Russian Love: Books 1 - 3: Russian Lullaby, Russian Gold & Russian Dawn

by Holly Bargo

  The prediction of his impending loss soured Pyotr, although he knew that Gennady spoke truly. He’d not been fighting the cream of the underground MMA crop. Those youngsters would likely wipe floor with his face. He was too old, too out of shape, too out of practice, even though he’d been winning steadily over the past seventeen days and six fights. His body felt permanently bruised. His hands hurt all the time, especially his knuckles. Maksim had not relieved him of his usual work, although that involved more driving than it did enforcement. Slava Bogu.

  With a surly grunt, he called Maksim.

  “What is it, Pyotr?”

  “I found Cecily.”

  “Then you will leave shortly?”

  “After tonight’s fight, I’ll get a flight out.”

  “Skip the fight,” Olivia’s voice came over the line.

  “Livvy! This is private.”

  “Maksim, the boy’s in love and he’s going after his girl. Give him a break.”

  His boss’ heavy sigh indicated capitulation. “Forget the fight tonight. I’ll find someone else to bet my money on.”

  “Put your money on Slaughterhouse,” Pyotr advised. “He’s good, better than I.”

  “Da. Spasibo.”

  “Find Cecily and bring her back,” Olivia ordered. “We miss her.”

  “We miss her cooking,” Maksim muttered.

  “Da.” Pyotr could have mentioned he missed having Cecily in his bed, waking up to her softness, seeing her possessions mixed among his. Already her scent had faded from his apartment. He looked around, gaze gliding over Gennady’s ugly mug, and noted the signs of her absence. Chert poberi, he was lonely.

  “Find me a flight to San Antonio,” he ordered his colleague. “I leave tonight.”

  Gennady’s face brightened with a toothy smile. “Good. Then I can focus on my love life.”

  “Gennady, you don’t have a love life. You just fuck them and leave them weeping.”

  “They like what I do to them.”

  Pyotr shook his head, not understanding how any woman could enjoy the kind of pain that Gennady inflicted upon them.

  “They know what they’re getting into,” the tall, slender man defended himself. “They wouldn’t be in those clubs otherwise.”

  “What do they call you? The Russian Dom?”

  Gennady responded with a thin smile and said, “Do you want the eight o’clock or nine-thirty flight?”

  Pyotr glanced at his watch. He still had to pack and get through airport security. “Nine-thirty.”

  “Done. Give me your credit card.”

  * * *

  Cecily untied her apron and, placing her hands against her lower back, bent backward as far as she could without toppling over.

  “A good night, eh?” Javier commented with a luminous grin brightening his dark face.

  “A very good night,” she agreed and rolled her shoulders.

  “There’s a customer asking for you?”

  “Who?” A chill of dread trickled down Cecily’s spine.

  However, Javier’s grin only got wider. “A reporter from Edible San Antonio. He’s reviewing us tonight.”

  “Oh, Lord, I wish I’d’ve known he was coming.”

  “Relax, niña. The menu was fine and your cooking was magnifico,” her boss reassured her.

  “What did he order? Did he order one of Paulina’s dishes?”

  “No. He ordered off the new menu, one of your specialties.”

  “None of those was a Mexican dish.”

  “It does not matter. The food was good and that is what matters. Go and speak with him, Cecily.”

  She pouted. “I don’t want to.” Pyotr might find me if this reporter publishes my name.

  Javier’s smile and good humor disappeared beneath a stern frown. “Cecily, don’t be foolish. My restaurant and your job may depend upon a good review. Be nice to the man. Smile at him.”

  She sighed. There was no polite way to refuse this opportunity. Slapping a damp towel on the counter, she marched into the dining room to confront the lone, remaining customer. With determination, she fixed a welcoming smile on her face. If her mother had taught her nothing else, she had taught her daughters to perform their duties with a pleasant expression and polite manners.

  Her mother had probably given birth with a determined smile, she thought sourly. The thought of children begat the thought of the making of them which led straight to the thought of Pyotr and a wave of loneliness so powerful it nearly caused her to stagger. Steeling herself against the weakness, Cecily squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.

