Used by the Russian Mafia Boss: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (28 page)

“Is that right?” Ivan mused. “You realize that’s just playing into my hands, right?”

Samantha straightened. “How so? You’d wind up as collateral damage.”

“No. I would know what was happening and could easily step clear.” Ivan snorted. “Do you really think I couldn’t leave the country in ten minutes if I wanted to?”

“I suppose I hadn’t considered it like that.” She gave him a thoughtful look. “I’ve never considered you a flight risk.”

“I’m not.”

She chuckled. “Until you are.”

“Exactly.”

The waiter set Samantha’s chicken salad sandwich on the table and then placed Ivan’s burger in front of him. Ivan picked up his food, discovering that he really didn’t have an appetite. It still felt wrong to be plotting Yuri’s demise. Sergei was one thing. Even using Emily…well using Emily was just a way to get back at Sergei. It wasn’t like Ivan was going to hurt her.

“You’re going to break her heart, you know.” Samantha told him quietly. “That Emily woman really cares about you.”

“What do you know about it?” he grunted around a mouth full of food. “You only saw her this morning.”

“That was plenty.” Samantha used a fork to poke at her chicken. “Call it women’s intuition.”

“That is such bullshit,” he muttered.

She kicked him under the table. “And yet it’s always right.”

***

 From across the street, Emily stared at Ivan and the woman sharing their lunch so amicably at the small table outside the trendy deli. It was a safe bet that Emily had never seen Ivan so comfortable with another person before in her life. Who
was
this woman? She’d been at the apartment and Ivan had alluded to her being some sort of business associate. Now they were having lunch too?

The pressure of tears caught Emily by surprise. She swiped angrily at her cheeks. What did she expect? She was messing around with a gangster who swore he was only trying to get in her pants so that it would make her brother angry. She should have expected this to happen. Still, she didn’t feel any better about it.

Emily straightened her spine and walked right across the street. She deliberately ignored the deli and turned into the office supply store. She had discovered Ivan’s office to be woefully understocked with some of her favorite supplies, not to mention that he didn’t seem to own a labeler.

“Emily!” Mr. Krakowski waved from behind the counter. He was an older man with a good deal of bushy white hair on his head, his face, and even in his ears. “It’s so good to see you! And how is Sergei?”

“Oh he’s doing well, thank you,” Emily said lamely. “I’ve picked up some extra work, though. So I’ll be needing a few of my favorite items for my new office.”

“New office?” Mr. Krakowski’s bushy eyebrows nearly shot off the top of his forehead. He leaned over the counter. “When on earth do you have time for such things? You are such a busy woman!”

“Oh you know how it is,” Emily said with forced nonchalance as she wandered down her favorite aisle to look at colored pens. “Volkov Real Estate practically runs itself these days!” Inside, she was cringing at the horror she was going to return to if Sergei got himself involved in the books while she was gone. The man was a brilliant business strategist, but he could barely tell a debit from a credit.

Unfortunately for Emily, Mr. Krakowski knew that. His shop and the apartment above it were located in a building owned by Volkov Real Estate. That meant that Krakowski paid protection money to Sergei. He was a part of the organization’s world.

“What happened, Emily?” Krakowski asked in a low, serious tone. “And don’t try to play off that bullshit to me.”

“I’m working for Ivan Dedov for a while. The hope is that it will pay off a sort of…debt that Sergei owes him.” Emily shouldn’t have been saying any of this. She would wind up getting herself and the Krakowskis in trouble.

“Ivan Dedov?” The old man sucked in so much oxygen that Emily was surprised he didn’t pass out. His face turned beet red. “That man is a monster!”

“Actually, he’s really not.” Her immediate defense of Ivan seemed to surprise the old man. Emily sighed. “Believe me, he can be a jerk. But I’ve known Ivan a long time and he’s really a good man. He’s just rough around the edges.”

“Like a bear or a boa constrictor,” Krakowski retorted. “Please be careful, my Emily!”

“I will,” Emily assured him. Although that ship had pretty much sailed, crashed, and burned before sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

***

Across the table from Ivan, Samantha’s face took on an unusual expression. “Don’t look now, but your
not
girlfriend is headed this way.”

