She giggled and hung up his coat in the closet. “I made your favorite.”
“I thought I smelled beef stew and kasha.” Boris pulled off his tie and tossed it over the back of a chair. “But vodka first, my little cabbage.”
Oksanna brought him a small, frost-covered glass of icy vodka. Boris tossed it back and shrugged off his suit jacket. He threw it onto a gilt chair and sat down on the red velvet couch. He stacked his feet on the gleaming coffee table. Oksanna was a good housekeeper, even if she was a spy. She picked up his jacket and tie and carried them off to the bedroom. She returned with the icy bottle of vodka and refilled his glass, smiling all the while.
“More?” she cooed.
“After dinner,” he said.
She trotted back to the freezer to return the bottle. She was as delicious from behind as she was from the front. It was not long before she curled up against him on the red velvet couch. Boris encouraged her to tell him about her day. It relaxed him to hear about her battle with the butcher and the man who had brushed against her while she was buying vegetables. He hoped the listeners were bored to their back teeth with hearing how her driver had defended her honor from the grocer.
Her throaty monologue barely needed response. She was waiting for him to relax and grow sleepy. Then she would put her head on his shoulder and ask the questions she had been sent to ask. He had to be growing soft in his old age. Because he enjoyed this daily interrogation, even though he knew it was a deadly game of Russian roulette.
“What about you, did anything special happen at work?” she asked casually.
Boris could have told her that when she pried, she first grew slightly sweaty and then her throat tightened and strangled her contralto. His bear nose caught the ramped up taint of fear. His ears, her tension. He squeezed her plump thigh. “Many things, my dumpling. But nothing that would interest you, I’m afraid. The export business was as always dull. Shall we eat that beef stew of yours?”
She murmured encouragement.
“Or shall I have an appetizer first?” He reached for her crotch.
Oksanna inhaled sharply and jerked away from him. She huddled on the couch.
“I hurt you,” he said.
“I-I walked into a turnstile today,” she lied. “It’s nothing.”
Boris smiled. He let his fingers roam to her backside instead. A gentle pat triggered no wincing. “We better eat before the stew spoils,” he said casually.
“Are you sure?” Her voice was coy. She placed a hand over his cock and rubbed it as suggestively as if she had not recoiled from his touch a moment ago.
“On your feet, woman, and get my food,” he growled.
She limped off to the kitchen leaving him on the settee. Boris had a fairly good idea of why she was moving like an old woman. Some asswipe in boots had kicked his sweet Oksanna in the crotch. It was an old technique for disciplining females. She had been punished for failing to seduce Boris’ fucking secrets out of him. That nutless old fart had lost all sense. Poor Oksanna was just fucking collateral damage. Was Boris Chekhov really not supposed to notice that his bedmate had been knocked around by some dipshit?
Apparently Odéen thought his Dva was now a blind and toothless moth-eaten fur coat who pissed with a noodle, rather than a ruthless, sharp-clawed bear. And Odéen wasn’t far wrong. Boris might be in his prime as bear shifters went, but Odéen had rendered him fucking impotent. If he went after Oksanna’s abuser, he would have to admit he knew that fucking Odéen had authorized the beating.
And for what? For forty years, the organization had been eavesdropping on Boris’ pillowtalk. They would have known long ago, if he was the sort of brainless filth who whispered the Mafia’s fucking secrets into the ears of every piece of snatch he screwed. If this kind of putrid donkey vomit was the Boss’ new logic, the whole organization was going to explode like a barrel of fermenting monkey turds.
He couldn’t even dismiss the wench. Odéen would probably have her and her kids killed. He was guessing that she had children. Oksanna never mentioned anyone but an aged grandmother, but whatever Odéen thought, Boris wasn’t an idiot. He had been fondling that lush body for two years. She had had a baby, and probably more than one. Hostages to guarantee she took her job seriously. The reason she didn’t run even after being viciously kicked in the privates. Poor, soft, silly bitch. He was going to have to pretend he was as stupid as those shit-for-brain baby dragons the Boss had foisted on him.