  Hand outstretched, she greeted the reporter, “Hello, I’m Cecily Carrigan, the chef of El Buey Azul.”

  The homely man with crooked teeth and lank, greasy hair shook her hand and introduced himself to her boobs. “Please sit. I’m sure your feet are killing you.”

  “I prefer to stand, thank you.” What she did not say was, “My face is up here, you jerk.”

  He nodded and jotted something down in his notepad. Cecily felt compelled to add, “If I sit, I probably won’t be able to get back up.” She softened the words with a smile.

  “I know the feeling,” the reporter replied and immediately launched into his questions. His gaze focused more often on her chest than on her face, something Cecily had more than sufficient experience enduring and never appreciated. Thoroughly annoyed, Cecily kept her answers short and to the point until he came to the part about her background.

  “Did you work in a restaurant before this?”

  “For a short while,” she admitted. “I don’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Painful memories,” came the terse answer. “I don’t discuss it.”

  “Auditions for Top Chef are coming to San Antonio. From what I sampled here, you’ve got some serious cooking skills. Are you going to enter?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Cecily said. “I only recently moved here.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Batesville, Indiana,” she answered, thinking it best to omit all mention of Cleveland, except as necessary where her degree was concerned.

  Not familiar with the rural, southwest Indiana town, the reporter dismissed it as unimportant and veered to other questions from a seemingly inexhaustible supply. When background questions finally ended, the interview turned toward her cooking, the influences, the inspiration, the goals.

  “Someday, I’d like to own my own restaurant,” she admitted. “But that’s a long way away, so right now I’m happy to make my mark as Javier’s chef.”

  “I think I have more than enough,” the reporter said and shook her hand. He tilted his head, looking her directly in the eyes instead of below her neck, and asked, “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in going out for coffee with me?”

  She shook her head and said, “Thank you, but I’ve got to clean the kitchen. Then my goal is to make it back to my bed before falling asleep on the sidewalk.”

  He accepted the polite—and honest—refusal with good grace and bade her good-bye. Cecily watched him walk out of the restaurant and yawned, wondering cynically if he hit on all the female cooks he interviewed or if she was just the lucky one. Javier locked the door behind the reporter and flipped the sign to CLOSED. She retreated to the kitchen to scrub everything down for use the next day. She made a mental note to speak to Javier about hiring an assistant for her.

  Leaving the restaurant, she locked the kitchen door behind her, hugged her purse close to her body, and began walking with purpose. Cecily disliked the dark alley, but Javier claimed he hadn’t the funds to install a security light back there. She pulled a flashlight from her oversized purse and switched it on. She blinked against the exhaustion that pulled at her, knowing that an alert demeanor helped deter assault. At least, that’s what the magazine articles on women’s safety said.

  She should have learned self-defense at school when she had the chance.

  She walked six blocks, turned left
, walked another seven blocks, turned right, and walked three more blocks. The neighborhood wasn’t the best. Well, in all honesty, it was pretty damned bad, but no worse, she told herself, than the ghetto area of student housing where she’d lived. Looking around her new neighborhood, she knew that she couldn’t lie worth a damn, not even to herself. She climbed the stairs of her recently procured studio apartment. The hallway stank of urine and the skunk smell of marijuana and something harshly chemical. She thought one of her neighbors might be cooking up some crystal meth, but wasn’t curious enough to investigate. People in this neighborhood didn’t appreciate curiosity.

  Cecily unlocked the door and the deadbolt and let herself into her small apartment, avoiding the rude stare of the creepy neighbor who opened his door to watch her whenever he realized she was in the hallway.

