A Love of Vengeance (Wanted Men Book 1)

by Nancy Haviland

“Ms. Jacobs?”

  She turned at the interruption to see a dark-haired, hazel-eyed man who belonged on the cover of GQ approaching. “Yes?”

  “Markus Fane.” He extended his hand and she shook it. “Natalie said you’d be here around this time, so I thought I’d come down and accompany you upstairs.” He nodded toward the elevator, moving Eva forward with a light hand on her elbow. She wished the receptionist a nice day before she was led away.

  They entered the half-full car and she listened as her guide got down to business, undistracted when they stopped at various floors to let people off. Markus explained that, aside from two large boardrooms, the owners’ spacious offices were the only two on the top floor of the building.

  Seconds later, the bell chimed and the elevator stopped on the top floor.

  “Thank you for escorting me, Markus,” she said as she stepped out onto the dark carpet.

  “My pleasure, Eva. We’ll most likely run into each other throughout the day. Good luck.” He gave her a two-fingered salute as he disappeared behind the closing panels.

  She looked left, wondering which way to go, and then right, where she caught sight of a man standing in front of an open door, his large frame backlit by the daylight coming from the windows behind him.

  She gaped, the butterflies that had been batting at her insides turning into one mother of an albatross.

  Gabriel?

  Confusion mixed with a good dose of WTF forced her into motion. She closed the distance between them, trying to think up some plausible explanation as to why he would be here. How had he known she’d be here when she hadn’t told him where she was going? He stepped to the side when she reached him and, without a word, motioned for her to enter the office first.

  Uh, no. Instead of complying, she stopped next to a comfy-looking chair in the outer room, careful to keep a few feet between them. “What are you doing here, Gabriel?” she whispered uneasily.

  “Come inside and I’ll explain.”

  Feeling dizzy all of a sudden, she nodded weakly and moved past him, tensing when their bodies brushed. Not nooow, her brain sang in warning as she forced herself not to react. Instead she focused her gaze on the walls lined with empty bookshelves. The office itself was modern, yet warm and comfortable with an obvious masculine appeal.

  She made for the black leather chairs in front of a huge desk and felt a shot of adrenaline slam her system at the nameplate sitting on the corner: GABRIEL MOORE, CEO.

  Shock rattled Eva’s bones at what that stupid little piece of metal revealed. Her hand came up to cover her mouth. Oh, God. What had she done?

  “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

  Dropping her hand, she turned to face him. His expression was shuttered. Unreadable and immobile. Blank but for the tic working in his jaw. His hands were buried deep in the front pockets of his pants and, sheesh, could he intimidate without moving a muscle.

  “No, I’m not okay,” she admitted. “What are you doing here? I’m supposed to be meeting Alekzander Tarasov.” She looked at the nameplate again, praying she’d somehow been wrong. “You’re not . . . Alekzander Tarasov,” she finished on a whisper, wanting to sink through the floor.

  “Sit.” He indicated the chair on the right with a tilt of his chin, and she didn’t argue. She perched on the edge—so she wouldn’t fall to the floor—and watched as he took the one directly across from her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped together in front of him.

  “After I saw you in New York,” he began, “I spoke to Natalie to see what you’d been doing at TarMor. She explained and forwarded me a copy of your resume and the following day, a rundown on how your interview went—”

  Eva held up a hand to stop him, her mouth drying. “The CEO I’m to work for is Alekzander—”

  “You met Alek last night, and you’ll be working for me, not him.”

  Her eyes widened. So that was why Alek had looked so familiar the first night she saw him at the Crown Jewel. She’d seen his picture online when she was researching her new boss. But he hadn’t looked anything like his polished executive photo she’d seen on LinkedIn.

  She shook her head as she tried to keep up. “Okay. I’m . . . Okay. So, when we met at the hotel the other night, you knew who I was? You knew I’d already interviewed for this position? You knew the job I was talking about was this one?”

  “Yes.”

