by Marsh,Anne
I give him a look. “Do you think it was an accident I married Lily? It took three months of planning to get my chance. I waited until she was in a bad situation, and then I called Ivan Petrov and told him I could help—for a price. He paid it then, and he’ll pay it now. He would do anything to keep his Lily safe.”
This is the moment when I hear a sound behind me. There is only one person who can be standing there, and she will not be happy to hear what I just said. I am not a coward, but I had hoped she would not find out about the opportunity I created for myself six years ago.
Liam’s face fucking lights up. “Princess, how nice of you to join us.”
I may have to kill him after all. I turn around, just in time to see Lily disappear down the hallway.
LILY
I am such an idiot.
I never wondered how Xander knew to show up that night in the club, or how Daniel’s debtors knew where to find him. He’d assured me we’d be safe—and maybe he had been right. Xander set us up. Xander didn’t rescue me—he played me. Maybe he engineered the Banda’s interest in my family, too. After all, he has the head of that family sitting in his living room.
I don’t really know what to think. Xander has played me for a fool. The reason why he never came for me after our marriage is because he already had what he wanted—whatever my father bribed him with. Our marriage is exactly what I didn’t want. It’s a property transfer, an alliance, a deal between my father and my husband. The problem is that I don’t know where I go from here.
I promised to give him a chance—but he also promised to let me go if I wanted to go. Leaving is attractive, but I’m actually leaning toward shooting his ass right now. Jack would help me. Hell, even Liam might. If the expression on his face was any indication, the Banda’s leader enjoys tormenting my husband.
Stupid Russian mafia boss.
I move down the hallway and then out the French doors at the end. They open onto the beach. I don’t see anyone, but I’m certain there are armed guards watching my every move now. It looks so easy to get out, as if all I have to do is step onto the sand and keep moving—and yet I can never leave this mob life behind me. Worse, I don’t think I can forget Xander. The man who held me, loved me, and explained why he enjoyed racing so much. The man who promised to learn one new thing about me every day. He lied to me. He set me up, and that hurts. I forgot who he is at heart.
He’s the mob boss. The billionaire.
And yet… I still want that something more with Xander. I want him to choose to come after me this time, to come and take me into his arms. I want him to keep me safe and make everything else go away. But this isn’t a fairytale where the prince kisses the sleeping princess into wakefulness. This is the two of us in the Bahamas, and I have no way of leaving here without his permission and that scares me too. Who did I marry? Last night’s tender lover or the cold mob boss explaining to his colleagues that he has Ivan Petrov and his daughter on a leash?
I stand there at the water’s edge, my feet in the water, for a long time. The waves come in, but they’re not bringing me any answers, not today.
When I turn around to head back to the house, I’m not surprised to find Xander leaning against a palm. He’s waiting for me.
“We should talk,” he announces.
“I have nothing to say to you.” My feet are wet. I’m going to track sand into his beautiful designer beach house, and I don’t give a fuck. I reach for the doors, and he stops me. That’s it. He doesn’t get to pull this kind of shit.
“I am not your fucking doll,” I hiss. “You don’t dress me up. You don’t treat me as your plaything. And you certainly don’t get to move me around as a pawn in whatever fiendish chess game you and your Mafia buds are playing.”
“Lily.” See? This is why I hate him. He growls my name, his accent thickening, and my panties get wet. I don’t want to like him in any way—and this is impossible. Kiss him or kill him—I lose both ways and I think it’s time life cut me some slack.
“Shut. Up.” I slam my hands into his chest. Maybe I could get used to the violence of mob life, because it feels good to hit him just that little bit. And then I think about hurting him, and I can feel the fight leak out of me. I don’t want him hurt, and I only partly want him gone.
What I want is for him to be mine—and that’s impossible.
“You agreed to give me a chance,” he says.
“And I did!” I shout. His bodyguards are going to get an earful. “You let me think you were rescuing me, when you were the one who put me in danger!”
“Daniel broke the rules, Lily. If the Bratva had not come for him that night, they would have come some other time, and maybe I would not have been there in time.”
“That’s bullshit,” I snap. “You wanted something and you took it.”
“Da.” He takes a step toward me as I launch myself at him.
I have no idea what I intend, but the look in his eyes scares me. He looks hard, resolved, and pissed as hell. This is not my fault. His arms close around me, and he lifts me until I have my back to the wall. His big body stands between me and the rest of the world, and I’m so fucking weak. For just a moment, I’m ready to forget. To hang onto him and let go of everything else.
“I have fixed your problem with the Banda,” he tells me, his voice silky with menace. “Liam will not bother you again. His people will leave you alone.”
“Great,” I mutter. I’m still trying to get my traitorous hormones under control. They think an angry fuck would be the perfect punctuation to our argument. No. This is more than a fight.
Xander stares down at me fiercely. “Tell me how to fix this.”
“I don’t know.” The wall is holding me up now. I will not fall into Xander’s arms. I will handle this on my own. “I don’t know how to let it go. You want me to take all the anger, all the ugly thoughts, and make them go away? I. Don’t. Know. How.”
