Vanity, Vengeance And A Weekend In Vegas (A Sophie Katz Novel) (9 page)

“My husband and I have a deal.
The day he’s able to make me a multiorgasmic woman is the day I stop dragging
him to Sandra Bullock movies.”

--Death Of The Party

He stood in the doorway, with
that totally infuriating and totally sexy half smile on his face.
 
He held up the phone I had just
inadvertently hurled at him. “Just like old times.”

He let the door close behind him.

For a full minute the room was
completely silent.

And then he took one step
forward.

“I thought I’d stop by and say
hello,” he said, his voice shaking ever so slightly.

And that was enough for me. I
burst into tears and threw myself at him. He caught me in his arms and kissed
my cheeks, my hair, my eyelids and finally my mouth. I held onto him so tightly
he would have had to struggle to get away.

But he didn’t try.

His hands moved up my back and
then down to my hips and then all the way back up to my hair. “I’m sorry,” he
whispered.

“Shut up.” I pushed myself away
from him and put my hands on my hips.
 
“The Russians are out to get you and there’s literally a skeleton in
your closet!”

“Tanya,” he said the name slowly,
his face completely unreadable.

I stood a little straighter and
tried to access the courage that was hiding somewhere underneath all my fear.
“I need to know something...actually, two things.”

He nodded but his jaw seemed to
tighten.

“One, Did you sleep with her and
two, did you kill her?”
 

He took a deep breath but he
didn’t avoid my gaze. “Which one is the worse offense?”

“Just…answer the questions.”

“I didn’t even consider sleeping
with her. I didn’t kill her either but I wasn’t all that upset to see her die.”

“Wow.” I sat down on the bed and
stared at the floor. Was that the answer I had wanted? “I have another
question.”

He sat down on the bed next to
me. “Go ahead.”

“Do I know who you are?”
 
The question came out as little more
than a whisper.

He grasped my chin and guided my
face in his direction. In a voice that was rich with both pain and warmth he
said, “Yes.”

With his free hand he pushed my
hair from my face and for the first time I realized that he was fighting back
tears. “I thought they had you,” he whispered. “When Tanya led me to that room
and you weren’t there…just a man with a gun…I thought I was too late.”

“It wasn’t my room! I…wait, there
was a man with a gun?”

“He showed up a few minutes after
I got there…by then Tanya already had me at gunpoint.”

“She…” my voice faded off as I
tried to make sense of what he was telling me. “The guy with the gun,” I said
slowly, “is he the one who shot Tanya?”

“No, Natasha did that.”

“Your wife shot Tanya?”

Anatoly nodded. “She saved my
life.”

And just like that he had killed
the mood. Again I pulled away and stood up. “I have spent the last eighteen
hours or so
freaking
out
! “ I snapped. “First I see you with some playmate from hell then I go
up to what I think is your room and find her dead in a closet filled with
my
stuff!
Then I’m harassed by your wife and the GM of that stupid hotel—“

“Wait,” Anatoly reached out and
grabbed my arm. “What GM?”

“That can
not
be the thing you’re focusing on!” I
yanked my arm away. “Your wife shot your bimbo in the head in a room that was
registered under your girlfriend’s name! Do you have any idea how fucked up
that is? I mean even a US Congressman couldn’t come up with something this
deranged! Do you get that? I mean for God’s sake, Anatoly, the only reason I
came to this stupid city was to buy a vibrator!”

Anatoly cocked his head to the
side. “Are you talking about that trade show? The minute we hit a bump in our
relationship you go shopping for sex toys?”

“We didn’t hit a bump. I kicked
you out of my life!”

“I was worried that you might
find some guy to have rebound sex with. But instead you went shopping for a
vibrator. That’s…” he paused as he searched for the appropriate word, “sweet.”

“Getting it on with a vibrator is
sweet?”

“It means you’re still thinking
of me and that another man can’t replace me.”

“What the fuck are you talking
about? It means you can be replaced by a dildo.”

“No woman uses a vibrator without
conjuring up an accompanying fantasy.” He stood up and brushed my cheek with
the back of his hand.
 
“What’s your
fantasy?”

“It doesn’t involve you, that for
sure. If anything it involves Ryan Gosling and an octopus-shaped bath toy with
eight functioning tentacles.”

Anatoly laughed and I was
immediately reminded of how much I loved that sound.

“I missed you,” he said quietly.
“I really…I really thought I had lost you.”