  She blinked at the one-word answer. “And last night? You must have known when I told you. You knew it was Natalie who’d called and told me I was hired.”

  “Yes.”

  She tried to wrap her mind around the fact that this man had been lying to her from minute one. He’d taken her to his home, into his bed, made love to her, already knowing they’d be working together! “Why did you do this?”

  He sighed as he surged to his feet, and, maddeningly, she couldn’t stop herself from devouring the fluid movement of his big body as he walked around the desk to sit in the large leather chair behind it. She wanted to kick herself for it.

  Their eyes locked as he leaned back. Fucking men and their selfishness, she suddenly seethed. How dare he do this to her? To any woman? Had he done it before?

  The thought made her feel ill, but she shoved it aside and forced herself to focus.

  She straightened her back and carefully placed her briefcase on the floor next to the chair, resting her purse in her lap. Fine. All right. He’d gotten what he wanted. Now she would get what she wanted. The same thing she’d wanted when first deciding to go after this job.

  The experience. The work experience.

  She had bills to pay and her mother’s life insurance would only go so far. It might be months before she found another job. Considering how all the recent Columbia grads had snatched up the open positions after graduation, it could even be a year or more. No matter how utterly stunned she was at this latest turn of events, she couldn’t afford to be a fool about the realities of her life. Her mother was dead. Her father had been MIA for years. And she had responsibilities.

  God. So this was what being an adult felt like. Being trapped.

  She wasn’t sure how she was going to do it, but she would find a way to make this job work until she could find another one. She’d smile her way through it and be the most professional, competent ABM Gabriel or Alek had ever had.

  Then she would move on, with a great reference and valuable, hands-on experience under her belt. Hands-on experience that did not include having her hands on the CEO.

  Gabriel’s cell went off and he snatched it up impatiently. “Go,” he barked, clearly not appreciating the interruption. A mix of relief and anxiety flashed across his face when he heard who was on the other end of the line.

  “Hey. You’re out. Everything okay?” he asked carefully.

  Her heart skipped into a frantic beat. Who was out of what? Was he talking to a woman? Her blood congealed in her veins. Jealousy invaded her like a bloodthirsty army.

  How dare he talk to another woman in front of her right after they’d spent the night together!

  How dare you get upset about it, she chastised herself. He’s still a liar.

  “She’s fine, brother.” He put the phone between his ear and shoulder and tore a piece of paper from a pad in front of him. He handed it to her. “I know. I got tied up and couldn’t send it.”

  The “brother” had her muscles unlocking, and she looked down at what he’d given her—a password and instructions for how to get into the company computer system. He certainly wouldn’t be calling a woman “brother.” But who was the “she” that was fine?

  It doesn’t concern you, Eva.

  No. It didn’t. But that didn’t stop her from wanting to know. Dammit.

  “Fane called me,” Gabriel was saying. “Night before last. Surprised, to say the least. He sounded okay. Wanted to tell me . . . Uh, word on the street is . . .”

  Hearing his uncharacteristic hes
itation, Eva glanced up to find him still watching her.

  “No. This really isn’t a good time to talk.”

  Well. That hurt. No sense denying it. She gave him a tight, understanding, professional smile and calmly motioned that she’d leave.

  He shook his head slowly and pointed at her, mouthing, “Stay. Right. There.”

  Her lips thinned at his arrogance, but she stayed.

  And waged a bloody war between throttling her undeniably sexy new boss or throwing herself at him.

  The muscles in Gabriel’s back felt as if they were going to snap up like a rolling blind. He tore his gaze away from Eva’s shocked and betrayed expression to look out the window. Heavy gray clouds as far as the eye could see.

  “Let me call you later,” he said to Vasily.

  He hadn’t sent his weekly report last night, the way he religiously had for the past eight weeks and it had been noted immediately. Typical, he thought without much heat. He was too relieved Vasily was out from under his cover, and unharmed by the sounds of it, to care much about being put under the microscope.