Could I do it? Could I mentally shove all the anger, the ugly thoughts in a chest in my head, lock it, toss the key, and douse the fucking thing in gasoline? Flick a mental Bic and say do svidaniia to the unpleasant parts of our past? If Xander needs that, he should have married a saint instead of me.
“We are married now. We are partners.”
“You promised I could walk if I didn’t want to stay married to you.”
He looks pained. “Da. If that is what you want.”
I stare at him and then he grabs me, pulling me into his body for a kiss that somehow manages to both hard and impossibly gentle at the same time. I need to hate his kiss. I need to hate him. So much need. My body is making promises my head rejects because Xander is so impossibly wrong. He kisses me fiercely, not letting up or easing off. His big hand wraps around my hair, while his other hand grips my butt, lifting me against him until I have no doubt at all that my man wants me. Xander is hard inside and out, and I can’t stop wanting him.
There is a sound behind us. Xander lifts his head.
“If you do not back the fuck off now, I will kill you.”
I don’t think he’s joking either.
Jack shoves his head out the door, flicks a glance over us, and then studiously returns his gaze to a palm tree. “There was a 9-1-1 call from the Petrov place in Miami twenty minutes ago.” He pauses, but Xander and I are already moving. He’s so impossibly wrong, and yet he knows exactly the right thing to say. He knows what I need.
“I will take you to him now,” he says. “We will be there in time.”
8
THREE WEEKS LATER
LILY
I don’t know whether I should cry—or just remember. My dad slipped away from me two days after Xander flies me home. Logically, I know we are all born dying. That the end goal is to die slowly and make it to 109 and tie Methuselah for longevity. And even if we make it to triple digits, it won’t seem like enough time, not if we’ve been really living. There is always stuff that’s not done or left unsaid and I had no idea that the final weeks, ho
urs, and days could speed up and disappear so quickly. Still, wherever he is now, I know he’s happier. Losing his life one memory at a time—that was never the way he’d have wanted to go. My dad was a fighter and a protector. He was strong right up until when he couldn’t be.
I saw Xander at the funeral. Now that I’ve been through my father’s papers and talked to his business people, a few things are clear. He transferred property to Xander shortly before our shotgun marriage, and I’m still trying to come to terms with that. Xander was no white knight—he was a bought-and-paid-for mercenary. And honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that. When I’m with Xander, I feel safe. I know he wants to take care of me and our chemistry is off-the-charts good… I just don’t know if that is enough for me anymore.
Xander know that too. He keeps his distance at the funeral. He watches me, scanning our surroundings for potential danger. I know he wants to stand by me, to take me in his arms—but he also understands that I need to do this on my own. He’s the one who gave me the idea, after all, that I could take over the Petrov family. I’m more than a property deed on legs to him. So now I’m trying, and strangely, Delia Zakharova and I have become friends of a sort. She came to the funeral—all of the Miami families did—but then she sort of stuck around. She’s irreverent, bold, and takes shit from no one. I kind of love her already.
When she first walked into our—my—house, she grinned when she saw all of the flowers. “Monday they want to kill you, but Friday they send flowers. It’s fucked up, isn’t it?”
I laughed my ass off, and it felt so good. Then she’d gone through the cards and told me all the gossip about each sender. There was a hidden lesson there as well—she’d told me more about who the players were in each Family than I had learned in years. Liam sent me an enormous bouquet of roses—and an even larger cactus in a pot. I think he had a message of his own to share. Xander sent lilies so dark red that they were almost black. If there is a language of flowers, he’s speaking Greek.
Today when she comes in, Delia immediately kicks off her heels and flops down on my couch. She always wears something expensive, the kind of shoe you see in a magazine picture of your favorite movie star on the red carpet. She promises to share her closet with me “because we girls need to stick together.”
“I don’t know how you can walk in those.” I snag the Louboutin from the floor. It’s a work of art from the sweet black curves of the upper to the red heel, but Delia waltzes around like the four-inch height merely makes it an orthopedic support shoe.
She winks at me. “Much practice.”
“How many pairs do you own?”
Her grin gets wider. “All of them. They’re my signature piece. My little fuck you and the horse you rode in on message to the Russian mafia. We should find you one.” When I don’t say anything, she continues. “It’s a male-dominated industry, and they like to think that girls are just a piece of pretty pussy. I may be decorative, but I’m as tough as they are. I do what has to be done and I protect what’s mine.”
“So the shoes are a feminist statement?” I know I sound doubtful.
Delia laughs. “I like the shoes, so I wear them and fuck them all. How is your big, sexy Russian lover?”
“Xander?”
Delia winks again. “You have more than one? Go, you.”
“He hasn’t come by,” I admit. “He was at the funeral. Everyone was.”
“And now everyone knows that you are Mrs. Volkov.” Delia shrugs. “He will have to come so that the two of you can sort that out. If you don’t live together, there will be many questions. Xander is a powerful man and he has worked hard for his place in our world.”
That is business and not personal. My thoughts must show on my face because Delia sighs and pats my hand.
“When he was younger, he was not so hard, but he was also not in charge. Now he is the head of his family, and he has responsibilities. You know what this is like—you have the Petrovs. I have my own challenges.”