I pressed my lips together as the
tears broke free again. I wanted to kill him…but…but I was so incredibly
relieved that no one
else
had. I reached out and pressed my palm against his chest. “
This
is
real.” I looked up into his eyes and I could see that he was losing his battle
against tears too.
 
“I take it
back,” I said, desperately trying to keep my voice steady. “I don’t want Ryan
Gosling, or the dildo or even the octopus. I just want you.”

He pulled me to him and his mouth
crushed against mine. I felt his arms surround me and there was no space
between us anymore. Every part of me was responding to him and I could feel his
desire literally growing and pressing up against me. I felt a surge of
power.
 
He wanted me. He had risked
his very life to be here with me. “Are we in danger?” I gasped.

“I’ll protect you.” His voice was
slightly muffled by the shirt I was pulling off him. God, his abs were as
perfectly sculpted as ever. Before I met Anatoly I hadn’t even known there were
straight men who
had
abs like his!

“But aren’t you in danger too?” I
breathed as his lips moved down my neck.

He pulled away slightly, pulled
my shirt over my head and took my face in his hands.
 
“You’re worth the risk.”

It was a stupid risk to take. We
were waving a red flag in front of a bull; risking our very lives.

And I loved every second of it.

I sucked in a sharp breath as his
fingers unclasped my bra.

He pulled the bra from me and
gently ran his thumbs over my nipples. “I was so worried I would never feel you
again,” he murmured. Without a word I slipped my hand down to the front of his
pants.

My fingers fumbled with the
button of his jeans and I felt him, hard and perfect, no batteries needed.

I let my fingers trace his ridges
and tip and felt him harden more still.
 
“I want to feel you too…inside me, Anatoly. Right now.”
 

And just like that, we were on
the bed again. I could barely feel the sheets beneath me. All I could feel was
him. He pulled my jeans off and my panties went off with them. I moaned as he
touched me.
 
His fingers toyed with
me until I could barely contain myself.

“More,” I breathed. “I need all
of you.”

He removed his hand and I gasped
again as I felt his weight on top of me…

…and when he entered me my world
exploded.

I dug my fingernails into his
back. I didn’t care if Anatoly had five friggin’ wives. I didn’t care if he had
a harem! I was never letting him go again!

“I love you.”

He breathed those words into my
ear and I tried to respond in kind but I couldn’t speak. All I could do was be
here feeling this. I wrapped my legs around him as he moved over me and raised
my hips to meet him. I scratched up his back as he sped up his rhythm. No one
would be able to look at him shirtless without knowing he was mine. He
continued to run his hands over my face, my breasts, the curve of my waist. He
bit down gently on my lower lip all the while pushing further and further
inside of me with increasing force until he finally pushed the words up through
my throat and I was able to say, “I love you too.”

And that’s when I felt him come
inside me, my body immediately reacting with an orgasm all its own.
 

We lay there, breathless and
sweaty, too tired to move.

It was perfect.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t
sleep with more than ten people in my lifetime. It works for me because I keep going
back and sleeping with my ex-boyfriends.”

--Death Of The Party

It took a few minutes before
reality sneaked back into the room. I stared at the ceiling trying so hard to
focus on nothing but the feeling of the man next to me. But the reality had a
sense of urgency to it and it smelled of fear.

“They’re watching me.” I said
quietly.
 
“Natasha’s tracked me
down twice and there are others…I don’t know who they are but I can sense
them.”

“You don’t have to worry about
Natasha and those others don’t know I’m here,” he said. He turned on his side
and stared down at me. “But you’re right, they have been watching you. That’s
why you have to go back to San Francisco.”

“They won’t watch me in San
Francisco?” I asked incredulously. “You know, they were in my house. They took
my computer…with my
manuscript
on it, Anatoly. I don’t know if I can really hide from
these guys.”

Anatoly swore under his
breath.
 
“I was at your place
several hours before I got on the plane to get here. They must have come in
right after I left.”

I paused for a second. “You
realize that you’re confessing to breaking into my house, right?”

“For over a year it’s been my
home too,” he countered and then after a moment added, “You had already boxed
up a bunch of my stuff. Clothes, books…”

“I did”

“There were some books I couldn’t
find. Like my books on soccer--”

“That’s because I donated a lot
of your books to the library the day after you left.”

Anatoly squeezed his eyes closed.
“Did you? That’s great. What library?”

“The one by the Civic Center.”

I smiled to myself as he cursed
in Russian. I hadn’t actually donated them although I had thought about it. I
had even put them in a box marked, “library” and stored them in the garage. I
knew how much Anatoly loved his books and I had wanted to hurt him…more to the
point, I had wanted to get all the things that helped define him out of my line
of sight. He had hurt me.