“What?” Ivan swung around in surprise. Why would Emily be in this area? Was she following him?

“I told you not to turn around!” Samantha moaned. “My God, you’d be a shitty cop. You know that?”

“That’s high praise,” he retorted. “And I don’t know why Emily would be over here. It’s ridiculous. This area is miles from my apartment.”

“And yet you’re here,” Samantha pointed out.

Emily was headed in their direction, a determined look on her face and a definite spring in her step. Ivan groaned. “She’s going to give me hell, isn’t she?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Can you help me out here?” Ivan pleaded.

Samantha was already standing. “Nope. You’re on your own.” She smiled cordially at Emily. “I’ll leave the two of you to chat.”

“Thank you,” Emily said with a polite nod. Then she sat in Samantha’s chair. She had a tiny bag stamped with the logo of a stationary store that she set on the ground with her handbag.

“You drove twenty miles for some pens?” Ivan said with a rude grunt.

She shrugged. “Twenty miles for you, but you forget that this is my neighborhood. Volkov Real Estate owns that building. Mr. Krakowski is one of our customers. So yes. I took the train over here to patronize his shop the same way I would have if I were still working back in my own office.”

“I did forget,” he murmured. “Samantha thinks you’re jealous.” The words just sort of fell out of his mouth without any real thought.

“Should I be jealous?” She cocked her head, a loose strand of blond hair falling over one shoulder. That was when he noticed that she had left her hair down.

“You didn’t put your hair in a bun,” he said gruffly. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you. But that isn’t going to distract me from my original question. Should I be jealous of this Samantha person?”

“We’ve been friends since middle school,” he explained. “Now she’s an associate.”

Emily fiddled with Samantha’s discarded knife, spinning it slowly in circles on the tabletop. “I don’t think she looked like that in middle school.”

“Huh?” Ivan had never really spent any time thinking about the way Samantha looked. “No. She was short in middle school. Really short, actually. And she had braces. Her teeth were a mess. I think she wore those things until we were in high school.”

“Wow.” Emily was laughing now and he couldn’t really figure out why. “Samantha is wrong. I’m not jealous.”

“You’re not?” He was completely confused. “But you’re mad at me for having lunch with her?”

“Not anymore.”

***

Emily watched Ivan try to work it all out in his head. Men were fascinating creatures. Perhaps nothing could have convinced her of his indifference to Samantha other than the fact that he didn’t seem to realize how beautiful she was. No, Ivan was just going to talk about how awkward Samantha had been growing up. Emily was certain the woman would be thrilled to hear that.

“Women make no sense,” Ivan growled. “Are you angry or are you hurt? No man can tell. And then when a guy expects a woman to get irritated because he’s actually done something that might be construed as illegal, she just gets over it and says
no big deal
. How are we supposed to understand that?”

“I could try to explain it, but I’d be using girl logic,” she told him with a solemn expression. “And there is no man alive who can fully comprehend girl logic.”

Emily laughed at the look of pure consternation on his face. Then his expression cleared and he smiled at her. “I love it when you laugh, Em. You have a really beautiful laugh.”

“Ivan, that’s the nicest thing you’ve said all day.” She reached across the table and touched his hand. To her surprise, it felt like grasping a live wire. The immediate jolt of electricity was pleasurable and even a little arousing.

His expression suggested that he’d felt it too. Then he took her hand in his and lifted it. He flipped her hand palm up and began tracing tiny circles on the sensitive skin.

“What are you doing?” she managed to whisper. Everything below her waist was starting to melt.

He gave her a devilish smile. “I was just enjoying the reaction.”

“Mine or yours?” she said with a shiver.

“Both, I think.”

“You’ve always been able to get a reaction out of me,” she admitted.

Emily couldn’t stop staring at him. The handsomeness of his face was so much more than just the basic symmetry of his features. Ivan had a rugged appeal that made him look dangerous in the way an antihero is dangerous. He might not make you think he was going to save the day, yet he always would, and usually because it was just more convenient to do so. It gave him an edge that other men lacked. He didn’t need to try to be sexy or commanding. Those things were just intrinsic to him as a man.

“You’re going to make me blush,” he told her with a wink. “You used to stare at me like this eight years ago.”

