Cupid to the Rescue: A Tail-Wagging Valentine's Day Anthology

by Lisa Mondello

  At the sound of her voice, Valentin popped his head up, leapt over the boxes faster than an obstacle course training, and practically slammed into her with his eagerness to greet her.

  He knew the reference Tanya meant, of course. Not America’s bohemian beatniks of the 1950s and ’60s, but the marginalized and starving artist culture of 1800s France.

  Was he?

  Before the Secret Service, he certainly had been—except for the family money which he’d refused to touch other than for tuition. Instead of living at home while attending UC Berkeley, he’d rented a typical student garret except for his junior year abroad in St. Petersburg. It had been very bohemian and he’d enjoyed it far more than the familial showpiece.

  Alex delayed his answer by greeting Valentin, then nudging him back so that they could close the door.

  There was little question about what he wasn’t supposed to be doing with a protectee.

  Valentin pushed forward again.

  Tanya tossed her be-furred coat over a box before squatting down to greet Valentin—who was eating it up like, well, a puppy dog. The two of them had some crazy connection, like siblings or something. The Pushkin poem had never said anything about Tatyana Larina having a great hound—though, being a member of rural Russian aristocracy, she probably had. Was Valentin in some weird way the dog Tanya had owned in a former, fictional life?

  Or maybe he just enjoyed the feel and smell of her.

  His own body remembered what hers had felt like in his arms. Tatyana Larina might be a foreign diplomat, but she was also an incredibly fit and lovely woman.

  She rose from hugging Valentin and ended up standing practically nose to nose with him in the tiny front entryway.

  “I am not some fantasy out of your Pushkin novel.”

  He breathed her in like a heady scent. No, she wasn’t some arcane model of duty and decorum. She was incredibly alive.

  “I’m going to regret this in the morning.”

  She draped an arm over either of his shoulders and clasped her hands behind his neck. “I won’t.”

  He shifted her two steps back until she was out of the entryway and had her back against the cool metal of the stainless-steel fridge, empty except for some dog meat.

  She was right.

  If he was going to go to hell, he was damn well going to enjoy it.

  Heart of a Russian Bear Dog: Chapter 15

  “You must do something about your bed.” Though Tanya couldn’t imagine why she was complaining, she felt incredibly limber this morning.

  She sat on the bathroom counter, drying her hair as well as she could with a couple of kitchen towels, and watched Alex drying himself off with a stack of paper napkins bearing a pizzeria’s logo. He was a very pretty lover as well as being a very creative one.

  They’d made use of the kitchen floor, had something of a wrestling match on the carpeted stairs that had ended with two victors, and finally shoved around enough boxes to get the mattress flopped down upstairs.

  They’d prowled through boxes of Russian literature, dog care books, and action-adventure thriller novels. The well-thumbed Secret Service training manuals told her just how seriously he took his job despite appearances.

  They’d never found the sheets, but a single pillow had surfaced and a sleeping bag unzipped over them had been enough by the time exhaustion had taken them under.

  Thankfully, the one thing he’d known exactly how to find had been condoms. There was a supply of them in Valentin’s emergency med kit.

  “If something happens where Valentin has to walk across broken glass and cuts his paws, they make a quick emergency bandage.”

  Based on his disorganization about everything else, it actually made her believe him.

  “This is going to be awkward,” Alex grimaced.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not supposed to fraternize with my protectees.”

  “Fraternize?”

  “I’m not supposed to, uh, have any relationship with a protectee.” He began dressing in sweatshirt and pants.

  “We do not have a relationship. We had sex.”

  “Not supposed to do that either.”

  She waited until he was standing on one leg to slip on his sweatpants. Pushing off the counter, she ducked low and tackled him. He flew out the door. Valentin had slept along her side of the mattress. When the back of Alex’s calves hit the dog, he’d tumbled backward onto the mattress.

  Exactly where she wanted him.

  Heart of a Russian Bear Dog: Chapter 16

  “Hey, Alex.”