And now I had opened my arms to
him again and made myself vulnerable despite the hell he had put me through.

The least I could do is let him
stress about his books for a day or two.

 
“What else did they take?” He asked.

“Just my storage discs.”

“What about your MacBook?”

“I have it with me.”

“OK, you can leave it here for
them to take. Then everything will be good.”

“
Good?
Then I won’t have any copies of my
work!
I’m
two thirds through the book! That’s 280 pages of
bad
Anatoly!”

“Save it on Google Docs. If they
know they have everything that you can store an electronic file on they
probably won’t be back to your home.”

“What are they looking for?”

“Evidence,” he said with a sigh.
He sat up and rested his back against the wooden headboard. “Working for the
mafia…it’s not the kind of job you can just walk away from.
 
I had to prove my loyalty and prove that
I could keep my mouth shut.”

“And they weren’t convinced of
that?”

“They
were
convinced. But for some reason
they’ve changed their mind. All these years I’ve been silent. I have
information that could be catastrophic for them if I shared it with the wrong
people.”

“So why do they think you’re
going to start talking after all these years?”

“It might not be them…not
entirely.”

 
“We’re dealing with the mafia and…and then some? Who else?”

Anatoly tightened his arm around
me. “It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that there are people who know I
have damning information.
 
They
know there’s a chance I’ve stored it in some kind of written or electronic
medium.
 
Once they have that all they
have to do to suppress the information is kill me.”

I sat up next to him. His eyes wandered
down to my bare breasts and I snatched up the sheet and used it to cover
myself. “Stay focused! If these guys can assure themselves that you don’t have
any files on them then they can kill you…and you want me to leave them my
MacBook? Are you suffering from a head injury? Let them think there’s a file!”

“If they think there’s a file
they will either come after you because they’ll suspect you can lead them to
it, or they’ll come after you to make me tell them where it is.”

“Anatoly--“

“I’ll do what I can to get your
stuff back…but Sophie you have to go back to San Francisco. They have to think
we’re completely through with one another. Otherwise they’ll use you to get to
me.”

I shook my head, refusing to
accept that. “What was the deal with Tanya?”

Anatoly sighed and rested his
hand on my thigh. Although the sheet kept our skin from actually touching I
could still feel the warmth of his palm. Again I shook my head. I would stay
focused even if it took every last bit of will power I possessed.

“Tanya had a crush on me while I
was with Natasha,” Anatoly explained. “I thought I could get her to help me and
lead me to you. But apparently she was still bitter that I rejected her back in
the day.”

“So she tried to kill you.”

“She has a tendency to
overreact.”

I glanced at the open door that
connected my room to Dena or Marcus’. Either of them could walk in at any
minute. “But was this all her plan?” I asked rushing my words together. “Is she
the one who made the mob lose faith in you?”

“No, she just agreed to lead me
into a trap.
 
She was never a big
planner.”

“Anatoly, we may not have much
time,” I said. “Tell me now what the evidence is that they’re looking for.”

Anatoly hesitated.
 
“I don’t want to lie to you any more.”

I smiled wryly. “It’s nice to
know we can still agree on something.”

He nodded and pulled me back
toward him so that my head was resting on his shoulder. I waited for him to say
more.
 
He didn’t.
 

“Wait a minute,” I said slowly,
“you don’t want to lie to me so as an alternative you’re just going to stop
talking?”

“If I tell you more it’ll put you
in danger. Like I said, they know what they’re looking for isn’t in your house,
so if they think I’m out of your life they’ll leave you alone.”

“Yeah but the problem is, you’re
not out of my life. You’re not even out of my bed.”

Anatoly was quiet for a moment.
He shifted his body toward mine and let his fingers run over my now tangled
hair. “You’re beautiful.”

I liked that. It was so much
better than,
you
look beautiful
. No, with Anatoly my beauty was a state of being that
couldn’t be disturbed by bloodshot eyes or a tangled nest of hair.
 
I tilted my head toward him and smiled
up into his eyes. “Tell me what you’re going to do. I promise not to get mad.”

He kissed me gently. “I’m going
to have to be with Natasha for a while.”

I slapped him across his stupid
face.

He rubbed his cheek which was now
bright red. “I thought you weren’t going to get mad.”

“Well gee, I guess you’re not the
only person who can break a promise! You can NOT go back to Natasha!”