“And I’m doing it for the same reasons now,” she assured him. “You’re beautiful to look at. In fact, if I thought your manliness could handle it, I’d call you pretty.”

“Oh I can handle it,” he teased. “Although I still don’t want to be pretty.”

“Well you are,” Emily told him softly. “So just take the stupid compliment. All right?”

Chapter Eleven

“Yo, where’s Ivan?”

Emily glanced up from her computer screen to see a squat man with stringy thinning brown hair standing in front of the desk. His appearance was almost comical with a jowly face and watery eyes. He looked a little like a bulldog. She almost expected him to sit on the floor and cock his head at her to express his confusion.

“Ivan isn’t in,” Emily said politely. “Can I help you?”

He thrust his lower lip up so hard that it squashed the rest of his features and wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know, lady. I don’t trust you.”

“That makes sense.” Emily folded her hands on the desk. “Are you Jacob? Ivan said you would be bringing the money in for me to get the deposits ready for the bank.” She could see that the man had a heavy pack thrown over one shoulder.

The man who might be Jacob scratched his belly. There was an oddly shaped red stain on his shirt that looked suspiciously like ketchup. “Just cause you know my name don’t mean I trust you,” he told her, jabbing his finger in the air to emphasize his point.

Emily pursed her lips and nodded her head. “I see. So what
would
make you trust me?” Ivan had gone to see his dealers after they had parted ways at the deli. Then he was intending to check with his supplier over some matter or another. Emily pulled out her phone. “Would you like me to call him for you?”

“Yeah!” Jacob’s scrunched-up face seemed to relax. He plopped down in one of the overstuffed chairs on the other side of the desk. “You call him. I’ll just sit here and take a load off.”

Emily dialed Ivan’s number on the desk phone and waited for him to pick up. When he did, she heard lots of shouts and raucous yelling in the background. Most of it was in Russian. Ivan sounded terse. “What?”

“Jacob needs some reassurance that I’m not lying in wait to rob you blind,” Emily said shortly.

“Ah.” Ivan snorted and then gave a dark chuckle. “Of course he does. Put him on.”

Emily held out the receiver to Jacob. “It’s for you.”

Jacob eagerly accepted the phone. “Dude, you got a chick in your office. You know that?”

Emily raised a brow. Who was this guy? He was nothing like the usual men that worked for the organization. Her brother’s men were all of Russian or Ukrainian descent. Most were immigrants and all spoke Russian. She suspected Jacob didn’t fit that profile at all.

There was a lot of nodding, some frowning, and then Jacob started laughing as though he were about to pee his pants. “Yo, that’s fine, dude. I was just looking out for you, know what I’m saying?”

Jacob tossed the receiver back onto the cradle and hefted his giant-sized pack onto Emily’s desk. The thud shook the entire desk. Jacob didn’t seem to notice. He had started pulling out manila envelopes. They were each labeled with some sort of cryptic number sequence, although Emily quickly realized that each arcade on the handwritten list had a number associated with it. The packets effectively told which arcade, the date, and the total. The other number had to refer to the way in which the money had been made. Emily could see that she most certainly had her work cut out for her.

After Jacob had deposited the mountain of packets on her desk, he closed his pack and gave her a thorough once-over with his watery gaze. “Ivan says you’re okay, but you look all stuffy like those other mafia types.”

“And you’re not like them?” She had already surmised as much. “How do you know Ivan?”

“Oh, Ivan and Samantha and me went to school together, you know? Ivan’s a good guy. He knows the value of a good friend.” Jacob gave a hard nod. “Those other guys are just snobs. Ivan’s better than that. And him and me help Samantha out, feeding her good info every once in a while. Then she keeps us up on what those FBI assholes are doing.”

Emily managed not to swallow her tongue.
Samantha
was FBI? “That sounds like a good swap.”

“Oh yeah,” Jacob nodded emphatically. “Plus, CIs get paid pretty good, you know. So between what she gives me and what Ivan gives me, I’ve got a good thing going. No reason I would ever turn on them.”

“I’m sure you’re the most loyal friend they have,” Emily agreed. Although she wouldn’t say he was the brightest.

“See you tomorrow.” Jacob gave a little wave over his shoulder before disappearing from the office.