  “I’d like to know why you didn’t send it now, Gabriel,” the Russian insisted. He wasn’t a man who would be put off. Vasily had switched to his native tongue, obviously an invitation for Gabriel to switch to Russian as well. Gabriel could have—Eva didn’t seem to know that language—but he decided to keep things vague and in English.

  He wasn’t quite ready to give Vasily a full report, not with everything he was feeling for Eva still rattling around his head. Her father was too clever and would know something was off.

  “Can’t,” he replied in English, hoping Vasily wouldn’t press the issue further.

  “Someone is there with you, obviously.”

  “Her.”

  The pause on the line was almost comical. “Her? Eva is with you? In your office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He continued to look out the window, but he wasn’t talking about the weather when he said, “Clouds are moving in. Anyone out in the open needs to find shelter.”

  “My enemies or yours?” Vasily demanded immediately, knowing without needing an explanation what Gabriel meant.

  “In this area.”

  “Stefano?”

  “Yes.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  “We suspected this might happen,” Gabriel reminded him. “At least now that it’s on the horizon we can prepare.”

  “And are you? Preparing? Is that why you’ve made contact with her?”

  “Yes,” he uttered the lie around a foul taste in his mouth.

  “You’ve proven you were the right choice, Gabriel. How is she? Does she suspect anything?” The hopeful note in Vasily’s voice to hear something—anything—personal about his daughter was like a wrecking ball to Gabriel’s solar plexus.

  Breathing through a choking shame, he muttered, “Fine,”—very fine—“And no.”

  “Shit. These answers are unsatisfactory. Call me when you can speak freely. I want details.”

  Gabriel hit the “End” button when dead air sounded in his ear signifying Vasily had hung up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” Eva demanded, wasting no time in getting back to it.

  “Because I didn’t want you to change your mind.” His voice was clipped, snappy. What the hell was he going to do if she told him to shove his job up his lying, untrustworthy ass?

  She remained as she was, sitting stiff and formal, her expression growing colder and more distant with each tick of the clock.

  “About what exactly? Working for you? Or sleeping with you?”

  He pushed his chair back and rose from his desk, moving around it to stand in front of her. “It wasn’t like that, Ev—”

  “Really, Gabriel?” she cut in. “Because I think that’s exactly what it was like. You thought that if you introduced yourself to me as my new boss, I wouldn’t sleep with you. And you were right. So you omitted the truth, had your fun last night, and . . . what? What are you expecting now? Sex over lunch? Working late, which translates to me on my back, spread across your desk?” She stood, spine straight, chin up in the most beautiful display of pride Gabriel had ever seen. “That isn’t going to happen. If you want me to stay on here, it will be on a completely professional level. Period. We won’t discuss last night, will not refer to it at all. In fact, I’d prefer not to discuss anything of a personal nature with you. Not ever again.”

  The smallest crack in her voice as she spit out those last words nailed him like a bullet. He’d blown it. Hurt her. Damaged the fragile trust every new relationship started with. Fuck.

  He stepped back. “Okay.” He had to placate her enough not to walk out on him. “If that’s the way you want it. I’ll accept that.” For now. “Just know that the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you. I’d hoped—”

  She held up a hand that shook slightly, a visual sign of her upset. “I think we’ve established what you’d hoped for. Now, if you could show me to my office, I’d like to get settled.”

  Allowing what was her second interruption to slide, Gabriel pointed to the desk sitting on the other side of the room. “That’s yours. I saw no sense in setting up an office when we’ll be gone in the next week. You have your instructions on how to log into the system and your passwords.”

  She crossed the space and placed her briefcase and purse on the desk, empty save for a laptop and phone, and took a seat to get started. She looked utterly captivating in her business attire. The perfect picture of professionalism. But Gabriel knew what was underneath.

  Gritting his teeth against his unwelcome hard-on, he snagged his cell, which had started ringing again.

  It was going to be a long day.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Come on, already. How long does it take to thrust and come?”

