over her waist, her heaving breasts, and eventually over her head. He dispensed with it as carelessly as she had stripped him seconds before; then he reached around behind her back, as much to offer his arm up as a buffer between her and the wall as it was to seek out the clasp of her bra. Savannah felt the constricting fabric give way, and shimmied her shoulders to get out from underneath the straps. The pushup fell away, and the cold air hit her exposed breasts like the ghostly breath of a lover. Her nipples tightened in aroused response.
They hadn’t broken apart from one another all throughout this risky operation; in fact, she realized distantly that she couldn't recall a moment since his entering the women's bathroom that Maxim's lips had not been upon her. Anyone watching might have thought they had stolen a hundred moments together, just like this one. Their chemistry was through the roof.
And Savannah felt like she was about to hit the roof when Maxim lowered his mouth to the pebbled flesh of one dark nipple. "Mmm!" She stifled an explosive groan
and strained away from him, trying to escape back into the wall as the wet, warm sensation of his tongue threatened to overwhelm her senses. He only teased and sucked her harder in response, until he had drawn all of her into his mouth.
Anyone could walk in at any moment. Maybe they already had, and Savannah had been too preoccupied with the Russian thug ravishing her to the boundaries of her senses to notice. This was not how an undercover FBI agent conducted herself, but even if there was someone in the room here with them, no one from the task force she was assigned to would witness her fall from grace. She was putty in his hands, as malleable as she was surprisingly reactive.
If he was going to have her, here and now, then she was going to have him. She wasn't going to fall so much as willfully plunge over the cliff of her sense of morality, leaving her gun and badge and better sense behind her.
Her fingers dragged down the flat, surging plane of his abdomen, hooking in the front of his pants and yanking insistently at one of the last barriers between them. She felt Maxim return the favor, roughly pushing her panties down in answer. Her inner thighs were already slick with the evidence of her arousal. He slipped one finger inside of her easily, followed by another, scissoring her inner folds until she could feel her muscles clenching reflexively against him. Pleasure at the invasion flooded through her, his deep touches making her desperate to experience more. How long had it been? More importantly, how often had she ached for him to reach between her legs like this, to penetrate her, to fill the most intimate parts of her?
She tugged his zipper down, and Maxim's cock sprang free in her hands. She wrapped her fingers around it, reveling in its rigid girth. "Can't believe you manage to ride a bike with this thing between your legs," she whispered. She squeezed a little, just to be sure she wasn't imagining things, and was promptly rewarded by a gasp from Maxim.
