Lying and Kissing (39 page)

***

“We have to change our appearance,” I told Luka. We’d left the market through a rear entrance and were moving through a maze of alleys.

He blinked at me. “You really are a spy.”

“I can talk in Russian, remember?” I said in Russian. “Less conspicuous.” Although my Russian accent wasn’t great. I’d only had to understand Russian, back in Langley, not speak it and convince people I was a local.

I was shutting out the panic and fear, now, and going step-by-step through what I’d learned in my basic training. All the stuff Nancy used every day, the stuff I’d never thought I’d need. Thank God for my memory.

Luka’s phone rang. He grabbed it and put it to his ear, pulling me into an alcove. I could feel the tension in his body….and then he relaxed. “My father is okay,” he said.

I let out a long breath. Given how pale Vasiliy had been, last time I saw him, I’d feared the worst. “Yuri got him to a doctor?”

“Yuri
is
the doctor.”

I stared at him.

“It’s fine. Yuri was a medic in the army.”

“At least tell me they went to a hospital?!”

He shook his head. “A safehouse.” He looked at my expression. “It’s fine. Yuri will have knocked him out with vodka and then dug the bullet out and stitched him up. It’s his third—no, fourth time.”

“Please say this hasn’t happened to you!”

“No. Well, only once. Bullet hit my leg. Hardly counts.”

I shook my head in disbelief. It was a miracle any of the Malakovs were still alive.

We found a department store that was open late and I led him through it, buying up clothes and make-up. Then we found the grottiest, seediest hotel we could, a place where they’d take cash and not ask questions.

A half hour later, I stepped out of our room’s tiny bathroom. Luka was sitting on the battered bed, his face lit up by the weak bulb in the bedside lamp. He came to attention when he saw me. “
Wow,”
he said.

What I’d done wasn’t subtle.

I’d based the look on the people I’d seen at the
Underside of Heaven
club. Rich and yet cheap and tacky. With everyone looking for us, trying to be inconspicuous wouldn’t work. We had to be so obvious and loud they’d look right past us.

I was in white knee boots with a towering heel and a ridiculous number of laces up the front. Fishnet stockings, then a tight dress in metallic blue made of some gleaming, sparkling fabric that had to stretch to allow me to walk. Over the top I had an ankle-length padded jacket in shiny black, like a latex fetishist’s sleeping bag. I’d gone heavy on the make-up, my lips a vivid red and my eyes dark and smoky. The crowning glory, though, was the wig.

It was gleaming, silky and blonde. Blonde like only one of Luka’s old girlfriends could do. Arrow-straight, the hair reached right down to my mid-back.

“Wow,” said Luka again.

I’d dressed him in expensive black pants and designer boots, with a flashy belt and an eggshell-blue sweater that matched his eyes. He’d drawn the line at a chunky chain around his neck but the effect still worked. We looked like a pair of rich kids out for a good time. Or, possibly, a hooker and her pimp. Fashion-wise, there wasn’t all that much difference.

He held out his arms to me and I climbed onto the bed. The springs squeaked—given the sort of hotel this was, they probably saw a lot of action. As if to back up my suspicions, a rhythmic banging started in the room next to us.

Despite everything, I laughed. “Who do you think they are? Two lovers, on their honeymoon?”

Luka snorted. “More likely boss and his secretary. Wife thinks he’s working late.” He looked at me. “Or hooker, with client.”

He kept looking at me and that familiar heat washed through me. I was kneeling up on the bed and I was very aware of how tight the dress was on my thighs. “Are you implying I look like a hooker?” I asked in my best
I’m-really-offended
tone.

“No,” he said. “You’re too beautiful to be a hooker.”

The heat throbbed down to my groin. Sex had been the last thing I’d been expecting. I wouldn’t have thought getting turned on was possible, when you were running for your life. I hadn’t realized that danger is an aphrodisiac, that having adrenaline pumping through your system for hours leaves you itching to do something with all that nervous energy. Suddenly, I was like a cat in heat. “Well, you’re too good looking to be a client,” I said.

“I know,” he deadpanned. He sat up fully, so we were just inches apart, and traced my cheekbone with one finger. “What would you call yourself, if you were a Russian hooker?”

“Natalia,” I said, shaking out my long blonde hair.

He blinked. “I had a girlfriend called Natalia, once.”

“I know. I remember the phone sex.”

He stared at me. “You listened to—”

“Many times.”

He just looked at me for a moment, anger flaring in his eyes and then turning slowly to lust. “So,
Natalia.
How much would it cost to sleep with you?”

“A lot,” I said. “Millions of dollars.”

“I have millions of dollars,” he said, leaning even closer. His lips were almost brushing mine. “So I could hire you and fuck you.”

I was quaking now, the heat rolling through me. This was all getting very kinky, very fast. It was like sex always was with him: dark and dangerous and edgy...and wonderful. It felt different now that we were together. The sex we’d had at Vasiliy’s house had been the tipping point, when we’d actually dared to talk about our sex games. I felt free, free to share my fantasies—if I dared. The potential was huge but the timing was awful—sex should have been the last thing on our minds.

But maybe, I realized, it was exactly what we both needed.

“Yes,” I said huskily. “You could. And I’d have to do anything you said.”

“Oh, would you?”