  Alex froze five steps out his front door, and looked up at Bethany as she ran up the sidewalk. She was wearing Wonder Woman-red leggings and runners. Dripping sweat stained a deep-v of darkness on her black USSS t-shirt. Trixie panted hard at her side.

  “About time you got your lazy ass up and moving. You know this isn’t California where…” Her words trailed off and her eyes went wide as she looked over his shoulder.

  He didn’t need to turn as Valentin came up beside him and his front door clicked shut. It didn’t close by itself.

  “Nice dress,” Bethany shot out, then grimaced an apology.

  He glanced over his shoulder. What had looked amazing on last night’s dance floor, and had spent most of the night on the kitchen floor where he’d stripped it off Tanya last night, looked severely out of place under the parking lot lights at six-thirty on a dark chilly morning. Even if it still looked incredible.

  “Thanks,” Tanya didn’t sound at all put out. “I wish I had my running clothes; I would have gone with you.”

  Bethany opened her mouth, scowled at him, then closed it.

  Tanya continued, “How hard was it not to say, ‘Looks like you got your exercise already.’?”

  Bethany smiled at her. “Pretty hard.”

  “Did I step in the middle of—”

  “God no!” Bethany held up both her hands.

  “I’m not her type,” Alex decided that he could either join the conversation or be run over by it.

  They both turned to look at him like he was a side of meat. Then Tanya simply raised her eyebrows in surprise at Bethany.

  Bethany shrugged a reply.

  Maybe it was safer to stay quiet.

  Bethany headed for her place with Trixie at her side, but called back over her shoulder. “Don’t let Baxter or Tibbets see you or you’re a dead man.”

  Tanya was silent as he held the Jeep’s door for her.

  Valentin only groused a little about being put in the rear seat. “Your legs are shorter, buddy. You ride in back.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “She is.” Alex started the Jeep and looked in the headlight’s spread to find a change of topic. All he found was an early robin listening for a worm under one of the manicured shrubs.

  “She’s not your type?”

  “No. She said I wasn’t…” Tanya had inverted the sentence and it gave him pause. The beautiful blonde with the twangy West Virginia accent and a good sense of humor made him feel as if he should want her. But…

  He looked over at Tanya watching him. “All these years I never knew what my type was. I guess now I do, Tanya.”

  For once, she didn’t have anything snappy to say as he backed out of his spot and headed to her hotel.

  Instead of stretching our for a nap on the back seat, Valentin rode with his big head between them so that Alex couldn’t see Tanya’s expression.

  Heart of a Russian Bear Dog: Chapter 17

  All week, there was no sign of any attack.

  Instead, Tanya played her foreign policy game.

  She took her meetings. Afterward, Alex offered interesting contexts from history she’d never studied, on just what they meant—really—and how to get around the blockades that were raised. Once the carefully routine afternoon changeovers were done, she shifted mode and let Carlton show her the sights of their capital. It should have been fun. He was intelligent, had grown up here, and clea
rly wanted her. There was a nice kind of charge when a man wanted you, but with each day she found less and less voltage in it.

  With Alex, there was nothing but charge, a very high-energy one.

  Each night he picked her up after Carlton’s drop off.

  Twice she and Alex had gone dancing.

  But the nights they spent at his place with Valentin were the best.

  The hotel was too neat, too perfect. She liked eating Chinese food on the couch and making love on the low mattress—now that they’d opened enough boxes to find the sheets.

  Each morning they ran together with Valentin, once with Bethany and both dogs. She was an easy woman to like, even though Valentin did his best to stay between them.

  Ukrainian had about a two-thirds vocabulary overlap with Russian and Alex had a very sharp ear. Their lovemaking rapidly slid into Ukrainian; food soon followed.

  If he still harbored Pushkinesque fantasies, he kept them to herself.

  “I see two problems,” she told him the morning of the fifth day as she lay in his arms. The mattress was still on the floor. Though about half of the boxes were unpacked, he still hadn’t found the hardware for the frame.