“Sophie, if the mob thinks that
torturing someone I love will get them what they want that’s what they’ll do.”

“Sooo....you’re going back to
Natasha so they’ll torture
her
?” Suddenly his plan sounded a lot more appealing. I mean I
didn’t want them pulling her fingernails out or anything but a little Chinese
water torture never killed anyone.

“They won’t torture Natasha
because of who she’s related to.
 
But she might be able to help me convince some key players that I’m not as
dangerous as they think I am.
 
And
if she can’t she might at least be able to help me kill the individuals leading
the crusade against me.”

“You’re planning on a murder?”

“It’ll be self-defense.”

“And Tanya? Did Natasha kill her
in self-defense too?”

“Tanya had a gun so yes, you
could make a case for it.”

“
You could make a case for it
? The woman
was stuffed in a closet with a bullet in her head! I’m not sure this is one of
those times when we should be coloring things in shades of grey!”

“I don’t think Natasha needed to
kill her.” Each of Anatoly’s words were carefully measured. “She could have
shot her in the leg or the shoulder and Natasha’s a good enough marksman to
have done that. But still, she saw the gun in Tanya’s hand and she had to make
a snap decision. If she hadn’t of shot Tanya I might not have been able to get
away.”

I hesitated a moment as I turned
this over in my mind. The last thing I wanted was to be indebted to Natasha.
“What happened after you left the hotel room?”

“The less you know the better.”

“Perfect,” I said flatly. “So
you’re leaving?”

“For a while, yes.”

“And you want me to go back to
San Francisco.”

“On the next plane.”

“And if I do you’ll be able to
defeat the Russian mafia.”

He hesitated at that. “I might be
able to get out of this without anyone important getting hurt.”

“And who are these important
people? You’re an important person, right?”

“Sophie—”

“And what are you going to do
with Natasha while you’re
with
her?”

Again, Anatoly hesitated. “I’ll
do what I need to do to keep her on my side. No more no less.”

“Oh fuck that.”
 
I jumped out of bed, completely naked
and started the search for the clothes I had been so anxious to get out of just
a short time ago. “I’m not leaving Vegas. I’m not going to sit around twiddling
my thumbs while you play Bonnie and Clyde with a Russian psychopath.”

Anatoly sat up and pulled on his
boxer briefs and jeans.
 
“Sophie we
don’t have a lot of options here.”

“I thought you said there was no
we
!” I
snapped as I yanked on my own clothes.

Leisurely he walked over to the
mini bar and pulled out a small bottle of vodka and a cranberry juice and
poured it into a glass.
 
“You’re
being unreasonable.”

“I’m being unreasonable?” I
turned away from him and pounded my fist against the wall three times before
facing him again. “You just told me you’re going to take one for the team with
Natasha! Tell me, how many orgasms are you going to have to give this woman to
make it worth it for her to double cross the mafia?
That’s
unreasonable! Paying $30 for a
mini-bar cocktail is unreasonable. What
I’m
being is hysterical!”

Anatoly handed me the $30
cocktail and I downed it in three consecutive gulps.

 
“You’re putting words in my mouth,” he said. “I didn’t say I
was going to be sleeping with her.”

“You didn’t say you weren’t
either! What you
did
say is that you were going to take off with another woman!”

“If I thought there was another
way to do this there’d be something to talk about.” He said, taking a seat on
the bed.
 

I took a deep and very shaky
breath. He wasn’t hearing me. I had to find a different tone…and maybe a
different volume.

Slowly, I sat down beside him and
clasped my hands together in my lap to better keep them from whacking him
upside the head. “I understand that you’re trying to protect me but what I
don’t think
you
understand is that there is no way in hell that I’m going to let you out of
my sight until we resolve this. If you even think of trying to leave here
without me I’ll barricade the door, I’ll scream so loud every mafia thug in the
country will hear me, I’ll-- ”

“I got it,” Anatoly said
resignedly, “and I knew you’d say that.”

“Right well…I’m…I……” Something
was wrong.
 
My thoughts were
becoming jumbled. “I’m dizzy,” I murmured

“You just had a glass of vodka.”

“No, no, not vodka dizzy,” I
clarified. The room wasn’t just spinning it was spinning at an odd angle…and
everything was getting fuzzier. “This…Anatoly this is different.”

I was having a hard time focusing
on his face…it was almost like there was two of him. But in his four eyes I
thought I saw a trace of sympathy. “I think what you’re reacting to is what I
put
in
your vodka….other than the cranberry juice.”