“Yes. Anything.” My head was spinning from the raw lust in his voice.
God, how does he always do this to me?

He moved back on the bed, sitting up against the scratched wooden headboard. And then he glanced down, just once, to the bulge in his pants. “
Susi hui
,” he instructed me.
Suck me.

My cheeks flared. He was being crude. Deliberately crude. And for some reason, that only made me hotter. I glanced around the room, seeing the torn wallpaper, the glowing neon sign outside the window. I really could be some Moscow hooker, kneeling over her client, preparing to suck him to pay my rent.

I took a deep, shuddering breath and unfastened his belt, pulling down his pants and then his shorts. His cock sprang out, thick and already erect, and I gazed down at those strong, muscled thighs. I slid my hands over them, pushing his pants lower. Then I slowly took him into my mouth.

It wasn’t the first time I’d done it. But doing it for him was completely different. With my boyfriends in the past, it had just been a part of sex—mechanical, almost. This felt...
dirty.
But in a good way. Like I was demonstrating how filthy I could be by doing it, and he loved me for it.

I rolled him around in my mouth, using my tongue, and he groaned and called me a good little
shalava.
I added my hand, his shaft hot and slick with my spit, and he began to stroke my long, blonde hair. Every time I looked up at him with my big, painted eyes, I could feel him grow harder in my mouth. We stared at each other as I bobbed my head, the tension building and building. God, I felt so dirty...and yet it felt utterly safe. Because, however much he played at being the callous, unfeeling customer, I’d seen the real him.

He suddenly pulled my panting mouth off him and then lifted me onto the floor so that I was standing, facing the bed. He put a hand on my back and pushed me down so that I bent at the waist, my hands braced on the bed and my ass high in the air.

I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror and scarcely recognized myself. Some blonde hooker, bending over for her client. I recognized him, though. Luka Malakov, big-time criminal, wanted arms dealer. As I watched, he stripped off his sweater and shirt, kicking off his pants so that he was naked. His tattoos gleamed in the dim light and, as he moved in behind me, the sight of his muscled body made me catch my breath. A mafioso, using one of his girls. Using
me.
It was exactly how I’d imagined him back before I’d really known him, before I’d seen past his defenses. Pure darkness. I’d seen the good in him, now, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be—my groin tightened—
evil.

He kicked my legs apart and I cried out in shock as I dropped lower. Then he was jerking my dress up over my thighs, baring my ass. I felt my panties shoved aside. God, I was already wet for him. There was the rubber sound of a condom and then—

I gasped as he drove up into me, filling me in three hard thrusts. His hands hooked around my hips, drawing me back onto him, his thumbs rubbing along my lower back. I writhed and groaned at the feeling of him inside me, that combination of size and hardness, just the right side of
too big.

He was hard and brutal—just the way I needed it. His breathing turned from gasps to sharp, almost angry grunts as he pounded me. He stroked my ass, his hands soft and tender, a stark contrast to his plunging cock. I could feel the pleasure flooding outward in warm waves, soaking into every part of me from my toes to my fingertips. I dared to open my eyes and the sight of us in the mirror, my blonde hair tossing, his muscled body tight up against my ass, rocketed me forward towards my orgasm.

His strokes sped up until the wonderful smooth friction seemed to blur and loop in on itself, becoming endless. My hips were grinding back against him and he was calling me filthy names in Russian and English. The words soaked into my brain and exploded in my groin.

And then, just as he reached his peak, I felt his hands spreading my ass and gently rubbing me
there
with his slickened thumb and I lost it completely. I yelled and screamed and I think I called him names, thrashing and grinding against him until I flopped on the bed, exhausted.

From the other side of the wall there came an angry knocking and a voice telling us to
keep it down!
We both laughed.

Afterwards, I said, “It’s never been like
that
before.”

“Maybe you just needed to let go.”

I thought of the way he usually took control, pinning my hands or throwing me on the bed. That let me let go. Pretending to be his whore had, too. Maybe he had a point. I imagined a future with him, with glorious long nights in some penthouse somewhere, learning more about letting go. Hell, forget the penthouse: my old apartment in Virginia would do just fine.

What I wanted was him. But, unless we could figure a way out of this, we had no future at all. It was only a matter of time until either Ralavich’s men or the police caught up with us.

We lay there in silence for a few moments. Then he said, “Arianna?”

“Yes?”

“What’s your real name?”

I turned and looked at him, gaping.
He still didn’t know.
Ever since the restaurant, he’d trusted me, even though I was CIA, without even knowing my real name. That made my heart swell until I thought it was going to burst.

“It’s Arianna,” I said breathlessly.

“Your
real
name,” he said patiently.

“No, it really is Arianna.” I laughed bitterly. “That’s how lousy an agent I am. They didn’t trust me to keep up a real alias. They just changed my surname. I’m Arianna Scott.”

He stared at me for a long time and then sort of grunted. “Good.”

“Good?”

He rolled over onto his side. His hand traced down the length of my body. “Because I like you as Arianna. I was worried I might have to get used to a new name.”

I stared into his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I lied to you.”

“Lying was your job.”

“I don’t think I want a job where I have to lie, anymore.”

He rubbed my cheek with his thumb. “I think you can do anything you want to, Arianna.”