Heart of a Russian Bear Dog

by M. L. Buchman

  He hit his gun safe and pulled out a slimline radio along with two concealed carry pieces.

  He had the feeling it was going to be a long night.

  11

  Tanya was waiting when a brilliant-yellow, four-door Jeep Wrangler Moab pulled up to the door of the Fairmont hotel and stopped close in front of her.

  A valet opened the passenger door for her.

  “Let’s walk.” Though if there was a proper ride, in her opinion this was it.

  Alex looked at her across the empty seat. “Let’s not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because without Valentin along, I want something big to run over the bad guys with.”

  “Let’s walk anyway.”

  Alex just shook his head. “Without Valentin, I’m going to limit attack vectors. That doesn’t include exposing you unnecessarily. You shouldn’t have even walked through the hotel lobby.”

  She actually liked that he insisted. So many of the men during her day had been pushovers. Their jobs were to block her from reaching their superiors, just like any bureaucrat’s. None had succeeded. Yes, these had been all low-level meetings, but she’d managed to arrange meetings with next-level people in every case.

  Not one had the spine to stand up to her. Not one had challenged her.

  Even Carlton she’d been able to whipsaw back and forth…a little.

  He also had no understanding of politics.

  She climbed up into Alex’s top-of-line Wrangler. A hundred-thousand euro in Ukraine, here in the United States it was just another SUV—one that fit her idea of what one should be. It was easy to image exploring the backroads of America. In warmer weather, take the top down, the doors off, and race away from her cares with the wind blowing through her hair. She could definitely imagine that as a lifestyle.

  Alex had done more than stand up to her. She hadn’t noticed how helpful he was between meetings until he was off-duty and Carlton had replaced him.

  “How do you know so much about Ukrainian politics?”

  He shifted into gear and headed northwest across DC to the address the concierge had given her.

  “I don’t. But I know Russian politics from the nineteenth century. I studied the literature against the backdrop of the Russian Empire that existed from Catherine the Great until the Soviet purges. The Crimean War, the first one, was right at the heart of the Golden Age of Russian literature and altered its shape in fascinating ways that carried on for decades after the 1856 defeat of… Sorry. I get a little stupid on this subject.”

  Tanya considered his words as he drove in silence.

  Alex’s insights had been helpful when she’d been thinking about the Balkans along the west of the Black Sea. But they’d been even more useful after her meetings with the Turks—the progeny of the Ottoman Empire who had led the fight against the old Russian Empire during the Crimean War. He didn’t know the current politics, but he understood the underlying dynamics of each people’s pride and power as clearly as her father.

  Her father would like this man. There was a thought.

  If only Alex wasn’t so irritating.

  She thumped her head against the padded headrest as they rolled up in front of the DC9 club.

  Was he irritating because her father would like him? He’d clearly shared Father’s pleasure for her Pushkinesque name. If that was part of the problem, she needed to do some thinking. Because if anyone knew what drove her, it was her father. Her mother always sighed when the two of them started on politics because they were so obviously of the same mind. No matter how fierce their debates became, they were over tactics and strategies, not underlying policies.

  She wasn’t paying attention until Alex had parked and circled to open her door.

  Sitting in the Jeep, she just looked at him. He was handsome in a remarkably blond-American way. Smart and good at his job—if she ignored his boss’ comments.

  Yes, she could do far worse.

  Ukrainian men knew who she was, and they cared deeply about that. In her foolish youth, she’d thought it was about her. In time she’d learned that dating the Prime Minister’s daughter was an obvious path to a bright future. It had made her drop many men on the road. Now her choices were taken with much more care.

  Sergeant Alex Warren would have no such agenda.

  Yes, tonight she would have fun.

  12

  “Tanya? You okay?”

  She gave him an odd look, which he should be used to by now. Tanya Larina was one of the least predictable women Alex had ever been around.

  Bethany was sharp, funny, and had a shield wall about a mile high.

  Tanya’s emotions never showed in a meeting. Afterward all of the doubts and questions traveled across her face in a fascinating sequence.

  But he hadn’t seen a look quite like the one that shifted onto her face as she inspected him while he continued holding the Jeep’s door open for her.

  Except it wasn’t really her door.

  It was usually…Valentin’s!

  He looked down at her knee-length, white-wool coat and swore.

  She arched her eyebrows at him in question.

  “Uh. Valentin usually sits there. I didn’t brush off the seat before you sat down. I’m so sorry. I have a lint brush. Somewhere.” At the apartment in some unknown box. “I—”

  She squinted at him, then down at the seat she still sat in. “I did say to leave your dog home.”

  “I left…most of him home,” Alex did his best to smile. “At least the part that drools and barks.”

  “But not the part that sheds.”

  Alex sighed. “Not the part that sheds.”

  “That is easy to take care of.” She shrugged out of the coat though the temperature was back down near freezing and stepped out of the Jeep.

  He attempted to apologize once more, but didn’t manage it.

