Xander (Billionaire Racers Book 1) (5 page)

“Come with me,
angel
.” He gives the word its Russian pronunciation. Ahn-gel. Xander’s accent rarely comes out. He came to the US when he young, and his English is nearly flawless.

“What?”

“Come race with me tomorrow on the
Koa.
I will protect you and you will take me for a test drive,
da
? Afterward, if you are happy with me, you move into my home. I get you as my wife. If you are not so happy, I will give you the annulment you want. No one will bother the Petrovs while you deal with your dad’s illness. I will make sure the other families never touch you. All right?”

There are times to be logical, and then there are those times where your intuition nudges you, bumps up against your consciousness like a shark testing the bottom of a boat, and you need to listen before you’re in the water. I’m almost certain Xander feels right, that I want to take this chance on us. But it’s not just that I’d be his—he’d be
mine
.

And I’m so fucking tempted.

His mouth finds my ear again. The bastard cheats too. “Think about it tonight and then you come find me on the dock tomorrow.”

LILY

It
feels like an eternity before I’m finally headed home. Xander walks me to my car and then sends two bodyguards from his own security detail to watch over me. He’s taking no chances after I confess that I had a tail earlier today. The sharks are circling, and he’s on high alert. He wants to come himself, but he has tomorrow’s race. I know he has things to do, and I can’t bring myself to keep him close. Not yet. Not now.

He wants us to be married for real.

I don’t like the Bratva. I don’t live under their control. I don’t play by their rules. I do my own thing, and I have a life. Or at least, I had and I did. Xander’s asking me to change all that. I climb the steps to our house, mentally reciting all the reasons I can’t afford Xander. He’s arrogant. He likes giving orders far too much. And he’s the head of one of the most powerful Russian mobster families in Miami. If I kept him, I’d never have another moment’s peace. I can’t fix everything that’s wrong with my life, but I shouldn’t make it worse.

Our house isn’t too over the top. It’s maybe three thousand square feet and worth a few million thanks to an effervescent real estate market. Years ago, a Florida design magazine came and took pictures. My mother saved that issue. She’d take it out and flip through the pages. I asked her why once, and she said because right then, in that moment when the shutter clicked, everything was perfect and no one could ever take that moment away from her. She gave up things when she married my dad, including her career and the ability to walk around Miami by herself. So many of the wives spend their lives tanning, polishing, painting, and primping. In and out of the spas, the shops, Harry Winston. They’re the pretty pictures in the frames their husbands’ money bought. My mother had a PhD in biochemistry. She was smart, and she gave up her career because Ivan Petrov asked her to do it.

The Mercedes disappears behind the house, and Xander’s men fan out, disappearing into the shadows. Our house is newer construction. My dad bought it after my mom died. He couldn’t beat breast cancer for her, couldn’t make her live, but he thought he could erase the painful memories of her last days by moving us to a new house. The realtor called it a stunning contemporary. It’s two sprawling stories of white, glass, and smoky wood surrounded by palm trees. Lit up so the neighbors can see what my dad owns, the lights reflect off the pool and the manicured lawn—and make certain we see anyone coming for us. Still, I feel better knowing Xander’s men are out there.

The sky is a velvety black overhead, the stars blinking down at us. That light has been traveling four years or more to get here. Light moves fast, but the distance it’s got to cover can be measured in the trillions of miles. The North Star’s light takes almost seven hundred years to get here. The Ottoman empire was just getting started, and the bubonic plague was ravaging Europe. I used to lie out on our lawn and imagine all the things that had happened while that light was moving, moving, moving through space. My dad would come too, and he’d tell me stories until we were both almost asleep or the sky lightened too much to see the stars.

He still remembers those nights. He may not remember what he had for lunch today or the names of his bodyguards or where his bank is, but he remembers telling me stories as we lay on our backs on the grass, staring up at the sky. At least he’s kept the good stuff, the happy parts. Is it really so important that he can’t balance a checkbook, let alone manage a business empire?