He was fucked. He could read his doom in the Boss’ suspicions. He needed to provide Oksanna with a stake. When Boris was freezing solid in some snowbank or floating belly down in the Dnieper River, perhaps she could escape to a better life with her kids. Something no one could take away from them. Leaving her money would be the easy part. It would be infinitely more difficult to prevent her being executed to appease Odéen’s wrath.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“What are you talking about, Dolores?” Nicole demanded.
Dolores turned her wrinkled brown face from the bowl of black beans she was picking over on the scarred wooden kitchen table. “Don’t be foolish, Chica,” the older woman said sternly. “There are strangers asking about you. Three people told me so.” She held up age-gnarled fingers. “Señor Asher, Señora Mandelbaum, and my grandson Enrico.”
“I did put the sign back out advertising rooms,” Nicole pointed out.
“People who want rooms ring the doorbell,” Dolores said tartly. “These people asked about the house and who lives in it. It is that husband of yours. Chica, he is looking for his son.” She went back to picking small bits of stone and withered beans from the bowl.
Nicole had told no one that Felipe was dead. Who was she to tell? Dolores had probably never believed Tia Evita and Tia Luisa’s story of Nicole’s widowhood. She suspected, however, that her aunts had confided the real story to their housekeeper. She debated telling Dolores that about Felipe’s death. But that would raise issues she would just as soon not discuss.
“How many strangers?” Nicole asked instead.
Dolores rolled her black eyes. “How should I know? You think that I asked questions? Bad enough those three are spreading gossip. All I know is strangers are asking about you.”
Nicole knew quite well that Dolores’ information came from her access to gossip. Her niece worked in the Mandelbaum household as a nanny. Maria had probably overheard her employers talking. Señor Asher was the local butcher. Dolores had picked up her news with the shoulder of pork she was stewing for tonight’s dinner. And Enrico delivered the mail and talked to everyone in Santa Rosa. He also drove his grandmother to and from work.
“What do you think I should do?” Nicole asked softly.
“Maybe you and the boy should go home to America.” Dolores picked up her bowl of beans and took them to the sink where she began to rinse them noisily to cover her tears.
“I don’t think I can, Dolores. Matteo doesn’t have a US passport.”
“But I thought you sent for them,” Dolores objected.
Nicole had not tried to be particularly discreet about her passport application. She knew she had few secrets from Dolores. Nicole’s new passport had been delivered by a courier who wanted a signature. Dolores had quite proudly written her name on the screen of the newfangled device the courier used. She had given Nicole the envelope, but Nicole had not opened it until she was in her own room.
“I did. But I only got one for me. They didn’t accept Matteo’s birth certificate, or his baptismal records as proof that he is my child.” Nicole shrugged.
Dolores sucked her few remaining teeth in annoyance. “How do they expect you to prove he is your son?”
“They want a DNA test.” Nicole didn’t say the obvious: I have no money to pay for that.
“Did they give you back your money?” Dolores demanded.
Nicole chuckled derisively. “The fee is an administrative charge. You don’t get it back because they don’t give you what you ask for. I have to pay again if
I reapply.”
Dolores clucked her tongue. “Maybe you should go and stay with my sister. You and the boy. In Barro, if people knew they shouldn’t to talk to strangers about you, they probably wouldn’t.”
“My husband is dead.” Nicole decided to explain after all. “He was killed last April. So it’s not him who is looking for me and Matteo. Maybe I should find out what the strangers really want? Matteo’s father was a very rich man. Maybe they’re looking for his heirs.”
“Rich?” Dolores was doubtful. “Maybe so. Then why are you so frightened, Chica?” Nicole didn’t know what to say. Her sense of impending doom was not based on anything rational. Just as she had felt jittery last night out on the pampas, she had woken this morning with a sick sense of dread that was only getting worse with every word of Dolores’ tale.
Ever since that horrible morning in Buenos Aires when she had awakened, no longer a real woman, her intuition had been her guide. It was by following it that she had come to safety here in Santa Rosa. And now it was telling her that there was danger ahead for her and Matteo. It seemed obvious that her intuition was warning her about those nosy strangers.