  “Give me a minute to recover before I try to solve one of them.”

  She kissed him briefly. He was very sweet.

  “The second problem is that I’m supposed to fly home immediately after the treaty is signed in two days.”

  Alex just grunted unhappily. “The Secret Service isn’t in the habit of posting its dog handlers to Kyiv.”

  “You’ll miss the sex.”

  “Hell yeah.”

  Which was going to really irritate her for being his priority, even if she’d miss it too.

  “At least half as much as I’ll miss you,” he growled out in a surly mashup of Ukrai-ssian which made her feel much better.

  “Yes,” she agreed carefully as she tested the thought inside. “Yes.” In a single week she’d come to care about Alex Warren a great deal. Not once past the first meeting had he seen her as Pushkin’s Tatyana Larina helplessly flailing against society’s dictates and whims. Nor did he see her as Father did: a useful tool to fill an important government position, expanding his control. And definitely not as if she was a mere steppingstone toward advancement.

  Alex saw her as his lover. As a crusader for Ukrainian rule for the Crimea. And as more of a person and less of a “woman” than she’d thought herself. Everyone always treated her as a woman first, until she’d believed that was most of what she was. But Alex, despite being her lover, seemed to bring her into focus—to herself—as a person.

  Last night, after making love, they’d actually talked of her long-term plans for the future of reunifying Ukraine.

  She’d never laid out the full scope of her plan to anyone, not even Father. It was an impossible task and the few she’d even partially revealed it to had laughed outright.

  With Alex, they’d debated late into the night about just what it would take to achieve that goal based on the various countries’ present-day geopolitical dynamics.

  This morning they lay together in silence for a while, neither of them finding anything more to say about the fast-approaching end of their time together.

  Finally Alex grumbled out, “What’s the first problem?”

  “The first problem—” Tanya took a deep breath. “You can not become strange with me about this.”

  Alex nodded his agreement.

  “The first problem is…that I want to go to the Library of Congress this afternoon. They have a first edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. I have had my embassy call and they’ve arranged for me to see it at the same time as your turnover to Carlton. Now, one unwise remark out of you and I’ll… I’ll… I will tell Valentin to sit on you.”

  He smiled. “Oh, I’m so afraid of my own dog.”

  Her typical “retributions” when Alex was being impossible about something could be very enjoyable as they typically ended in great sex. She’d never get enough of him and that “second problem” was a major one. But as to the first, if he did not behave…

  “It would be my pleasure to escort you there, Ms. Tatyana Larina.”

  “Valentin!” She called to the dog where he slept close by her side of the bed. Tanya pointed at Alex’s chest. “Sidet’!”

  Valentin hopped to his feet, stepped lightly over her, and sat on Alex’s chest.

  “Goddamn it,” Alex grunted as seventy-five kilos of dog landed squarely on him.

  “Myesto!” She ordered him to Stay.

  Then she slipped out of bed, and made a point of walking very slowly toward the shower while Alex tried to get his dog off his chest.

  Heart of a Russian Bear Dog: Chapter 18

  Tanya’s Crimean Campaign, as they now called it between themselves, had led him up and down embassy row and into both the Capitol Building, which was impressive, and the Pentagon, which was a little alarming. She was a true force of nature. Alex figured if anyone could actually achieve her so-unlikely objective, it would be Tanya Larina.

  But Alex hadn’t yet been to the Library of Congress.

  He hated not being able to check out the premises before escorting Tanya there, but that had been the pattern of much of their week.

  The Library of Congress lay east across the street from the Capitol Building, just south of the pillared Supreme Court Building. The broad marble steps zigzagged around either side of a large fountain.

  “It is the court of the Neptune King,” Tanya announced.

  “King Neptune, the god of the sea. What is he doing guarding the Library of Congress?”

  “I was thinking that might make sense to you Americans. It makes no sense to this Ukrainian.”