Still, I can’t help tensing as I climb our front steps and let myself in. Dad waits for me in his lounge chair. He’s so much smaller and frailer than he was even two months ago. It’s as if he’s folding in on himself, all the life and vitality draining away like water circling the drain. He used to be a big man with broad shoulders and dark hair. Good-looking if I go by my parents’ wedding pictures. He still wears the same neatly pressed khaki pants and polo shirt that he has for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure he’s ever owned a pair of jeans or sweatpants.

“I found Xander,” I tell him, dropping into the chair beside him. So much light pours through the front windows that I can see his face clearly. He frowns, then relaxes.

“Didn’t realize he was lost,” he drawls, his accent a mixture of the South and Georgia. “That boy’s been busy.”

Yes. Xander has. While the Petrovs have lost ground, Xander has built himself an empire. He’s strong, he’s ruthless, and he might be my best bet. Literally.

“He’s not happy with us.”

It must be point-out-the-obvious night at our house because my dad snorts. “That boy never did like being told what to do.”

That boy
is my husband.

“Did you ask him for his protection?” My dad thinks we should bring Xander into the Petrov fold. He’s got this idea that Xander should be his successor. It’s funny. Xander believed I could do it. He said so, and he’s the first person who hasn’t just assumed I need a surrogate, a stand-in, someone with a penis. He believes in me even though we haven’t seen each other in years.

“I did.” And I kissed him. I rocked my pussy against him and he made my panties wet. These aren’t things I want to confess to my dad. “I also suggested we seek an annulment so I can potentially marry someone else, a guy who wants to run the Petrov businesses. Or else I needed to leave town and start over somewhere else.”

My father sighs. “Do you want to go away?”

No. No, I don’t. I rub my dad’s bony forearm. He feels so fragile beneath my fingertips, as if I’m big enough and old enough now to break him when he’s always seemed so larger than life.

“I’m gonna die soon,” he confides. “I’m an old man. My memory’s not so good.”

I’m not ready to lose any part of him. “I don’t want to leave.”

You.
I don’t want to leave you.

He reaches around with his other arm to pat my hand. “But I need you safe, and I’m not the man to do it anymore. Wish I was, but shit’s broken in me, and I won’t make promises I can’t keep. The sharks are circling, baby girl.”

That’s how our world works. There’s always some bigger, harder, nastier shark bumping the bottom of your boat and hoping you come flying out so he can eat you up.

“So let me have a turn. Let me take care of you.”

He shakes his head. “That’s not how this is supposed to work. You know I can’t let you do my job for me. I gotta be strong for you.”

“I know.” And I do. He’s always done the best he could for me, including let me run as far as I could from the Russian mob and our world. But now he can’t do it anymore, and there’s a chance I can help him. I get on that yacht tomorrow, and Xander will protect us.

“I married you to Volkov for good reasons,” he says quietly. “I know you weren’t happy about it, but it served its purpose.”

“What purpose?” I ask softly. Because yeah, I’ve wondered. What kind of man tells his sixteen-year-old daughter she’s getting married? Eight hundred years ago that stuff happened, but we’ve come a long way since then.

“I knew I couldn’t be here forever.” His arm twitches beneath mine, and I know he’s fought for as many years as he could get. He won’t go easily into that good night. That’s not how my dad rolls. He’s a fighter, a protector—and a Petrov. “I figured Volkov was kinda like an insurance policy. If shit happened, he’d be there for you.”

“And yet he went to jail for rescuing me” I point out dryly. “He wasn’t around at all.”

“Yeah.” He snorts. “But you were sixteen and my baby girl. No father likes to think about his daughter getting in bed with some guy, and Volkov was way too old for you. It all worked out.”

I never, ever want to think about my dad and sex in the same sentence again.

“The age difference is still the same,” I point out.

The corner of his mouth pulls up. “Technically. But you’ve done some living and some growing, and that boy’s gotta be ready to settle down. You’d make a good pair.”