The trouble was she didn’t know where to go. Strangers who had tracked her to Santa Rosa del Pampas, could even more easily track her into the rural hamlet that Dolores’ family came from. In that tiny settlement, there was no place to hide except the pampas. She was not equipped to survive long out on the grasslands. If she and Matteo weren’t taken by wolves or jaguars, they would die of starvation and thirst or simple exposure.
She was better off staying here, where she knew people. Santa Rosa might be a small country town, but they had a police force. And she had a phone. Her dream going back to the States was just a childish dream. She could probably find a job waiting tables or selling fast food, but that wouldn’t give her enough to support herself and a child.
She was trapped here in Santa Rosa del Pampas.
Dolores put the beans on to boil in the battered old aluminum pot. She sprinkled herbs in the water and stirred. She stomped back to the table and sat down. “You take down the sign. Close the shutters and the curtains. Maybe they’ll think you’ve gone away.”
“If I don’t get a tenant, there won’t be any more money for beans,” Nicole pointed out. “Or anything else.”
“You wouldn’t have to pay me for a month or two,” Dolores said gruffly.
Nicole was touched. Dolores of course should be retired, but until Tia Evita’s will was probated, she and her family needed her income, small as it was. Dolores couldn’t really afford to work with no pay. Any more than Nicole could afford to continue to leave her spare rooms empty.
* * *
Nicole was in the dining room, halfway through hemming Matt’s new school pants when someone leaned on the doorbell. She drove the needle into her thumb. She sucked at the droplets of blood, contemplating ignoring the bell. She was alone here in the Villa Mendoza. Dolores had slipped out to go to the market. Matteo was still at school.
Nicole kept her seat until she heard the bell peal again. She recognized that her reluctance to answer the door was foolish cowardice, but she couldn’t stop her heart from racing. She reminded herself again that you couldn’t run a boarding house, if you wouldn’t open your front door. That six months without income, was six months too long.
She set her sewing on the table, and walked down the long hallway to the old wooden front door. It was original to the house, four inches thick, and lacked both window and peephole. She cracked it open. As soon as she smelled the man standing on her doorstep, she wished she had kept the door locked. He was tall, very tall, and very wide. His shoulders entirely blocked her view of the three-story house across the road. He was bigger even than Felipe had been. But, just like Felipe, he was a fricking dragon. Her past had well and truly caught up with her.
This dragon smiled down at her like an elegant top-of-the-food-chain predator surveying a tender morsel. His teeth were very large, and very white. His elegant golden mustache was trim and his neat beard ended in a little point. A Vandyke. Her terrified brain found her the word for his facial hair, even as she froze like a rabbit before his intense blue gaze. Her throat closed. She clasped her hands to conceal their shaking.
“Señora Balcazar Mendez?” the dragon asked in schoolboy Spanish.
“Señora Estevan y Garcia,” she corrected.
“May I come in?” He stepped towards her without waiting for her to answer. Nicole took an automatic step backwards into her hall. And then he was on the other side of the door closing it. His bulk filled up the wide hallway. Her chest tightened.
He was blond and sleek, where Felipe had been dark and sleek. His eyes were hot and blue where Felipe’s had been cold and black. He was taller than her late husband, and thicker and broader through thigh and chest. But his golden good looks could not disguise his fierceness. Felipe had completely concealed his under a glossy, cosmopolitan veneer.
“What do you want?” She stammered her question. Surely Dolores should be back by now? Although how the elderly woman could assist her to repel a dragon was unclear.
The dragon’s gaze roved over the cream-colored walls, the wrought-iron hanging light, the worn terracotta tiles, and the ornate frames on the rows of formal portraits of long-dead Bernals. His blue eyes returned to her. She felt menaced by his broad smile.
“My name,” he said in careful Spanish, “Is Lars Lindorm.”
It meant nothing to her. “Do you want to rent a room?” Nicole asked with as much dignity as she could muster. To her chagrin, her voice shook.
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid I have no vacancies today,” she lied.