“So it’s stupid to hope for something more with him.”
Delia pats my hand again. “Tell me about the sex with him. Is he as big where it counts as he is everywhere else? I’ll bet he can go all night.”
I can feel myself blushing. “He’s—”
“That good. I am jealous.” She pauses for a moment before perking up. “So you should give him a chance. You can train him a little and maybe then he will be everything you want.”
“He’s not a pair of shoes I can just buy,” I protest.
Do I really want Xander Volkov? He is a dangerous, hard man—a man who waited six years for me and then has looked out for me every step of the way since. He’s not a nice guy. He won’t be easy. He doesn’t talk about feelings or emotions—and I don’t know if that is because he believes he doesn’t have them or if he just doesn’t have the vocabulary. He will never be a guy man. He will always be more, the head of his family, and a power to be reckoned with.
Delia regards me with sympathetic eyes. “It is not simple, being married to a mob boss.”
“Is that why you’re single?”
She wrinkles her nose. “I would need to learn to take orders and that is not something that has ever interested me.”
“And you think I could?” I can’t help laughing at her.
She grins back. “I think you could pretend better than I could. I would never be able to keep a straight face. But I do have my eye on someone. Perhaps we make a merger, or maybe I will just take advantage of his very talented penis. I am open to negotiation on this point.”
I suspect I am open to negotiating with one particular mob king. Xander is who his circumstances have taught him to be. He sees life as a series of opportunities, negotiations, and hostile take overs. He is a Mafia king, but I hope he is more. Maybe he can also be a man who loves me. And maybe I can be the woman who loves him and has his back.
Point in case? After Delia struts out of my house, her four-inch Louboutins firmly back on her feet, I go down to the private dock. I’ve decided I should learn to boat. Since I’m new to the mob life (and sticking to strictly legal enterprise anyhow) and can’t afford a gazillion-dollar yacht, I have a dinghy. The Wishful Thinking is a mere ten feet long and it took three bottles of nail polish to paint her name onto her beat-up aluminum side. But she has a tiller and sails and seats for two—she’s definitely a boat. Unfortunately, making her go in a particular direction still eludes me.
I consult my rather damp copy of Sailing for Dummies. It turns out they do make that book, and it has been invaluable.
At least now I know there are two-hundred-plus pages of instructions that I haven’t mastered. The Craigslist guy who sold me the dinghy promised me that the Wishful Thinking was extremely responsive and that she’d feel each touch on the tiller and any trim to her sails. I nodded and forked over cash. What I subsequently discovered is that dinghies sit low in the water—and so I get wet and then wetter each time I sail. It’s also important to pay attention to where I park my butt. One foot too far left or right, and the Wishful Thinking likes to dump my ass into the ocean and then she’s painfully difficult to right.
I have managed to get my dinghy twenty feet from the dock when I look up. Maybe my body has some built-in proximity alarm because I’m painfully, wonderfully aware that Xander is standing there at the end of my dock. He looks breathtakingly handsome and large in an expensive suit and tie—maybe he has come straight from a business meeting? He eyes my poor dinghy.
“What the fuck, Lily?”
These are not the romantic words I have dreamed of. Perhaps they were not the words he planned on saying either because he curses and his hands tighten by his side. Good. He’s screwed up and I want him to know that. I am not a sure thing, even if he and my father conspired when I was sixteen. I have choices and it’s my life.
I yank the ropes hard because I can’t kick the man standing so arrogantly on the dock and I certainly can’t tell him that I love him. The Wishful Thinking heels
hard and then keeps on tipping and tipping. The ocean rushes up to greet me
XANDER
I am the king of saying the wrong thing. This is perfectly clear and should come as no surprise to either Lily or myself. I had a plan when I came here today. I would lay out all the reasons she should consider moving in with me and letting me be her husband. This is what I want, but I have no reason to expect her to choose me. I realize I am no prize, other than the money I have. She can spend it all and I would not mind—but that is not what my Lily wants.
She wants more. More words, more time, more of me. I am not sure I know how to give that to her, even if I want to. Certainly, these are not things that can be purchased in a store. My money will not help me here.
If I am to be a good husband, I have to figure this out. I have to provide whatever she needs. All these thoughts go flying out of my head, however, when I reach the end of the dock and realize that Lily is sailing. I would be happy to teach her, but she has apparently taken her education into her own hands. There are things you can learn from books, but I do not believe sailing is one of them. She certainly should not be out there alone. I blurt out my surprise, she glares at me, and then her ridiculously tiny little boat heels hard starboard.
I drop the flowers I brought and dive off the dock. Foolishly, she is not wearing a life jacket and we will have words about that after I have made sure she is safe. She may have hit her head or be trapped under the boat. Perhaps the mast struck her. At least a thousand possibilities rush through my mind as I close the distance between us.
She pops to the surface, laughing and cursing, as I reach her. She seems okay, thank God. I wrap my arms around her just in case, and she does not seem to mind. She laughs and floats, twining her arms around my neck. This is not a bad thing at all,
“You’ve ruined your suit,” she says breathlessly.
“They are just clothes.” I run my hands over her, checking for injuries, and she giggles.