  Except for a couple of cheap throw rugs, the worn linoleum floor was bare. A tiny kitchenette failed utterly as a place to cook an actual meal. A curtain drawn across the doorway to a small, dingy bathroom offered a modicum of privacy in case she was so foolish as to invite a guest to visit her humble abode. A few mornings of scavenging yard sales had netted her some general housewares and some extra dollars yielded the agreement of some sellers to deliver a double bed and mattress, a loveseat and armchair, and a dinette table and two chairs, and bureau. A morning trip to a local discount store helped brighten up the depressing space with cheap lace curtains, cheerfully colored bedspread and sheets, the aforementioned rugs, and a freestanding rack from which she could hang her clothes, since the studio apartment had no closet.

  After relocking the door and deadbolt, she looked around the space and wished she could afford a trip to Ikea, then trudged to the bathroom to take a shower and wash off the sweat, grease, and grime of a long day’s work. Not all that far away, she heard shouts and two gunshots, screams, more yelling. She dared not look out the window. Business was picking up at the restaurant and she decided that she’d ask her boss for a raise. Not much, just enough to get the hell out of this horrible neighborhood.

  Sirens interrupted her new nighttime routine. She’d quickly learned to ignore them. Sitting in her armchair with her e-reader in hand and a glass of cheap wine to help her relax, she jumped and splashed wine on her sleep shirt when someone pounded on her door. Hastily, she set the wine glass down before she spilled any more on herself. With caution, she approached the door and peered through the peephole.

  “I know you’re in there, chica,” her creepy neighbor said. “You gotta let me in. I need to use your phone.”

  “Tell me whom you want to call and I’ll make the call,” she shouted back through the door. No way was she going to let that weirdo in her apartment.

  He jerked and danced in place, the flab of his skinny arms jiggling. “C’mon, chica. I locked myself out of my apartment.”

  “I’ll call the super for you.”

  “Fuck, chica, he won’t answer his phone. Shit hole like this? We be lucky if he ain’t the one shot out there.”

  “I am not going to let you into my apartment,” Cecily said. “I don’t know you and this is a bad neighborhood.”

  She heard him mutter, “Fuckin’ bitch,” as he walked away. Giving her creepy neighbor the benefit of the doubt, she called the superintendent who, surprisingly, did answer the phone.

  “Whaddayawant?”

  “Mr. Boromitz,” she began, took a breath to calm her nerves, and continued, “my neighbor from apartment 3-C says he locked himself out of his apartment. I’m calling to ask you to open his door and let him back in.”

  “Why ain’t he callin’ me then, chica?”

  Cecily frowned, tired already of being called chica. She wasn’t a little girl, damn it. “Mr. Boromitz, I don’t let strange men into my apartment, so I offered to place the call for him.”

  “Tell the fucker I’ll be up after my show.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Boromitz,” she replied faintly and decided that she would not venture into the hallway to let her creepy, probably drugged-up neighbor know that the building superintendent would unlock his door for him. Eventually.

  She sat back down, picked up her wineglass, and drained it in one long swallow. She cast a glance at the open window, but decided not to close it. The building had no air conditioning and the temperature—already sultry—would grow unbearable if she closed her only source of outside ventilation.

  “I have got to get out of here,” she muttered and plugged in her smartphone to be sure to have sufficient power to search for a new place to live. She’d just have to dig into her savings for a while to afford better living conditions.

  Shouts, screams, and sirens still pierced the night at irregular intervals when she finally tucked herself into bed.

  Chapter 6

  Pyotr sat at an outside bistro table across the river, watching the door to El Buey Azul, which he had learned meant “the blue ox.” He sipped a cup of coffee altered with chicory and watched a man who appeared at least a decade or so older than Maksim walk into the restaurant. His eyebrows lowered, met above the bridge of his nose in a frown. That was his Cecily’s new boss? She worked in this dump?

  He took another sip and glared at the white mug in his hand. What the hell was this swill anyway? Didn’t these people understand tea? Too bad it was just too early to scour the taste of coffee away with a mouthful of good vodka.

  “Are you ready to order, sir?” the waitress inquired when she appeared at his table.

  He looked up at her, although he didn’t have to look very far. The young Hispanic woman’s accent charmed him. Her clear, caramel skin provided the perfect setting for a set of big, brown eyes and thick black hair which was pulled into a messy bun. He found he could appreciate her warm beauty, but his cock remained uninterested. It only thickened and rose for Cecily.