  The lovely white lace dress, that earlier had been suitable for an updated Tatyana Larina, had been replaced. Now she wore cobalt blue leather. Short-sleeved top, a heart-stoppingly shorter skirt, and a deep-V cleavage that only a slender woman like her could get away with. Unless he missed his guess, it might be backless as well.

  She ran a finger across his chest, underlining the USSS logo on his t-shirt.

  “Best clothes I’ve got,” he did his best to recover though her touch had distracted him—badly. He scanned the street again to make sure nothing had changed other than his blood pressure.

  “As they have already saved my life once, I’m inclined to agree. Let’s dance.”

  Alex tossed his jacket in the Jeep, locked it, and escorted her to the entrance of DC9.

  13

  Tanya tossed back a Stoli vodka which lit a fire deep in her belly. She didn’t sip it because she didn’t want to get drunk. She wanted the heat.

  Actually, she wanted to have an excuse for the heat she was already feeling.

  The Regrettes was a garage-funk-punk rock-or-something band with three female leads and a male drummer. It didn’t matter what they were, they’d burned up the stage with two hours of totally danceable music without even a breath between songs. The DC9 hall was packed with the young people of Washington, DC dancing as hard as at any Ukrainian disco.

  Alex didn’t just dance, he danced well. Very well, which was the real cause of the heat coursing through her. She’d expected a merely fun evening. But Alex was a man who knew how to lead, how to make any dance snap with tension until it felt like they were having sex on the dance floor.

  And it wasn’t just the dancing that was adding to the fire.

  Without once missing a step, he was always looking around the room.

  At first, she’d thought that maybe he was watching the other women, because there were a lot of them and many…some…a few were dressed as high-end as she was. Most of those had hit the slut button and it seemed to attract every male’s eye. With the fifteen-centimeter tall “USSS” emblazoned across the back of his t-shirt, he certainly gained a lot of attentio
n himself.

  But it wasn’t the darkness or strobing of the lights that made him never focus on any particular woman. In fact, he spent more time watching the men. Assessing the competition?

  No, he was doing the same thing she was—assessing possible threats.

  They were dancing their hearts out, and still he was on guard, watching for breaks in the patterns of the crowd or something. For her it came from paranoia, but for him it was vigilant duty.

  That was very attractive.

  By the time the first slow-dance number came up, she hadn’t even hesitated, just stepped into his arms. There was a safety there. He guided her expertly, so that they didn’t bump a single couple despite the crowded floor. But he also kept turning them slowly as if it was completely natural, shifting through the crowd with a calm ease that would make them hard to pin down as a target.

  She’d finally just let herself go and trusted to his skills. Instead she focused on appreciating the physical man as well as the protective one. He might not be as robustly muscular as his dog was, but she could feel that Alex Warren was whip strong. And after they’d sweat enough that he no longer smelled of soap, he’d become deliciously male.

  He was not some Russian-speaking professorial type. He was a United States Secret Service agent, which meant he was also an elite warrior.

  In Alex’s arms, that was now impossible to ignore.

  However long had it been since…Sergey? Or was it Yegor who she’d been with most recently? Whoever, it had been too long.

  The fire of the vodka after the heat of dancing made her just let go.

  “Come on. It’s time.” She grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the door.

  The chill of the night air as they walked to his Jeep didn’t feel cold at all. After the heat of the dance hall, it felt wild and fresh.

  “You are coming back to the hotel with me,” she informed him as he held her door and she climbed back into the Jeep.

  “I…what? No.”

  She closed the door in his face.

  He circled around and climbed in the driver’s side. “Besides, I left Valentin at home.”

  “Fine, we will go there then.”

  “No, Ms. Larina. That’s not going to happen.”

  “I will scream bloody murder if you try to remove me from this vehicle at my hotel.”

  He glared at her, still not starting the engine. “Are you always this much trouble?”

  “You must ask my father that someday.”

  She laughed as he made a strangled sound, but he started the engine and drove off.

  14

  Alex actually had his key in the apartment door before he came to his senses.

  “Uh, you can’t come in.”

  “Because it isn’t right?” Tanya asked in disdainful Russian.

  “Well, it isn’t,” he stuck with English. “But that’s not the only problem.”

  She pushed him aside and turned the key. “Why? Do you have another woman in there?”

  “No, I…” Alex gave up.

  Tanya opened the door and stepped in. Then burst out laughing.

  “Okay, so I haven’t really had a chance to unpack yet. Think of it as early U-Haul decor.”

  “You are bohemian?”

  At the sound of her voice, Valentin popped his head up, leapt over the boxes faster than an obstacle course training, and practically slammed into her with his eagerness to greet her.

  He knew the reference Tanya meant, of course. Not America’s bohemian beatniks of the 1950s and ’60s, but the marginalized and starving artist culture of 1800s France.

  Was he?

  Before the Secret Service, he certainly had been—except for the family money which he’d refused to touch other than for tuition. Instead of living at home while attending UC Berkeley, he’d rented a typical student garret except for his junior year abroad in St. Petersburg. It had been very bohemian and he’d enjoyed it far more than the familial showpiece.

  Alex delayed his answer by greeting Valentin, then nudging him back so that they could close the door.