  Vasily Tarasov scowled as he tucked his phone away, silently having wondered the same thing a half-dozen times since they’d arrived in the run-down Moscow neighborhood. The strong odor of yeast hung in the air from the large brewery a few blocks away from where he and Dmitri, his right hand—who’d just so eloquently voiced his impatience—stood in the shadows. They were tucked into the entrance of a dilapidated apartment building across the street from where Viktor Baikov’s current mistress lived. Further evidence the man was a total jackass. Baikov more than had the means to put her up somewhere nicer.

  He’d gone into the building nearly two hours ago for his biweekly fuck, and it was time for the final man responsible for Kathryn Jacobs’s death to come back out and get what was coming to him.

  Equal treatment.

  A life lost for a life taken. In the Baikov family’s case, it had been six lives to Kathryn’s one; the extras necessary to keep Eva’s identity from being shared.

  “Maksim better have been on the mark with this one,” Dmitri added, rolling his shoulders. “Otherwise we’ve wasted a dickload of time and materials here.”

  The continued use of their mother tongue was comforting to Vasily. “You’re well aware Maksim doesn’t get much wrong,” he chastised, injecting just the right amount of censure in his tone. It was a sin to verbalize doubt in one of their own’s abilities. Backstabbing and undermining were not accepted within his faction. It couldn’t be prevented completely, but if he heard it firsthand, he put an end to it. Much more forcefully than he’d just done. But this was Dmitri.

  “Of course I am. We both know Maks is on the money with his information. But would it be too much to ask for one fuckup to hang over the guy’s swelled head? Just one, and I’ll be content.”

  Seemed he’d be left wanting, then. Because Maksim Kirov didn’t allow for fuckups. Ever. He was in control. Always. Dominated everything he did. And everyone, or so Vasily had heard.

  Dmitri stiffened next to him as a couple of drunk male voices sang happily, but unintelligibly, a block away. Vasily’s attention snapped front and center. Vikto
r Fucking Baikov. As Maks’s intel had stated, the guy had indeed rolled out of his mistress’s run-down building on the hour. Guess they should’ve had more faith and not showed early.

  The feud between the Tarasov and Baikov families had existed as far back as Vasily could remember. What had started it, he’d never heard, but in Vasily’s eyes what kept it alive was the hit that had taken his father’s life—a violent and brutal public gun down in front of a well-known mobster hangout. And now, cementing that hatred, Kathryn’s life had been taken as well. Though the Baikovs responsible for both murders were now gone, Vasily was sure retaliation was coming. Whatever that entailed would set the wheel in motion once again. A vicious, absurd circle that neither family was willing to walk away from.

  Viktor, the grandson to the original Pakhan in their organization, took a long, leisurely gander around the darkened street before he got his ass in gear and started slowly down the litter-strewn sidewalk. He passed a beat-up little Citroën, ignored an early 1990s, falling apart Audi, and Vasily had to shake his head at the fact that the guy was arrogant enough to be out on his own. Not even one man with him. Stupid.

  “Keep moving.”

  Dmitri’s whisper was barely audible as they watched their final target slow next to a shit-brown Lada and . . . fuuuck . . .

  But instead of pulling out a set of keys, as Vasily expected, Viktor ended up withdrawing a fucking cell phone from his pocket. The tension of the moment was interrupted by Vasily’s own phone vibrating in his pocket. Shit. Now Gabriel could talk? He dug it out and put it to his ear.

  “Da,” he whispered. They were far enough away that Baikov couldn’t possibly hear, but he still intended to hurry the convo along.

  “Speak up, Russian, and in English, please. I’m a little rusty.”

  He ground his teeth when he recognized the mildly accented voice, one that didn’t belong to Gabriel. “Not now, Fane.” He hung up and dropped his phone back into his pocket just to have it vibrate again. With a hard jam of his hand, he snatched it out again. “Lucian, you of all people should know that when—”