“Maybe I want what you and Mom had.”

He lifts a shoulder. “We had it good, but we had to work at it. Life doesn’t pass out happily-ever-afters like they were candy. You keep the boy and be married for real, maybe you find that together.”

“And maybe we don’t.” I believe in honesty.

My dad sighs. “I don’t know what day of the week it is anymore. I have to write shit down because otherwise I don’t remember it. I need to know you’re safe, baby girl.”

If I believe even half of what I’ve read online and in magazines, Xander’s screwed most of Florida as if it’s his God-given right. His dick spends more time out of his pants than in. And it hurts. I’ve told myself to let it go, because a handful of words before a justice of peace who’d been bought and paid for couldn’t make us really married, and I’d been both grateful and disappointed that Xander hadn’t slept with me. But it would be devastating to watch it as his wife in fact.

The sun will be up in hours, and that’s when I have to be on the dock if I’m accepting Xander’s offer. Originally, yacht racing was province of billionaire playboys and Hollywood stars—men rolling in money whether it was old money or new. Xander may be a billionaire who can’t keep it in his pants, but he represents a different breed of man. The question is: can he be different enough?

My dad sighs and looks at me. “You gonna keep him?”

I suck in a breath. “I think so.”

XANDER

Heading back to the slip after I drop Lily off is a relief. I’m aware that I was more jackass than loving husband, but she had to see it coming. And it is part of my plan. I set her up, I rescued her, and then I waited for her to grow up. Now she is old enough—and she is mine. Lily tastes good—and she feels even better. I kick off my Pradas and shuck my socks, balling the silk up inside the loafers.

Still sun-warmed, the boards of the dock feel almost alive beneath my bare feet. Being in the water would be better, but the marina’s oil-streaked chop is a deterrent. Fuck. Maybe I am getting old. I have swum through worse. The music spearing out of the building jackhammers into my head, making a strong case for an immediate exit. I head for my yacht. A staccato burst of laughter from the party follows me, the sound too sharp, a knife digging into my skull.

I need to get my head back in the game by the time we start tomorrow morning. Lose your focus, and the ocean eats you alive. There is a razor-thin edge in professional racing, and I ride it, hug it so close and so hard I can smell the fall coming.

And yet I cannot bring myself to stop.

There is no point in stopping. I make money, I build my power base, and I keep going. I do the left, right thing with my feet. Take another left. The music pursues me through the maze of docks where Miami’s sailing set tie up their finest, the slip sizes growing larger the farther away I get from the party scene happening inside the clubhouse. My baby, the
Koa
, is now all the way out at the end tie, as close to open water as she can get. Nothing but the best for me, and that is the truth. This late at night, the
Koa
is an elegant, dark shadow, her sleek curves and lines barely lit by the floodlights picking out the path along the dock. When I race her, I need a crew of seven, but to get underway and out into open water, I do not need company.

I drop over the side and discover I have the company anyhow. Jack watches me come, metal flashing as he slides a gun back into its holster. We have played our share of deep games together. Caution keeps a man alive, and Jack has no plans to die anytime soon. He is always watching.

“Moved the
Koa
for you,” he announces. As if I have not noticed that she is not where I left her. He has a yacht of his own that he will be racing tomorrow, but he enjoys bothering me. It is a game we play, and I will come up with some other way to get even and then he will repay me.

“What are we betting on?” Liam’s voice slides out of the shadows. He is the third racer in our private club. He takes no shit, not in a fight and definitely not in business. This makes him a hard, mean fighter who never takes the middle ground, not in the jungle, not at sea, and definitely not in the boardroom. The victor gets the spoils in Liam’s world, and losing is not in the man’s vocabulary. In addition to heading up the Banda, Liam built D-11, a global empire of defense technologies. Just in case, he told me once, he got tired someday of life in the mob and because money means power in our world. He likes to cover all of the eventualities.