  There was little question about what he wasn’t supposed to be doing with a protectee.

  Valentin pushed forward again.

  Tanya tossed her be-furred coat over a box before squatting down to greet Valentin—who was eating it up like, well, a puppy dog. The two of them had some crazy connection, like siblings or something. The Pushkin poem had never said anything about Tatyana Larina having a great hound—though, being a member of rural Russian aristocracy, she probably had. Was Valentin in some weird way the dog Tanya had owned in a former, fictional life?

  Or maybe he just enjoyed the feel and smell of her.

  His own body remembered what hers had felt like in his arms. Tatyana Larina might be a foreign diplomat, but she was also an incredibly fit and lovely woman.

  She rose from hugging Valentin and ended up standing practically nose to nose with him in the tiny front entryway.

  “I am not some fantasy out of your Pushkin novel.”

  He breathed her in like a heady scent. No, she wasn’t some arcane model of duty and decorum. She was incredibly alive.

  “I’m going to regret this in the morning.”

  She draped an arm over either of his shoulders and clasped her hands behind his neck. “I won’t.”

  He shifted her two steps back until she was out of the entryway and had her back against the cool metal of the stainless-steel fridge, empty except for some dog meat.

  She was right.

  If he was going to go to hell, he was damn well going to enjoy it.

  15

  “You must do something about your bed.” Though Tanya couldn’t imagine why she was complaining, she felt incredibly limber this morning.

  She sat on the bathroom counter, drying her hair as well as she could with a couple of kitchen towels, and watched Alex drying himself off with a stack of paper napkins bearing a pizzeria’s logo. He was a very pretty lover as well as being a very creative one.

  They’d made use of the kitchen floor, had something of a wrestling match on the carpeted stairs that had ended with two victors, and finally shoved around enough boxes to get the mattress flopped down upstairs.

  They’d prowled through boxes of Russian literature, dog care books, and action-adventure thriller novels. The well-thumbed Secret Service training manuals told her just how seriously he took his job despite appearances.

  They’d never found the sheets, but a single pillow had surfaced and a sleeping bag unzipped over them had been enough by the time exhaustion had taken them under.

  Thankfully, the one thing he’d known exactly how to find had been condoms. There was a supply of them in Valentin’s emergency med kit.

  “If something happens where Valentin has to walk across broken glass and cuts his paws, they make a quick emergency bandage.”

  Based on his disorganization about everything else, it actually made her believe him.

  “This is going to be awkward,” Alex grimaced.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not supposed to fraternize with my protectees.”

  “Fraternize?”

  “I’m not supposed to, uh, have any relationship with a protectee.” He began dressing in sweatshirt and pants.

  “We do not have a relationship. We had sex.”

  “Not supposed to do that either.”

  She waited until he was standing on one leg to slip on his sweatpants. Pushing off the counter, she ducked low and tackled him. He flew out the door. Valentin had slept along her side of the mattress. When the back of Alex’s calves hit the dog, he’d tumbled backward onto the mattress.

  Exactly where she wanted him.

  16

  “Hey, Alex.”

  Alex froze five steps out his front door, and looked up at Bethany as she ran up the sidewalk. She was wearing Wonder Woman-red leggings and runners. Dripping sweat stained a deep-v of darkness on her black USSS t-shirt. Trixie panted hard at her si
de.

  “About time you got your lazy ass up and moving. You know this isn’t California where…” Her words trailed off and her eyes went wide as she looked over his shoulder.

  He didn’t need to turn as Valentin came up beside him and his front door clicked shut. It didn’t close by itself.

  “Nice dress,” Bethany shot out, then grimaced an apology.

  He glanced over his shoulder. What had looked amazing on last night’s dance floor, and had spent most of the night on the kitchen floor where he’d stripped it off Tanya last night, looked severely out of place under the parking lot lights at six-thirty on a dark chilly morning. Even if it still looked incredible.

  “Thanks,” Tanya didn’t sound at all put out. “I wish I had my running clothes; I would have gone with you.”

  Bethany opened her mouth, scowled at him, then closed it.

  Tanya continued, “How hard was it not to say, ‘Looks like you got your exercise already.’?”

  Bethany smiled at her. “Pretty hard.”

  “Did I step in the middle of—”

  “God no!” Bethany held up both her hands.

  “I’m not her type,” Alex decided that he could either join the conversation or be run over by it.

  They both turned to look at him like he was a side of meat. Then Tanya simply raised her eyebrows in surprise at Bethany.

  Bethany shrugged a reply.

  Maybe it was safer to stay quiet.

  Bethany headed for her place with Trixie at her side, but called back over her shoulder. “Don’t let Baxter or Tibbets see you or you’re a dead man.”

  Tanya was silent as he held the Jeep’s door for her.

  Valentin only groused a little about being put in the rear seat. “Your legs are shorter, buddy. You ride in back.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “She is.” Alex started the Jeep and looked in the headlight’s spread to find a change of topic. All he found was an early robin listening for a worm under one of the manicured shrubs.