  He nodded and ordered breakfast.

  “Good choice. The huevos rancheros is excellent,” she said with a professional smile.

  He returned her smile, as empty and perfunctory as hers. She walked away and he returned to watching for Cecily’s arrival. His breakfast arrived fifteen minutes later and he ate it, appreciating the hearty meal. He’d have to make good use of the hotel’s fitness room or find some other, much more enjoyable way to burn off those calories.

  He lingered over breakfast. The pretty waitress grew irritated with him for occupying a table for so long. When the sign on the other restaurant’s door flipped from CLOSED to OPEN, he decided that Cecily must have gone in through a back entrance. Pyotr figured that he’d wait until the restaurant was busy; then Cecily was less likely to bolt.

  When he finally rose from his seat, he made sure to leave the waitress a generous tip. He walked along the River Walk and admired the scenery as much as he enjoyed the balmy temperatures. He ignored the admiring looks tossed at him from female passersby. He had no interest in any woman but Cecily. He hoped she hadn’t hooked up with another man in the weeks since she’d left him, because then he’d have to kill the man.

  Cecily was his. He’d claimed her as much as Vitaly had claimed Giancarla. He admitted he had failed in not putting a ring around her finger earlier. Thinking of that ring, his hand aimed for the depths of his front pocket to finger the small, velveteen box that had taken up permanent residence. He’d put that ring on her finger. Before or after he filled her body with his was a detail to be worked out later.

  He passed boutique shops and toyed with the idea of buying her something sparkly, but then remembered that she’d left behind the jewelry he’d already bought her. Gold and precious stones meant little to his pretty blonde. She appreciated other things. He smiled to himself remembering how she’d practically melted the day he brought home a bouquet of daisies. Simple daisies. The flowers had barely made it into a vase before they’d had some of the best sex ever.

  He stepped into a floral shop and looked around.

  “May I help you, sir?” called a flirty voice that matched a pair of flashing blue eyes and swaying hips. �
��Are you looking for roses?”

  “Da. I am looking for daisies.”

  “Oh, that’s so sweet. Are they for your mama?” the woman asked, tossing her head to the side so that her shiny blonde hair swung over her shoulders.

  Pyotr’s eyes narrowed and he wondered how long he had before the hussy threw herself at him. He counted down from ten and before he finished she’d sashayed next to him and settled her long-nailed fingers on his arm and squeezed him lightly.

  “Oh, my, aren’t you a strong one?” she purred.

  “Daisies,” he reminded her.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “A proposal.”

  She laughed, a practiced titter that ran up down the musical scale. “Oh, you silly man! For a proposal, you want roses, not daisies. Roses are romantic, deep red ones.”

  “She likes daisies.”

  The saleswoman pouted her shiny, cherry red lips. “Well, if you insist.”

  “I do.”

  “You’ll be saying that soon enough,” she muttered, disgruntled. “What a waste.”

  Disgusted, he said, “On second thought, I’ve reconsidered.”

  The sales clerk’s jaw dropped as she watched her customer leave.

  Pyotr resumed his casual stroll down the River Walk and walked into another boutique to purchase clothing more suited to the southern climate. The sales clerk in the upscale men’s clothing shop sighed as he watched his customer leave with full shopping bags. Pyotr returned to his hotel room, took a shower, and dressed in his new clothes: crisply pressed linen pants, a blue silk shirt, soft loafers, and lightweight jacket to match the trousers. He completed the look with a rakishly tilted Panama hat and felt very dashing, despite the bruises that yet bloomed on his body.

  He’d endure more if that was needed to convince Cecily to come back to him.

  The dinner shift was in full swing when returned to the restaurant after stopping at another floral shop and purchasing a small bouquet of daisies from a grandmotherly type who winked and smiled at him. Or maybe that was palsy. He took his place in line at the door, feeling a secondhand sort of pride knowing that it was Cecily’s fabulous cooking that made this dump so popular.