“I think you will find you have room for me.” His voice wasn’t soft and persuasive, as she remembered Felipe’s being. It was curt and clipped. Freighted with hard authority. He stepped a little closer.
“I am full up,” she said backing up another couple steps.
He switched to English. “I think, Señora, that you should find some room for me.”
* * *
He had frightened her. That hadn’t been his intention. Felipe’s widow needed protection from those Russian thugs, but she was more likely to accept it from someone she was not afraid of.
She was not at all what Lars had expected. He had imagined that the luminous dragoness who had issued her mating challenge to the night air would be a tall and magnificent human female. Nicole Estevan y Garcia, as the widow chose to call herself, was a good foot shorter than he was. In the hideous flowered apron she was swathed in, she looked as wide as she was tall. And twice as plain.
Felipe was such a connoisseur of women, that Lars could not fathom why the Spaniard had gone to the trouble of marrying such a dowdy little nobody. She should be a willowy beauty, like the females Balcazar Mendez had normally dallied with. But Señora Balcazar Mendez, née Nicole Hastings, was stout and homely. Her wavy dark hair was scraped back into an unattractive knot at the nape of her neck. Her floral pinafore was as ugly as any garment he’d ever seen. It seemed expressly designed to disguise her femininity.
But you could fall headlong into those hazel eyes of hers and drown. Her dark lashes were long and lush. They curled over those compelling eyes, framing and enhancing them. But her black brows had been allowed to grow until they almost met. She wore no makeup, and her lips were compressed into two thin, pale lines. She stared at him for a long time until he introduced himself.
But whatever she looked like, Felipe’s woman still had what it took to draw a dragon. Even though she reeked of fear, she also exuded the luscious smell of fertile, desirable female dragon. It had been four years since he had felt the slightest pull to any woman. Immediately he felt guilty at his strong reaction to this small, round dragoness. Could he forget Annalise in the blink of an eye?
Anyway his first task was to solve the puzzle Nicole Estevan represented. Lord Felipe Balcazar Mendez had turned out to be an enigma to all of Dragonry. He had proved t
o be a liar, a cheat, and a common thief. Felipe’s death had ended his betrothal to Lars’ cousin, Christina of Severn, before it began. But no one, least of all the Eldest of the House of Lindorm, would have arranged a marriage between their greatest treasure and a married man. Not even the heir to a dukedom.
Why had Lord Felipe parked his wife in a rural outpost instead of taking her home and celebrating their union? Virgins to transform were rarer than hen’s teeth in these days of sexual freedom. And once you transformed a female, it was traditional to claim her with all the pomp and circumstance of their ancient race. And Nicole Hastings had not merely been transformed, she had borne Felipe a son. What kind of dragon was so foolish as to leave his mate and fireling unclaimed?
CHAPTER NINE
It was difficult to be eloquent when you were pretending not to speak particularly good Spanish. But he had to make the attempt. Undoubtedly, the Russians were on the trail of this young woman. Whatever their reasons, it was unlikely that they meant her well.
If, as seemed probable, they were after Felipe’s vanished fortune, they would stop at nothing to find it. He didn’t believe that this shabbily dressed woman knew anything at all about whatever stash Felipe might or might not have had. This house spoke of genteel poverty. But the truth wouldn’t matter to those Mafiosi Vladimir the Enforcer had dispatched to the Argentine. If they had been told to break her, they would.
The Villa Mendoza house was large, and must once have been a showpiece. But it had clearly fallen on hard times. Although the red tile roof was in good repair, the pale pink exterior walls were blotched with dark patches of damp, and the glaze of the terracotta tiles on which he was standing had worn away. The ancestors on the walls of her hallway looked out of gilt frames that were dustless, but cracked and peeling.
Clearly Felipe had not shared his wealth with his family. The battered sign outside the villa offered rooms to let at reasonable rates. And it was not a new sign. It had been exposed to years of sun and rain and wind. It seemed the widow and her aunts had been renting rooms even when Felipe was alive. How could the heir to the Dukedom of Estremaura have permitted his wife to live in straitened circumstances?
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