  Alex stared at the large bronze king. All about him, his courtiers blew fountains of water out the end of conch shells raised as trumpets. “It’s because he visits here so often. You see, it’s very hard to read books in his underwater kingdom. Of course, you wouldn’t recognize him. He comes disguised as an out-of-practice scholar of old Russian literature.”

  Tanya turned to him and after a long moment whispered, “But I do recognize him, Mishka.”

  Alex blinked. Little Bear. An endearment between girlfriend and boyfriend. Until this moment, they had avoided the little nicknames so common between Slavic couples. It felt both wonderful and painful, the former because of its truth and the latter because of its looming end. It was made even more appropriate by the big Russian bear dog presently leaning over the fountain for a drink of water.

  But what was Tanya? Tygrenya, his “little tiger”? Or…

  “Drakonchyk.”

  Tanya blinked in surprise, then wrapped her arms around his neck and his Little Dragon kissed him most thoroughly.

  “What?” He kept her close after the kiss.

  “The way you see me…it is wonderful!”

  A hard snarl from Valentin had him instantly shoving Tanya behind him and grabbing for his sidearm.

  “What I’m seeing is going to knock you out of the goddamn service!” Carlton stepped right up into his face. “Fast!”

  Ripper let out a hard snarl. He must have mistaken Carlton’s snarled “Fast” for “Fass”—attack!

  He leapt at Alex.

  Before Alex could do more than raise an arm in self defense, Valentin casually raised a massive paw and swatted the Malinois aside, tumbling him into the fountain.

  Ripper came out of the water in a fighting rage and leapt on Valentin. But even the Malinois’ jaws were little match for Valentin’s thick coat.

  Valentin twisted far faster than anyone would expect from his bulk. He clamped his massive jaw down on the back of Ripper’s Secret Service Kevlar vest, shook him free of his bite on Valentin’s scruff, then tossed him back into the water as if he was a bath toy, not seventy pounds of furious attack dog.

  Ripper braced to leap over the fountain’s concrete edge. Alex could almost feel Valentin roll his eyes and sigh. Then he turned to face Ripper
directly and braced himself for action. This was going to end badly for Ripper.

  “You’d better call him off unless you want him hurt,” Alex warned, keeping his body between Tanya and the near-apoplectic Carlton.

  “Fuss!” Carlton snapped out. “Platz!”

  Ripper’s snarl still echoed deep in his chest as he climbed from the water and came to Heel. He gave himself a big shake that sprayed Carlton with near-freezing fountain water. But he didn’t Lie Down.

  Valentin tracked his every step very closely.

  “Ruhig!” Alex ordered Ripper to be Quiet in German while Carlton wiped at his own face. The Malinois obeyed, though his teeth remained bared.

  Carlton looked even angrier that Alex could command his dog. It was a shortcoming that Valentin did not share. Except for his curious obedience to Tanya, Valentin would ignore anyone other than Alex himself.

  “I have control now,” Carlton snapped at him. “You are relieved of duty pending review. I will be reporting both of you to Captain Baxter.”

  Tanya stepped around him with what sounded like a truly foul Ukrainian imprecation but he thought might translate as “ducks are going to kick your ass.” She’d told him that Ukrainians used Russian when they wanted a gutter-foul curse. Their native language leant itself mostly to insults.

  “You,” she jabbed a Ukrainian Fort 17 pistol under Carlton’s chin, forcing him to tip his head back.

  Alex had noticed the small 9mm in her purse several times but she was so smooth and practiced that he hadn’t spotted her drawing it—a useful skill on a busy street. It was small enough that she almost appeared to have her fingers around Carlton’s throat.

  “You wish vengeance because his dog is stronger than yours,” her voice was dangerously calm—stripped of all the lilt and emotion that normally made it so rich. “Or because he stops Russian attackers and you do not. Or he sleeps with me and you do not. Ah, I see that is what makes you angriest. I will tell you this, Lieutenant Carlton Tibbets, there was never a chance that I wanted to see if your tiny dick matched your massive ego.” She used a sharp jab with her gun to send Carlton stumbling back.